All of Ann Garth's Comments + Replies

Thanks for the feedback! I updated the title to be a bit more descriptive

Thanks for catching! I missed them when doing my initial scan of the nominees list.

Hi Ben! I have been checking your podcast feed and haven't seen this episode come up. Did I miss something, or do you have a sense of when it will be posted?

1
Ben Yeoh
9mo
Hi Ann, we recorded it but because of lots events, he wanted to re-record it and then he decided it would be better if we didn’t go public. So I’m sorry but it’s been kept private for the moment. I’m hoping we might revisit some time. Happy to discuss the issues with you some time if interested. (Sorry for slow reply as well as I haven’t logged in for a while).

I'm curious to know what open questions he has after all the research he's done. What research still needs to be done? What are the biggest areas of uncertainty that he sees in this space?

1
Ben Yeoh
2y
Great question, will try and weave it into the conversation.

Do you worry at all about a bait-and-switch experience that new people might have?

I would hope that people wouldn't feel this way. I think neartermism is a great on-ramp to EA, but I don't think it has to be  an on-ramp to longtermism. That is, if someone joins EA out of an interest in neartermism, learns about longtermism but isn't persuaded, and continues to work on EA-aligned neartermist stuff, I think that would be a great outcome.

 

And thank you for the fact-checking on the books!

I agree that it should be! Just not sure it is, at least not for everyone

These are very reasonable concerns. To address them, I think it might make sense to limit submissions so that only people employed at EA orgs could submit, and only for bills related to their work at the org. Those people would presumably have the specialized knowledge needed to evaluate the legislation, and  most EA orgs aren't advocating for legislation that is polarizing within the community.

Alternately, submissions could stay open to everyone but the person receiving/organizing the submissions could be empowered to ask for more info about the subm... (read more)

I think this could be a great approach, but my concern is that people might not check the forum often enough (or might not check the tag). My personal experience suggests that one email every few weeks with a list of bills to call about all in one place would be better. But of course that might not be true for others!

1
Jeremy
2y
The forum will send emails for tags you are subscribed to if you set it up that way in the settings. I think I would prefer the idea of getting the bills to call about one at a time (a big list could be imposing), and having the option to discuss, but it  might be too much friction getting people to set that up though (and I guess some might not have forum accounts).

I've heard this from activists I trust, but can't cite a specific source. That said, this article (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/what-calling-congress-achieves) has a paragraph which discusses the impact of calling about small bills (control-F "mud-flap" to find the paragraph).

I paid for a lifetime subscription to Freedom (freedom.to/), an app that blocks certain websites from your phone and computer during pre-set windows. It cost like $60 (one-time cost) and has made an extraordinary difference in my productivity.

Things my office has bought me that are well worth the money/that I will buy for myself in the future if I need to: a mouse/mousepad, a second monitor, and a good (comfortable, height-adjustable) office chair.

8
Sam Bogerd
2y
Somehow Freedom does not work for me, but I feel the same way about Cold Turkey (https://getcoldturkey.com/). This software is a life saver for me. 

I did competitive college debate for four years (American Parliamentary format, which is similar to the BP format used in the EA Debate Championship but not identical) and I think that the extent to which it does/doesn’t encourage truth-seeking is less important than the way it pushes people to justify their values.

Oversimplifying broadly, debate has two layers: one is the arguments about what the impacts of a certain idea/policy are likely to be, and one is arguments about which impacts are more important (known as “weighing”). In order to win rounds, you... (read more)

Hi Teo! I know your comment was from a few years ago, but I was so excited to see someone else in EA talk about self-compassion. Self-compassion is one of the main things that lets me be passionate about EA and have a maximalist moral mindset without spiraling into guilt, and I think it should be much more well-known in the community. I don't know if you ever ended up writing more about this, but if you did, I hope you'd consider publishing it -- I think that could help a lot of people!

3
Teo Ajantaival
3y
Hi Ann, thanks for the reply! I agree that self-compassion can be an important piece of the puzzle for many people with an EA outlook. I am definitely still working on reframing EA-related ideas and motivations so that the default language would not so easily lead to 'EA guilt' and some other problems. Lately I've been focusing on more general alternatives to 'compassion', because people often have different (and strong) preexisting notions of what compassion means, and so I'm not sure if compassion will serve as the kind of integrative 'bridge concept'  that I'm looking for to help solve many (e.g. terminological) problems simultaneously.  So unfortunately I don't have much (quickly publishable) stuff on compassion specifically, having been rotating abstract alternatives like 'dissonance minimalism' or 'complex harmonization'. But who knows, maybe I'll end up relating things via compassion again, at some point! I'm not up-to-date on what the existing EA-memesphere writings on (self-)compassion are, but I love the Replacing Guilt series by Nate Soares (http://mindingourway.com/guilt), often mentioned on LW/EA. It has also been narrated as a podcast by Gianluca Truda. I believe it is a good recommendation for anyone who is feeling overwhelmed by the ambitions of EA.

Hi Rocket, thanks for sharing these thoughts (and I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you)!

To respond to your specific points:

  1. Improving the magnitude of impact while holding tractability and neglectedness constant would increase impact on the margin, ie, if we revise our impact estimates upwards at every possible level of funding, then climate change efforts become more cost-effective. 2. It seems like considering co-benefits does affect tractability, but the tractability of these co-benefit issue areas, rather than of climate change per se.
... (read more)

One data point: I recently got a job which, at the time I initially applied for it, I didn't really want (as I went through the interview process and especially now that I've started, I like it more than I thought I would based on the job posting alone).