The Nonlinear Library EA - Ways in which I'm not living up to my EA values by Joris P
Mar 18, 2024
02:52
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Ways in which I'm not living up to my EA values, published by Joris P on March 18, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
This is a
Draft Amnesty Week draft. It may not be polished, up to my usual standards, fully thought through, or fully fact-checked.
When I was pretty new to EA, I was way too optimistic about how Wise and Optimized and Ethical and All-Knowing experienced EAs would be.
I thought Open Phil would have some magic spreadsheets with the answers to all questions in the universe
I thought that, surely, experienced EAs had for 99% figured out what they thought was the biggest problem in the world
I imagined all EAs to have optimized almost everything, and to basically endorse all their decisions: their giving practices, their work-life balance, the way they talked about EA to others, etc.
I've now been around the community for a few years. I'm still really grateful for and excited about EA ideas, and I love being around the people inspired by EA ideas (I even
work on growing our community!). However, I now also realize that today, I am far from how Wise and Optimized and Ethical and All-Knowing Joris-from-4-years-ago expected future Joris and his peers to be.
There's two things that caused me to not live up to those ideals:
I was naive about how Wise and Optimized and Ethical and All-Knowing someone could realistically be
There's good things I could reasonably do or should have reasonably done in the past 4 years
To make this concrete, I wanted to share some ways in which I think I'm not living up to my EA values or expectations from a few years ago. I think Joris-from-4-years-ago would've found this list helpful.[1]
I'm still not fully vegan
Donating:
I just default to the community norm of donating 10%, without having thought about it hard
I haven't engaged for more than 30 minutes with arguments around e.g. patient philanthropy
I left my GWWC donations to literally the last day of the year and didn't spend more than one hour on deciding where to donate
I have a lot less certainty over the actual positive impact of the programs we run than I expected when I started this job
I'm still as bad at math as I was in uni, meaning my botecs are just not that great
It's so, so much harder than I expected to account for counterfactuals and to find things you can measure that are robustly good
I still find it really hard to pitch EA
I hope this inspires some people (especially those who I (and others) might look up to) to share how they're not perfect. What are some ways in which you're not living up to your values, or to what you-from-the-past maybe expected you would be doing by now?
^
I'll leave it up to you whether these fall in category 1 (basically unattainable) or 2 (attainable). I also do not intend to turn this into a discussion of what things EAs "should" do, which things are actually robustly good, etc.
Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org
This is a
Draft Amnesty Week draft. It may not be polished, up to my usual standards, fully thought through, or fully fact-checked.
When I was pretty new to EA, I was way too optimistic about how Wise and Optimized and Ethical and All-Knowing experienced EAs would be.
I thought Open Phil would have some magic spreadsheets with the answers to all questions in the universe
I thought that, surely, experienced EAs had for 99% figured out what they thought was the biggest problem in the world
I imagined all EAs to have optimized almost everything, and to basically endorse all their decisions: their giving practices, their work-life balance, the way they talked about EA to others, etc.
I've now been around the community for a few years. I'm still really grateful for and excited about EA ideas, and I love being around the people inspired by EA ideas (I even
work on growing our community!). However, I now also realize that today, I am far from how Wise and Optimized and Ethical and All-Knowing Joris-from-4-years-ago expected future Joris and his peers to be.
There's two things that caused me to not live up to those ideals:
I was naive about how Wise and Optimized and Ethical and All-Knowing someone could realistically be
There's good things I could reasonably do or should have reasonably done in the past 4 years
To make this concrete, I wanted to share some ways in which I think I'm not living up to my EA values or expectations from a few years ago. I think Joris-from-4-years-ago would've found this list helpful.[1]
I'm still not fully vegan
Donating:
I just default to the community norm of donating 10%, without having thought about it hard
I haven't engaged for more than 30 minutes with arguments around e.g. patient philanthropy
I left my GWWC donations to literally the last day of the year and didn't spend more than one hour on deciding where to donate
I have a lot less certainty over the actual positive impact of the programs we run than I expected when I started this job
I'm still as bad at math as I was in uni, meaning my botecs are just not that great
It's so, so much harder than I expected to account for counterfactuals and to find things you can measure that are robustly good
I still find it really hard to pitch EA
I hope this inspires some people (especially those who I (and others) might look up to) to share how they're not perfect. What are some ways in which you're not living up to your values, or to what you-from-the-past maybe expected you would be doing by now?
^
I'll leave it up to you whether these fall in category 1 (basically unattainable) or 2 (attainable). I also do not intend to turn this into a discussion of what things EAs "should" do, which things are actually robustly good, etc.
Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org