I want to gently push back on this being more EA than not undergoing surgery and removing important parts of one's body. I think you might be influenced a lot by your feelings (I know I am despite trying to be rational - I am rational about how irrational I am!). Therefore, I could imagine myself in your situation feeling a strong pull to be an organ donor because you feel like you are not giving enough otherwise. I therefore strongly advice to wait a few years after you have graduated and you have a comfortable, stable income. This way you will have compassion for your future self which is likely to most of the time have a stable and comfortable income - the student years pass quickly! Take care of yourself whatever you do, this is a marathon, not a sprint (unless we are unlucky with AGI timelines and alignment).

I am curious what you think of a first-principled approach to resiliency/preparedness? I wrote a blog post on this on LessWrong. I still have a feeling that from an individual, and perhaps from a nation state's perspective, one will arrive at quite different resiliency measures if one carefully starts with the likelihood of different disasters affecting one's loved ones, then the likelihood and cost of different interventions mitigating these disasters and in the end having a prioritized list of most cost-effective preparedness actions. It would, for example, surprise me if digging a hole would be a cost-effective way to avert death or permanent damage.

Am I correct in interpreting your comment as something like "Rebecca says it's costly to say more which might imply she is sitting on not yet disclosed information that might put powerful EAs in a bad light"? I did not really pick up on this when reading the OP but your comment got me worried that maybe there is some information that should be made public?

I loved this episode as it clearly laid out the challenges with nuclear weapons and looked at possible interventions. I am a bit curious why it was "demoted" to after hours - it felt perhaps more relevant than some recent "main show" episodes on evolutionary X (evolutionary history, evolutionary psychology, etc.). Or maybe you are trying to draw in a wider audience by covering a wider array of topics, including topics starting to fall outside of priority causes.

Thanks! That does seem super relevant. Is my understanding below roughly correct?

"A post on a non-community topic that receives ~500 karma is roughly equivalent in impact to a high quality research paper in a peer reviewed journal. And such a post receiving about 100 karma or a bit below is about 1-10% of the impact of such a journal article."

I was wondering if our continued conversation would be better as a new post using the conversation format if that's still in use? That said,I only want to do that if people find it helpful - I got pretty down voted including by people of the marginalized groups that I feel "bad because of".

Fantastic work. Would you be able to, if you think it is advisable, to have some sort of "adjusted JEID" score? I am thinking that since EA is mostly white and male, that if the community, in its current form, had been more "equally distributed across gender, race, etc", that the JEID concerns would have loomed even larger?

Very simplified, something like if 20% of respondents identified as POC, and JEID issues were raised by 15% of respondents, that we could do something like "if EA was 50% POC, the JEID issues would be raised by 37.5% of respondents". This is wrong math, I know, but meant to give an example to point in the direction of what I am thinking about.

And if any readers did not pick up on this already - I am potentially very interested to chip in on any JEID efforts where you think perhaps my privileges (or lay DEI expertise) might be of some use.

I will answer as briefly as I can so please double click on anything you would like me to respond to in more detail. And I think the value of me responding here is to let others know better how I feel and the mechanisms at work in making me feel alienated from EA.

Is Heightism even a thing?

2 responses:

1. One can assume that a person of shorter stature has heard comments on their height many times before. And I think few such people find it flattering. I am interested here in describing my emotions and how EA differs from other spaces I am used to navigate, thus leading to my feeling of not belonging.
2. Height does correlate with race, so in that sense, it can cause emotional "spillover" or something like that.

Did you in fact go ask this person for water as your friend suggested? If so, how did this person respond? Did they threaten you with the shotgun, or give you water, or what?

Yes I went, as I judged that my friend was likely to be correct and I did not want to sleep in the bush (we did not have money to be towed). Nope, it went just fine when I went there. In fact, they were super friendly. Again, I do not trust my memory here 100% but if this is a crux for people in understanding my general feeling of being alienated from EA (which I do not suspect) I can see if I can confirm the story with my friends. And on the larger point about whether such fears are justified - I do not think that matters much for actions EAs can take. This is because we have 2 choices:

1. Work to convince all potential POC/women candidates for EA that their concerns about racism/sexism/etc. are unjustified. After we have convinced them they are not, they will naturally help increase diversity in EA.
2. Assume that their feelings are true and tell them this, maybe even believing it ourselves. Then act accordingly to make them feel at home in EA.

