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 feel like psychology offers some pretty standard solutions to disillusionment, and have light-heartedly thought about whether providing an EA-targeted charity/service to address this could be worthwhile.
However, there is an ethical dilemma here or two which I mulled over for years in other contexts, with no conclusion:
1. The perfect prevention and cure for disillusionment would likely mean fewer smart people stay in EA. I.e., we successfully dissuade people who would have joined EA and become disillusioned from ever committing to EA in the first place. Of those who we retain, the plus is that they are doing so for the right reasons for them and thus in a sustainable way. We probably improve open-mindedness and decrease groupthink in the community too. Is this net positive? Is it net positive on average if disillusioned EAs had never been a part of it instead?
2. A side-effect of an effective cure for disillusionment is increased life satisfaction. Could too much life satisfaction cause decreased productivity or drive within EA? (I don’t have any evidence for this, it’s just a thought.)
Under the stated assumptions about the AMF clone, I agree with your assessments about low or negative impact. Would you also say, on paper, that Malaria Consortium and AMF are similar enough to being clones that whichever came second probably has/had low impact?
I wonder if replacing the third property of Shapley values would lead to basically a generalized version of Shapley values, with equal splits being a special case. Maybe this could address those two implications about unequal agents and members who did nothing.
The example with unsuccessful applicants getting credit seems weird but also necessary to me, because they do contribute to the outcome in terms of market competition, but maybe they need a lower weighting than Shapley gives, as you suggest, since they are individually not “critical”.
The use case I’m trying to get my head around is comparing the case of starting a new organization vs donating to AMF.
It seems easy to use the normal counterfactual calculation to severely inflate the ROI when making a pitch to investors. Is that solved by only arguing for the ROI of the intervention the charity is using? I’m not sure.
If I start a charity with an intervention with identical outcomes and cost effectiveness to AMF, that seems pretty impressive and good, but have I actually made zero counterfactual benefit because AMF haven’t saturated their ability to make use of donations? It might be net negative if I require more externalized costs than AMF, or conversely it might be net positive if I win funding that other equally good charities would never have won.
This is great! Thank you!
I see you’re the author of that post and have probably been thinking about Shapley value for a while. How practical do you think Shapley is for comparing three choices like 1) earning to give 2) starting a charity 3) taking an EA job? Would this be calculated as one game, three separate games, or three games and a combined game?
Thanks for the clarification about how 1 and 2 may look very different in the EA communities.
I’m not particularly concerned about the thought that people might be out there taking maximization too far, the framing of my observations is more like “well here’s what going through the EA Handbook may prompt me to think about EA ideas or what other EAs may believe.
After thinking about your reply, I realized that I made a bunch of assumptions based on things that might just be incidental and not strongly connected. I came to the wrong impression that the EA Handbook is meant to be the most canonical and endorsed collection of EA fundamentals.
Here’s how I ended up there. In my encounters hearing about EA resources, the Handbook is the only introductory “course”, and presumably due to being the only one of its kind, it’s also the only one that’s been promoted to me via over multiple mediums. So I assumed that it must be the most official source of introduction, remaining alone in that spot over multiple years, seeing it bundled with EA VP also seemed like an endorsement. I also made the subconscious assumption that since there’s plenty of alternative high quality EA writing out there, as well as resources put into writing, that the Handbook as a compilation is probably designed to be the most representative collection of EA meta, otherwise it wouldn’t still be promoted the way it has been to me.
I’ve had almost no interaction with the EA Forum before reading the Handbook, so very limited prior context to gauge how “meta” the Handbook is among EA communities, or how meta any of its individual articles are. (Which now someone has helpfully provided a bunch of reading material that is also fundamental but while having quite different perspectives.)
There are a couple of strong “shoulds” in the EA Handbook (I went through it over the last two months as part of an EA Virtual program) and they stood out to me as the most disagreeable part of EA philosophy that was presented.
Is there a viable version of non-catering where the organizers promise nothing but also invite a bunch of food trucks to camp by the venue? Perhaps that could help at least some of the attendees have fast and affordable food options.
I’m finding the app feedback misleading and none of the explanations in the About/FAQ page are expanding in my Chrome and Opera.
Does anyone have quick tips on who to ask for feedback on project ideas?
I feel like the majority of feedback I get falls into:
No comment
Not my field and I don’t really see the value in that compared to other things
Not my field but have you considered doing it this alternative way [which seems broadly appealing/sensible/tame but then loses the specific thesis question which I think could unlock exceptional impact]
I see the value in that and I think it’s a great idea
The truth is, no one can really talk me out of attempting that specific thesis question except by providing a definitive answer to my specific question. And if the only feedback I get is one of the above, then I might as well only ask people who will be encouraging of my ideas and potentially recommend other people that are good to talk to.
It’s relatively uncommon for me to get feedback at the level of tweaking my ideas. Is it even worth trying to solicit that given how few people are in a good position to do so?