Sophia

Karma: 573

What I am thinking about at the moment 🤓 and why my profile is not my full name 😶

Effective altruism community building 🏕️

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/have 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/self-esteem issues that I’m slowly but surely working through).

Progress I have made so far 🤩: I have become much more self-compassionate over the years which has helped a lot with a lot of the mental health struggles I’ve 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. I’m 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 🧗🏼: 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 won’t 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 I’m excited about things, especially when everything I’m 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 you’re 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 😊😶🙃🌞).

Why my forum username is not my full name 🤫

I don’t 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 (I’m a bit of a broken record sometimes), I want to be able to be honest about how I’m 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 I’m working on these. I don’t 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 I’m still a real person—though maybe that is what a fake person would say 😅)

Is it possible for EA to remain nuanced and be more welcoming to newcomers? A distinction for discussions on topics like this one.

Sophia15 Jul 2022 7:03 UTC

35 points

19 comments11 min readEA link

Sophia 13 Jul 2022 5:29 UTC
34 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Luke Freeman’s comment on: EA for dumb people?
Luke needing to be reminded what he brings to the table I think is evidence that we’re missing out on many extremely talented people who aren’t 99.9th percentile on one particular skillset that we overselect for.

As a counter-example, I am below average in many skills that people in my wider-peer group have that, I believe, would be incredibly helpful to the effective altruism movement. However, I am good at a very narrow type of things that are easy to signal in conversation that makes people in the EA community often think way more highly of me than, I believe, is rational.

I have found easy social acceptance in this community because I speak fluent mathematics. I have higher IQ friends who, in high-trust conversations, are extremely epistemically humble and have a lot to contribute but who I can’t easily integrate into the effective altruism community.

I believe that part of what makes it hard to introduce people who aren’t exceptionally analytical to effective altruism is because there seems to be a stronger prior that intelligence and competence are one-dimensional (or all types of competence and intelligence are correlated) in a way there isn’t so much this prior elsewhere. It does seem true that some people are more intelligent/skilled than others on many different dimensions we might care about and this is maybe a taboo thing to say in many contexts. However, competence and intelligence are multi-dimensional and different types of intelligence/skills seem to me unlikely to be perfectly correlated with each other. I’d guess some are probably anti-correlated (we each have a limited number of neurons, surely if those neurons are highly specialized at solving one type of problem then there are going to be trade-offs which mean, at the skill frontier, it seems likely that this scarce brain capacity trades-off against other specialized skills).

To find someone good at marketing, we possibly had to find the one marketing guy who happened to be way above average in pretty much everything, including analytic intelligence (who was only 99th percentile analytic instead of 99.9th percentile and so needs reminding of his value in a community of people that very heavily rewards analytical thinking).

While analytic reasoning can be handy, it is not the only skill worth having and I don’t think you need to have that much of that particular skill to understand the core EA ideas enough to be a very valuable contributor to this community. Being exceptionally good at reasoning transparency and analytic philosophy is not perfectly correlated with many other types of skills or intelligence desperately needed within the effective altruism community for the EA community to maximize its impact. While some types of skills and intelligence have synergies and often come together, I suspect that other skills have different synergies.

If this model is accurate, then some skills are likely to be anti-correlated with the capacity to show large degrees of reasoning transparency and impress in EA-style conversations.

If those are skills we are in desperate need of, saying this movement isn’t for anyone who doesn’t find the forum very easy to read or doesn’t find analytical conversations as effortless might very well cause us to be much lower impact than we otherwise could be.

Comparative advantage is a thing and, as far as I’ve observed, skillsets and personalities do seem to cluster together.
If we want our movement to maximize its impact, then we can’t just select for the people who are exceptionally analytical at the detriment of losing out on people who are exceptionally good at, e.g. marketing or policy (I suspect it could be harder to find top people to work in AI governance without there being room for a greater variety of people who care deeply about helping others).
What links here?
- Sophia's comment on Senior EA ‘ops’ roles: if you want to undo the bottleneck, hire differently by AnonymousThrowAway (17 Jul 2022 1:21 UTC; 1 point)

Sophia 25 Jul 2022 1:13 UTC
32 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Sophia’s comment on: Making Effective Altruism Enormous
I actually think being welcoming to a broad range of people and ideas is really about being focused on conveying to people who are new to effective altruism that the effective altruism project is about a question.
If they don’t agree with the current set of conclusions, that is fine! That’s encouraged, in fact.

People who disagree with our current bottom line conclusions can still be completely on board with the effective altruism project (and decide whether their effective altruism project is helped by engaging with the community for themselves).
If in conversations with new people, the message that we get across is that the bottom-line is not as important as the reasoning processes that get us there, then I think we naturally will be more welcoming to a broader range of people and ideas in a way that is genuine.

Coming across as genuine is such an important part of leaving a good impression so I don’t think we can “pretend” to be broader spectrum than we actually are.
We can be honest about exactly where we are at we are while still encouraging others to take a broader view than us by distinguishing the effective altruism project from the community.
I think there is a tonne of value to making sure we are advocating for the project and not the community in outreach efforts with people who haven’t interacted that much with the community.

If newcomers don’t want to engage with our community, they can still care a tonne about the effective altruism project. They can collaborate with members of the community to the extent it helps them do what they believe is best for helping others as much as they can with whatever resources they are putting towards the effective altruism project.
I’d love to see us become exceptionally good at going down tangents with new people to explore the merits of the ideas they have. This makes them and us way more open to new ideas that are developed in these conversations. It also is a great way to demonstrate how people in this community think to people who haven’t interacted with us much before.
How we think is much more core to effective altruism than any conclusion we have right now (at least as I see it). Showing how this community thinks will, eventually, lead people we have these conversations with to conclusions we’d be interested in anyway (if we’re doing those conversations well).

Sophia 25 Jul 2022 0:43 UTC
32 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Zach Stein-Perlman’s comment on: Making Effective Altruism Enormous
I agree that EA being enormous eventually would be very good. 🙂

However, I think there are plenty of ways that quick, short-term growth strategies could end up stunting our growth. 😓

I also think that being much more welcoming might be surprisingly significant due to compounding growth (as I explain below). 🌞

It sounds small, “be more welcoming”, but a small change in angle between two paths can result in a very different end destination. It is absolutely possible for marginal changes to completely change our trajectory!

