The Nonlinear Library EA - Schlep Blindness in EA by John Salter
Oct 26, 2023
02:01
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: Schlep Blindness in EA, published by John Salter on October 26, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Behold the space of ideas, back before EA even existed. The universe gives zero fucks about ensuring impactful ideas are also nice to work on, so there's no correlation between them. Isn't it symmetrical and beautiful? Oh no, people are coming...
By virtue of being of conferring more social status and enjoyment, attractive ideas get more attention and retain it better. When these ideas work, people make their celebratory EA forum post and everyone cheers. When they fail, the founders keep it quiet because announcing it is painful, embarrassing and poorly incentivized.
Be reminded of the earlier situation and then predict how it will affect the distribution of the remaining ideas
Leads to...
The impactful, attractive ideas that could work have largely been taken (leaving the stuff that looks good but doesn't work). The repulsive but impactful quadrant is rich in impactful ideas.
So to summarise, here's the EA idea space at present
So what do I recommend?
Funders should give greater credence to projects that EAs typically like to work on and less credence to those they don't. The reasoning presented to them is less likely to be motivated reasoning.
EA should prioritise ideas that sound like no fun
They're more neglected, less likely to have been tried already,
You overestimated how much it would affect your happiness
It's less likely that the idea hasn't already been tried and failed
You're probably biased against them due to having heard less about them, for no reason other than people are less excited to work on them
Announcing failed projects should be expected of EAs
EAs should start setting an example
Tune in next week for my list of failed projects
There should be a small prize for the most embarrassing submissions
Funders should look positively on EAs who announce their failed projects and negatively on EAs who don't.
Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org
Behold the space of ideas, back before EA even existed. The universe gives zero fucks about ensuring impactful ideas are also nice to work on, so there's no correlation between them. Isn't it symmetrical and beautiful? Oh no, people are coming...
By virtue of being of conferring more social status and enjoyment, attractive ideas get more attention and retain it better. When these ideas work, people make their celebratory EA forum post and everyone cheers. When they fail, the founders keep it quiet because announcing it is painful, embarrassing and poorly incentivized.
Be reminded of the earlier situation and then predict how it will affect the distribution of the remaining ideas
Leads to...
The impactful, attractive ideas that could work have largely been taken (leaving the stuff that looks good but doesn't work). The repulsive but impactful quadrant is rich in impactful ideas.
So to summarise, here's the EA idea space at present
So what do I recommend?
Funders should give greater credence to projects that EAs typically like to work on and less credence to those they don't. The reasoning presented to them is less likely to be motivated reasoning.
EA should prioritise ideas that sound like no fun
They're more neglected, less likely to have been tried already,
You overestimated how much it would affect your happiness
It's less likely that the idea hasn't already been tried and failed
You're probably biased against them due to having heard less about them, for no reason other than people are less excited to work on them
Announcing failed projects should be expected of EAs
EAs should start setting an example
Tune in next week for my list of failed projects
There should be a small prize for the most embarrassing submissions
Funders should look positively on EAs who announce their failed projects and negatively on EAs who don't.
Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org