Illegible impact is still impact

Gordon Seidoh Worley

34

This is a really good post! I often have difficulty trying to estimate my own illegible impact or that of other people. Here are some thoughts on the situation in general:

People should take more time to thank others who have helped them would increase the amount of legible impact in the movement. I was startled to hear someone attribute their taking a job to me more than a year after the fact; this led me to update appropriately on the value of a prior project, and other projects of that type.
It would be cool if people developed a habit of asking other people about impact they think they'd had. I'd love to see EA foster a culture where Bob can ask Alice "did our conversation last month have any detectable impact on you?", and Alice can answer truthfully without hurting Bob's feelings. (80,000 Hours and CFAR both seem to do a good job of hunting for evidence of illegible impact, though I'm concerned about the incentive fundraising organizations have to interpret this evidence in a way that overestimates their impact.)
Small actions matter!
1. I really appreciate people who take the time to vote on the Forum; very few posts get more than 50 votes, and many excellent posts only get a dozen or so. The more people vote, the better our sorting algorithm performs, and the more knowledge we (CEA) have about the types of content people find valuable. We have lots of other ways of trying to understand the Forum, of course, but data is data!
2. Likewise, I'm really happy whenever I see someone provide useful information about EA to another person on Twitter or Reddit, whether that's "you might find this concept interesting" or "this claim you made about EA doesn't seem right, here's the best source I could find". If EA-affiliated people are reliably kind and helpful in various corners of the internet, this seems likely to contribute both to movement growth and to a stronger reputation for EA among people who prefer kind, helpful communities (these are often very good people to recruit).

ElliotJDavies

4y

1

People should take more time to thank others who have helped them would increase the amount of legible impact in the movement. I was startled to hear someone attribute their taking a job to me more than a year after the fact; this led me to update appropriately on the value of a prior project, and other projects of that type.

Hey Aaron, this comment left an impression on me. I think I am (marginally) more likely to leave this feedback now.

Aaron Gertler 🔸

4y

4

Thanks for letting me know! Your comment, in turn, makes me update a tiny amount on the value of leaving comments with this kind of advice :-)

adamShimi

6y

18

Once upon a time, my desire to build a useful mastery and career made me neglect my family, and more precisely my little brothers. Not dramatically, but whenever we were together, I was too stuck up with my own issues to act like a good old brother, or even to interact correctly with them. At some point, I realized that giving time and attention to my family was also important to me, and thus that I could not simply allocate all my mental time and energy to "useful" things.

This happened before I discovered EA, and is not explicitly about the EA community, but that's what popped into my mind when reading to this great post. In a sense, I refused to do illegible work (being a good brother, friend and son) because I considered it worthless in comparison with my legible aspirations.

Beyond becoming utility monster, I think what you are pointing out is that optimizing what we can measure, even with caveat, yields a negligence of small things that matters a lot. And I agree that this issue is probably tractable, because the illegible but necessary tasks themselves tend to be small, not too much of a burden. If one wants to allocate their career to it, great. But everyone can contribute in the ways you point out. Just a bit every day. Like calling your mom from time to time.

That is to say, just like you don't have to have an EA job to be an effective altruist, you don't have to dedicate all your life to illegible work to contribute some.

alex lawsen

6y

16

Thank you for writing this. As someone whe estimates his own career path has almost entirely illegible impact, it's made me more excited to continue trying to maximise that impact, even though it's unlikely to be visible. I thought it was worth commenting mostly as even though the majority of the impact you've had by writing this post will be illegible, it might be nice to see some of it.

Vaidehi Agarwalla 🔸

6y

15

This is a great post, thanks for writing it. I've thought about this topic a lot, specifically about the value helping others in the movement - I used the term "soft impact", because it improves coordination and community and interconnectedness. These actions often are illegible, but don't have to be.

EAs do this a lot anyways, but making the value of such action explicit or trying to track it could be really useful (and I think more of the following would only help!)

Examples:

connecting people to each other with the goal of them collaborating, one person getting advice, or just having shared interests.
providing detailed feedback on projects, posts etc.
sending people relevant resources
encouraging someone
maintaining connections with people whether that's in person, email, at conferences etc.

To track soft impact, you could send a message to people you know (maybe annually) and ask for feedback. Some people send out feedback forms so that it can be anonymous and people can give honest answers.

I currently have kept a list of introductions I have made and update it occasionally. I also track projects where I have given feedback. I will need to send out feedback forms at some point and see the actual impact, but even if only 1/5 introductions is very useful, I think this is worth the few minutes it takes to make an intro.

I'd be curious to know how much time people put aside to do these kind of things - especially for people who aren't very involved in meta stuff.

Greg_Colbourn ⏸️

6y

14

I don't know that this is still or ever really was part of the mission of the EA Hotel (now CEEALAR), but one of the things I really appreciated about it from my fortnight stay there was that it provided a space for EA-aligned folks to work on things without the pressure to produce legible results. This to me seems extremely valuable because I believe many types of impact are quantized such that no impact is legible until a lot of things fall into place and you get a "windfall" of impact all at once

Yes, this was a significant consideration in my founding of the project. We also acknowledge it where we have collated outputs. And whilst we have had a good amount of support (see histogram here), I feel that many potential supporters have been holding back, waiting for the windfall (we have struggled with a short runway over the last year).

Stefan_Schubert

6y

9

Cf. Katja Grace's Estimation is the best we have (which was re-published in the first version of the EA Handbook, edited by Ryan Carey).

Gordon Seidoh Worley

4y

4

Since I originally wrote this post I've only become more certain of the central message, which is that EAs and rationalist-like people in general are at extreme risk of Goodharting ourselves. See for example a more recent LW post on that theme.

In this post I use the idea of "legibility" to talk about impact that can be easily measured. I'm now less sure that was the right move, since legibility is a bit of jargon that, while it's taken off in some circles, hasn't caught on more broadly. Although the post deals with this, a better version of this post might avoid talking about legibility all together and instead speak in more familiar language about measurement, etc. that people are already familiar with. There's nothing in here that I think hinges on the idea of legibility, though it's certainly helpful for framing the point, so if there were interest I think I'd be willing to revisit this post and see if I can make a shorter version of it that doesn't teaching some extra jargon above all the other necessary jargon.

I think I'd also highlight the Goodharting part more, since that's really what the problem is. More time on Goodharting and why this is a consequence of that, less time on going round the topic.