We probably don’t want effective altruism to lose its nuances. I also think nuanced communication is relatively slow (because it is often best done, at least in part, in many conversations with people in the community)^[1]. I think that we could manage a 30% growth rate and keep our community about a nuanced version of effective altruism, but we probably couldn’t triple our community’s size every year and stay nuanced.
However, growth compounds. Growing “only” 30% is not really that slow if we think in decades!
If we grow at a rate of 30% each year, then we’ll be 500,000 times as big in 50 years as we are now.^[2]
Obviously growth will taper off (we’re not going to grow exponentially forever), but I think at what point it tapers off is a very big deal. That saturation point, that maximum community size we hit, is more important for EA ending up enormous. We can probably grow by focusing on “slow” growth strategies, and still end up enormous relatively soon (30% is actually very fast growth but can be done without loads of the sorts of activities you might typically think of as fast-growth strategies).^[3]
I actually think one of the biggest factors in how big we grow is how good an impression we leave on people who don’t end up in our community. We will taper off earlier if we have a reputation for being unpleasant. We can grow at 30% with local groups doing a lot of the work to leave a lot of people with a great impression whether or not they decide to engage much with the community after they’ve formed that first impression.
If we have a reputation for being a lovely community, we’re much more likely to be able to grow exponentially for a long time.
Therefore, I do think being really nice and welcoming is a really huge deal and more short-term strategies for fast growth that leave people confused and often feeling negatively about us could, in the end, result in our size capping out much earlier.
Whether or not we have the capacity for all the people who could be interested in effective altruism right now (only being able to grow so fast in a nuanced way limits our capacity), we still do have the capacity to leave more people with a good impression.
More of my thoughts on what could be important to focus on are here.
1. ^
  Books and articles don’t talk back and so can’t explore the various miscellaneous thoughts that pop up for a person who is engaging with EA material, when that material is thought-provoking for them.
2. ^
  ${1.3}^{50} \approx 5 \times 10^{5}$ (I find the weird neatness of these numbers quite poetic 😻)
3. ^
  This isn’t to say I’m against broad outreach efforts. It’s just to say that it is really important to lay the groundwork for a nuanced impression later on with any broad outreach effort.

Sophia 26 Mar 2021 0:32 UTC
28 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Why I prefer “Effective Altruism” to “Global Priorities”
I am enjoying all this recent discussion on what we should be calling “effective altruism”.

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, “global priorities” seems like a great name for the academic field, and it can be acknowledged that it is related to “effective altruism” the social movement which is, itself, clearly very distinct but still related to the LessWrong/Rationality 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/ people on the internet that both like to deeply philosophise about morality and base their lives around the conclusions of that philosophising.

Sophia 11 Jan 2022 5:35 UTC
25 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Effective Altruism is a Question (not an ideology)
Key points
- We (the effective altruism community) probably want a community centred around values/principles/axioms rather than conclusions.
- This post is a great starting point to value-centric discussions instead of conclusion-centric.
  - It communicates that asking the question honestly and then acting on its answer is more important than the specific current conclusions
  - It is very accessible so newcomers can easily understand it (having this be articulated for people new to effective altruism helps make this a central part of the effective altruism movement in the future because some newcomers will make up our future community)
Elaboration on key points

I think this post nudges the culture of the effective altruism movement in a really good direction. I don’t think it necessarily accurately describes what the effective altruism movement is, but more of what it aspires to be. Having this compass on where we want to be helps us nudge the movement towards that.

Why do we want to emphasise values/principles/axioms over conclusions?
The answer to the question “how do we do as much good as possible with our limited resources” (referred to as the EA question for the rest of this review) is an uncertain one: we never have complete information. The answer to the EA question is also a dynamic one: our judgement of the best answer, even if we did have all the information, is likely to be constantly changing with time, as our world changes.
Reasonable conclusions tend to be context-dependent and should change rapidly as we learn new information and our world changes. Principles/values/axioms can and should remain much more stable over time (though they likely should gain nuance with time too, hopefully, as we’ve thought more).

How this post (and posts like it) help
We can’t help but be at least a little bit defined by our current conclusions, but posts like this remind us that we aspire to be about the question, not any specific current answer.
This post’s usefulness for communicating to newcomers what effective altruism is aspiring to be about is helped by it being an exceptionally accessible piece of writing. Someone new to effective altruism can read it without reading much other material and still understand it. This makes it particularly useful because it helps newcomers see effective altruism more like how we want effective altruism to be. This helps us bring in more people interested in effective altruism’s question more than effective altruism’s current conclusions. It also helps new people see effective altruism as more about its question than its current conclusions.

This post certainly helped me to feel like I belonged in the effective altruism community soon after I first came across the movement, while I was still forming my best guesses on the answer to the question “how do I do the most good?”. It helped me feel like I belonged in the community while my guesses were often very different from those I knew in the community. Why? It brought the emphasis back to values that I completely was on board rather than conclusions I wasn’t fully convinced by or didn’t fully understand. For me, posts like this one did not act in a vacuum. Reading this was probably only convincing because I also had great conversations with people in the community that emphasised these points.
If we can make people who are curious about the question “how do we do as much good with our lives” feel more welcome in our community, then we’ll attract more curious, more independent thinkers. In the long run, this will probably create a healthier effective altruism movement (even if there are some costs from a loss in cohesiveness from not all having the same conclusions).

Material like this, along with people in the community demonstrating these ideas in real-time in conversations and their actions, can go a long way to create a movement united by principles instead of one united by (hopefully) transient conclusions.
Some follow-up thoughts
Should we be united around ideas like “AI safety is one of the most important issues of our time” or ideas like “all people (and perhaps more than just people) are worthy of moral consideration”? I suspect we want to have a stronger identity around ideas like the latter than the former.
Given the answer to the EA question is uncertain and dynamically changing, I suspect that we want to be more united by fundamental principles (values/ axioms) like “all people (or all sentient beings) are worthy of moral consideration” rather than conclusions like “AI safety is one of the most important issues of our time”.*
Diversity in conclusions is desirable, as long as we all have clear common ground (that is narrow enough that having a community is still useful). What should that clear and sufficiently narrow common ground be? This is a challenging question, but my guess is that we want to find more principle/value-centric common ground. Posts like this help us map that out right from our first introduction and can help remind us of what we want effective altruism to be many years later.

Note: lots has been written more recently that is related, but because I am short on time and reviews need to be posted by tomorrow, I am posting this review now (but I might come back and add some links I think are particularly relevant).
*This is a fuzzy distinction, “future lives are worthy of moral consideration” might reasonably be classed as a conclusion or a principle. However, I still think it is a meaningful one, despite the existence of edge cases.
What links here?
- Results from the First Decade Review by Lizka (13 May 2022 15:01 UTC; 163 points)

Sophia 13 Jul 2022 5:33 UTC
23 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Sophia’s comment on: EA for dumb people?
In short, if my model is correct, being a bit different to other people in the effective altruism community is evidence that you might have a comparative advantage (and maybe even an absolute advantage) within our community and you are paving the way for other people who are less weird in ways people in EA tend to be weird to find belonging here.

I strongly believe that if you care deeply about others in an impartial way, that carving out space for you is very much in the best interest of this community (and that if the EA community is a place you want to be, finding your place in it is going to help others feel like they, too, have a place). It is also fine for you to just do what’s good for you too and if the EA community isn’t healthy for you for whatever reason, it’s fine to bring what you like and discard the rest elsewhere too!

