Firstly, thank you in general for writing this up, this is an important piece of information and creates common knowledge and norms around how to behave related to the topic.

"You still control your own social circle - you don’t have to be friends with jerks just because they are EAs."

Joining EA at a subjectively still young and starry-eyed age, I equated anyone associating with EA as "living up to the EA principles". Now being older and more experienced, I see many younger people in EA making the same mistake. By now, I'm convinced that e.g. interest in ethics and actual ethical behavior and character correlate only very mildly. Similarly, there are many people in EA who are not particularly ethical either. Humans are still humans. 

 

"utilitiarians should self-efface their utilitarianism" "Parfit suggests adopting whatever moral system seems to be most likely to produce the highest utility" "you may instead need to forget that you ever believed in utilitarianism"
This sounds plausible: you orient yourself towards the good and backpropagate over time how things play out and then learn through it which system and policies are reliable and truly produce good results (in the context and world you find yourself). This is also exactly what has played out in my own development, by orienting toward what produces good consequences and understanding how uncertain the world is (and how easily I fooled myself by saying I was doing the thing with the best consequences when I didn't) I came out with virtue ethics myself.

"For a while, I have been thinking of writing a post with many similar themes and maybe I still will at some point." I would read it with joy and endorse a full post being devoted to this topic (happy to read drafts and provide thoughts)

Focusmate has changed a lot since this post was published; maybe invite links are disabled by now.

Glad you enjoy it!

Thank you for reading and reviewing the book for the rest of us!
Disappointed to hear it is close minded in regards to the political framework it comes from.
I do think there are many valid arguments to be made to criticize EA on its own terms and hope this is what the book set out to do.

• During EAG London 2021 @Emerson Spartz and I initiated a informal but successful "Complexity and EA" meetup. 
• @Michael Hinge wrote "Complexity Science, Economics and the Art of Zen" inspired by the meeting 
• We now have a Telegram Chat and Discord Server for people interested in the topic, please reach out if you want to get added. (Not posting the link to keep entry selective) ("ComplexitEA")

Further resources we collected or found relevant:

• Making Sense of Complexity (Introduction to Complexity) Comic by Sarah Firth
• The Map of the Complexity Sciences by Brian Castellani
•  Meditations on Moloch (Slate Star Codex)
• Seeing like a State (Slate Star Codex)
• Complexity Podcast (Michael Garfield)
• Jim Rutt Show Podcast (Jim Rutt)
• Thinking in Systems (Donella Meadows) (start here) -- Reading Group 
• Applied Complexity Science (Joe Norman)
• Game B Movement (e.g. Daniel Schmachtenberger)
• Nassim Taleb: Fooled by Randomness, Antifragile, Skin in the Game, Black Swan
• The Systems Bible (John Gall)
• Origin of Wealth (complexity economics) 
• Physics of Life (and his second book, Freedom and Evolution) 
• Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned (novelty search) 
• Scale (by Geoffrey West)
• Order Without Design
• Map of Cybernetics and Systems Science (Bob Horn)
• Loopy, a tool for thinking in systems
• Complexity Explorables
• Complexity Explorer Courses by SFI
• Graphic design showing difference between systems thinking/change etc.
• Books by the Santa Fe Institute
• Reading list by Daniel Schmachtenberger
• Polycrisis Response Mapping
• Principles of Systems Science George E. Mobus, Michael C. Kalton

More than ever as far as I can tell 

People who like Logan's post on EA burnout will love Tyler Alterman's post on Effective altruism in the garden of ends. Both are close to my own experience.

Hey Jay,

Over the years, I have talked to many very successful and productive people, and most do, in fact, not work more than 20 productive hours per week. If you have a job with meetings and low-effort tasks in between, it's easy to get to 40 hours plus. Every independent worker who measures hours of real mental effort is more in the 4-5 hours per day range. People who say otherwise tend to lie and change their numbers if you pressure them to get into the detail of what "counts as work" to them. It's a marathon, and if you get into that range every day, you'll do well.

Thank you for putting this together!