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/
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?
I’ve just partly read and partly skim read that post for the first time. I do suspect that post would be ineligible under a hypothetical “no hit pieces under duck typing” rule. I’ll refer to posts like this as DTHP to express my view more generally. (I have no comment on whether it “should” have been allowed or not allowed in the past or what the past/current Forum standards are.)
I’ve not thought much about this, but the direction of my current view is that there are more constructive ways of expression than DTHPs, and here I’ll vaguely describe three alternatives that I suspect would be more useful. By useful I mean that these alternatives potentially promote better social outcomes within the community, while hopefully not significantly undermining desirable practical outcomes such as a shift in funding or priorities.
1. If nothing else, add emotional honesty to the framing of a DTHP. A DTHP becomes more constructive and less prone to inspire reader bias when they are introduced with a clear and honest statement of the needs, feelings, requests from the main author. Maybe two out of three is a good enough bar. I’m inclined to think that the NL DTHP failed spectacularly at this.
2. Post a personal invitation for relevant individuals to learn more. Something like “I believe org X is operating in an undesirable way and would urge funders who might otherwise consider donating to X to consider carefully. If you’re in this category, I’m happy to have a one on one call and to share my reasons why I don’t encourage donating to X.” (And during the one on one you can allude to the mountain of evidence you’ve gathered, and let someone decide whether they want to see it or not.)
3. Find ways to skirt around what makes a DTHP a DTHP. I think a simple alternative such as posting a DTHP verbatim to one’s personal blog, then only sharing or linking to it with people on a personal level is already incrementally less socially harmful than posting it to the forums.
Option 4 is we find some wonderful non-DTHP framework/template for expressing these types of concerns. I don’t know what that would look like.
These are suggestions for a potential writer. I haven’t attempted to provide community-level suggestions here which could be a thing.
a piece of writing with most of the stereotypical properties of a hit piece, regardless of the intention behind it
Thanks for entertaining my thought experiment, and I’m glad because I better understand your perspective too now, and I think I’m in full agreement with your response.
A shift of topic content here, feel free to not engage if this doesn’t interest you.
To share some vague thoughts about how things could be different. I think that posts which are structurally equivalent to a hit piece can be considered against the forum rules, either implicitly already or explicitly. Moderators could intervene before most of the damage is done. I think that policing this isn’t as subjective as one might fear, and that certain criteria can be checked even without any assumptions about truthfulness or intentions. Maybe an LLM could work for flagging high-risk posts for moderators to review.
Another angle would be to try and shape discussion norms or attitudes. There might not be a reliable way to influence this space, but one could try for example by providing the right material that would better equip readers to have better online discussions in general as well as recognize unhelpful/manipulative writing. It could become a popular staple much like I think “Replacing Guilt” is very well regarded. Funnily enough, I have been collating a list of green/orange/red flags in online discussions for other educational reasons.
“Attitudes” might be way too subjective/varied to shape, whereas I believe “good discussion norms” can be presented in a concrete way that isn’t inflexibly limiting. NVC comes to mind as a concrete framework, and I am of the opinion that the original “sharing information” post can be considered violent communication.
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)?