My EA Story in brief plus some comments on EA

Hello!

I’ve recently been working on a memoir of my time in EA (Harri Besceli and the non methods of post-rationality). 

However, AI timelines have led me to conclude that everything I had previously planned on doing over the course of the coming months or years, must now be completed as soon as possible, ideally by the end of the weekend. [edit: this sentence was a joke, perhaps not my best one]

Given that, I’m sharing the quick version now, and hope to complete the full version in the fullness of time. Here’s my story in brief: 

Proto EA

• As a child and teenager I was fairly smart and ‘successful’, I did well academically, had prestigious accolades and so on.
• I had various heroic fantasies about my future, often imagining myself as James Bond. These fantasies became less common and less combat oriented as I got older, though I still had a sense that I was in some way destined to do important things and or save the world.
• I was very into self-improvement, pop psychology and books kind of related to new atheism.
• I often had a sense of intellectual and philosophical isolation. I wasn’t exactly lonely, though I also didn’t feel met by others in these dimensions. 

Promising EA

• I found Lesswrong online as a teenager.
• I got involved with the EA group at university. Meeting EA’s I had a strong sense of ‘omg I’ve found my people!’
• I spent a lot of time devouring Lesswrong and the EA Forum, and nagging my friends about taking the GWWC pledge. 

Professional EA

• After university I did an internship with CEA on the EA Groups team, and went on to work there for around 5 years. During this time work was the dominant thing in my life.
• I often had disagreements with CEA about EA strategy, and I found it challenging to do work that I believed in whilst meeting my responsibilities in my role. I also felt a lot of insecurity around my work and performance, and often felt quite stressed about this.
• In some sense I did not ‘fully believe’ in the work I was doing (though I also didn’t think it was bad). It seems to me that my semi-conscious implicit strategy throughout this period was something like ‘perform well enough in my role for my thoughts on strategy to be taken seriously’.
• During a particularly stressful period I started having anxiety attacks. I came to realise that I was not having a good time, and became aware that my semi-conscious strategy was not in fact working.
• I decided to leave CEA and take a sabbatical/ period of funemployment. 

Post EA

• My rough plan was to take some time to ‘figure out what was going on’, and then trial out some different projects and roles, and then recommence my career with newfound vigour.
• Around this time I was getting more into the ‘psychospirituality’ the ‘post-rationality scene’. This was all very interesting and also very confusing.
• My rough plan did not survive contact with reality, and I spent most of this time in something of a hole. If felt quite clear to me that I was in a hole of some sort, but I did not know how to conceptualise the nature of the hole, eg. as depression, disillusionment with EA, spiritual crisis, burnout, misaligned chakras, fundamental personality defect, vitamin D deficiency, g deficiencty etc. And it felt very unclear to me what courses of action were digging myself out of the hole vs. digging myself further into the hole.
• This was a rather grim period. I felt a lot of shame, guilt, frustration, desperation and despair. 

Apotheosis EA Post Post EA

• After a year and a half of funemployment, I began working part-time at the EA Infrastructure Fund, in part because I thought that having a job could be a good way to get out of the hole.
• This didn’t quite work, and I continued to be in the hole for another year or so.
• Things began to change when I switched anti-depressants, my depression lifted and began to have more of a sense of a positive vision for my existence.
• Since then it feels like I’ve slowly been building up momentum. I still have various insecurities and the like, and these don’t seem to grip me in the way that they once did, and I no longer feel perenially confused (Huzzah!)

Commentary

I think switching anti-dpressants was pretty useful for me, and importantly, I don’t conceptualise the experience as just one of depression, or as solely within the ‘mental health’ bucket. I don’t have a settled framework for thinking about it, though I quite like Anna Salamon’s post Ayn Rand’s model of “living money”; and an upside of burnout.

My worldview and approach to existing now feels substantially different to what it was 5 or so years ago. The EA community used to feel like ‘home’ to me, though now I feel a bit of a foreigner. And the extent to which I’ve become more able to live in accordance with EA principles - ‘scout mindset’, ‘collaborative spirit’, ‘integrity’ and so on - this seems to have come from interacting with the world outside of EA, in particular various parts of the ‘psychospirituality’ scene. 

I’ve learned and gained a lot from being within EA. And it seems to me that the culture and worldview in EA interacted with my psychology in ways that were not good for me. 

I think it makes sense to be wary of projecting one’s own personal neuroses onto effective altruism. Effective altruism is big - I expect people to have very different experiences of EA, and for those experiences to interact with their own psychology in different ways.

That said, I also think it makes sense to be wary of not projecting enough of one’s own personal neuroses onto effective altruism. 

I have a hard time in striking the balance here. My best guess from reflecting on my own experiences and hearing about the experiences of other EAs, is that there are certain patterns. Insofar as EAs can find themselves in a hole, my sense is that this hole is at least in part ‘predictable, structural and long dug’ (the link is to a very good poem about holes, one which I found oddly inspiring during my stay in one). 

More broadly, I think that effective altruism as a worldview, culture and community isn’t particularly conducive to individual ‘wholeness’ (not to be confused with 'holeness'). I think something like ‘wholeness’ is something of an enabling factor for living EA principles, in particular things like scout mindset and collaborative spirit. And given this, I have some medium to large reservations about whether EA is a place that cultivates the principles it espouses.

I hope to write up my reasons for thinking this more fully in the future. 

(I am a Fund Manager at the EA Infrastructure Fund. These are my personal opinions, not those of EAIF).