Don't Be Bycatch

I really liked the encouraging tone of this― "from one little fish in the sEA to another" was so sweet― and like the suggestion to instigate small / temporary / obvious projects. Reminds me a bit of the advice in Dive In which I totally failed to integrate when I first read it, but now feels very spot on; I spent ages agnoising over whether my project ideas were Effective Enough and lost months years that could have been spent building imperfect things and nurturing competence and understanding.

tl;dr: I like the post. One thing that I think it gets wrong is that if "picking up trash in the park is a fine EA project to cut our teeth on", then that is a sorry state for EA to find itself in. 

I think that a thing that this post gets wrong is that EA seems to be particularly prone to generating bycatch, and although there are solutions at the individual level, I'd also appreciate having solutions at higher levels of organization. For example, the solution to "you find yourself writing not-so-valuable blogposts" is probably to ask a mentor to recommend you valuable blog posts to write.

One proposal to do that was to build what this post calls a "hierarchical networked structure" in which people have people to ask about which blog posts or research directions would be valuable, and Aaron Gertler is there to offer editing, and further along the way, EA groups have mentors which have an idea of which EA jobs are particularly valuable to apply to, and which are particularly likely to generate disillusionment, and EA group mentors themselves have someone to ask advice to, and so on. This to some extent already exists;  I imagine that this post is valuable enough to get sent on the EA newsletter, which means that involved members in their respective countries will read it and maybe propagate its ideas. But there is way to go. 

Another solution in that space would be to have a forecasting-based decentralized systems, where essentially the same thing happens (e.g., good blog posts to write or small projects to do get recommended, career hopes get calibrated, etc.), but which I imagine could be particularly scalable.

We can also look at past movements in history. In particular, General Semantics also had this same problem, and a while ago I speculated that this lead to its doom. Note also that religions don't have the problem of bycatch at all.

This really resonated for a young EA like myself. EA totally transformed the way I think about my career decisions, but I quickly realized how competitive jobs at the organizations I looked up to were. (The 80k job board is a tough place for an undergraduate to NOT feel like an imposter). This didn't discourage me from EA in general, but it did leave me with some uncertainty about how much I should let EA dictate my pursuits. This post offered some excellent reassurances and reminders to stay grounded.

Inspired me to leave my first comment on the forum. Thank you for the lovely post :)

Thanks a lot for writing this! I think this is a really common trap to fall into, and I both see this a lot in others, and in myself.

To me, this feels pretty related to the trap of guilt-based motivation - taking the goals that I care about, and thinking of them as 'I should do this' or as obligations, and feeling bad and guilty when I don't meet them. Combined with having unrealistically high standards, based on a warped and perfectionist view of what I 'should' be capable of, hindsight bias and the planning fallacy and what I think the people around me are capable of. Which combine to mean that I set myself standards I can never really meet, feel guilty for failing to meet them, and ultimately build up aversions that stop me caring about whatever I'm working on, and to flinch away from it.

This is particularly insidious, because I find the intention behind this is often pure and important to me. It comes from a place of striving to be better, of caring about things, and wanting to live in consistency with my values. But in practice, this intention, plus those biases and failure modes, combine in me doing far worse than I could.

I find a similar mindset to your first piece of advice useful: I imagine a future version of myself that is doing far better than I am today, and ask how I could have gotten there. And I find that I'd be really surprised and confused if I suddenly got way better one day. But that it's plausible to me that each day I do a little bit better than before, and that, on average, this compounds over time. Which means it's important to calibrate my standards so that I expect myself to do a bit better than what I have been  realistically capable of before.

If you resonate with that, I wrote a blog post called Your Standards Are Too High on how I (try to) deal with this problem. And the Replacing Guilt series by Nate Soares is phenomenally good, and probably one of the most useful things I've ever read re own my mental health

What I appreciate the most about this post is simply just the understanding it shows for people in this situation.

It's not easy. Everyone has their own struggles. Hang in there. Take some breaks. You can learn, you can try something slightly different, or something very different. Make sure you have a balanced life, and somewhere to go. Make sure you have good plan B's (e.g., myself, I can always go back to the software industry). In the for-profit and wider world, there are many skills you can learn better than you would working at an EA org.

Similar to "Effective Altruism is Not a Competition"

Ask, don't tell.

This is really good advice, at least for a subset of people.

Whether someone is problem-oriented ("the shortage of widgets in EA") versus solution-oriented ("find a way to use my widget-making skills") often gives me a strong signal of how likely they are to be successful.

I'd add on that sharing the answers people give to your questions (e.g. on this forum) is helpful. The set of things EA needs is vast, and there's no reason for us to all start from scratch in figuring out how to help.

Thank you for this wonderful post!

Humans need places came to mind as I read it. Alongside leveling up one's personal robustness & grit, I think there is much we can do at the systemic level to reduce the incidence of bycatch in EA.

Thanks for this really thoughtful post :)

Zahara's trying to maximize her chance of a 10% increase in her altruistic output.

I agree it's a good idea to focus on small gains. Even better advice might be to focus on learning or building skills which might give Zahara a 10% increase in her altruistic output later on (e.g. focus on studying, learn something new, try and find a job which means she'll learn a lot). 

You could apply the same idea to donating 0% or 1% this year. It's also fine to donate 0% for several years and then give when you're more comfortable.

In general, I think EAs (myself included) are too focused on generating impact today and should focus more on building skills to generate impact later on.

I propose that March 26th (6 months equidistant from Petrov day) be converse Petrov day.

Is it true that some tech folks started up a low-impact-angst group for all the Zaharas out there? (Asking question, not telling!)

I'm really sorry I downvoted... I love the tone, I love the intention, but I worry about the message. Yes, less ambition and more love would probably make us suffer less. But I would rather try to encourage ambition by emphasising love for the ambitious failures. I'm trying to be ambitious, and I want to know that I can spiritually fall back on goodwill from the community because we all know we couldn't achieve anything without people willing to risk failing.