I’m a freelance writer and editor for the EA community. I can help you edit drafts and write up your unwritten ideas. If you’d like to work with me, book a short calendly meeting or email me at ambace@gmail.com. Website with more info: https://amber-dawn-ace.com/
Amber Dawn
Karma: 4,289
Yeah, this is a good point: you can go a long way with just commitment/agency/creativity/confidence/?
I mean, maybe people who are strong in those traits aren’t really “mediocre”, ?
But yeah, this is a good reminder that excellence isn’t just one axis.
I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit recently. It’s not that I see myself as a “mediocre” EA, and in fact I work with EAs, so I am engaging with the community through my work. But I feel like a lot of the attitudes around career planning in EA sort of assume that you are formidable within a particular, rather narrow mould. You talk about mediocre EAs, but I’d also extend this to people who have strong skills and expertise that’s not obviously convertable into ‘working in the main EA cause areas’.
And the thing is, this kind of makes sense: like, if you’re a hardcore EA, it makes sense to give lots of attention and resources to people who can be super successful in the main EA cause areas, and comparatively neglect people who can’t. Inasmuch as the community’s primary aim is to do more good according to a specific set of assumptions and values, and not to be a fuzzy warm inclusive space, it makes sense that there aren’t a lot of resources for people who are less able to have an impact. But it’s kind of annoying if you’re one of those people!
Or like: most EA jobs are crazy competitive nowadays. And from the point of view of “EA” (as an ideology), that’s fine; impactful jobs should have large hiring pools of talented committed people. But from the point of view of people in the hiring pool, who are constantly applying to and getting rejected from EA jobs—or competitive non-EA jobs—because they’ve been persuaded these are the only jobs worth having, it kinda sucks.There’s this well-known post ‘don’t be bycatch’; I currently suspect that EA structurally generates bycatch. By ‘structurally’ I mean ‘the behaviour of powerful actors in EA is kinda reasonable, but also it predictably creates situations where lots of altruistic, committed people get drawn into the community but can’t succeed within the paradigms the community has defined as success’.
Thanks for writing this! I’ve long been suspicious of this idea but haven’t got round to investigating the claim itself, and my skepticism of it, fully, so I super appreciate you kicking off this discussion.
I also identify with ‘do I disagree with this empirically or am I just uneasy with the vibes/frame, how to tease those apart, ?’
For people who broadly agree with the idea that Sarah is critiquing: what do you think is the best defence of it, arguing from first principles and data as much as possible?
I have a couple of other queries/scepticisms about the power-law argument. I haven’t read all the other comments, so sorry if I repeat stuff said elsewhere.
1. Does it empirically hold up even assuming you can attribute stuff to individuals?
You focus a lot on critiquing conceptual idea of the individual impact of one person (since most actions happen in the context of other actions and actors). I think I also have empirical disagreements with the claim even if we can tease out what impact comes from which person.
It feels to me like EAs sometimes over-generalize that finding from global health interventions — where I don’t doubt that it holds up — to other domains, where it hasn’t been established (e.g., orgs working in longtermist causes, or people compared to their peers, or actions one takes in one’s career). It’s possible that there *is* more discussion and substantiation of this idea out there, but I just haven’t seen it.
Like, even if we accept that (per your example) the President does have much more impact than the average person, or (per Jeff’s example above) a larger donor has more impact than a smaller donor to the same charity, can I generalize that to the actions available to me personally, or to questions of how impactful ‘overall’ I can be compared to my peers? What’s the empirical justification for such generalizations?2. Is the bar low? Does this depend on how you define the space?
Benjamin Todd, in the article you linked, claims that the power-law pattern has been found in many areas of social impact. I’m sure this is true, but I want to point out that this is kind of contingent, not a law of nature. E.g., I’d guess this is due to some combination of ‘there’s not a culture of measuring outcomes and prioritization in general philanthropy’ (that’s kind of the whole point of EA) and/or ‘the world is very complicated and it’s hard to know ex ante (and sometimes even ex post) what will work/what did work’.
