I, and a lot of other people I know, seem to believe something like this:
Somewhere out there, there are the cool, high-impact effective altruists who are really having a positive effect on the world. They are all invited to lots of awesome parties with other cool, high-impact effective altruists. They know all kinds of secrets that us normal people don’t know, and they laugh at us for our out-of-touch takes. They can get jobs and grants by having a fifteen-minute conversation with a friend or a friend of a friend. They don’t have to slog through endless and dispiriting job applications, throwing out a hundred apps to get nothing back but “we had a very strong pool this time.” They never sit at home alone on weekends scrolling TikTok and contemplating doing their laundry. They can go to all the coolest co-working spaces AND EA Global.
This viewpoint is (a) not true (b) unhelpful for achieving any reasonable goal.
That Is Not How Anything Works
I am, arguably, part of the secret circle of cool effective altruists. I have friends who work for Anthropic and Lightcone Infrastructure. I am at least friendly acquaintances with many writers you’ve heard of (Kelsey Piper, Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky). Every article about the Bay Area effective altruism community is contractually obligated to include my friends’ group house and their habit of singing Landsailor before Friday night Shabbat.
You know who all these statements are also true of? My coparent Lindsey, who dropped out of college because he couldn’t hack it, works as an elementary-school teacher, and was my first choice to give the speech at my Solstice about being a failed effective altruist.
And he didn’t get those connections through me—in fact, he’s closer to many Official Cool Effective Altruists than I am.
The reason is that no emotionally healthy person picks their friends by ranking everyone they know from highest impact to lowest impact and then proceeding steadily down the list until they’re out of social spoons. People choose their friends based on proximity, common interests, shared values, idiosyncratic personal chemistry, how convenient they are for scheduling D&D, etc. Most social groups with a lot of Official Cool Effective Altruists also have a lot of normal people, or even people who are quite low-status.
Furthermore, there isn’t one Secret Inner Circle of Cool Effective Altruists. There are many different inner circles, many of which don’t like each other very much. The leadership of Pause AI isn’t exactly going to Anthropic house parties, and neither has a ton of overlap with GiveWell leadership or the Secret Masters of Animal Advocacy.
It’s reasonable to want to be friends with Official Cool Effective Altruists-- they’re usually strikingly kind and interesting people, they probably want to talk about AI or cause prioritization as much as you do, it can be good networking (but see section three). But I think a lot of people want to be friends with the Official Cool Effective Altruists as a form of validation-- this proves that you’re successful and intelligent and high-impact and really able to make the world better. Unfortunately, whom you’re friends with provides almost zero information about whether you’re successful and intelligent and high-impact.
A lot of people (i.e. me) assume that, if you never see someone at parties, it’s because the person is going to secret even cooler parties that you aren’t invited to. In reality, in my experience, Official Cool Effective Altruists are sometimes attending cool parties I’m not invited to, but very often are instead:
1. Working.
2. Playing Starcraft in their underwear while listening to bad metal and binging on vegan beef jerky.
Try not to believe in the Cool Parties of the Gaps.
We Would Not Want It To Be How Anything Works
I think people normally get invested in befriending The Secret Inner Circle of Cool Effective Altruists because they want something else: supportive friends and a healthy community, or a job in effective altruism, or even just being able to text their favorite blogger and get a response. All of those are reasonable things to want. But, thank goodness, befriending The Secret Inner Circle of Cool Effective Altruists is a terrible way to achieve those goals. We’re not that far gone!
Are there people who only want to be friends with high-impact people? Yes, of course. But they are a minority of effective altruists with impressive achievements, and whatever their merits as grantmakers or global priorities researchers, they suck and you deserve better than being friends with them.
Why? Because people who only want to be friends with high-impact people quietly drop their friends for being low-impact. So if you lose your job, or go through a mental health crisis, or get diagnosed with a chronic illness, suddenly you find your so-called friends aren’t returning your DMs—at exactly the time you need your friends the most.
Befriending these people isn’t even the best thing for doing good in the world! A lot of the best career paths are risky, and you’re going to be able to take more risks if you know that, if you fail, your friends will be there for you.
It’s important not to mix up “job that improves the world” with “job that makes people I admire think I’m cool.” Effective altruists fall victim to groupthink just like anyone else. Very likely, the effective altruism community is making serious errors. It’s possible that the most valuable path to impact (in general or for you specifically) is someone no one thinks of as an “effective altruist career.” But if your friends chose you based on your impact, you’re not going to be looking for the truth about these questions, you’re going to be looking for the answer that makes your friends respect you. As Upton Sinclair would have said if he’d thought of it, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his access to fun parties with hot tubs depends upon his not understanding it.