Sophia 21 May 2022 19:06 UTC
23 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: “Big tent” effective altruism is very important (particularly right now)
It is plausible to me that there are some low opportunity cost actions that might make it way more likely that certain people will work on guesses that are plausible candidates for our top (or close to the top) guesses in the next 50 years who, otherwise, wouldn’t engage with effective altruism.^[1]

For example, how existing community organizers manage certain conversations can make a really big difference to some people’s lasting impressions of effective altruism.
Consider a person who comes to a group who is sceptical of the top causes we propose but uses the ITN framework to make a case for another cause that they believe is more promising by EA lights.
There are many ways to respond to this person. One is to make it clear that you think that this person just hasn’t thought about it enough, or they would just come to the same conclusion as existing people in the effective altruism community. Another is to give false encouragement, overstating the extent of your agreement for the sake of making this person, who you disagree with, feel welcome. A skilled community builder with the right mindset can, perhaps, navigate between the above two reactions. They might use this as an opportunity to really reinforce the EA mindset/thinking tools that this person is demonstrating (which is awesome!) and then give some pushback where pushback is due.^[2]
There are also some higher opportunity cost actions to achieve this inclusivity, including the ones you discussed (but this doesn’t seem what Luke was advocating for, see his reply ^[3]).
1. ^
  This seems to get the benefit, if done successfully, of not only their work but having another person who might be able to communicate the core idea of effective altruism with high fidelity to many others they meet over their entire career with a sphere of people we might not otherwise reach.
2. ^
  Ideally, pushback is just on one part at a time. The shotgun method rarely leads to a constructive conversation and it’s hard to resolve all cruxes in a single conversation. The goal might be just to find one to resolve for now (maybe even a smaller one than the one that the conversation started out with) and hopefully they’ll enjoy the conversation enough to come back to another event to resolve a second.
  
  I think it’s also worth acknowledging 1) that we have spent a decade steelmanning our views, and that sometimes it takes a lot of time to build up new ideas (see butterfly ideas), which won’t get built up if no one makes that investment but also 2) people have spent 10 years thinking hard about the “how to help others as much as possible” question so it is definitely worth some investment to get an understanding of why these people think there is a case for these existing causes.
3. ^
  maybe this whole comment should be a reply to Luke’s reply but moving this comment is a tad annoying so hopefully it is forgivable to leave it here 🌞.
What links here?
- Sophia's comment on Sophia’s Quick takes by Sophia (5 Jun 2022 16:38 UTC; 1 point)

Sophia 27 May 2022 0:59 UTC
19 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Sophia’s Shortform
The goal of this short-form post: to outline what I see as the key common ground between the “big tent” versus “small and weird” discussions that have been happening recently and to outline one candidate point of disagreement.
Tl;dr:
- Common ground:
  - Everyone really values good thinking processes/epistemics/reasoning transparency and wants to make sure we maintain that aspect of the existing effective altruism community
  - Impact is fat-tailed
  - We might be getting a lot more attention soon because of our increased spending and because of the August release of “what we owe the future” (and the marketing push that is likely to accompany it’s release)^[1]
- A key point of disagreement: Does focusing on finding the people who produce the “tail” impact actually result in more impact?
  - One reason this wouldn’t be the case: “median” community building efforts and “tail” community building efforts are complements not substitutes. They are multipliers^[2] of each other, rather than being additive and independent.
    The additive hypothesis is simpler so I felt the multiplicative hypothesis needed some outlined mechanisms. Possible mechanisms:
    Mechanism 1: the sorts of community building efforts that are more “median” friendly actually help the people who eventually create the “tail” impact become more interested in these ideas and more interested in taking bigger action with time
    Mechanism 2: our biggest lever for impact in the future will not be the highly dedicated individuals but our influence on people on the periphery of the effective altruism (what I call “campground” effects)
Preamble (read: pre-ramble)
This is my summary of my vibe/impressions on some of the parts of the recent discussion that have stood out to me as particularly important. I am intending to finish my half a dozen drafts of a top-level post (with much more explanations for my random jargon that isn’t always even that common in effective altruism circles) at some point but I thought I’d start but sharing these rough thoughts to help get me over the “sharing things on the EA forum is scary” hump.

I might end up just sharing this post as a top-level post later once I’ve translated my random jargon a bit more and thought a bit more about the claims here I’m least sure of (possibly with a clearer outline of what cruxes make the “multiplicative effects” mechanisms more or less compelling)
Some common ground
These are some of my impressions of some claims that seem to be pretty common across the board (but that people sometimes talk as though they might suspect that the person they are talking to might not agree so I think it’s worth making them explicit somewhere).
1. The biggest one seems to be: We like the fact that effective altruism has good thinking processes/epistemics a lot! We don’t want to jeopardize our reasoning transparency and scout mindsets for the sake of going viral.
2. Impact is fat-tailed and this makes community-building challenging: there are a lot of uncomfortable trade-offs that might need to be made if we want to build the effective altruism community into a community that will be able to do as much good as possible.
3. We might be getting a lot more attention very soon whether we want to or not because we’re spending more (and spending in places that get a lot of media attention like political races) and because there will be a big marketing push for “What We Owe the Future” to, potentially, a very big audience. ^[3]
A point of disagreement
It seems like there are a few points of disagreement that I intended to go into, but this one got pretty long so I’ll just leave this as one point:
Does focusing on “tail” people actually result in more impact?
Are “tail” work and “median” work complements or substitutes? Are they additive (so specialization in the bit with all the impact makes sense) or multiplicative (so doing both well is a necessary condition to getting “tails”)?
I feel like the “additive/substitutes” hypothesis is more intuitive/a simpler assumption so I’ve outlined some explicit mechanisms for the “multiplicative/complements” hypothesis.