Like, if there were a culture shift in philanthropy across the board meaning that interventions would only be funded or carried out if they met some effectiveness bar, would we still expect interventions to be power-law distributed? Surely less so?To frame this another way, imagine I said to you ‘the nutritional value of foods follows a power-law distribution’, and you were like ‘hmm’, but then it turned out that among ‘foods’ I was counting inedible objects like chairs and rocks and grass. So yes, only a minority of objects have most of the nutritional value, but anything we’d call food is in the heavy tail, and this is a kind of silly frame.
This point isn’t fully worked out but yeah, I wonder if ‘what counts as the distribution’ is kind of socially constructed in a way that’s not always helpful.
I guess I weakly disagree: I think that motivation and already having roots in an issue really are a big part of personal fit—especially now that lots of “classic EA jobs” seem highly oversubscribed, even if the cause areas are more neglected than they should be.
Like to make this more concrete, if your climate-change-motivated young EA was like ‘well, now that I’ve learnt about AI risk, I guess I should pursue that career, ?’, but they don’t feel excited about it. Even if they have the innate ability to excel in AI safety, they will still have to outcompete people who have already built up expertize there, many of whom will find it easier to motivate themselves to work hard because they are interested in AI.
(On the object level, I assume that many roles in climate change and gender equality stuff are in fact more impactful than many roles in more canonical EA cause areas).
Thanks for writing this! As others have said, thank you for trying to do this valuable work even if it didn’t work out.
I haven’t read everything so sorry if you mention this elsewhere but I’m confused about:
-‘Of the three studies we found that measure the effects of facility-based postpartum family planning programming on pregnancy rates, two found no effect (Rohr et al. 2024; Coulibaly et al. 2021), and one found only a 0.7% decrease in short-spaced pregnancies (Guo et al. 2022).
This suggests that facility-based programs may have limited to no effect on reducing unintended pregnancies despite increasing contraceptive uptake.’
Why might programs increase contraceptive uptake but not reduce unintended pregnancies? Is it mainly because many who take the contraceptives are in the postpartum insusceptibility period anyway?
I think I’ve never gotten real feedback! It’s possible I’m not promoting it often enough/not making specific requests of people, so people don’t know it’s an option.
This is a cool idea!
FYI, if you’re excited about one of these ideas but struggling to actually get it drafted and posted, I can help with that. I wrote more here:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4towuFeBfbGn8hJGs/amber-dawn-s-shortform?commentId=C6Z7u57FHh6nYqo4N
Since the season of Draft Amnesty is upon us, a bit of mild self-promotion: you can hire me to help you turn your unwritten thoughts and messy drafts into posts.
For example:
-if some sections of your post are in your head but not yet on the page, I can help you draft them
-if you feel self-conscious about your draft, I can quickly review it and fix or flag the biggest issues
-if you feel ugh-y or uncertain about posting or finishing your post, or if you have anxieties about posting more generally, I can talk you through that
-I agree with the Forum team that it can be very valuable to share even unpolished and unfinished drafts, but if you’d like to publish a more polished post, I can help with editing and structuring
I have collaborated on a bunch of Forum posts.
Happy drafting!
Thanks for the shout-out! I just want to add that I also offer writing coaching, for those who want to learn how to make their own writing clearer and more effective.
TLDR: freelance writer and editor interested in (mostly) part-time and contract work. I’m particularly interested in finding more clients for writing coaching (see below).
Skills & background: I’m a freelance writer and editor: here’s my website and here’s my personal blog. You can also read many of my posts (both personal and collaborative) here on the Forum.
I’ve worked with several EAs and EA-adjacent people, writing or editing blogs, website content, internal organizational documents, podcast transcripts, fiction and more. I’ve also designed an educational module on IFS therapy concepts and worked as a facilitator for the EA Forum.Previously, I’ve worked as an ESL and secondary school teacher, and I spent some time pursuing an academic career in Classics (specialising in Greek and Roman philosophy), which also involved working as an instructor and teaching assistant. I think I’m good at teaching and related skills, such as explaining things simply, empathetically listening and responding to people’s problems, thinking of creative solutions, and making plans. I’m actively interested in finding more teaching-adjacent work.