Now, getting hired in effective altruism is hard. Networking matters in effective altruism as it does in any other field. Some effective altruist jobs are only available to people who have a good reputation in the effective altruist community, for reasons I wrote about in this post. You can’t tell from a resume if someone is a kind, reliable person with good judgment, so people tend to hire for many sensitive positions from within their networks.
However, in every effective altruist workplace I have ever interacted with, hiring is based on the hiring manager’s best assessment of whether you can do the work. People with only tangential involvement in the effective altruist community are regularly hired over heavily involved effective altruists, because they are better at the job. Indeed, in my experience, effective altruist hiring is far more likely to involve blinded work trials than non-effective-altruist hiring is—in part to prevent the bias of people hiring their friends and acquaintances. And once you’re senior enough that people are hiring for good judgment, having former coworkers and bosses who think well of you is way more important than whatever you do in your off time.
Also. Let me be blunt here. If you get an effective altruist job over a more skilled alternative candidate because you’re friends with the right people, then your effective altruist work is actually worse for the world than you not doing anything. You would literally have made the world better off if you had spent your time getting in stupid fights on Reddit about fake Am I The Asshole? stories.
If you want, you can think of not attending parties as heroically saving the effective altruist community from poor talent allocation.
There Are Better Ways To Achieve Your Goals
I have occasionally amused myself at events by watching people try to suck up to Scott Alexander. If you want Scott Alexander—or any other effective altruist microcelebrity—to think well of you, you need to treat them like a normal person. If you instead act like a supplicant begging for any bits of wisdom that drop from their lips, or vomit up your entire curriculum vitae to show that you’re worthy to participate in this conversation, or pick stupid fights to show that you’re not overawed by them, they will be uncomfortable and not want to spend more time with you than etiquette demands.
In general, the more you try to impress people, the weirder you act, and the less impressed they are by you. You are far more likely to actually impress people if you’re fine with the possibility that they’ll think you’re stupid, annoying, boring, or a jerk. Being really invested in joining the Secret Inner Circle of Cool Effective Altruists makes you worse at befriending people you admire.
Doing effective altruist work has a far lower barrier to entry than getting an effective altruist job. If you want a job in communications or technical AI safety research or global priorities research or investigative journalism, you can literally just do that shit on your own, write up your results, and post it somewhere people will read. Hiring managers at effective-altruism-associated nonprofits really do follow LessWrong and the Effective Altruism Forum, and if your work there is impressive you are far more likely to get a job.
Some jobs—like fundraising, accounting, or ops jobs—are difficult to impossible to do without an employer. In those cases, the best course of action is often to get a job doing the same kind of work for a less competitive, non-effective-altruism-associated employer, and then switch into effective altruist work once you’ve built enough skills that they won’t have to train you on the job.
Now, you might be thinking “I wouldn’t know where to begin doing investigative journalism on my own” or “I have been posting my global priorities research but no one reads it” or “I can’t get hired doing ops for anyone, even for-profit businesses.” In that case, your problem is that you don’t have the skills you need to do the job, and should (a) git gud or (b) give up. Either of those options is better than pursuing the Secret Inner Circle of Cool Effective Altruists, which will get you party invitations and not job offers because you still won’t be very good at your job.
Finally, if you want a healthy supportive community, don’t strategize about how to appeal to the highest-status effective altruists you can. Instead, strategize about how you can meet people whom you like, who share your values, and who make you a better person when you’re around them—regardless of whether their impact is legible or even extant. To be sure, finding a community like that is also very hard. But it’s much easier to achieve your goal if you’re actually pursuing the right one in the first place.
If you already have a healthy supportive community, be grateful for what you have. Don’t neglect the best things in your life in a futile quest for the approval of imaginary cool people.
You Will Never Join The Secret Inner Circle of Cool Effective Altruists
Like I said, I am arguably part of the secret inner circle of cool effective altruists. And yet I also have this anxiety. I have friends who are even more incontrovertibly in the secret inner circle of cool effective altruists than I am, and many of them still have this anxiety.
The reason is that there is always a more inner circle. To someone who doesn’t live in the Bay Area, I’m part of the Secret Inner Circle of Cool Effective Altruists. From my perspective, I’m on the outside, and the real Secret Inner Circle is Anthropic employees or people who work at the Constellation coworking space. If I worked at Anthropic or at Constellation, I’d think I was on the outside, and the real Secret Inner Circle were the people who sit at the cool kids’ table at lunch. If I sat at the cool kids’ table at lunch, I’d think I was on the outside, and the real Secret Inner Circle are the people who are part of Dario Amodei’s group chat, Lightcone Takeover & Optimization Planning (Let’s Make A Dyson Sphere Out Of Mercury). And if I were part of Lightcone Takeover & Optimization Planning, I’d think I was on the outside, and the real Secret Inner Circle is the second group chat Amanda Askell made to shittalk people she doesn’t like in the first group chat.