Mechanisms for the “multiplicative/complements” hypothesis
Mechanism 1
“Tail” people often require similar “soft” entry points to “non-tail” people and focusing on the “median” people on some dimensions actually is better at getting the “tails” people because we just model “tail” people wrong (e.g. someone could think it looks like some people were always going to be tails, but in reality, when we deep-dive into individual “tail” stories, there was, accidentally, “soft” entry points).
The dimensions where people advocate for lowering the bar are not epistemics/thinking processes, but things like
1. language barriers (e.g. reducing jargon, finding a plain English way to say something or doing your best to define the jargon when you use it if you think it’s so useful that it’s worth a definition),
2. making it easier for people to transition at their own pace from wherever they are to “extreme dedication” (and being very okay with some people stopping completely way before, and
3. reducing the social pressure to agree with the current set of conclusions by putting a lot more emphasis on a broader spectrum of plausible candidates that we might focus on if we’re trying to help others as much as possible (where “plausible candidates” are answers to the question of how we can help others the most with impartiality, considering all people alive today ^[4] or even larger moral circles/circle of compassion than that too, where an example of a larger group of individuals we might be wanting to help is all present and future sentient beings)
Mechanism 2
As we get more exposure, our biggest lever for impact might not the people that get really enthusiastic about effective altruism who go all the way to the last stop of the crazy train (what I might call our current tent), but the cultural memes we’re spreading to friends-of-friends-of-friends of people who have interacted with people in the effective altruism community or with the ideas and have strong views about them (positive or negative), which I have been calling “our campground” in all my essays to myself on this topic 🤣.
E.g. let’s say that the only thing that matters for humanity’s survival is who ends up in a very small number of very pivotal rooms,^[5] it might be much easier to influence a lot of the people who are likely to be in those rooms a little bit to be thinking about some of the key considerations we hope they’d be considering (it’d be nice if we made it more likely that a lot of people might have the thought; “a lot might be at stake here, let’s take a breather before we do X”) than to get people who have dedicated their lives to reducing X-risk because effective altruism-style thinking and caring is a core part of who they are in those rooms.
As we get more exposure, it definitely seems true that “campground” effects are going to get bigger whether we like it or not.^[6]
It is an open question (in my mind at least) whether we can leverage this to have a lot more impact or whether the best we can do is sit tight and try and keep the small core community on point.
1. ^
  As a little aside, I am so excited to get my hands on a copy (suddenly August doesn’t seem so soon)!
2. ^
  Additive and multiplicative models aren’t the only two plausible “approximations” of what might be going on, but they are a nice starting point. It doesn’t seem outside the range of possibility that there are big positive feedback loops between “core camp efforts” and “campground efforts” (and all the efforts in between). If this is plausibly true, then the “tails” for the impact of the effective altruism community as a whole could be here.
3. ^
  this point of common ground was edited in after first posting this comment
4. ^
  This is a pretty arbitrary cutoff of what counts as a large enough moral circle to count under the broader idea behind effective altruism and trying to do the most good, but I like being explicit about what we might mean because otherwise people get confused/it’s harder to identify what is a disagreement about the facts and what is just a lack of clarity in the questions we’re trying to ask.
  
  I like this arbitrary cutoff a lot because
  
  1) anyone who cares about every single person alive today already has a ginormous moral circle and I think that’s incredible: this seems to be very much wide enough to get at the vibe of the widely caring about others, and
  2) the crazy train goes pretty far, it is not at all obvious to me where the “right” stopping point is, I’ve got off a few stops along (my shortcut to avoid dealing with some crazier questions down the line, like infinite ethics, is “just” considering those in my light cone where it be simulated or not😅, not because I actually think this is all that reasonable, but because more thought on what “the answer” is seems to get in the way of me thinking hard about doing the things I think are pretty good which I think, on expectation, actually does more for what I’d guess I’ll care about if I had all of time to think about it.
5. ^
  this example is total plagiarism, see: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/sam-bankman-fried-high-risk-approach-to-crypto-and-doing-good/ (also has such a great discussion on multiplicative type effects being a big deal sometimes which I feel people in the effective altruism community think about less than we should: more specialization and more narrowing the focus isn’t always the best strategy on the margin for maximizing how good things are and will be on expectation, especially as we grow and have more variation in people’s comparative advantages within our community, and more specifically, within our set of community builders)
6. ^
  If our brand/reputation has lock-in for decades for a really long time, this could plausibly be a hinge of history moment for the effective altruism community. If there are ways of making our branding/reputation is as high fidelity as possible within the low-fidelity channels that messages travel virally, this could be a huge deal (ideally, once we have some goodwill from the broader “campground” we will have a bit of a long reflection to work out what we want our tent to look like 🤣😝).
What links here?
- (Even) More Early-Career EAs Should Try AI Safety Technical Research by tlevin (30 Jun 2022 21:14 UTC; 86 points)

Sophia 25 Jul 2022 2:06 UTC
16 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Zach Stein-Perlman’s comment on: Making Effective Altruism Enormous
I also think faster is better if the end size of our community stays the same. 👌🏼 I also think it’s possible that faster growth increases the end size of our community too. 🙂

Sorry if my past comment came across a bit harshly (I clearly have just been over-thinking this topic recently 😛)!^[1]

I do have an intuition, which I explain in more detail below, that lots of ways of growing really fast could end up making our community’s end size smaller. 😟
Therefore, I feel like focusing on fast growth is much less important than focusing on laying the groundwork to have a big end capacity (even if it takes us a while to get there).

It’s so easy to get caught up in short-term metrics so I think bringing the focus to short-term fast growth could take away attention from thinking about whether short-term growth is costing us long-term growth.

I don’t think we’re in danger of disappearing given our current momentum.

I do think we’re in danger of leaving a bad impression on a lot of people though and so I think it is important to manage that as well as we can. My intuition is that it will be easier to work out how to form a good impression if we don’t grow very fast in a very small amount of time.
Having said that, I’m also not against broad outreach efforts. I simply think that when doing broad outreach, it is really important to keep in mind whether the messages being sent out lay the groundwork for a nuanced impression later on (it’s easy to spread memes that makes more nuanced communication much harder).

However, I think memes about us are likely to spread if we’re trying to do big projects that attract media attention, whether or not we are the ones to spread those broad outreach messages.

I could totally buy into it being important to do our best to try and get the broad outreach messages we think are most valuable out there if we’re going to have attention regardless of whether we strategically prepare for it.

I have concrete examples in my post here of what I call “campground impacts” (our impact through our influence on people outside the EA community). If outreach results in a “worse campground”, then I think our community’s net impact will be smaller (so I’m against it). If outreach results in a “better campground”, then I think our community’s net impact will be bigger (so I’m for it). If faster-growth strategies result in a better campground then I’m probably for them, if they result in a worse campground, then I’m probably against them. 😛
1. ^
  I went back and edited it after Zach replied to more accurately convey my vibe but my first draft was all technicalities and no friendly vibes which I think is no way to have a good forum discussion! (sorry!)
  
  (ok, you caught me, I mainly went back to add emojis, but I swear emojis are an integral part of good vibes when discussing complex topics in writing 😛🤣: cartoon facial expressions really do seem better than no facial expressions to convey that I am an actual human being who isn’t actually meaning to be harsh when I just blurt out some unpolished thoughts in a random forum comment😶😔🤔💡😃😊)

Sophia 21 May 2022 22:03 UTC
14 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: RobertM’s comment on: “Big tent” effective altruism is very important (particularly right now)
A core part of the differing intuitions might be because we’re thinking about two different timescales.
It seems intuitively right to me that the “dedicated to a particular set of conclusions about the world” version of effective altruism will grow faster in the short term. I think this might be because conclusions require less nuanced communication, and being more concrete there are more concrete actions to take that can get people on board faster.

I also have the intuition that a “commitment to using reason and evidence to do the most good we can” (I’d maybe add, “with some proportion of our resources”) has the potential to have a larger backing in the long-term.

I have done a terrible “paint” job (literally used paint) in purple on one of the diagrams in this post to illustrate what I mean:
There are movement building strategies that end us up on the grey line, which gives us faster growth in the short term (so a bigger tent for a while), but doesn’t change our saturation point (we’re still at saturation point 1).

