All of Ronja's Comments + Replies
I think these are true, and mitigate some of the problem of "going all in". As I see it, though, they don't mitigate the potential (psychological) harms from treating most things as a means to impact.
Yes! yesyesyes. Hey. Wow. Thank you! This is the first time that a forum article has spoken to me as a whole, not just the optimiser part of my brain (which by now is so interwoven with my inner critic that, well, meh).
It felt eerie to see so much of my own journey here: from spritely, quirky, happy person, to eager optimiser, to dimmed and depressed. When I read your post, I am aching for the Ronja that should have read this years ago, and a sort of raging against this community that no one could see that this was a descent fed by their very own beh...
Talking about "there should be spaces to articulate hunches", I am now taking the plunge and speed-writing a few things that have felt slightly off in EA over the last few years. They are definitely not up to the standard of thought-through critique (I've tried to indicate confidence levels to at least show how they might compare against each other), but I'd like to know if any of them resonate with other people here who might've thought about them more. The list isn't complete, either.
Things that feel off in EA:
- Lots of white male people working on A
I agree very much! I have a lot of half-finished but mostly not-even-really started drafts myself, and one thing that resonated in the OP was the need for spaces where those hunches can be explored, as opposed to expecting thought-through and well-articulated criticisms.
Thank you so much for the post! It also resonated very strongly with me, so I felt I might share my own disillusionment journey here, in form of a post I wrote but never published. I wrote it in early 2020 - I followed pretty much the path the OP describes, but decided "this community isn't good for me", as opposed to "I disagree with the guiding principles", so I took a break from the community for around 2-3 years, dialed-down my expectations for impact, and am now back as something like "EA-adjacent".
Thanks for this! I agree that my past self would have found this, or something along those lines, a very useful starting point. That said, I think I would also have found this process a little overwhelming (esp during initial projects, when I was trying to assess personal fit more than anything else). So here's a quote from the GovAI agenda which I find useful whenever I get lost: _"Ultimately, perhaps the simplest rule of thumb is to just begin with those questions or ideas that most grab you, and start furiously working."_ (p.13)
Yes, I find trying to make that part less dominant most promising here. If it secretly is still dominant while you pretend engaging in other things for their own sake, you will get this "trick" flavour.
For me, this part only ended up less dominant once it could fully comprehend that it wasn't leading to good places even by its own light. (I would go: "See, optimiser-Ronja, we have followed your lead for a while now, and we've ended up absolutely depressed and unable to do anything at all. I know you don't want that either. So, please, let go of your grip for a while as we figure out other approaches.")