Iâm one of the contact people for the effective altruism community. I work at CEA as a community liaison, trying to support the EA community in addressing problems and being a healthy and welcoming community.
Please feel free to contact me at julia.wise@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.
Besides effective altruism, Iâm interested in folk dance and trying to keep up with my three children.
Glad to see more attention on this area!
A little spot-checking:
âPeople with nothing more than a high-school diploma and a month long crash course can treat PTSD ~75% as well as a professional therapist.â The metastudy linked doesnât attempt to compare lay counselors with professional therapists; itâs only about trained lay counselors.
Thank you for writing about an important subject! Iâm sorry about the ways I gather EA has been difficult for you. Iâve found EA pretty emotionally difficult myself at times.
People who fill out the EA Survey are likely to report that EA has a neutral or positive effect on their mental health. This might be because participating in a community and having a sense of purpose can be helpful for peopleâs wellbeing. Of course, youâd expect bias here because people who find EA damaging may be especially likely to leave the community and not take the survey. An excerpt from a colleagueâs summary:
âAn interesting bit of information is that the 2022 EA survey asked how EA had affected the mental health of individuals in the community. While some people reported that their mental health had reduced as a result of being part of EA, on average, most people reported improved mental health. Obviously, there is some sampling bias here in who filled out the survey. Still, this was more positive than I expected. Thatâs not to say that we canât do betterâit would be really great if no one was in a situation where they found that this was personally harmful for them.
. . . I asked Rethink Priorities to do a more thorough analysis of this question. Theyâve now done this! TL;DR: There are only small differences in responses across cause area/âengagement level/âlocation/âcareer level/âtime in EA (students + newcomers were slightly more likely to say EA improved their mental health than other groups).â
About existing efforts on mental health in EA (some of which are mentioned in other comments):
MentNav (formerly the EA Mental Health Navigator) aims to list mental health resources that will be useful to people in EA or elsewhere
You mention Rethink Wellbeing, which is running projects similar to some of what you suggest
The EA Peer Support Facebook group is for informal peer support, and allows anonymous posts
The Effective Peer Support Slack is one location where people have worked on related projects, although it doesnât seem to be very active currently
Some other resources, like community contact people in local groups and at EA conferences, or the community health team where I work, arenât focused on mental health specifically but do end up assisting with some situations related to mental health.
Some efforts to provide volunteer support with accessing mental health services proved difficult, because of liability to the volunteers.
On imposter syndrome, thereâs enough content that thereâs a Forum tag specifically on this topic.
You suggested mental health materials like articles or podcasts by mental health practitioners. Readers interested in this might explore the 80,000 Hours interview with with psychotherapist Hannah Boettcher, writing by psychologist Ewelina Tur, another mental health provider who writes as Daystar Eld on the Forum, and other writing under the Forum tag self-care and wellbeing in the effective altruism community.
Iâll note that I think itâs good to have mental health resources tailored to specific communities /â populations, but this doesnât necessarily mean much about the prevalence of problems in those populations. E.g. there are lots of therapy resources aimed at people with climate anxiety, therapists who specialize in treating medical professionals, clergy, etc.
Cross-posting Georgia Rayâs /â @eukaryoteâs âI got dysentery so you donât have to,â a fascinating read on participating in a human challenge trial.
What a fun read!
Welfare standards on farms like larger cage sizes, stunning before killing, etc donât have obvious benefits for humans. Arguably there are downstream benefits by making meat more expensive and thereby causing less of whatever indirect effects meat consumption creates.
Glad this question-and-answer happened!
A meta note that sometimes people post questions aimed at an organization but donât flag it to the actual org. I think itâs a good practice to flag questions to the org, otherwise you risk:
- someone not at the org answers the question, often with information thatâs incorrect or out of date
- the org never sees the question and looks out-of-touch for not answeringâ
comms staff at the org feel they need to comb public spaces for questions and comments about them, lest they look like theyâre ignoring people
(This doesnât mean you canât ask questions in public places, but email the org sending them the link!)
(Writing personally, not organizationally)
Iâm happy people are trying experiments like this!
Thinking about other ways that people incorporate each otherâs judgement about where to donate: often it involves knowing the specific people.
I think some people who knew each other through early EA /â GWWC did this â some had a comparative advantage in finance so went into earning to give, and others had a comparative advantage in research or founding organizations so went into nonprofits. But they made heavy use of each otherâs advice, because they knew each otherâs strengths.
