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Credible Alternatives for (EA-flavoured) Depressive Beliefs
One idea in cognitive behavioural therapy is that it's easier to let go of beliefs that are doing damage to you if you have credible alternative beliefs. I found a list of some such alternatives in my notes from when I was doing CBT a few years ago, and was inspired by the recent 80,000 hours podcast on mental health to share them. Coming up with alternative beliefs was a really useful exercise for me and I would recommend it to others!
Damaging Belief: It’s a shame that I’ve had such a fortunate life. Someone else would do better with what I’ve got.
Credible Alternative: I can’t give my good luck to anyone else. The best I can do is be grateful for it.
Damaging Belief: I’m a drain on the world by default. Only by doing as much good as possible can I justify existing.
Credible Alternative: All lives are valuable. My life is valuable. I work to do good because I care, not because I’m obligated.
Damaging Belief: I’m a frivolous (and therefore bad) person because I make time for enjoying things.
Credible Alternative: I can trust myself to try my best. I’m better able to do that if I leave time for joy.
Damaging Belief: Noticing what can be done and failing to do it is worse than remaining unaware.
Credible Alternative: There isn’t enough of me to work on everything that I’d like to, and that’s okay.
Damaging Belief: Saying I can’t do something because of limited willpower or effort is just an excuse.
Credible Alternative: Acknowledging my limitations is not giving up. It lets me wisely direct the time and resources I have.
Note: I am not necessarily saying that the beliefs I labelled as "damaging" above would be damaging for everyone. They were certainly bad for my mental health, though!
While making several of review crossposts for the Decade Review I found myself unhappy about the possibility that someone might think I had authored one of the posts I was cross-linking. Here are the things I ended up doing:
- Make each post a link post (this one seems... non-optional).
- In the title of the post, add the author / blog / organization's name before the post title, separated by an en-dash.
- Why before the title? This ensures that the credit appears even if the title is long and gets cut off.
- Why an en-dash? Some of the posts I was linking already included colons in the title. "Evidence Action – We’re Shutting Down No Lean Season, Our Seasonal Migration Program: Here’s Why" seemed easier to parse than "Evidence Action: We’re Shutting Down No Lean Season, Our Seasonal Migration Program: Here’s Why".
- Other approaches I've seen: using colons, including the author's name at the end of the post in brackets, e.g. Purchase fuzzies and utilons separately (Eliezer Yudkowsky), using "on" instead of an en-dash, e.g. Kelsey Piper on "The Life You Can Save", which seems correct when excerpting rather than cross-posting.
- Add an italicized
header(ETA: I think a footer works better) to the crosspost indicating that it's a crosspost and, where appropriate, adding a link to the author's EA Forum account.- Example: Because of the ongoing Decade Review I am re-posting some classic posts under the review crosspost tag. With their permission, this post may eventually appear under the original author's account. This post is from December 19, 2014.
Curated and popular this week
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[Cross-posted from my Substack here]
If you spend time with people trying to change the world, you’ll come to an interesting conundrum: Various advocacy groups reference previous successful social movements as to why their chosen strategy is the most important one. Yet, these groups often follow wildly different strategies from each other to achieve social change. So, which one of them is right?
The answer is all of them and none of them.
This is because many people use research and historical movements to justify their pre-existing beliefs about how social change happens. Simply, you can find a case study to fit most plausible theories of how social change happens. For example, the groups might say:
* Repeated nonviolent disruption is the key to social change, citing the Freedom Riders from the civil rights Movement or Act Up! from the gay rights movement.
* Technological progress is what drives improvements in the human condition if you consider the development of the contraceptive pill funded by Katharine McCormick.
* Organising and base-building is how change happens, as inspired by Ella Baker, the NAACP or Cesar Chavez from the United Workers Movement.
* Insider advocacy is the real secret of social movements – look no further than how influential the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights was in passing the Civil Rights Acts of 1960 & 1964.
* Democratic participation is the backbone of social change – just look at how Ireland lifted a ban on abortion via a Citizen’s Assembly.
* And so on…
To paint this picture, we can see this in action below:
Source: Just Stop Oil which focuses on…civil resistance and disruption
Source: The Civic Power Fund which focuses on… local organising
What do we take away from all this? In my mind, a few key things:
1. Many different approaches have worked in changing the world so we should be humble and not assume we are doing The Most Important Thing
2. The case studies we focus on are likely confirmation bias, where
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I speak to many entrepreneurial people trying to do a large amount of good by starting a nonprofit organisation. I think this is often an error for four main reasons.
1. Scalability
2. Capital counterfactuals
3. Standards
4. Learning potential
5. Earning to give potential
These arguments are most applicable to starting high-growth organisations, such as startups.[1]
Scalability
There is a lot of capital available for startups, and established mechanisms exist to continue raising funds if the ROI appears high. It seems extremely difficult to operate a nonprofit with a budget of more than $30M per year (e.g., with approximately 150 people), but this is not particularly unusual for for-profit organisations.
Capital Counterfactuals
I generally believe that value-aligned funders are spending their money reasonably well, while for-profit investors are spending theirs extremely poorly (on altruistic grounds). If you can redirect that funding towards high-altruism value work, you could potentially create a much larger delta between your use of funding and the counterfactual of someone else receiving those funds. You also won’t be reliant on constantly convincing donors to give you money, once you’re generating revenue.
Standards
Nonprofits have significantly weaker feedback mechanisms compared to for-profits. They are often difficult to evaluate and lack a natural kill function. Few people are going to complain that you provided bad service when it didn’t cost them anything. Most nonprofits are not very ambitious, despite having large moral ambitions. It’s challenging to find talented people willing to accept a substantial pay cut to work with you. For-profits are considerably more likely to create something that people actually want.
Learning Potential
Most people should be trying to put themselves in a better position to do useful work later on. People often report learning a great deal from working at high-growth companies, building interesting connection
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Our advising is open to people at all career stages who want to have a positive impact across a range of cause areas—whether you're early in your career, looking to make a transition, or facing uncertainty about your next steps. Some applicants come in with specific plans they want feedback on, while others are just beginning to explore what impactful careers could look like for them. Either way, we aim to provide useful guidance tailored to your situation.
Learn more about our advising program and apply here.
Also, if you know someone who might benefit from an advising call, we’d really appreciate you passing this along. Looking forward to hearing from those interested. Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.
Finally, we wanted to say a big thank you to 80,000 Hours for their help! The input that they gave us, both now and earlier in the process, was instrumental in shaping what our advising program will look like, and we really appreciate their support.
While making several of review crossposts for the Decade Review I found myself unhappy about the possibility that someone might think I had authored one of the posts I was cross-linking. Here are the things I ended up doing:
header(ETA: I think a footer works better) to the crosspost indicating that it's a crosspost and, where appropriate, adding a link to the author's EA Forum account.