I think that a “broad spectrum of ideas” might mean our end saturation point is higher even if this might require slower growth in the near term. I’ve illustrated this as the purple line which ends up being bigger in the end, at saturation point 2, even if in the short term, growth is slower. In this sense, we will be smaller tent for a while, but we have the potential to end up as a bigger tent in some terminal equilibrium.
What links here?
- Sophia's comment on Making Effective Altruism Enormous by Davidmanheim (25 Jul 2022 0:43 UTC; 32 points)

Sophia 9 Nov 2021 10:49 UTC
14 points
0 ∶ 0
on: EA Forum engagement doubled in the last year
This sort of thing is hard to judge but I’d guess that having a moderator who seems enthusiastic, approachable and friendly makes a huge difference.

I think Aaron Gertler might have made the forum a much less intimidating place to contribute to the discussion than it would have been without his comments and posts (and also that this sort of thing compounds over time). Many of his additions seemed to nudge the forum culture in a more open, more curious, more patient and more welcoming direction (I have read the forum regularly for years and I noticed the change in tone—which seemed in no small part to the huge number of generally encouraging, patient and kind posts/comments by Aaron—changing how much I impulsively wanted to engage).

Sophia 19 May 2021 18:28 UTC
14 points
0 ∶ 0
on: What gives me hope
I love this post! Thank you for sharing it :)

Sophia 27 May 2022 14:46 UTC
13 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Chris Leong’s comment on: Sophia’s Shortform
I suspect that some ways we filter at events of existing groups are good and we should keep doing them.

I also suspect some strategies/tendencies we have when we filter at the group level are counter-productive to finding and keeping high-potential people.

For example, filtering too fast based on how quickly someone seems to “get” longtermism might filter in the people who are more willing to defer and so seem like they get it more than they do.

It might filter out the people who are really trying to think it through, who seem more resistant to the ideas or who are more willing to voice their half-formed thoughts that haven’t developed yet into something that deep (because thinking through all the different considerations to form an inside view takes a lot of time and voicing a lot of “dead-end” thoughts). Those higher value people might systematically be classed as “less tractable” or “less smart” when, in fact, it is sometimes^[1] that we have just forgotten that people who are really thinking about these ideas seriously, who are smart enough to possibly be a person who could have a tail end impact, are going to say things that don’t sound smart as they navigate what they think. The further someone is from our echo chamber, the stronger I expect this effect to be.

Obviously I don’t know how most groups filter at the group-level, this is so dependent on the particular community organizers (and then also there are maybe some cultural commonalities across the movement which is why I find it tempting to make broad-sweeping generalisations that might not hold in many places).
1. ^
  but obviously not always (and I don’t actually have a clear idea of how big a deal this issue is, I’m just trying to untangle my various intuitions so I can more easily scrutinize if there is a grain of truth in any of them on closer inspection)
What links here?
- Sophia's comment on Sophia’s Quick takes by Sophia (28 May 2022 2:17 UTC; 9 points)
- Sophia's comment on Sophia’s Quick takes by Sophia (5 Jun 2022 16:38 UTC; 1 point)

Sophia 26 Jul 2022 0:30 UTC
12 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Alejandro Acelas’s comment on: Making Effective Altruism Enormous
You don’t need to convince everyone of everything you think in a single event. 🙂 You probably didn’t form your worldview in the space of two hours either. 😉

When someone says they think giving locally is better, ask them why. Point out exactly what you agree with (e.g. it is easier to have an in-depth understanding of your local context) and why you still hold your view (e.g. that there are such large wealth disparities between different countries that there are some really low hanging fruit, like basic preventative measures of diseases like malaria, that you currently guess that you can still make more of a difference by donating elsewhere).

If you can honestly communicate why you think what you do, the reasons your view differs from the person you are talking to, in a patient and kind way, I think your local group will be laying the groundwork for a much larger movement of people who care deeply about helping others as much as they can with some of their resources. A movement that also thinks about the hard but important questions in a really thoughtful and intelligent way.

The best way to change other people’s minds for me is to keep in mind that I haven’t got everything figured out and this person might be able to point to nuance I’ve missed.

These really are incredibly challenging topics that no-one in this community or in any community has fully figured out yet. It didn’t always happen in the first conversation, but every person whose mind I have ever ended up changing significantly over many conversations added nuance to my views too.

Each event, each conversation, can be a small nudge or shift (for you or the other person). If your group is a nice place to hang out, some people will keep coming back for more talks and conversations.

Changing people’s mind overnight is hard. Changing their minds and your mind over a year, while you all develop more nuanced views on these complicated but still important questions, is much more tractable and, I think, impactful.

Sophia 23 Jul 2022 13:35 UTC
12 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Leaning into EA Disillusionment
I think a big thing I feel after reading this is a lot more disillusioned about community-building.
It is really unhealthy that people feel like they can’t dissent from more established (more-fleshed out?) thoughts/arguments/conclusions.
Where is this pressure to agree with existing ideas and this pressure against dissent coming from? (some early thoughts to flesh out more 🤔)
This post isn’t the only thing that makes me feel that there is way too much pressure to agree and way too little room to develop butterfly ideas (that are never well-argued the first time they are aired, but some of which could iterate into more fleshed-out ideas down the road if given a bit more room to fly).
My guess is there is a lot more uncertainty among people who fleshed out a lot of the ideas that now feel unquestionable, but uncertainty is hard to communicate. It is also much easier to build on someone else’s groundwork than to start an argument from scratch, making it easier to develop existing ideas and harder to get new ones, even potentially good ones, off the ground.
I also think it’s incredibly important to make sure people who are doing community building feel fully comfortable saying exactly what they think, even if it isn’t their impression of the “consensus” view. No talking point should ever be repeated by someone who doesn’t buy into it because that person can’t defend it if questioned because it’s not their view. My guess is the original talking points got written up as inspiration or prompts, but weren’t ever intended to be repeated without question and without buy-in. It’s such a big ask of people though to figure out that they don’t really believe the things they are saying. It is especially hard in a community that values legible thinking and intelligence so much and can be quite punishing to half-formed thoughts. There is often a long period between not fully buying-in and having a really well-fleshed out reason for disagreeing. This period where you have to admit you feel you don’t really agree but you don’t know why yet is hard to be honest about, especially in this community. I don’t think addressing this pressure has easy answers but I think addressing it seems pretty incredibly important anyway for creating healthy spaces with healthy epistemics.
More thoughts and suggestions on how we maybe can improve
I agree with so much of this post’s suggestions. I also have so many random half-baked ideas in so many half-finished google docs.
Maybe get better at giving people who are not extremely dedicated or all-in good vibes/a good impression because we see them as future potential allies (even if we don’t have the capacity to fully on-board them into the community)
It just does seem so important to make sure we have a culture where people really feel they don’t have to take all or leave all of effective altruism to have a voice in this community or to have a place in our spaces. The all-in and then all-out dynamic has a tonne of negative side-effects and I’ve definitely seen it a lot in the people I’ve known.

