Mental health advocate and autistic nerd with lived experience. Working on my own models of mental health, especially around practical paths to happiness, critique of popular self-help & therapy, and neurodivergent mental health. 50% chance of pivoting to online coaching in 2025.
IG meme page: https://www.instagram.com/neurospicytakes/
As someone out of the loop in terms of the contextual specifics of said people/organizations, I think there’s a much simpler explanation than those statements being strategic lies. Firstly, those statements resemble expressions of boundaries within a conversation. To oversimplify, they basically translate to “I don’t want to talk about EA”. This is a difference between literal speak (preferred by autistic people for example) and neurotypical speak, where something that would be bizarre/false if interpreted factually is understood as a contextual boundary which is not about the facts and therefore isn’t considered lying.
However, even in a more literal sense, I don’t think those statements are necessarily false, if you take into account the fact that EA is “everything” to some EAs and “just a speck” to others. If I think maths is the most important thing in the world and I belong to a community with some degree of agreement, then it’s easy for me to start accusing people adjacent or on the borders of the community for downplaying the importance of math. Every time someone mentions something math-adjacent but not in a maths-worshipping tone, they’re being disingenuous. But this would be a fallacy where me equating lack of worship for lying says more about my world view than anything else.
A personal example: I identified as an EA for a few years and now I would consider myself “post-EA”, if such a term existed. Both things are possible, that I invested a lot into EA and was inspired significantly by it, and simultaneously that I find relatively few tools moving forwards to be worth attributing to EA conversationally or philosophically. EA isn’t “one consistent thing” and it’s certainly not everything. For example, ranking charities is very EA, but it also exists outside EA, so even if my exposure was through EA, it doesn’t necessarily make sense for me to acknowledge EA in a conversation about charity efficiency. The EA-ness of it doesn’t mean anything to non-EAs, and it barely means anything to me having integrated the perspectives I want to keep vs discard.
I think that “99% business as usual” for several years is still going to be a “good enough” strategy for most people, even if the threat of AI catastrophe or mass unemployment is imminent within the next two decades. The specifics of timelines does not really change my point, but even if “99% of fully-remote jobs will be automatable in roughly 6-8 years”, there are several steps between this and most of the human workforce being displaced that I suspect will take another 5-20 years. Even with AGI being achieved, not everything is equally tractable to automate. I suspect that AI-to-hardware-solution timelines may be reasonably slower in progression, e.g. achieving reliable robot automation may continue to be difficult for a number of years.
Would you recommend applying now or later for a project that would start in 6 months and has a 50% chance of being cancelled before starting (without any resources spent)?
I love NVC for this. Just to pick one example, instead of expressing moral judgments on actions and decisions as bad or wrong (which can come across as judgmental and put people off of whatever preference you wanted to communicate), making it clear what your value preference is. E.g. rather than saying “violence is wrong,” we might say “I value the resolution of conflicts through safe and peaceful means.”
Another concept I love is based on consent culture applied to information/discussion. Would you like to hear more about X? Are you open to hearing feedback on Y? Discussing Z while I play devil’s advocate? When I receive unsolicited advice and “impact interrogation” at EAGx events (pretty much always during ad-hoc or speed meeting convos), it can come across as adversarial and makes me feel unsafe at those conferences.
I hold the same view towards “non-naive” maximization being suboptimal for some people. Further clarification in my other comment.
I have concerns about the idea that a healthy-seeming maximizer can prove the point that maximization is safe. In mental health, we often come across “ticking time bomb” scenarios that I’m using as a sort of Pascal’s mugging (except that there’s plenty of knowledge and evidence that this mugging does in fact take place, and not uncommonly). What if someone just appears to be healthy and this appearance of being healthy is simply concealing and contributing to a serious emotional breakdown later in their life, potentially decades on? This process isn’t a mysterious thing that comes without obvious signs, but what may be obvious to mental health professionals may not be obvious to EAs.
I don’t reject the possibility that healthy maximizers can exist. (Potentially there is a common ground where a rationalist may describe a plausible strategy as maximization, and I, as a mental health advocate, would say it’s not, and our disagreement in terminology is actually consistent with both our frameworks.) If EA continues to endorse maximizing, how about we at least do it in a way that doesn’t directly align with known risks of ticking time bombs?
Longer quotes like these are narrative descriptions of the types of things I see and hear. Do you have any ideas on how to distinguish this from word-for-word quotations?
This is an important question, which I left out because my full answer is extremely nuanced and it isn’t central to my intention for this post (to stimulate discussion about the mental health of the community).
Here’s a brief version of my response:
A good maximizer would know to take mental health into account and be good at it. However, it’s very difficult to guess and figure out what the needs and requirements are for good mental health. Good mental health needs more than “the minimum amount of self-care”, and maximizers will always be considering whether they could be doing less self-care. I argue that maximization as a strategy will always be suboptimal when one of these two conditions are present (and I believe they often are): when self-care is less visible and measurable than the other parts of the maximization equation, and if one of the requirements for good mental health includes things that necessarily include not maximizing. For example: embracing failure and imperfection, trusting one’s body, giving yourself permission to adjust your social/moral/financial obligations at any time, these are not compatible with any rationality-based maximization. (Wild thought: Maybe they could be compatible with “irrational maximization”?) I believe I can refute pretty much any angle resembling “but the maximizer could just bootstrap based on your criticism and be better/smarter about maximization”, but there are too many forms of this to pre-emptively address here.
These two strategies are worlds apart, despite seeming like they have a common interest: treating self-care as a task necessary for impact vs treating impact as an important expression within self-care. I advocate for the second approach, and I believe that for some people, this second approach can lead to greater impact AND greater happiness.