Location/remote: London – most of my work is remote but I’m willing to meet face-to-face in London. I’m not interested in relocating. My working hours are roughly 9.30ish-5.30ish UK time, but I’m happy to work a little later than that sometimes to accommodate people in Pacific Time!
Availability & type of work: I’m mainly interested in contract or part-time work, but would also consider full-time roles if they are an especially good fit.
I’m interested in offering:Writing coaching: I’ve only had a few one-off clients so far for this but I think it went well. Generally, I think I might be a great fit for this because it’s at the intersection of my two skillsets, writing and teaching.
Editing, proofreading, and review: I’m happy to proofread things, offer light or intensive editing, and give feedback on your drafts. In general, I’ll engage with the content of what I’m editing and tell you if something doesn’t make sense or doesn’t land right.
Content writing help: you describe your ideas, and I’ll write them up into a finished draft.
Debugging, problem-solving, sympathetic listening, and accountability.
I’m starting a series on ideas that have changed people’s lives: the first post is on the Alexander technique. If you’re interested in funding one of these posts, let me know (this will help me to prioritize the project more).Here’s a list of questions that I’d be interested to research.
I’m open to work that doesn’t come under any of these headings but that I might be a good fit for: feel free to reach out and ask.
Resume/CV/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amber-ace-4b8a261b1/
Email/contact: Feel free to email me at ambace@gmail.com, DM me on the Forum, or book a short meeting if you’re interested in hiring me or would like to learn more.
I don’t agree that EA requires current venal systems to exist. For example, in a state communist society, or an anarchist society, or a libertarian society, you can still imagine people trying to work out how to do the most good with their resources. Of course current EAs work within current systems, but that just seems necessary to get anything done.
I think it’s “poor intellectual etiquette” to require people to comment along with votes: if I posting, I’m interested in whether readers find it valuable or not, even if they understandably don’t want to prioritize explaining why they think I’m right or wrong.
The evidence collected here doesn’t convince me that Alice and Chloe were lying, or necessarily that Ben Pace did a bad job investigating this. I regret contributing another long and involved comment to this discourse, but I feel like “actually assessing the claims” has been underrepresented compared to people going to the meta level, people discussing the post’s rhetoric, and people simply asserting that this evidence is conclusive proof that Alice and Chloe lied.
My process of thinking through this has made me wish more receipts from Alice and Chloe were included in Ben’s post, or even just that more of the accusations had come in their own words, because then it would be clear exactly what they were claiming. (I think their claims being filtered through first Ben and then Kat/Emerson causes some confusion, as others have noted).
I want to talk about some parts of the post and why I’m not convinced. To avoid cherry-picking, I chose the first claim, about whether Alice was asked to travel with illegal drugs (highlighted by Kat as “if you read just one illustrative story, read this one”), and then I used a random number generator to pick two pages in the appendix (following the lead of other commenters).
I worry that the following will seem maximally negative. But I don’t mean I am strongly convinced of the more negative interpretations I suggest; just that a lot of the screenshots are consistent with Alice and Chloe’s claims being true. This should be read in the spirit of red-teaming or spot-checking, rather than me offering a figured-out narrative.
Was Alice asked to bring drugs across borders illegally?
Ben wrote: ‘Before she went on vacation, Kat requested that Alice bring a variety of illegal drugs across the border for her (some recreational, some for productivity). Alice argued that this would be dangerous for her personally, but Emerson and Kat reportedly argued that it is not dangerous at all and was “absolutely risk-free”. Privately, Drew said that Kat would “love her forever” if she did this. I bring this up as an example of the sorts of requests that Kat/Emerson/Drew felt comfortable making during Alice’s time there.’
As evidence against this, Kat offers screenshots showing Drew asking Alice to pick up some medicine. When Alice reports that a prescription is needed and says she is too sick to ask around extensively, Drew says not to worry, and hopes she gets better soon.
Does this prove that Alice wasn’t asked to bring drugs across borders illegally?
