I found that this episode increased my faith in the EA community a little bit. One of my caricatures of other EAs when I first found the community was “it’s good these people exist but they’d make terrible friends because they’re so impartial they’d leave me in a rut to squeeze the epsilon out of an EV that bears a resemblance to a probability.”
It was a bit of an (irrational?) fear that EAs and EA orgs were constituted by hyper-utilitarians that’d sacrifice their friends / employees if the felicific calculus didn’t add up.
But most people I’ve met in (at least my section of) the EA community have been unusually kind and compassionate people. Some I am very glad to call my friends. And I don’t think they would jettison me if I gained a debilitating illness, which makes me more motivated to do good.
Note: Of course there’s instrumental utilitarian reasons to act in a manner more consistent with commonsense decency.
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This made me want to hear more narratives and cases like this that give a helpful but honest report of what someone’s experience of mental health was like. I’ve thus far avoided the extant literature out of a fear that reading / listening to cases of people experience severe mental illness would degrade my own well-being.
In particular, I’d like to hear about other people in the EA community and hear more stories (there’ve kind of been a few on the forum) who weren’t as lucky as Howie.
The title of this post did not inform me about the claim “that EAs have collectively decided that they do not need to participate in tight feedback loops with reality in order to have a huge, positive impact -- [and] this is a deeply rooted mistake.”
I came very close to not actually reading what is an interesting claim I’d like to see explored because it came close to the end and there was no hint of it in the title or the start of the post. Since it is still relatively early in the life of this post you may want to consider revising the title and layout of the post to communicate more effectively.