Thanks for sharing. It’s interesting to hear about this from the perspective of someone in this community. I’d be happy to see more posts like this on EA forum.

This was the most interesting part to me:

It wasn’t some meaningful part of the larger story of my life, replete with a buried darkness in my soul coming to the forefront, or a unique challenge driven by terrible circumstances. I have had to push back in therapy repeatedly on these subtler and more interesting attempts to make something of the event. The truth is sober reflection makes it all look like little more than a meaningless tragedy.

This is kind of relatable. My own past abuse — and the effects it has had on me — both do not fit existing narratives very well at all. People (including therapists) don’t seem to get it, and that makes it harder to figure things out and make progress.

I agree with this post. Given that we react more leniently towards selfish behavior when people appear to have good intentions, it seems clear to me that we are incentivizing everyone to convince themselves that they really do have good intentions. Regardless of whether they’re actually doing morally good behavior.

I don’t think this is isolated to “having good intentions.” I think it affects many other internal states and ways-of-seeing-oneself. e.g. If we give people more slack for missing deadlines when they have ADHD, that incentivizes people to convince themselves they have ADHD (whether or not they truly meet the criteria). If we give people whatever they want when they throw a tantrum, that incentivizes them to avoid learning how to regulate their emotions.

(Of course, all of these examples involve trade-offs, and the answer isn’t clearly “stop giving any special treatment towards people who have some sympathetic internal state.”)

There’s a related concept in medicine called “secondary gain.” Basically, a patient may be subconsciously motivated to stay sick because their illness resulted in some indirect benefit, e.g. their spouse started helping more with housework.

This idea has been called the Petrie multiplier. I agree that this probably makes things worse for women in EA.

I don't see anything at that link now. I expect those openings were taken?

I'm in Facebook groups where people in California and the Bay Area specifically are searching for appointments (and leftover vaccines); it seems pretty difficult for eligible people to find an appointment.