I can see why the strategy of only accepting and focusing on full-in extremely dedicated people makes sense given how capacity constrained community building is and given this community probably can only accommodate so many new people at a time (detailed and nuanced communication is so time-consuming and within community trust seems important but is hard to build with too much growth too fast).

It is challenging to create room for dissent and still have a high trust community with enough common ground for it to be possible for us to cohesively be all in the same community.

I’m not sure exactly what a feasible alternative strategy looks like, but it seems plausible to me that we can get better at developing allies to collaborate with who come by a local group and have a good time and some food for thought without this feeling like an all-in or all-out type engagement.

It seems good to me to have more allies who give us that sometimes nuanced but sometimes (naturally) missing-the-mark critique, who feel comfortable thinking divergently and developing ideas independently. Many of those divergent ideas will be bad (of course, that’s how new ideas work) but some might be good, and when they’re developed, those people who got good vibes from their local group are keen to share them with us because we’ve left a good enough impression that they feel we’ll really want to listen to them. I think there are ways of having a broader group of people who are sympathetic but who think differently who we don’t try and do the “super detailed and nuanced take on every view ever had about how to help others as much as possible” thing. Not sure exactly how to do this well though, messaging gets mixed-up easily and I think there are definitely ways to implement this idea that could make things worse.
More separate communities for the thinking (the place where EA is supposed to be a question) and the doing (the place for action on specific causes/current conclusions)
Maybe it is also important to separate the communities that are supposed to be about thinking and the ones that are supposed to be about acting on current best guesses.
Effective altruism groups sound like they sometimes are seen as a recruiting ground for specific cause areas. I think this might be creating a lot of pressure to come to specific conclusions. Building infrastructure within the effective altruism brand for specific causes maybe also makes it harder for anyone to change their minds. This makes effective altruism feel like much less of a question and much more like a set of conclusions.
Ideally, groups that are supposed to be about the question “how do we help others as much as possible?” should be places where everyone is encouraged to engage with the ideas but also to dissent from them and to digress for hours when someone has an intelligent objection. If effective altruism is not a question, then we cannot say it is. If the conclusions newcomers are supposed to adopt are pre-written, then effective altruism is not a question.
Separating encouragement of the effective altruism project from the effective altruism community
Maybe also we need to be better at not making it feel like the effective altruism project and the effective altruism community come together. Groups can be places where we encourage thinking about how big a part of our lives we want the effective altruism project to be and what our best guesses are on how to do that. The community is just one tool to help with the effective altruism project, to the extent that the EA project feels like something that group members want to have as a part of their lives. If collaborating with the community is productive, then good, if a person feels like they can do the EA project or achieve any of their other goals better by not being in the community, that should be strongly encouraged too!
More articulation of the specific problems like this one
I’m so very glad you articulated your thoughts because I think it’s posts like this that help us better capture exactly what we don’t want to be and more of what we do want to be. There have been a few and I think each one is getting us closer (and we’ll iterate on each other’s ideas until we narrow down what we do and don’t want the effective altruism community to be).

(just for context given I wrote way too many thoughts: I used to do quite a bit of community building and clearly have way too many opinions on stuff given my experience is so out-of-date, I am still pretty engaged with my local community, I care a lot about the EA project, a lot of my friends consider themselves engaged with the effective altruism community but many aren’t but everyone I’m close to knows lots about the EA community because they’re friends with me and I talk way too much about my random interests, I have a job outside the EA community ecosystem, I haven’t yet been disillusioned but I cheated by having over-confident friends who loudly dissented so I think this helped a tonne in me avoiding a lot of the feelings described here)

Sophia 14 Jul 2022 12:10 UTC
12 points
0 ∶ 0
on: EA for dumb people?
I don’t think it is your capacity for impact, your intelligence or anything else that would stop you from adding a tonne of value to the effective altruism project. Your post is insightful (a sign of intelligence if I were to look for signs) and I also think that intelligence and competence are complicated and are so far from perfectly correlated with impact that worrying about them on an individual level seems counter-productive to me (lots of people have said similar things in the comments, but I felt this was, nonetheless, still worth reiterating).

The biggest thing I see is whether the effective altruism community is a place where you feel you can add value and, therefore, whether you can be here and be mentally healthy. Regardless of reality, how you feel matters. I think people struggle in this community not because they can’t contribute, but because they feel they can’t contribute “enough”, or at all. I think “enough” is a low bar to pass in reality (where enough is “the world is better because of your contribution than it would have been otherwise”: thanks comparative advantage).

I think feeling like you’re enough is the real challenge here.
Why I think people like me and not-so-like me can contribute to this community whether or not we are above average and what really should be at the core of deciding whether this community is for us
An anecdotal account of the unimportance of being analytical or finding forum posts relatively easy to read (which often gets confused for “intelligence” in this community) in determining your ability to contribute
In my experience, in whatever ways I guess I’ve had an impact, I think being in the right place at the right time and caring a tonne has mattered much more than my intelligence. I’m rarely the smartest person in the room (and I think this is a good thing!). However, in places where I’ve messed up and could have had much more impact, I feel like self-love was a bigger factor than intelligence. I’ve seen much more intelligent people than me mess up. I have seen people who I have judged, at some point, to be much less intelligent than me do much more for others than I ever have.

What I lack in intelligence, I feel I maybe make up for in relatability and I think that actually is a massive deal. I am weirdly analytical so fitting in was strangely easy for me, but I really do wish all the people I know who are more competent than me in so many different ways also could feel the sense of belonging that I feel here (there are a lot of people who probably would outperform me on an IQ test and/or who are much more successful than me who can’t “trick” people, a skill in itself in my eyes, in conversation as well as I can into thinking they’re smart/insightful).

Even if it could be true, that on average, intelligence, as judged by EA forum post comprehension or people thinking you’re smart or doing well on some kind of standardized test, was somewhat correlated with impact, impact is extremely noisy.
I am confident that so many people smarter than me, even if they are trying, are going to have less impact than me and so many people less smart than me by any reasonable measure are going to have more impact! The world is messy. Impact is noisy. Any social scientist worth their salt will tell us that people are not like particles, psychology (unlike physics) does not have the same kind of narrow confidence intervals that make this sort of reasoning all that meaningful. Nonetheless, I’m going to continue to try and make broad, sweeping generalisations.

Things like caring a tonne, I think, often gets you further or having really deep levels of self-acceptance and self-compassion (which is something I believe anyone can get with a good enough psychologist if they have the time and money for one) or conscientiousness seem likely to me to be more predictive than IQ. I’d guess, even all of these traits put together will still be pretty noisy if we try and apply it to any individual.

Sometimes I catch myself feeling insecure in this community because I’m not competent or smart or conscientious enough to have “enough” of an impact. But what even is enough?

The way I see it, it doesn’t even matter if it is true that I can contribute much less than others because I am less smart or less conscientious or less “whatever-thing-I-am-insecure-about”. I am pretty certain, if I am honest and upfront about what I can and can’t do, if I’m self-aware enough to communicate clearly what my strengths and weaknesses are, due to comparative advantage, I can certainly find a way to contribute something.