No: just because on this occasion Drew didn’t push the issue, doesn’t mean she wasn’t asked to do illegal things on other, different occasions.Note that the exchange is with Drew, who was dating Alice for some of the time, and who as far as I know no-one has made any negative allegations about. This exchange doesn’t have any bearing on whether similar exchanges with Kat or Emerson involved more pressure on Alice. The texts also don’t show whether it would have been legal for her to travel with the medicine to where Nonlinear were based, even if she could purchase it without a prescription where she was.
I realise that it’s actually nigh-on impossible for Nonlinear to prove they never asked Alice to do anything illegal! They’d have to show their entire message history, and even then, Alice could claim that the conversation happened in person. So maybe this is the best evidence they could have included. But just because it’s the best evidence we could hope for, doesn’t mean we should accept it as knock-down, irrefutable evidence that Alice lied; that requires believing that this is the incident Alice was referring to in her conversations with Ben, which is not clear to me.
Spot checks: p 52
From the appendix:
‘Alice says “look at this screenshot—it’s proof that Kat is trying to silence me by withholding my pay!” But Alice strategically cropped this screenshot.’
This is the screenshot that was included in Ben’s original post, when Alice says she is figuring out ‘survival stuff’ and Kat appears to make her silence about her experience a condition of offering her help. In the appendix, Kat shows more context; she shows that she proactively reached out to Alice, suggested some free accommodation (like the EA hotel) and a mental health resource. She comments:
“This, by the way, is a perfect example of how Alice spreads falsehoods. They’re mostly lying by omission. She’ll say something that is true (the cropped screenshot), but not show the rest. And the rest will totally flip the sign of the whole accusation.”I disagree that the rest flips the sign of the accusation. I think these messages are consistent with Kat’s story: that Alice was mentally unwell and spreading (false) bad stories, and Kat genuinely wanted to help her while preventing her from spreading lies. I also think they’re consistent with Alice’s story; that Kat had found out that Alice was telling (true) stories about bad experiences she’d had at Nonlinear, and Kat was trying to persuade her to stop. If you want to persuade someone to stop telling negative stories about you —whether true or false —being helpful and friendly is a good way to do it! Ime it’s much harder to say negative things about someone who is being explicitly very generous to you.
I guess something that confuses me here about Kat’s story is, if Alice was telling lies because of mental illness or a lack of contact with reality, then I’m not sure why Kat expected a commitment from her to mean anything anyway.
I think it’s right that Ben’s claim that Alice was “in a position of strong need” was stretching it: she does say she’s safe, and ‘figuring out basic survival stuff’ *could* mean being very needy, but could also mean something less extreme than that.
Spot check: p. 104
from the appendix:
”Kat: It’s incredibly unwise to date your colleague/roommate/boss’s brother who has a different relationship orientation, but it’s up to you.
Alice: Kat’s trying to force me to not be poly!”
Here Kat gives some evidence that she’s not anti-poly and would never try to interfere with someone’s dating life:‘For example, around the time Alice alleges that Kat said she couldn’t be poly around her, Kat suggested that Alice might like dating two of her poly friends coming to visit who she knows are looking for a third to form a triad. Also, we’ve invited many poly people to travel with us. Including Alice, who was practicing polyamory the entire time she lived with us. We knew she was poly before she even arrived and were 100% fine with it. She started polyamorously sleeping with multiple of our friends within a week of joining us in Puerto Rico. So clearly we don’t mind having poly people live with us.’
To say ‘we can’t be anti-poly because we invited polyamorous Alice to travel with us’ is begging the question, since Alice claimed that Kat asked her to stop being poly and wasn’t ’100% fine with it’.
The other parts aren’t strong evidence that Kat did not have the conversation Alice reported. Someone can have a bias or discomfort without that affecting them literally all the time. Lots of people in the EA and AI safety community are poly, so it would be difficult for Nonlinear to avoid asking poly people to travel with them.
I think it’s reasonable for Kat to discourage Alice from dating Drew —albeit arguably hypocritical, given that Kat and Emerson are a couple and also colleagues, so they clearly can’t think it’s inappropriate in all cases.
Again, there is probably no way that Kat could actually prove that she never told Alice she shouldn’t be poly! But again, just because this is the best evidence we could reasonably hope for, doesn’t mean it’s actually that strong.
