There are lots of contexts, even ones that aren't work contexts, where you might be being evaluated or assessed informally. This is kind of just true in the world in general, but if you end up making EA a big part of your social and professional networks, then the consequences of that are bigger.
If you care about being able to do EA work longterm, it's worth pretty significant costs to avoid resenting EA. Take that into account when you think about what decisions you're making and with what kind of sacrifice.
"Say more?" and "If your thoughts are in a pile, what's on top?" are pretty powerful conversational moves, in my experience
A lot of our feelings and reactions come reactively / contextually / on the margins - people feel a certain way e.g. when they are immersed in EA spaces and sometimes have critiques, and when they are in non-EA spaces, they miss the good things about EA spaces. This seems normal and healthy and a good way to get multiple frames on something, but also good to keep in mind.
People who you think of as touchstones of thinking a particular thing may change their minds or not be as bought in as you'd expect
The world has so much detail
One of the most valuable things more senior EAs can do for junior EAs is contextualize: EA has had these conversations before, the thing you experienced was a 20th/50th/90th percentile experience, other communities do/don't go through similar things etc.
Maybe one of the best things we can all do for each other is push on expanding option sets, and ask questions that get us to think more about what we think and what we should do.
When you're new to EA, it's very exciting: Don't let your feet go faster than your brain - know what you're doing and why. It's not good for you or the world if in two years you look around and don't believe any of it and don't know how you got there and feel tricked or disoriented.
You're not alone in feeling overwhelmed or like an imposter
If you're young in EA: Don't go into community building just because the object level feels scarier and you don't have the skills yet
Networking is great, but it's not the only form of agency / initiative taking
Lots of ick feelings about persuasion and outreach get better if you're honest and transparent
Lots of ick feelings about all kinds of things are tracking a lot of different things at once: people's vibes, a sense of honesty or dishonesty, motivated reasoning, underlying empirical disagreements - it's good to track those things separately
Ask for a reasonable salary for your work, it's not as virtuous as you think to work for nothing
Sets bad norms for other people who can't afford to do that
Makes it more like volunteering so you might not take the work as seriously
Don't be self-hating about EA; figure out what you believe and don't feel bad about believing it and its implications and acting in the world in accordance with it
Earnestness is shockingly effective - if you say what you think and why you think it (including "I read the title of a youtube video"), if you say when don't know what to do and what you're confused about, if you say what you're confident in and why, if you say how you feel and why, I find things (at least in this social space) go pretty damn well, way better than I would have expected.
This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what’s most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That’s great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing variou...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