Thanks to comparative advantage (and having a very good psychologist), I honestly believe I can make this community better able to help others than if I weren’t here at all. That is enough for me (that and the fact that being in this community makes me happy).

Others being able to contribute much more than me does not make my contributions, in absolute terms, any less valuable. Others being able to contribute much more than me just means much more is going to get contributed! It literally just means the world is a much better place than it would have been otherwise! Those people are using what they have to make the world a better place and that’s pretty wonderful. I’ll do the same in my own little way.

I can’t change my baseline level of intelligence.^[1] I can still contribute. I can still do something about the mess of a world we live in.

I am in an entry-level job, earning a fairly average amount for the country I live in and I can speed up the end of absolute poverty by donating 10% of my income.

Even if this community has more money than before, it does not have nearly enough to end absolute poverty and prepare us for future pandemics and give AI safety researchers a fraction of the resources AI capabilities researchers have let alone anything else.

This community doesn’t have, nor do I expect it to have any time soon, the sorts of resources that will allow it to solve all the world’s most pressing problems. I don’t need to be able to contribute as much as Sam Bankman-Fried for my contribution to matter a tonne more to the person I helped than that same money mattered to me.

I don’t need to contribute as much as others to feel like I belong here and to feel like the amount of value I am capable of adding is enough. Comparative advantage means that I know that if I’m self-aware enough to place myself well, I’m pretty confident that I can contribute regardless of how my baseline gifts compare to others.
Being happy here and believing (on expectation) I can contribute is enough of a reason for me to feel fully justified in sticking around all these people who are even more gifted than me (I know it’s hard to imagine that someone could be more gifted than a random ADHD mess of a woman who is in an entry level job in her late-20s, shocker!).

I do wish that people who were smart or competent in ways that I am not felt the levels of belonging that I feel in this community. I don’t feel like I can easily bring along people who aren’t as weirdly analytical as me (regardless of whether they are more intelligent or more competent than me according to any traditional measure). I also know that I don’t have to be extraordinary to make it easier for extraordinary people to feel like they belong here. 7 years ago, in my local group, I was often the only woman in the room. Nowadays, I honestly don’t know whether there are more women or men in my local group. Having another woman there first made it easier for the next woman to feel like this is the sort of place where she could belong and thrive. Extraordinary women have felt more welcome in rooms that I was in, simply because there was another woman there too (turns out you let one in, you let us all in :P). One “average” woman (and by the way, since when is being average a bad thing?? Half the population is below average and so if I’m in that half on any given trait, then that’s totally fine with me!). I hope that being female is no longer weird (I think my local community might be better in this way than others but I honestly have no idea and I’ve spent too long on this comment to be bothered to look up the latest EA demographic survey).

I think being different but still completely and deeply passionate about the effective altruism project brings a tonne of value to the community.

You being good for the community doesn’t mean the community is good for you

I don’t think being able to contribute means you should necessarily stay engaged with this movement!

For example, if the effective altruism community was bad for my mental health in the ways I’ve seen it be bad for other people I’ve known, I would think I should leave because staying in a relationship that is bad for you is bad for everyone (my guess is this holds in both romantic partnerships and for social movements too).
Likewise, if you feel that this community is not good for your mental health and that you’d feel more valued and fulfilled elsewhere and maybe even better able to contribute out of this community than in it, then leaving for that reason is a great idea. Mutually beneficial relationships here only!

I’m not sure how to help create a community about effective altruism that also allows for all sorts of different sorts of people who care deeply about others and who act on their best guess of how to do that a significant proportion of the time. I think that keeping effective altruism about effective altruism is challenging. Nonetheless, I believe that we can become a lot more inclusive with time by putting an extra bit of effort into making people who are a bit different, but still fundamentally care deeply about effective altruism and also understand what it is, feel like they belong here.

I know not all of our experiences are going to be the same, but I think swapping our own personal stories might help more people carve out their space and their sense of belonging here or elsewhere so understanding every forum post doesn’t feel like the defining feature of our community (I don’t think everyone understands every forum post anyway, even the people who are much more typical members of this community than me).

I might write out my experience in this community and finding belonging here in more depth in a top-level post (but I’m so ADHD that I’ve unfortunately got a graveyard of things that matter to me that have become quite ugh that I hope to get to long before this).

While we might be able to evaluate ourselves somewhat accurately on any given trait compared to our peers, no one trait tells us all that much about how much we can contribute and imposter syndrome can certainly make us blind to our strengths.

Even the objectively best people in the community (this was partly ironic, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Sam Bankman-Fried, is, in fact, going to donate more than me and is, therefore, objectively going to have more of an impact through his donations than me—a controversial statement indeed) are going to feel imposter syndrome around some people sometimes until they see a great psychologist or unless they were born with a very healthy disposition that makes them much less likely to indulge in self-loathing (from Sam’s podcast episode, he seems like an example of someone who just is mentally healthy but he still was the example I wanted to use because amount donated is such an uncontroversial measure of impact: point is, extraordinary people sometimes have imposter syndrome too and so do more salt-of-the-earth, proudly average people like me and it really doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything of substance).

In the meantime, I think extreme self-compassion goes a long way when you feel like you’re not good enough to be here because I think that it is literally a fact proven by economists under weak enough assumptions to hold well enough in the real-world afaict that everyone can contribute (with some minor caveats that I am happy to go into in more depth but are more about mental health and self-awareness and not really much to do with the traits discussed by the OP)!

Focusing more on the fact that everyone can contribute and letting go of this idea that “enough” requires anyone to be smarter or better than anyone else seems more wholesome, more useful and more true than focusing on many other things that make me, the OP, and many others unnecessarily miserable for a moment until something like Ajeya’s talk reminds us that that comparative crap isn’t what all of this is supposed to be about (Sam BF donating does not make my donations any less valuable in absolute terms beyond him taking all the best donation opportunities, which he obviously hasn’t because as far as I’ve observed, absolute poverty is still, tragically, a thing of the present and GiveDirectly could do a lot for that when we run of all the interventions that are six times better than cash transfers).
Even if it is true that some people can understand more forum posts than others and that is well-correlated with something we might care about, even if this is true, and I am relatively unconvinced of this personally, it’s so noisy and also not actionable enough for it to do any good to anyone to waste time and energy on thinking “am I enough?” because the answer to this question, “are you enough?” is a resounding yes. If being in this community is healthy for you, then you are definitely much more than enough to be a contributor! Now your full attention can go to the real question which is, is this community enough for you? It has some good bits and some bad bits and for different people, the answer to whether the good outweighs the bad will absolutely be different. This community has been exceptionally kind to me. I am aware that this is not everyone’s experience. Furthermore, everyone being pretty nice or virtuous doesn’t even mean this community, overall, can’t have toxic elements anyway.

