The CEA research team just published a new paper - Considering Considerateness: Why communities of do-gooders should be exceptionally considerate (PDF version). The paper is co-authored by Stefan Schubert, Ben Garfinkel, and Owen Cotton-Barratt.
Summary
When interacting with others you can be considerate of their preferences, for instance by being friendly or reliable. This normally has small positive direct effects. But, by improving your reputation or strengthening aspects of culture that make a community more cooperative, the positive indirect effects can be large.
We present the case that these indirect effects are further strengthened when you are acting as part of a community of people doing important work. For instance, being considerate can improve the level of trust and collaborativeness among members of the community. It can also improve the reputation of the community. Conversely, failing to be considerate can harm the community, both internally and in its reputation.
This means that for communities of people striving to do good, such as the effective altruism community, considerateness should be a surprisingly high priority. It could be that, in order to do the most good, they should be considerably more considerate than common sense morality requires.
Thanks for this. I think I strongly agree with what you've said. I've often noticed/got the impression that lots of EAs seem to be quite interested in pursuing their own projects and don't help each other very much. I worry this results in an altruistic tragedy of the commons problem; it would be better if people helped each other, but instead we chose to do our own good in our own way, resulting in less good done overall. Now I think of it, I've probably done this myself.
The real challenge, as you noted, is the following:
This seems to be quite a common problem, at least in academia. VIPs (very important people) will often deliberately make themselves unavailable so they have time for their own projects. Presumably, this has some reciprocal costs to the VIP too: if they had helped you, you would be more inclined to help them in future.
Relatedly, suppose people accept more considerate norms and so are reluctant to bother some VIP in case it's annoying to the VIP. We can imagine this backfiring. Take an extreme scenario where considerate people dont ask VIPs (or indeed anyone) else for help. This means people don't get help from the VIPs, and VIPs only get requests from inconsiderate people. Presuming these VIPs do grant some requests for help and the requests from considerate people would have done more good, this is now a worse situation overall. Extreme considerateness, call it 'meekness', seems bad.
It strikes me that it would be important to develop some community norms for navigating this difficulty. Perhaps people asking for help should be encouraged to do so, ask once or twice and leave the other person plenty of room to turn the request down. Perhaps receipients of requests should make a habit of replying to them but being polite and honest about their current capacity to help.
I think you're right that there's a failure mode of not asking people for things. I don't think that not-asking is in general the more considerate action, though -- often people would prefer to be given the opportunity to help (particularly if it feels like an opportunity rather than a demand).
I suppose the general point is: avoid the trap of overly-narrow interpretations of considerateness (just like it was good to avoid the trap of overly-narrow interpretations of consequences of actions).