This comment is great, and resonates with a lot of the stuff I found hard when I was first immersed in the community at an EA hub.
Evie
Seven ways to become unstoppably agentic
Thanks Kevin :)
[On the title—you gotta have fun with these things haha]
Thanks Gavin!
Yes, the laws of equal and opposite advice defo apply here.
I also wonder whether this sort of thing becomes zero sum within a small enough environment (e.g. if everyone starts lowering their bar for asking for help, people will raise their bar for saying yes, because they will be inundated with requests). Could lead to competitor dynamics (discussed in the comments of this post), which seems unfortunate.
I really like the point of spending years ‘becoming yourself’. Like, I probs just want my younger siblings to chill out and spend a lot of time with their friends and doing stuff that feels hedonically good to them. I like the point about groundedness. I felt ungrounded and uncertain when I was first immersed in EA, and I think this could (?) have been less if I was older. I’m kinda unsure, and think it’s maybe inevitable to feel unsettled when you are introduced to and immersed in a very new culture/worldview in a short space of time.
Where is Elizabeth’s post on being a potted plant? Could you send it?
My guess is that it’s just very context dependent — I’m not sure how generalisable these sorts of numbers are.
It also seems like the size of favours would vary a ton and make it hard to give a helpful number.
Thank you for the comments!
I agree with some of what you wrote. I don’t want the subtext of the post to be “you should amass social capital so that senior people will do you favours.”
Some thoughts:
It’s generally the case that ‘social domineeringness’ is a trait that is rewarded by society. Similar to intelligence, people who have this quality will probs be more likely to achieve their goals. (This makes me kinda uncomfortable, but I think it’s broadly true and it doesn’t seem good to ignore it).
Given that this is the case, I want to encourage this quality in EAs.
However, I would rather see EAs have this quality when interacting with non-EAs. Like, if young EAs all start asking senior EAs for favours, the EA landscape will become competitive and zero-sum.
BUT it seems strictly good for EAs to be socially domineering in non-EA contexts. Like… I want young EAs to out-compete non-EAs for internship or opportunities that will help them skill build. (This framing has a bad aesthetic, but I can’t think of a nicer way to say it.)
I’m curious about the specific parts that you think people would be allergic to.
Wow haha this is pretty cool! And also an entertaining read
Pretty confused by what some of the cause areas are (e.g. epistemic institutions). I expect my responses were less helpful/ accurate bc of not knowing what some of them meant.
Given that I was aiming to spend only a few mins on the census, I don’t expect that I would have scrolled through the post to find the description of the cause area.
But some people might, so could be useful.
Networking for Nerds [linkpost]
I feel concerned about versions of this where there is implicit social pressure to:
stay;
seem fine with the critiques given;
participate in the first place.
Like, if its implicitly socially costly to opt out, it’s pretty hard for an individual to opt out.
I also think that it is hard to avoid these pressure-y dynamics in practice. Especially when people really want to be included in the social group.
I can imagine a scenario where there is a subtext of:
“You can opt out. Of course. But, as we know, the real hard-core and truth-seeking people stay. And this social group values truth-seeking. So… you can leave. But that is an out-group thing to do. Come on guys, it’s virtuous to seek-truth! And we are just providing you with an opportunity to do that! Don’t tell me that you’d rather hide from the truth than get your feelings hurt.”
(I’m overdoing this a bit to illustrate my point.)
I like this, and think that networking as a teen is super useful and high ROI. (Maybe I’m biased because networking opened up opportunities for me.)
I really like this post as a starting guide! Thanks for writing
Thanks for writing this post ! It resonated and I feel like I’ve fallen into a similar mindset before.
It reminds me of a point made here: “like, will we wish in 5 years that EAs had more outside professional experience to bring domain knowledge and legitimacy to EA projects rather than a resume full of EA things?”
When reading the post, this felt especially true and unfortunate: “They get the reputation as someone who can “get shit done” but in practice, they’re usually solving ops bottlenecks at the cost of building harder-to-acquire skills.”
“C1: A person in a poor country whose life is saved experiences less welfare than a person in a rich country whose life is saved”
(Asking a dumb question here, but,) is this true? Ie, does an increase in material wealth actually increase psychological wellbeing?
I have an intuition that psychological well-being is mostly affected by how wealthy you are compared to your peer group.
Maybe you’re talking about individuals poor countries who are below the poverty line (in which case, I agree that they would experience much less psychology wellbeing).
But I would be surprised if individuals in rich countries are actually happier than individuals in poor countries (who have all their basic needs met).
What does PB/CM mean?
Thanks! Also this is a small point but I find it easier to skim articles when they have formatted headings (so there’s an overview of the article on the left hand side). You can do this using the forum formatting features.
Congrats for organising EAGx—that’s huge! :)
Sorry for being a downer, but I want to push back on the subtext that it’s (always) good for people to be willing to “lend a helping hand, whether it’s sending a message, reviewing a draft or hopping onto a call?”
My rough thoughts:
Some people say yes to too many things and don’t value their time highly enough.
Sometimes, it’s the right call for someone to say no to helping others in their immediate environment.
It’s often hard to say no, even when it’s the right call.
I’m worried about a culture where {saying yes to peoples’ requests} --> {you’re a nice and helpful person} --> {it’s good that you’re an EA because you’re warm and welcoming}.
I’m worried about the message “EA is warm and welcoming because people are willing to give you their time” making it harder for people to say no.
This might not be super relevant—especially if most of the audience would err on the side of not asking for help.
But just wanted to comment because it came to mind.
The overall message of “people are kind and not scary and probably willing to help” is a nice one though!
“Agency” needs nuance
Ah nice, I was missing that context. Yup, the angle of confidence building seems good for this audience.
I really really loved section 2 of this post!! It articulates a mindset shift that I think is important and valuable, and I’ve not seen it written out like that before.