At the end of the day, we’re all probably smart enough to help others quite a bit over our lifetimes. That’s all there needs to be to it.^[2] The only real question is not “are you enough for this community?” but is this community good enough for you and your mental health for engaging with it to be worth it for you. It is fine to find a place to contribute here or elsewhere. This community is here if it’s helpful and should absolutely be abandoned if it isn’t, for whatever reason. As others have said, you can still bring the bits you love elsewhere, perhaps somewhere with zero association with this community, and leave the rest. Bringing the best stuff and leaving the rest can not only be good for a person’s well-being but can also be hugely impactful in its own right, if impact is an important consideration for you (it doesn’t have to be! For the OP, it sounds like it probably would be but it’s obviously fine for this to not be a priority and it is especially fine for it to not always be a priority).
Or if you decide staying engaged in this community is good for you, that’s great too and we’re lucky to have you.
PS. I don’t think how average we are actually changes the whole comparative advantage thing being a slam dunk argument that anyone can probably find a way to contribute (but also that being able to contribute is neither here nor there for deciding whether to stay involved in this movement, the real question is actually about whether this movement is healthy for you and its totally fine for it to not be and for you to find purpose and meaning and value elsewhere for that reason!).

I think I’m way above average in how analytical I am and I’m way below average in my ability to be on time to things (I’m working on it though). I don’t think it matters much to the central point of this whole comment how average I am. I know that I have found it easier to belong here than others who, on objective tests of intelligence, perform better. I know that I’m also not that thick (but so clearly neither is the OP). I also don’t think the solution to this issue is to reassure people that they are smart. I don’t think the solution is to ignore the fact that, on a population level, more money or more intelligence or more charisma or more warmth or more conscientiousness or being prettier or taller (woe is me—my legs are forever a little stumpy because I have no intention of getting leg-lengthening surgery and statistically, that really does harm my expected earnings and therefore my expected donation-wise impact) or being born rich all give a leg-up in life and in any goal you want to pursue, including social impact! However, I think 1) this stuff is oh so noisy, 2) everyone who is self-aware and honest can contribute something (even when we don’t have the statistically optimal amount of a trait: despite my short legs, I’m pretty sure I can earn enough to donate a life-changing amount to someone in the world), 3) saving a life is still saving a life whether you are the only person in the world who has ever done it or whether everyone else is saving hundreds: it may not feel the same but it is, actually, still saving a life and it still matters as much as saving a life matters or any other impact you’re able to have by focusing on what is useful and letting go of the rest and 4) people who are different from the existing community who understand what effective altruism is and who care deeply about it can contribute a lot to this community in paving the way for a wider range of people to understand what scope-insensitivity is about, why it might matter and how many different types of people can contribute to helping others a tonne. This is unlikely to be the only way people who are different from the existing mean community member can contribute, but as high-fidelity communication is darn hard in the best of times, and the more people are different, the harder crossing inferential gaps can be, this is a very significant contribution.
1. ^
  Likewise, I could say the same things about conscientiousness which I, personally, am much more insecure about. We all have our thing that we think matters so much more than everything else in our own eyes—and like intelligence, conscientiousness also is pretty predictive on average and also probably has a baseline level that people are born with that can be worked on/that a growth mindset can almost definitely help with to at least some extent too.
2. ^
  (but we’re all human and should also keep that in mind so its okay to do less good for good reason or for no reason other than our own sanity if that’s, at all, in jeopardy—please look after yourself if that’s what you actually need right now!)
What links here?
- EA for dumb people? by Olivia Addy (11 Jul 2022 10:46 UTC; 477 points)

Sophia 21 May 2022 22:16 UTC
12 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Sophia’s comment on: “Big tent” effective altruism is very important (particularly right now)
An example of a “movement” that had a vaguer, bigger picture idea that got so big it was too commonplace to be a movement might be “the scientific method”?

Sophia 13 May 2021 6:07 UTC
11 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: HIPR: A new EA-aligned policy newsletter
That makes sense! My mistake.

Sophia 17 Jul 2022 22:30 UTC
10 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Buck’s comment on: Senior EA ‘ops’ roles: if you want to undo the bottleneck, hire differently
Great (and also unsurprising so I’m now trying to work out why I felt the need to write the initial comment)

I think I wrote the initial comment less because I expected anyone to reflectively disagree and more because I think we all make snap judgements that maybe take conscious effort to notice and question.

I don’t expect anyone to advocate for people because they speak more jargon (largely because I think very highly of people in this community). I do expect it to be harder to understand someone who comes from a different cultural bubble and, therefore, harder to work out if they are aligned with your values enough. Jargon often gives precision that makes people more legible. Also human beings are pretty instinctively tribal and we naturally trust people who indicate in some way (e.g. in their language) they are more like us. I think it’s also easy for these things to get conflated (it’s hard to tell where a gut feeling comes from and once we have a gut feeling, we naturally are way more likely to have supporting arguments pop into our heads than opposing ones).

Anyway, I feel there is something I’m pointing to even if I’ve failed to articulate it.

Obviously EA hiring is pretty good because big things are getting accomplished and have already happened. I probably should have said initially that this does feel quite marginal. My guess as an outsider is that hiring is, overall, done quite a bit better than at the median non-profit organisation.

I think the reason it’s tempting to criticize EA orgs is because we’re all more invested in them being as good as they can possibly can be and so want to point out perceived flaws to improve them (though this instinct might often be counter-productive because it takes up scarce attention, so sorry about that!).

Sophia

Is it pos­si­ble for EA to re­main nu­anced and be more wel­com­ing to new­com­ers? A dis­tinc­tion for dis­cus­sions on top­ics like this one.

Preamble (read: pre-ramble)

Some common ground

A point of disagreement

Mechanisms for the “multiplicative/​complements” hypothesis

Where is this pressure to agree with existing ideas and this pressure against dissent coming from? (some early thoughts to flesh out more 🤔)

More thoughts and suggestions on how we maybe can improve

Maybe get better at giving people who are not extremely dedicated or all-in good vibes/​a good impression because we see them as future potential allies (even if we don’t have the capacity to fully on-board them into the community)

More separate communities for the thinking (the place where EA is supposed to be a question) and the doing (the place for action on specific causes/​current conclusions)

Separating encouragement of the effective altruism project from the effective altruism community

More articulation of the specific problems like this one

Why I think people like me and not-so-like me can contribute to this community whether or not we are above average and what really should be at the core of deciding whether this community is for us

An anecdotal account of the unimportance of being analytical or finding forum posts relatively easy to read (which often gets confused for “intelligence” in this community) in determining your ability to contribute

You being good for the community doesn’t mean the community is good for you

Is it possible for EA to remain nuanced and be more welcoming to newcomers? A distinction for discussions on topics like this one.

Mechanisms for the “multiplicative/complements” hypothesis

Maybe get better at giving people who are not extremely dedicated or all-in good vibes/a good impression because we see them as future potential allies (even if we don’t have the capacity to fully on-board them into the community)

More separate communities for the thinking (the place where EA is supposed to be a question) and the doing (the place for action on specific causes/current conclusions)