What I am thinking about at the moment đ€ and why my profile is not my full name đ¶
Effective altruism community building đïž
I used to do a lot of effective altruism community building and I am currently thinking about how the effective altruism community can maximize its expected impact, given the rapidly changing conditions.
My own personal productivity and wellbeing bottlenecks : why I think prioritising working on these is important, progress I have made and my current challenges
I suspect that working on my personal productivity and wellbeing bottlenecks is a great way for me to increase how much impact I can expect to have over my career.
I am currently focused on working out how to become much more reliable than I am/âhave been in the past.
In particular, I am working on finishing my top priority tasks in a timely manner, becoming better calibrated on what commitments I can and cannot meet, getting better at promising the 5th percentile scenario rather than the 50th (or the 95th) and on becoming better at quick communication when plans break. I find this quite challenging for a number of reasons (one of those reasons being a cluster of personality traits that got me an ADHD diagnosis and another being a number of non-ADHD mental health/âself-esteem issues that Iâm slowly but surely working through).
Progress I have made so far đ€©: I have become much more self-compassionate over the years which has helped a lot with a lot of the mental health struggles Iâve had.
I have a process that works for getting me to consistently start on my top priority (but is very time-consuming and maybe only works consistently when I control enough of the variables, e.g. Iâm not sure it would work if I had a very different home environment and work environment to the ones I have now).
My next challenges đ§đŒ: I struggle to keep the scope narrow enough to finish a lot of what I start. I finish what I want to finish some of the time, but nowhere near consistently enough for me to feel like I wonât become the bottleneck sometimes in a team (and therefore slow the progress of the whole team a lot).
I also find it very hard to under-promise (I sometimes find it hard to accept that I realistically need to promise to do 15% of what I think is actually possible when Iâm excited about things, especially when everything Iâm saying no to feels important if I could fit it in).
More broadly, I am currently thinking about how to leverage the upsides of being a bit more ADHD than the average person and managing the downsides to still reach the payoffs I care about.
Please do reach out about pretty much anything (as long as youâre okay with me maybe not getting around to replying because messages and emails, every now and again, turn into a massive ugh field and I can only progress on so many ugh fields at a time đđ¶đđ).
Why my forum username is not my full name đ€«
I donât have my full name on the forum because, even though anyone who knows me in person can probably tell who I am because I always say the same things (Iâm a bit of a broken record sometimes), I want to be able to be honest about how Iâm thinking about the best strategies to increase my expected impact over my lifetime. This means I want to sometimes discuss my personal productivity bottlenecks and my mental health (as I do here) and also how Iâm working on these. I donât necessarily really want to be this open about my mental health and other parts of who I am right now that I am working on improving (to, hopefully, do more good in the longer term) with anyone who thinks to google my full name.
(But I promise Iâm still a real personâthough maybe that is what a fake person would say đ
)
I am enjoying all this recent discussion on what we should be calling âeffective altruismâ.
As EA ideas become more common and get applied in a larger variety of contexts, it might be good to have different words that are context and audience specific. For example, âglobal prioritiesâ seems like a great name for the academic field, and it can be acknowledged that it is related to âeffective altruismâ the social movement which is, itself, clearly very distinct but still related to the LessWrong/âRationality community. Maybe policy orientated effective altruism needs its own name (clearly related to the academic field and social movement but distinct from it?). Similarly, maybe it is also okay for a broader appeal version of effective altruism to have a different name (this is maybe what the GWWC brand is moving towards?).
The effective altruism project is pretty broad and even if a large amount more thought had been put into the name, it still seems unlikely to me that one name could appeal to policy-makers, academics, the broader population and students/â people on the internet that both like to deeply philosophise about morality and base their lives around the conclusions of that philosophising.