I am tired.

Thanks for all your hard work, Megan.

I'm reminded of this post from a few months ago: Does Sam make me want to renounce the actions of the EA community? No. Does your reaction? Absolutely.

And this point from a post Peter Wildeford wrote: "I think criticism of EA may be more discouraging than it is intended to be and we don't think about this enough."

In theory, the EA movement isn't about us as EAs. It's about doing good for others. But in practice, we're all humans, and I think it's human nature to have an expectation of recognition/gratitude when we've done an altruistic act. If instead of gratitude, we get a punishment in the form of a bad outcome or sharp words, that feels like a bait & switch.

My hypothesis is that being surrounded by other do-gooders makes the situation worse. You feel like you're in a recognition deficit, many people around you feel the same way, and no one is injecting gratitude into the ecosystem to resolve the misery spiral. Internal debates exacerbate things, insofar as trying to understand someone else's perspective depletes the same emotional resource that altruism does.

Anyway, most of that wasn't very specific to your post -- I'm just wondering if emphasizing "other-care" in addition to "self-care" would help us weather ups & downs.

And, thanks to all the EAs reading this for all the good you are doing.

Hi Megan  - I just wanted to say thank you for writing this. For being you. For showing up. This so well encapsulates how I and so many others are feeling. I just wanted to say thank you <3

(and i'm tired too ). 

I resonated with this post a lot. Thank you for writing it.

Yeah, I empathise. 

I am very surprised by the warm reception to this post. To my mind, this is exactly the type of rhetoric we should be discouraging on the Forums. It's insinuating all kinds of scandals

(I am tired of drama, scandals, and PR. I am tired of being in a position where I have to apologize for sexism, racism, and other toxic ideologies within this movement)

without making any specific allegations or points, which becomes somehow acceptable within the emotional frame of "I am TIRED." Presumably many other people, including those directly impacted by these things, are tired too, and we need to use reason to adjudicate how we should respond.  

Thank you for your hard work, Megan. Being a social worker sounds hard in itself to me. I think it's extremely generous and impressive that in addition to that you volunteer, and donate, and are vegan. That does sound exhausting, even without the community dramas that feel kind of incessant at the moment. 

It feels really tiring to me too. EA itself feels tiring. It's tiring that there's always more to do and that I could always be prioritising harder and helping others more. A thing that makes that bearable to me is working together - having a community supporting each other other in trying to do good but also giving each other a break. It feels horrid to instead have people angry at each other, and getting fire from outside the community too. I hope your local community is supportive. I hope you guys are able to help each other to focus on the good and to take breaks, and deeply care about each other, while you're all improving the lives of others.  I hope some of the appreciative, caring messages people have left in response to this post have helped the burden feel a little lighter.  

How much drama/scandal has there actually been in EA beyond FTX (admittedly a huge scandal) and now Bostrom (in my opinion something that doesn't need to be given all that much oxygen)?

Serious question.

Thank you for writing this Megan. I don't even consider myself liberal or left but it is quite exhausting, as a community builder, to explain to friends, colleagues at work, and the fellowship members, that EA is a method of thinking and a goal of doing the most good and not shady billionaire schemes, self-promotion, and justifying lack of sensitiveness with rationality. So there is not much epistemic value to my comment but I just wanted to express that I am tired as well. 

I'm tired, too. I'm tired of constantly having to watch what I say or don't say because of the fear that some mob will descend on me and try to ruin my life as they are now trying to do to Nick Bostrom. Perhaps someone in your situation can find it in themselves to have sympathy for people in my position and not just people in yours.

I strongly felt the same when I opened the forum today. When reading the post titles mentioning "some apology email of Bostrom" I figured it couldn't have been anything good and my first thought was "Oh god, not again". I'd love to think about and discuss how to make the world the best place it can be. I'd also love to spread the EA ideas to other people, but the bar to then also join the community is high and the ideas once you're beyond the principles are weird and for many, difficult to grasp. When I first learned about EA, I thought of it as a very elite thing. I'd love to be able to say that this is no longer the case, but sadly, it isn't.  I've been thinking about starting an EA University group, but the feelings expressed above have made me doubt doing so. The "drama" (apology for not finding a better word) of today and the previous months makes me doubt even more. I don't want to represent a community that is about apologizing for other people's actions, nor do I want to invite other people into such a community.

Valid.

Thanks for expressing your position.

Sorry you're in this situation! :(

I want to allow my problem solver side to say a few things, but, eh, if that's not what you want, totally skip my comment

So:

[reminder this is ignorable] 

Maybe community building isn't a good fit for you now, in a time where it involves all these things you don't like? 

1. Or maybe you could do community building in some niche (like.. run the EA Product Managers group or something, if they don't have someone doing that) where you're not exposed to the parts you don't like?
2. My cold take is that too many EAs are in roles they find tiring/stressful/something, and that these EAs can find another role that is (in my interpretation of 80k's words) a better fit for them.
   1. I personally see software developers who want to be data scientists, and data scientists who want to be software developers, and each think they've got to do the not-fun-thing. Maybe you're somehow in this situation? I know at least one person who is fascinated by preventing and managing PR problems. I personally don't get it, but these people do exist. I know another person mission driven (in a good way) about reducing the.. toxicity. Maybe there's something you're excited about that you don't understand why not everybody else wants to do?
3. A reminder that I know nothing about you, this is a long shot guess + pattern matching. Ignoring my comment is totally a legit move. (or maybe someone else who resonates with your post would resonate with this comment, I hope)

<3

I empathise with this a lot, and know many others who do too.

Thanks for sharing where you're at and also for all the effort you've put in and for not quitting <3

girl*, same

*or however you identify

I share this feeling. I feel like EA has trended in the direction of some other groups I've dealt with where the personalities and interpersonal issues of a small number of people at the top come to be overly dominant. 

I've also had my faith in the movement fractured a bit by seeing how much of how things were run seems to be based on friends of friends networks. I had naively assumed they were doing the kind of due diligence and institutional division of power that other charitable organisations do.

A lot of this isn't a particular specific set of issues, but its a general sense of ones estimates of people being shifted downward

Thank you for writing this.

I don't do community building work, but I too am tired of these things being so present, and even accepted. Other than some specific projects that seem good to me (e.g. GiveWell, Charity Entrepreneurship), I'm having a harder and harder time sticking to the view that the movement as it exists is expected to have a big positive impact.