All of Evie's Comments + Replies

Maybe imperative sentences will always tend read as preachy. I’m not sure.

I thought the same thing when I read it. I got similar vibes from some of the other merch (but “do good better” the strongest).

I think that “moral consideration for all” reads similarly. Especially since most people reading it will read it out of context.

Also “maximise impact” a little bit.

I’ve been considering writing a post about my experience of receiving a grant, and the downsides I didn’t anticipate beforehand. It would probably look similar to this comment but with more info.

General encouragement for having done something risky (a wacky title) and then deciding against it and changing it. The first sentence of the changed post made me laugh.

(Removed this comment. Don't know how to delete it.)

“Better” could mean lots of things here. Including: more entertaining; higher quality discussion; more engagement; it’s surpassed a ‘critical mass’ of people to sustain a regular group of posters and a community; better memes; more intellectually diverse; higher frequency of high quality takes; the best takes are higher quality; more welcoming and accessible conversations etc.

The aims of EA Twitter are different to the forum. But I think the most important metrics are the “quantity of discussion” ones.

My impression is that:

• There are more “high quality ta

Thanks for sharing! That's useful to know.

I'll look into adding to the post later today.

If I was going to spend longer on this post, I'd make it more empirical and talk through evidence for/against the effectiveness of ACT. 

As it is, I didn't want to spend significantly longer writing it, so I've gone for a summary of the core ideas -- so that readers can assess the vibe and see if it's something that sounds interesting to them.

This might have been the wrong call though.

I also wanna give general encouragement for sharing a difficult rejection story.

Sorry that your experience of this has been rough. 

Some quick thoughts I had whilst reading:

• There was a vague tone of "the goal is to get accepted to EAG" instead of "the goal is to make the world better," which I felt a bit uneasy about when reading the post. EAGs are only useful in so far as they let community members to better work in the real world. 
  • Because of this, I don't feel strongly about the EAG team providing feedback to people on why they were rejected. The EAG team's goals isn't to advise on how applicants can fill up their "EA resum

(Currently reading the post and noticing that many of the links go to the top of the same google doc. I assume this isn’t supposed to be the case. This could be because I’m on mobile, but also could be an error with the links.)

(Also congrats on your first forum post! Go you :) )

This poem really made me smile; thanks for writing it Luke :)

This relates to a caveat in my recent post:

• I’m concerned about too much EA meta conversation — about worlds where most of EA dialogue is talking about EAs talking about EAs (lots of social reality and not enough object-level). 
• These sorts of convos are often very far removed from {concrete things that help the world}, and I worry about them taking away attention from more important ones. 
• I think it’s probably much better (for the world) for conversations to stay focused on the real world, object-level claims and arguments.

Part of me wants to fles... (read more)

A distinction I've found useful is "object-level" vs "social reality". They are both adjectives that describe types of conversation/ ideas.

Object-level discussions are about ideas and actions (e.g. AI timelines, the mechanics of launching a successful startup). Object-level ideas are technical, empirical, and often testable. Object-level refers to what ideas are important or make sense. It is focused on truth-seeking and presenting arguments clearly. 

Social reality discussions are about people and organisations (e.g. Will MacAskill, Open Philanthropy)... (read more)

Thanks for your comment!

this could've been mostly avoided by a consideration of Chesterton's Fence

Meh, I don't think so. This taken to its extreme looks like "be normie."

I'm now worried about e.g. high school summer camp programs that prioritize the development of unbalanced agency.

I'm pretty confident that (for ESPR at least) this was a one off fluke! I'm not worried about this happening again (see gavin's comment above).

Hey, thanks for writing. 

I also used to feel extremely confused about this (e.g. I thought that in-person university groups were "woefully inefficient" compared to social media outreach). I did not understand why there weren't EA youtubers or social media marketing campaigns. Much of my own social conscious had been shaped by online creators (e.g. veganism and social justice ideas), and it felt like a tragedy that EA was leaving so much lying on the table. 

I now am less optimistic about short-form social media outreach. Mostly because:

• It seems re

If I ask three people for their time, they don't know whether they're helping me get from 0 to 1 person helping with this, 1 to 2 or 9 to 10 for all they know.

Nice, yup, agreed that the information asymmetry is a big part of the problem in this case. I wonder if it could be a good norm to give someone this information when making requests. Like, explicitly say in a message "I've asked one other person and think that they will be about as well placed as you to help with this" etc

I do also think that there's a separate cost to making requests, in that it act... (read more)

Hmm, interesting. Thanks for clarifying, that does work better in this context (although it's confusing if you don't have the info above)

Yup, another commenter is correct in that I am assuming that the goals are altruistic.

Hey, thanks for asking.