General thoughts
This is all tricky, because my impression is that this was always very much about…vibes? (Which partly comes from the fact that I heard about it from Alice and Chloe, rather than Ben’s post). It’s understandable that lots of discussion has been about legible, concrete things: how much were they paid? Were they asked to bring illegal drugs across borders or not? But that legible stuff has always seemed less central than ‘there were just super toxic interpersonal dynamics at play’. And that’s tricky either way: if Alice and Chloe are telling the truth, it’s tricky because it’s really hard to express ‘why was it so bad’ (I thought Chloe’s comment about her experience on the weekend day trip was really useful here). And if Kat and Emerson are telling the truth, it’s hard to argue against a vibe, or to argue that the vibe came from unreasonable interpretations or expectations on the part of Alice and Chloe. In general, it just seems really, really hard to think clearly about situations like this. My sympathies to everyone involved.
There are also Facebook groups for people with specific marginalised identities, which might also have some of that sort of content: e.g. there is one for LGBTQ people, and one for women and non-binary people. There may also be groups related to other identities: there are a bunch of “EA+X” related groups on FB so I’d say search there
There is a Facebook group on EA + diversity and inclusion: https://www.facebook.com/groups/diversityEA
I’ve sometimes been interested in making a group on EA+ ‘economic left’ thought (socialism, anarchism, anti-capitalism and such) - I’ll let you know if I ever do!
Not sure if you know, but GiveDirectly did have a zakat fund last year https://fundraisers.givedirectly.org/campaigns/yemenzakat
I think @Daniel_Wyrzykowski is working on something in this area
I think it’s a minority opinion in EA but I also think it would be worth it for EAs to produce lists of the cost-effective charities/interventions within causes that EAs don’t prioritize overall, recognizing that some people may care about effectiveness but will be emotionally attached to certain cause areas, or (as you say) will be motivated more by selfish reasons or by a narrower altruistic concern for their loved ones. This might be an especially good idea for people who have expertize in that area.
When I posted about this, people pointed out that SoGive does a bit of this (for misc causes, maybe not for things like cancer specifically).
Fund me to research interesting questions?
Here’s a list of questions/topics I’d be interested to research. If you’re also interested in one of these questions and would like to fund me to research it, get in touch: you can email at ambace@gmail.com, DM me on the Forum, or book a chat. It’s a bit of a long shot, but you don’t get what you don’t ask for XD
I’m also keen to hear about relevant work that already exists. I haven’t done much work yet on any of these questions, so it’s possible there’s already a lot of research on them that I’m not aware of.
1. Why do people treat each other badly?
The world is pretty bad. Some of that badness isn’t caused by humans, for example disease and natural death. But lots of the badness comes from humans doing bad things to each other: abuse, war, and failing to save metaphorical drowning children.
Why is this?
Scott Alexander fans might say ‘Moloch’. Therapy people might say ‘trauma’. Evopsych people might say ‘it maximises fitness’. Other people, I’m sure, would say other things. Who is (most) right?
2. Antidote to the curse of knowledgeThe ‘curse of knowledge’ is the phenomenon whereby, if you know about something, it’s really hard to explain it to others, because it’s hard for you to imagine not knowing what you know, and therefore what needs explanation. This is one of the fundamental difficulties of teaching and explanatory writing.
Relatedly, I think there is also a ‘curse of competence’: if you’re teaching or explaining a topic, chances are you have some natural aptitude for that topic or skill. If you’re a maths teacher, chances are you’re naturally good at math, and learnt it quite easily when you were young. This makes it harder for you to empathise with people who really struggle.
I think it would be cool to do some research into ‘systematic ways to bypass the curse of knowledge’. This could either be a technique that explain-ers and teachers could use themselves, or a technique for a teacher and student, or explainer and explain-ee, to use collaboratively. Such a technique might involve asking certain questions, developing a typology of ‘reasons people don’t understand a thing’, coming up with intuitive ways of ‘breaking things down’, etc.
(I expect there is some useful research and thought on this out there, so it might just be a question of collating/distilling it)
3. Could we make a society where everyone loved their work?
It seems like an awful lot of people don’t like their jobs, the thing they have to do for approximately 40 hours a week. This seems bad.
