I agree with all those points. One additional point I was trying to make is that it’s okay to trade off some impact for your own happiness.
I think the EA community would benefit on the margin from moving more in the personal happiness direction. (Probably the general population would benefit from moving more in the impact direction, but my audience is heavily EA-skewed.)
Note: the mental health navigator doesn’t just focus on free or low-cost mental health resources. They provide links to free/low cost online resources, plus a providers database of coaches, therapists, and psychiatrists recommended by EAs.
The MHN has a pretty broad inclusion, so dealing explicitly with mental health isn’t a requirement. There’s a bunch of coaches there.
I second that it doesn’t make sense to name a few coaches here. I’d be happy with adding all the coaching focusing on EAs (probably a dozen to a few dozen?) or pointing to a third party source like MHN that already has extensive lists.
Can we add EA Mental Health Navigator, especially the provider database? It’s a list of coaches and therapists recommended by EAs. It is available as a resource, and would also benefit from more people leaving reviews of providers they’ve worked with!
I wish we didn’t need to treat ADHD like a disease, and instead people could just say “yes, I struggle more along these dimensions that the average person.” Unfortunately, the medical community treats ADHD as a disease and has drawn arbitrary, frustratingly vague guidelines around it. If someone wants to access medication, they need to accept that label.
My best understanding is that ADHD symptoms are roughly normally distributed in the population. I would be thrilled if the medical community followed an informed consent model where patients could decide for themselves if they needed medication, following proper advisement of the risks and costs. Baring that, it would be great if they established clearer thresholds for what was significant enough impairment to be worth medicating, instead of the current system.
I find the DSM-V criteria aggravatingly vague and non-specific. Like “Six or more symptoms of inattention for children up to age 16 years, or five or more for adolescents age 17 years and older and adults; symptoms of inattention have been present for at least 6 months.” I.e. adults who say “often” or “very often” more than 5 times on a questionnaire get diagnosed with ADHD. How often if “often”? You know, often!
Seconding that the risk of harmful interventions is low. Based on Scott’s pages and the UpToDate page, the risks from taking stimulant medication as prescribed are pretty negligible—comparable to normal side effects from caffeine.
Haha, same! My reaction to reading Luisa’s post was “Ohh, wait, perfectionism is spending time inefficiently because I don’t want to stopping working on one task until I think it’s good?” Calling this “perfectionism” feels a bit misleading: from the inside it never felt like I was trying to make something perfect, just meeting an (admittedly high) bar for “good enough.”
Re using LLMs as therapists, I’m more skeptical than Kat is, but not by much. Like, maybe LLMs can replace 20% or 50% of therapy right now, not 100%?
My best experiences with therapists were when they could hold threads over several sessions and challenge my blindspots. I expect it will be easier to ignore an LLM telling you something you don’t want to hear, and the LLM probably won’t be able to hold me accountable for doing my homework :P
On the other hand, free on-demand therapy! That’s huge! If you’ve already done therapy before and more-or-less know what you want out of a session, then this seems like it could be a pretty good substitute for ongoing sessions.
Right now, I have a lot of uncertainty that I expect to narrow as I hear more examples of people using the LLMs for therapy.
I have a couple blog posts in the works on ADHD!
I don’t really know what we’re going to find, and I’m very uncertain about what actions we’ll want to take at the end of this. We’re open to the possibility that things are really bad and that improving the experiences of women and gender minorities should be a major priority for our team. But we’re also open to finding out that things aren’t – on the whole – all that bad, or aren’t all that tractable, and there are no significant changes we want to prioritise.
I appreciated this. I really want EA to understand its problems and deal with them, but that’s not going to happen if everyone is starting with an agenda. I value someone going in with a truth seeking goal to understand the situation.
Emily was great to work with to get it all done and out :)
I just finished revamping the Mental Health Navigator’s community-recommended provider database, and I’m really hopeful that this will help a bunch of EAs find therapists. (It will be promoted later this fall) https://www.eamentalhealthnavigator.com/recommended-providers
Fixed! Thanks for catching that.
Good question! The Al Smith example is from The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro. The examples with Sam and Rohin were from personal conversations/interviews. I think I also drew in a bit from Rohin’s FAQ https://rohinshah.com/faq-career-advice-for-ai-alignment-researchers/. The Scott Young example I pieced together from his blog post and book. I tried to link to some of the relevant blog posts above.
A few quick meta comments: It feels like this level of polish is sufficient for getting some people to read the post to begin with. The alternative would be to put a lot of time into creating an engaging, compelling post building your idea, but I don’t actually have a good sense of how much better that would be than simple, conversational tone and brevity you used. The epistemic status note at the top was helpful.
On the other hand, I suspect that almost none of your readers will actually do anything based on this. You probably want to put more effort into making the suggested action easy and compelling if you want to get people to do something.
On net, I vote for more quick posts like this.
The individual receiving the grant has to pay taxes on it, so the net benefit may be somewhat less than you’re anticipating.
I love Miranda’s fanfic series “A Song for Two Voices” for EA-themed fantasy. https://www.archiveofourown.org/series/936480
“Major themes include the complexity of thinking about ethics, the challenge of taking on problems in the world that seem insurmountable, and trying to do good while dealing with serious mental health issues. The characters do not start out masters of rationality, but they do learn from their mistakes and grow as people, and do their best to help support each other.”
Compared to HPMOR, I think “A Song for Two Voices” does a much better job representing the EA community. I.e. trying to do good as a community with limited resources instead of a solitary hero single-handedly saving the day. (Not to bash HPMOR—it’s also an excellent read!)
What’s a skill you have spent deliberate effort in developing that has paid off a lot? Or alternatively, what is a skill you wish you had spent deliberate effort developing much earlier than you did?
I hear the vague umbrella term “good judgement” or even more simply “thinking well” thrown around a lot in the EA community. Do you have thoughts on how to cultivate good judgement? Did you do anything—deliberately or otherwise—to develop better judgement?
I’m a big fan of “counting up”, where you start at zero and get points for doing good things, instead of starting at perfect and losing points for imperfection.