I have never seen option 1 successfully implemented, I think for obvious reasons. The reason to not go with either option would be because one does not think we need more diversity. That said, having too much complaints about diversity likely works against any work to increase diversity, see my other comment here on 3 options for EA "leadership".

On the "airplane incident": You might be right. But I both think "whiteness is true" and am embedded in a social circle that is super diverse. So if I have to choose between stopping to see the world through a racial/gender/LGBTQ+/etc. lens or stop being an EA, I will always, always chose the latter. Seeing the world through such a lens, or seeing it as much as I can from the vantage point of the people I love, is critical to my closeness to them. I really like who I am and the people I love. I would like to be an EA too, but that comes second.

Your second last paragraph: I think I answered this already. If I were to do this, which I also think is a less true view of the world, I would not be close to my loved ones, potentially even losing them. Not an option. And I do apologize for the unpolished/offensive nature of the post - I think I could have re-worded it much better but was encouraged to publish it unpolished. I really do not want people to feel like I am ascribing agendas to people - that was the whole point of the airplane incident - I know one can be totally "woke" and still have feelings that can result in behavior that other perceive to be racist/sexist etc. And I am largely uninterested in people's intentions. The sole point of this post was to give an anecdote/some more detail on why a person might feel alienated in EA - the idea was that this might be helpful for EAs to take action and to bridge understanding. But it is a minefield because we so quickly start playing "the victim" instead of engaging in solving the issue. And my wording and tone might have contributed to this victim competition and that is not my intention. I would rather like to see EA being the victim if I left - I am very happy with my non-EA life. I guess if it is down to wording, tone and so on in my post I just cowardly seek draft amnesty!

Actually there were some instances of jerkiness/conflict at that workplace too. Actually someone there did comment on someone's height difference. And another incident I remember is one where someone was allergic to perfume and someone wore thick perfume in the office. So not utopia but the feeling I got was in general one of belonging a lot more. And I think other EAs who feel alienated in the same way I do also have been in other spaces where they felt much more at home. And I am sure this is studied well - there is a large body of research and lots of work on implementing best practices in DEI. But this is easy to find by asking GPT/Googling.

Just let me know if I missed anything. Just keep in mind that I am really not interested in talking about politics. This for me is deeply personal and I only mean to describe why I care and I think attempts at convincing me, or the people close to me to feel differently is just likely to increase the feeling of not belonging. The best first step if one is trying to convince someone of something after they are hurt, is to acknowledge their feelings, maybe with a scout mindset. Of course you could play that ball back to me, saying it is my who do not understand and we can play ball like that and that is likely why maybe the best option is just for "leadership" to take a stance so that at least someone feel like they belong. But I do not want to advocate too hard for this - I am largely a lay person in these matters. And I would ideally like women/POC EAs to guide any actions I take and to let me know what I should endorse or not.

Thanks for spending time to respond. Currently I will respectfully decline to engage further and I think I can sum it up briefly:

You offer alternative framings but unfortunately it does not sway how I feel. Not sure I can control my emotions although I wish I sometimes could. And there is the more complicated issue that people close to me also get hurt by EAs - I definitely think it would be a long shot to make them see EA differently. In fact, and unfortunately I think what I feel to be a slightly infantilizing vibe in your reply just make me feel more awkward about associating with EA.

If others think the commenter here makes valid points, I commit to answering if the posts gets 10 positive Karma (no matter if it is offset by negative votes). Just want to be careful where I spend my time for the most impact.

Case in point on outreach beyond EA. I'm sure 80k hrs and/or CE has thought about this, but it might be a "missing" skillset in EA. I also remember seeing this note on sales people perhaps having a hard time to find work in EA.  My comment here is not thought through at all, but I have a hunch that people good at getting the attention of people and knowing how to network/find their way in corporations and/or governments can be a good skill set in EA, especially paired with someone technical/subject matter expert.