The Nonlinear Library EA - Friendship as a sacred value by Michelle Hutchinson
Mar 24, 2024
12:19
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: Friendship as a sacred value, published by Michelle Hutchinson on March 24, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
In 2022/3 there were a number of stressful events in and affecting the EA community, starting with the FTX crash. That led to people thinking about how to make a community one that you want to be a part of, and one in which people feel happy and safe - including, sometimes, wanting some people to leave or change how they interact with the community.
How to make sure a community thrives seems difficult. For other types of entities, there are clearly defined interventions. A company has a clear mandate to fire people who act against its interests and it's clear that that mandate should be carried out by managers at that company. Communities are in a pretty different situation.
There are some community cases which seem reasonably clear - for example, people organising community events should take some care to exclude people who are likely to cause harm at those events. But there are also questions around whether communities should try to take more generalisable action against particular individuals, in the sense of trying to encourage everyone to stop associating with them.
Some of the discussions I've seen around negative events in the community have at least implicitly pushed for coordinated action. Sometimes that's been in a backward looking way, like wishing SBF had been excluded from the EA community long ago. Sometimes it's been in a forward looking way: 'Are certain types of finance just inherently shady? Should we avoid associating with anyone working in those?'.
I've been feeling kind of angsty about engaging in conversations around this, and have so far had trouble pinning down why. I often think more clearly by writing, which is why I wrote this. I also thought others might have experienced similar internal tension, and if so maybe hearing someone else's reflection on it could be useful.
After thinking about it some, I realised that I think the discomfort is coming from the fact that what's sometimes going on in questions like the above is implicitly "at what point does morality get to tell you to break off a friendship?".[1] I think I intuitively hate that question. It seems important to me that who I spend non-work time with to be 'out of morality's reach' - I think it gets into the domain of what you might call 'sacred values'.[2]
What do I mean by sacred values?
It often feels kind of hard to know what the scope of effective altruism should be, because it feels like nothing is ever enough. But for most people it's not sustainable to be always optimising every part of life for helping others more.
A friend of mine resolves that tension by using the idea of 'sacred values'. Deciding that something is a 'sacred value' for you means treating that part of your life as something you're clearly permitted to have, regardless of whether foregoing it would allow you to help others more.[3]
I don't think 'sacred values' should be taken too literally. They're more of a useful cognitive manoeuvre for helping us deal with the weight of morality and how many different ways there are of helping others. Having sacred values might be a way of allowing yourself to dive into doing good effectively in a sustainable rather than overwhelming way. Periodically, in cool moments, you pick which areas to optimise in and which to keep for yourself.
Then day to day you don't have to stress over every possible way of helping others more.[4]
Sacred values differ between people. For one person, having children might be a sacred value - they simply plan to have children, regardless of whether they could help others more if they didn't. Another person might feel fine doing a careful calculation of how costly to the world them having children is likely to be, and make the decis...
In 2022/3 there were a number of stressful events in and affecting the EA community, starting with the FTX crash. That led to people thinking about how to make a community one that you want to be a part of, and one in which people feel happy and safe - including, sometimes, wanting some people to leave or change how they interact with the community.
How to make sure a community thrives seems difficult. For other types of entities, there are clearly defined interventions. A company has a clear mandate to fire people who act against its interests and it's clear that that mandate should be carried out by managers at that company. Communities are in a pretty different situation.
There are some community cases which seem reasonably clear - for example, people organising community events should take some care to exclude people who are likely to cause harm at those events. But there are also questions around whether communities should try to take more generalisable action against particular individuals, in the sense of trying to encourage everyone to stop associating with them.
Some of the discussions I've seen around negative events in the community have at least implicitly pushed for coordinated action. Sometimes that's been in a backward looking way, like wishing SBF had been excluded from the EA community long ago. Sometimes it's been in a forward looking way: 'Are certain types of finance just inherently shady? Should we avoid associating with anyone working in those?'.
I've been feeling kind of angsty about engaging in conversations around this, and have so far had trouble pinning down why. I often think more clearly by writing, which is why I wrote this. I also thought others might have experienced similar internal tension, and if so maybe hearing someone else's reflection on it could be useful.
After thinking about it some, I realised that I think the discomfort is coming from the fact that what's sometimes going on in questions like the above is implicitly "at what point does morality get to tell you to break off a friendship?".[1] I think I intuitively hate that question. It seems important to me that who I spend non-work time with to be 'out of morality's reach' - I think it gets into the domain of what you might call 'sacred values'.[2]
What do I mean by sacred values?
It often feels kind of hard to know what the scope of effective altruism should be, because it feels like nothing is ever enough. But for most people it's not sustainable to be always optimising every part of life for helping others more.
A friend of mine resolves that tension by using the idea of 'sacred values'. Deciding that something is a 'sacred value' for you means treating that part of your life as something you're clearly permitted to have, regardless of whether foregoing it would allow you to help others more.[3]
I don't think 'sacred values' should be taken too literally. They're more of a useful cognitive manoeuvre for helping us deal with the weight of morality and how many different ways there are of helping others. Having sacred values might be a way of allowing yourself to dive into doing good effectively in a sustainable rather than overwhelming way. Periodically, in cool moments, you pick which areas to optimise in and which to keep for yourself.
Then day to day you don't have to stress over every possible way of helping others more.[4]
Sacred values differ between people. For one person, having children might be a sacred value - they simply plan to have children, regardless of whether they could help others more if they didn't. Another person might feel fine doing a careful calculation of how costly to the world them having children is likely to be, and make the decis...