Charles Fourier was an early socialist/anarchist thinker. He had this (bonkers? genius?) idea that one could set up a happy society by forming people into units such that for every job that needed to be done, there would be enough people in the unit who were innately passionate about doing that job.
His idea was that you could drive production purely by exploiting people’s passions, so you wouldn’t need to force anyone to work with external incentives.This seems… great if you could make it work?
I envisage that for this project, I’d start by reading Fourier’s writings and trying to extract the non-bonkers elements, and then move on to studying more prosaic ways that people have tried to improve working conditions, such as labour unions, workers cooperatives, even career coaching.
4. Surveys to work out global priorities
I’ve posted about this before. If we want to do the most good, it seems important to get a granular sense of what the majority of people in the world actually want and value the most. If the population of the world could vote on what I should do with my donations or career, would they want me to work on global health, or longtermist causes, or something else entirely?5. Getting ‘open borders’ into the Overton window and/or research into advocacy to decrease anti-immigrant sentiment
6. Ideas that changed people’s lives: substack/blog series
I want to interview people about specific ideas that changed their life, then write posts based on that.
What sort of ideas?
e.g.
-theories or facts about how the world works (e.g. historical, scientific, economic, personal?)
-relationship skills (e.g. non-violent communication, authentic relating, ??)
-therapeutic techniques (e.g. IFS, CBT, ACT, loving-kindness meditation, ??)
-political ideas (e.g. critical race theory, labour theory of value, classical liberalism, ??)
-philosophies (e.g. Stoicism, utilitarianism, Quakerism, ??)
-practical ideas (e.g. productivity or planning systems, skills, ??)What do you mean ‘changed your life’?
-made you decide to do a certain sort of work, or advocacy
-changed your day-to-day habits
-improved your wellbeing or mental health
-improved your relationships
I’ve started this one already as a spare-time project, but if someone funded it, I could afford to spend more time on it.My hope for this project is it will both spread lots of good ideas, and also help me understand ‘how people and ideas interact’, which might in turn help me understand how one could best spread good/helpful ideas, if one wanted to do that.
7. Anarchism: ???
More of a broad topic than a question. I’m drawn to anarchism but have a bunch of questions about it. There is loads of writing on anarchism, so this might be less of a research project, more of a distillation project; for example, producing an ‘Anarchism 101 for Dummies’ explainer, or coming up with and framing anarchism-inspired ideas that could, with skilled advocacy, spread and catch on (for obvious reasons, I’m thinking less of political advocacy and change, more of cultural change or movements).
How much funding do you want?
Say up to £25,000, but (much!) less is also fine? I’m open to lots of possibilities. You could fund me to work on one of these questions full-time, or part-time, for a few months or a year. Or you could say ‘I’ll pay you to do 3 hours of research on Question 2 and see how you get on’. Or you could do something in the middle. Happy to talk specifics in DMs.Will you research [other thing] instead?
It very much depends on what the other thing is and how well it fits my skills and interests, but feel free to ask.What are your qualifications to do this?
I did most of a PhD in Classics. I ended up leaving the PhD before finishing*, but for many years I enjoyed the course and produced research regularly, and I got some good feedback on my research.I think I’m good at the type of research that involves staring at difficult questions, sitting with confusion, working with concepts, understanding and synthesizing complex texts, and thinking by writing. Happy to send you my CV and/or talk in more detail about my credentials.
*this was because of a combination of poor mental health and becoming disenchanted with my topic and academia in general
What’s the impact?
I haven’t done a detailed impact analysis for any of these questions, but my intuition is that they are all difficult to solve/make progress on, but potentially highly impactful if you do make progress. The impact case for me working on these questions is not, imo, that they are likely have more impact than malaria prevention/AI safety/other central EA areas, but that they might be the highest impact thing for me personally to be doing.
Questions? Feel free to DM, email (ambace@gmail.com) or book a call. While I am shamelessly plugging myself, I am also doing writing and editing stuff: more details here.
FWIW I’m happy this question was asked publicly: I had no idea about this ruling (which is just extremely cruel and unhelpful) and this is a serious inclusion issue.