Exploring what’s helpful is definitely an interesting angle that generates ideas. One idea that comes to mind is how EA communicates around the Top Charities Fund, basically “let us do the heavy lifting and we’ll do our best to figure out where your donations will have impact”. This has two particular attributes that I like. Firstly it provides maximum ease for a reader to just accept a TLDR and feel good about their choice (and this is generally positive for a non-EA donator independent of how good or bad TCF’s picks are). Secondly, I think the messaging is more neutral and a bit closer to invitational consent culture. Hardcore EA is more likely to imply that you “should” think and care about whether TCF is actually a good fund and decide for yourself, but the consent culture version might be psychologically beneficial to both EAs and non-EAs while achieving the same or better numeric outcomes.
Does anyone know of a low-hassle way to charge invoices for services but it’s a third-party charity that gets paid? It could well be an EA charity if that makes it easy. I’m hoping for something slightly more structured than “I’m not receiving any pay for my services but I’m trusting you to donate X amount to this charity instead”.
I used to frequently come across a certain acronym in EA, used in a context like “I’m working on ___” or “looking for other people who also use ___”. I flagged it mentally as a curiosity to explore later, but ended up forgetting what the acronym was. I’m thinking it might be CFAR, which seems to have meant CFAR workshops? If so, 1) what happened to them, and 2) was it common for people to work through the material themselves, self-paced?
I identify as an anti-credentialist in the sense that I believe ideas can (under ideal circumstances) be considered on merit alone, regardless of how unreliable or bad the source of the idea is. Isn’t credentialism basically a form of ad hominem attack?
An example of invested but not attached: I’m investing time/money/energy into taking classes about subject X. I chose subject X because it could help me generate more value Y that I care about. But I’m not attached to getting good at X, I’m invested in the process of learning it.
I feel more confused after reading your other points. What is your definition of rationality? Is this definition also what EA/LW people usually mean? (If so, who introduces this definition?)
When you say rationally is “what gets you good performance”, that seems like it could lead to arbitrary circular reasoning about what is and isn’t rational. If I exaggerate this concern and define rationality as “what gets you the best life possible”, that’s not a helpful definition because it leads to the unfalsifiable claim that rationality is optimal while providing no practical insight.
I’ve seen EA writing (particularly about AI safety) that goes something like:
I know X and Y thought leaders in AI safety, they’re exceptionally smart people with opinion A, so even though I personally think opinion B is more defensible, I also think I should be updating my natural independent opinion in the direction of A, because they’re way smarter and more knowledgeable than me.
I’m struggling to see how this update strategy makes sense. It seems to have merit when X and Y know/understand things that literally no other expert knows, but aside from that, in all other scenarios that come to mind, it seems neutral at best, otherwise a worse strategy than totally disregarding the “thought leader status” of X and Y.
Am I missing something?
Two things:
1. I think of “Invested but not attached [to the outcome]” as a pareto-optimal strategy that is neither attached nor detached.
2. I disagree with the second to last paragraph, “Mud-dredging does improve your rationality, however. That’s why betting works.” I think that if you’re escaping in the mountains, then it’s true that coming down from the mountain will give you actual data and some degree of accountability. But it’s not obvious to me that 1) mud-dredging increases rationality, 2) the kind of rationality that mud-dredging maybe increases is actually more beneficial than harmful in the long run in terms of performance. Furthermore, among all the frameworks out there in terms of mental health or productivity, I believe that creativity is almost universally valued as a thing to foster more than rationality, in terms of performance/success, so I’m curious about where you’re coming from.
I appreciate your perspective, and FWIW I have no immediate concerns about the accuracy of your investigation or the wording of your post.
Correct me if I’m wrong: you would like any proposed change in rules or norms to still support what you tried to achieve in that post, which is provide accurate information, presented fairly, and hopefully leading people to update in a way that leads to better decision making.
I support this, I agree that it’s important to have some kind of channel to address the kinds of concerns you raised, and I probably would have seen your post as a positive contribution (had I read it and been a part of EA / etc back then but I’m not aware of the full context), and simultaneously I’m saying things like your post could have even better outcomes with a little bit of additional effort/adjustment in the writing.
I encourage you think about my proposed alternatives not as being blockers to this kind of positive contribution. That is not their intended purpose. As an example, if a DTHP rule allows DTHPs but requires a compulsory disclosure at the top addressing the relevant needs, feelings, requests of the writer, I don’t think this particularly bars contributions from happening, and I think it would also serve to 1) save time for the writer by reflecting on their underlying purpose for writing, and 2) dampen certain harmful biases that a reader is likely to experience from a traditional hit piece.
If such a rule existed back then, presumably you would have taken it into account during writing. If you visualize what you would have done in that situation, do you think the rule would have negatively impacted 1) what you set out to express in your post and 2) the downstream effects of your post?
If we take the premise that income is the single most important factor correlated with happiness, then I think the acceleration effects do seem to imply that there is no happiness ceiling. However, I’m not sure how reasonable this premise is in the first place. I suspect we’re zooming in on a well studied effect and if we zoom out a bit, there are many plausible hypotheses for why acceleration effects does not rule out a happiness ceiling, namely that other factors impact the high end of the scale more.
I notice this being muddied in the references to the happiness ceiling. On one hand, the happiness ceiling is only being defined or evaluated in the income sense, and on the other, the conclusions are described as though the income-happiness-ceiling is the only effect and therefore equivalent to all possible models of the happiness ceiling.
A separate question: how does the mathematical relationship relate in practice, e.g. if I have 9⁄10 happiness, then 10x my income, then am “only” 10⁄10 happy because I can’t exceed 10? I haven’t seen this explained before, and I have some concerns about whether it’s valid to draw conclusions about this part of the curve without more complicated design. (In other words, I think the extreme end of the scale is an exception and that different study design is required to understand it more objectively.)