Itâs also common to do this within a couple /â family. My husband spent 10 years earning to give while I worked in social work and nonprofits, so heâs earned the large majority of what weâve donated. Early on, the two of us made separate decisions about where to donate our own earnings (though very informed by talking with each other). Later we moved to making a shared decision on where weâd donate our shared pot of money. This isnât necessarily the best system â people are biased toward trusting their family even in domains where the person isnât very competent, and you can see examples like the Buffett family where family members seem to make kind of random decisions.
I feel good about people pooling judgement when they know the strengths and weaknesses of the specific other people involved. I feel much less excited about pooling judgement with people whose judgement I know nothing about.
In 2020 when I asked you about lead policy work, you werenât optimistic that people without strong networks and expertise could make much progress on policy advocacy. Has your view changed?
I found this a clear explanation of the costs and benefitsâthanks for writing it up!
A similar issue: lack of iodization in Europe, the region where children have the highest rates of low iodine. https://ââwww.who.int/ââpublications/ââi/ââitem/ââ9789241593960
Iâve added a link to the section of the CEA mistakes page that outlines these.
>emails to those accepted to the EAGxAustralia 2023 conference but who did attend
Was this meant to say âdid not attendâ?
Just a note that as an American then-Quaker, I went to a âRight Sharing of World Resourcesâ event in 2006. This post is correct that there wasnât an emphasis on effectiveness, but on frugality and solidarity with the global poor.
My understanding is that there wasnât any direct connection between these Quaker efforts and the early effective giving projects that became part of EA.
Also, youâre always welcome at the EA peer support group.
Hi Emrik,
I wanted to flag the outside view is that stopping all communication with other people seems like a very bad idea. If I understand right from your link, Maria is a spirit-animal rather than another person in the usual sense of the word.
My best guess is that isolation will not improve your ability to help others, but will create a complete echo chamber that wonât be good for your wellbeing or your ability to help others.
(I think there can be some variations on this that make sense. Like I have a family member who can only write science fiction when heâs been away from people for several days, so for a long time he structured his life to be pretty isolated in order to write books. But he was still in touch with friends and family at intervals.)
It sounds like youâre in a difficult place, and I really hope youâre able to find other people you trust to help you work out how you want to approach things.
[Edited a bit since I think my tone was off, thanks quila for identifying some of that]
For people interested in this topic, Iâve found Alice Evansâ writing interesting.
My impression is that Jaan Tallinnâs interest in rationalit- and EA-related projects, going back a long time, was one factor in Estonia.
My experience is that itâs more possible to avoid current conflicts of interest, but as people work in the same ecosystem they often have multiple interactions in different contexts over time. Iâd want people to keep in mind that the person in their group now may later end up being their colleague, funder, etc. To me, this is still a reason to seriously consider mental health resources outside the community.
Thereâs an asymmetry between people/âorgs that are more willing to publicly write impressions and things theyâve heard, and people/âorgs that donât do much of that. You could call the continuum âtransparent and communicative, vs locked down and secretiveâ or ârecklessly repeating rumors and speculation, vs professionalâ depending on your views!
When I see public comments about the inner workings of an organization by people who donât work there, I often also hear other people who know more about the org privately say âThatâs not true.â But they have other things to do with their workday than write a correction to a comment on the Forum or LessWrong, get it checked by their orgâs communications staff, and then follow whatever discussion comes from it.
A downside is that if an organization isnât prioritizing back-and-forth with the community, of course there will be more mystery and more speculations that are inaccurate but go uncorrected. Thatâs frustrating, but itâs a standard way that many organizations operate, both in EA and in other spaces.
There are some good reasons to be slower and more coordinated about communications. For example, I remember a time when an org was criticized, and a board member commented defending the org. But the board member was factually wrong about at least one claim, and the org then needed to walk back wrong information. It would have been clearer and less embarrassing for everyone if theyâd all waited a day or two to get on the same page and write a response with the correct facts. This process is worth doing for some important discussions, but few organizations will prioritize doing this every time someone is wrong on the internet.
So whatâs a reader to do?
When you see a claim that an org is doing some shady-sounding thing, made by someone who doesnât work at that org, remember the asymmetry. These situations will look identical to most readers:
The org really is doing a shady thing, and doesnât want to discuss it
The org really is doing the thing, but if you knew the full picture you wouldnât think it was shady
The claims are importantly inaccurate, but the org is not going to spend staff time coordinating a response
The claims are importantly inaccurate, and the org will post a comment next Tuesday that you probably wonât notice