Observation about EA culture and my journey to develop self-confidence:
Today I noticed an eerie similarity between things I'm trying to work on to become more confident and effective altruism culture. For example, I am trying to reduce my excessive use of qualifiers. At the same time, qualifiers are very popular in effective altruism. It was very enlightening when a book asked me to guess whether the following piece of dialogue was from a man or woman:
'I just had a thought, I don't know if it's worth mentioning...I just had a thought about [X] on this one, and I know it might not be the right time to pop it on the table, but I just thought I'd mention it in case it's useful.'
and I just immediately thought 'No, that's an effective altruist'. I think what the community actually endorses is communicating the degree of epistemic certainty and making it easy to disagree, while the above quote is anxious social signalling. I do think the community does a lot of the latter though, and it's partly rewarded because of confounding with the first. (In the above example it's obvious, but I think anxious social signaling is also often the place where 'I'm uncertain about this', 'I haven't thought much about this', and 'I might be wrong' (of course you might be wrong) come from. That's certainly the case for me.) Tangentially, there is also a strong emphasis on deference and a somewhat conservative approach to not causing harm, esp. with new projects.
Overall, I am worried that this communication norm and the two memes I mentioned foster under-confidence, a tendency to keep yourself small, and the feeling that you need permission to work on important problems or to think through important questions. The communication norm and memes I mentioned also have upsides, esp. when targeted at overconfident people, and I haven't figured out yet what my overall take on them is. I just thought it was an interesting observation that certain things I'm trying to decrease are particularly pervasive in the effective altruism community.
(I think there are also lots of other problems related to self-esteem and effective altruism, but I wanted to focus on this particular aspect.)
Hi! I’m looking for help with a project. If you’re interested or know someone who might be, it would be really great if you let me know/share. I'll check the forum forum for dms.
2. Be a saint and help with acausal research by doing tedious manual labor and getting little in return
We also need help with various grindy tasks that aren’t super helpful for learning, e.g. turning pdfs with equations etc. into sensible txts to feed to LLMs. If you’re motivated to help with that, we would be extremely grateful.
I have a weird amount of experience with the second thing (dealing with formatted PDFs) and may be able to help - feel free to DM!