On the first point:

• Throughout both of my posts, I've been using a nicher definition than the one given by the Stanford philosophy dictionary. In my last post, I defined it as "the ability to get what you want across different contexts – the general skill of coming up with ambitious goals ^[1] and actually achieving them, whatever they are."
• But, as another commenter said, the term (for me at least) is now infused with a lot of community context and implicit assumptions. 
• I took some of this as assumed knowledge when writi

Thanks, that's useful to know! :)

Thanks for your comment Aaron! :)

I don't think I ever got the sense-even intuitively or in a low-fidelity way- that "agency" was identical to/implied/strongly overlapped with "a willingness to be social domineering or extractive of others' time and energy" 

I wrote about this because it was the direction in which I noticed myself taking "be agentic" too far. It's also based on what I've observed in the community and conversations I've had over the past few months. But I would expect people to "take the message too far" in different ways (obvs whether s... (read more)

Wait, I'm not actually sure I want to change the inside view thing, I'm confused. I was kinda just describing a meme-y version of hustling -- therefore the low-resolution version of "has inside views" is fine. 

has strong inside views which overrule the outside view

I'm not really sure what you mean by this.

Thanks :)

Your learned helplessness is interesting, because to me the core of agency is indeed nonsocial

Yeah, the learned helplessness is a weird one. I felt kinda sad about it because I used to really pride myself on being self sufficient. I agree that the social part of agency should only be a small part -- I think I leaned too far into it.

strong inside views which overrule the outside view

Thanks for the inside view correction. Changing that now, and will add that Owen originally coined social agency.

ESPR 2021 went a little too hard on agency

Fwiw I did ge... (read more)

Ah nice, I was missing that context. Yup, the angle of confidence building seems good for this audience.

Congrats for organising EAGx -- that's huge! :)

Sorry for being a downer, but I want to push back on the subtext that it's (always) good for people to be willing to "lend a helping hand, whether it's sending a message, reviewing a draft or hopping onto a call?"

My rough thoughts:

• Some people say yes to too many things and don't value their time highly enough. 
• Sometimes, it's the right call for someone to say no to helping others in their immediate environment.
• It's often hard to say no, even when it's the right call.
• I'm worried about a culture where {sayi

Thanks! Also this is a small point but I find it easier to skim articles when they have formatted headings (so there's an overview of the article on the left hand side). You can do this using the forum formatting features.

What does PB/CM mean?

“C1: A person in a poor country whose life is saved experiences less welfare than a person in a rich country whose life is saved”

(Asking a dumb question here, but,) is this true? Ie, does an increase in material wealth actually increase psychological wellbeing?

I have an intuition that psychological well-being is mostly affected by how wealthy you are compared to your peer group.

Maybe you’re talking about individuals poor countries who are below the poverty line (in which case, I agree that they would experience much less psychology wellbeing).

But I would be surprised if individuals in rich countries are actually happier than individuals in poor countries (who have all their basic needs met).

Thanks for writing this post ! It resonated and I feel like I've fallen into a similar mindset before. 

It reminds me of a point made here: "like, will we wish in 5 years that EAs had more outside professional experience to bring domain knowledge and legitimacy to EA projects rather than a resume full of EA things?"

When reading the post, this felt especially true and unfortunate: "They get the reputation as someone who can “get shit done” but in practice, they’re usually solving ops bottlenecks at the cost of building harder-to-acquire skills."

I like this, and think that networking as a teen is super useful and high ROI. (Maybe I'm biased because networking opened up opportunities for me.)

I really like this post as a starting guide! Thanks for writing

I feel concerned about versions of this where there is implicit social pressure to:

• stay;
• seem fine with the critiques given;
• participate in the first place.

Like, if its implicitly socially costly to opt out, it's pretty hard for an individual to opt out.

I also think that it is hard to avoid these pressure-y dynamics in practice. Especially when people really want to be included in the social group.

I can imagine a scenario where there is a subtext of: 

"You can opt out. Of course. But, as we know, the real hard-core and truth-seeking people stay. An... (read more)

Given that I was aiming to spend only a few mins on the census, I don't expect that I would have scrolled through the post to find the description of the cause area. 

But some people might, so could be useful. 

Pretty confused by what some of the cause areas are (e.g. epistemic institutions). I expect my responses were less helpful/ accurate bc of not knowing what some of them meant.

Wow haha this is pretty cool! And also an entertaining read

Thank you for the comments!

I agree with some of what you wrote. I don't want the subtext of the post to be "you should amass social capital  so that senior people will do you favours."

Some thoughts:

• It’s generally the case that ‘social domineeringness’ is a trait that is rewarded by society. Similar to intelligence, people who have this quality will probs be more likely to achieve their goals. (This makes me kinda uncomfortable, but I think it’s broadly true and it doesn’t seem good to ignore it).
• Given that this is the case, I want to encourage this qu

My guess is that it’s just very context dependent — I’m not sure how generalisable these sorts of numbers are. 

It also seems like the size of favours would vary a ton and make it hard to give a helpful number.

[On the title -- you gotta have fun with these things haha]

Thanks Gavin! 

Yes, the laws of equal and opposite advice defo apply here. 

I also wonder whether this sort of thing becomes zero sum within a small enough environment (e.g. if everyone starts lowering their bar for asking for help, people will raise their bar for saying yes, because they will be inundated with requests). Could lead to competitor dynamics (discussed in the comments of this post), which seems unfortunate.

I really like the point of spending years 'becoming yourself'. Like, I ... (read more)

Thanks Kevin :)

This comment is great, and resonates with a lot of the stuff I found hard when I was first immersed in the community at an EA hub.

I really really loved section 2 of this post!! It articulates a mindset shift that I think is important and valuable, and I've not seen it written out like that before.