Ways in which I’m not living up to my EA values

By Joris P @ 2024-03-17T21:30 (+112)

When I was pretty new to EA, I was way too optimistic about how Wise and Optimized and Ethical and All-Knowing experienced EAs would be. 

• I thought Open Phil would have some magic spreadsheets with the answers to all questions in the universe
• I thought that, surely, experienced EAs had for 99% figured out what they thought was the biggest problem in the world
• I imagined all EAs to have optimized almost everything, and to basically endorse all their decisions: their giving practices, their work-life balance, the way they talked about EA to others, etc.

I’ve now been around the community for a few years. I’m still really grateful for and excited about EA ideas, and I love being around the people inspired by EA ideas (I even work on growing our community!). However, I now also realize that today, I am far from how Wise and Optimized and Ethical and All-Knowing Joris-from-4-years-ago expected future Joris and his peers to be. 

There’s two things that caused me to not live up to those ideals:

1. I was naive about how Wise and Optimized and Ethical and All-Knowing someone could realistically be
2. There’s good things I could reasonably do or should have reasonably done in the past 4 years

To make this concrete, I wanted to share some ways in which I think I’m not living up to my EA values or expectations from a few years ago. I think Joris-from-4-years-ago would’ve found this list helpful.^[1]

• I’m still not fully vegan
• Donating:
  • I just default to the community norm of donating 10%, without having thought about it hard 
  • I haven't engaged for more than 30 minutes with arguments around e.g. patient philanthropy
  • I left my GWWC donations to literally the last day of the year and didn’t spend more than one hour on deciding where to donate
• I have a lot less certainty over the actual positive impact of the programs we run than I expected when I started this job
  • I’m still as bad at math as I was in uni, meaning my botecs are just not that great
  • It’s so, so much harder than I expected to account for counterfactuals and to find things you can measure that are robustly good
• I still find it really hard to pitch EA

I hope this inspires some people (especially those who I (and others) might look up to) to share how they’re not perfect. What are some ways in which you’re not living up to your values, or to what you-from-the-past maybe expected you would be doing by now?

1. ^{^}

   I’ll leave it up to you whether these fall in category 1 (basically unattainable) or 2 (attainable). I also do not intend to turn this into a discussion of what things EAs “should” do, which things are actually robustly good, etc.