And remember what I said about how there are a number of inner circles which often don’t like each other much? Even if you are in Amanda Askell’s secret shittalking group chat, you almost certainly aren’t also in, I don’t know, the group chat where Ray Arnold figures out who’s going to be creative lead for the next Bay Area Winter Solstice. You can be sitting there, reading Amanda Askell’s snark about other people’s bad plans for Mercury, going “I am being excluded from the chat the real cool kids are in, where they argue for three hundred hours about what version of Somebody Will we’re going to do this year.”
“The cool insiders who know what’s really going on and who are invited to all the best parties” is one of those irregularly declining nouns. That guy over there is a cool insider who knows what’s really going on and who is invited to all the best parties. You are a successful networker with a thriving social life. I just have friends.
That’s because “the cool insiders who know what’s really going on and who are invited to all the best parties” are like 5% an actual group and 95% a projection of your insecurities. As soon as you actually get to know someone cool, they start having their own traits which have nothing to do with what makes you feel worst about yourself. So you feel accepted for like two weeks, and then you start projecting on some other group you’re not part of, because the problem was never social acceptance in the first place.
You will never be able to get validation and acceptance from the anthropomorphic personification of all your deepest insecurities, because we haven’t got any of those in the effective altruist community. All we have is Alice, who keeps losing her house keys, feels insecure about whether her research direction will pay off, often skips parties to play Starcraft in her underwear while listening to bad metal and binging on vegan beef jerky, and is the first author on half a dozen important papers in technical AI safety.
You might be able to be friends with Alice. You will never be able to be friends with the Secret Inner Circle of Cool Effective Altruists. I generally advise having desires it is in theory possible to achieve.
My take on your opener:
Not having a positive effect with certainty, no.
More yes than no.
I don't think they think about others like that but they do know secrets you'd like to. I know secrets you'd like to, there are a lot of secrets to know. Many of the "cool" people are in fact really fricking fun, though I only know most from a distance. But basically all of the EA big names I have hung out with, have been brilliant, fun people with great chat.
Probably, though they have earned the trust of grant funders. Would you invest in Zuckerberg if he said he was starting a new business? So yeah, there are some people grant funders would love to give more money.
They don't, no. Though many seem to work a lot of hours.
They also do that, though maybe some don’t. The group seems a mix of functional and very dysfuctional.
They can, though sometimes EAGs can be a bit annoying, I hear.
So basically I think this isn't true.
I guess to speak briefly as a person who has been in a number of sort of inner circle type things (I have been to some really good EA-adjacent parties, some very exclusive group chats, I have had a long public argument with Amanda Askell), it is in fact pretty fun (well except the argument). It seems silly to pretend otherwise. Cool things are cool.
But I guess it generally moved the needle between 95% and 97% of my cool experiences bar and there are other bars that I want to fill. Do I do good work (kind of)? Do I have a community that likes and respects me (yes, though it has taken a lot of work)? Do I have a romantic relationship that I find satisfying and a family I long for (no)?
I think the above piece is wrong in that it acts as if these things aren't nice or attainable. But I think they are both. But I am not sure they are actually value for effort for most people, especially at this point. Year on year it gets harder to be in the inner circle and staying comes with its own complexity and drama unless one is really fricking great at doing good work (my work is fine, but few think it excellent). And there is always the risk that in trying to be popular one will become a version of oneself that one hates.
So I am not gonna pretend that these things aren't nice (they are) or attainable (they are) but I wonder if they are things you actually want to put most of your effort into attaining. At some point I found something like satisfacton - I wanted to fill other bars rather than ensure I was keeping pace with the cool.
And do we want there to be status hierarchies? I dunno, yes? Surely we want them as long as they are actually aligned with virtue? I hope that Ryan Greenblatt and Nate Soares are going to the great parties. What are the parties for if not to encourage poeple to do great work or write bestselling books. And yes that kind of sucks for those of us less clever than Ryan and less charismatic than Nate, but we are not in some liberal fantasy, we are in the real world.
So yes, you can peraps have this if you choose to, but maybe consider if you actually want it. Is it a good system? I dunno, probably? If you do good work, I shall vote for your elections to the halls of the cool people though hopefully your life will already be rich and fun enough as it is.