jenn

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The question is rather, what qualities do EAs want themselves and the EA movement to have a reputation for?

Yes, I think this is a pretty central question. To cross the streams a little, I did talk about this a bit more in the EA Forums comments section: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5oTr4ExwpvhjrSgFi/things-i-learned-by-spending-five-thousand-hours-in-non-ea?commentId=KNCg8LHn7sPpQPcR2

I get a sense that the org is probably between 15 and 50 years old

Yep, close to the top end of that.

It's probably been through a bunch of CEOs, or whatever equivalent it has, in that time. Those CEOs probably weren't selected on the basis of "who will pick the best successor to themselves". Why has no one decided "we can help people better like this, even if that means breaking some (implicit?) promises we've made" and then oops, no one really trusts them any more?

That's a really great observation. Samaritans has chosen to elide this problem simply by having no change in leadership throughout the entire run of the organization so far. They'll have to deal with a transition soon as the founders are nearing retirement age, but I think they'll be okay; there are lots of well aligned people in the org who have worked there for decades.

Have they had any major fuck ups? If so, did that cost them reputationally? How did they regain trust?

If not, how did they avoid them? Luck? Tending to hire the sorts of people who don't gamble with reputation? (Which might be easier because that sort of person will instead play the power game in a for-profit company?) Just not being old enough yet for that to be a serious concern?

They haven't had any major fuck ups, and there's two main reasons for that imo:

  1. The culture is very, very hufflepuff, and it shows. When you talk to people from Samaritans it's very obvious that the thing they want to do the most is to do as much good as possible, in the most direct way as possible, and they are not interested in any sort of moral compromise. They've turned down funding from organizations that they didn't find up to snuff. Collaborating orgs either collaborate on Samaritan's stringent terms, or not at all.
    Doing the work this way has become increasingly easier as working with Samaritans has gotten to be an increasingly stronger and valuable signal of goodness, but they didn't make compromises even as a very young and cash strapped organization.
  2. They have a very very slow acculturation process for staff. It's very much one of those organizations where you have to be in it for over a decade before they start trusting you to make significant decisions, and no one who is unaligned would find working there for a decade tolerable, lol. So basically there are no unaligned rogue actors inside it at all.

[reputation and popularity] probably have overlapping causes and effects, but they're not the same.

I'm inclined to think that this is a distinction without a difference, but I'm open to having my mind changed on this. Can you expand on this point further? I'm struggling to model what an organization that has a good reputation but is unpopular, or vice versa, might look like.

If EA as a whole is unpopular, that's also going to cause problems for well-reputed EA orgs.

Yes, I think that's the important part, even though you're right that we can't do much about individual orgs choosing to associate itself with EA branding.

I share your sense that EAs should be thinking about reputation a lot more. A lot of the current thinking has also been very reactive/defensive, and I think that's due both to external factors and to the fact that the community doesn't realize how valuable an actually good reputation can be - thought Nathan is right that it's not literally priceless. Still, I'd love to see the discourse develop in a more proactive position.

Thanks for your super thought out response! I agree with all of it, especially the final paragraph about making EA more human-compatible. Also, I really love this passage:

We can absolutely continue our borg-like utilitarianism and coldhearted cost-benefit analysis while projecting hospitality, building reputation, conserving slack, and promoting inter-institutional cooperation!

Yes. You get me :')

I don't think the answer is super mysterious; a lot of people are in the field for the fuzzies and it weirds them out that there's some weirdos that seem to be in the field, but missing "heart".

It is definitely a serious problem because it gates a lot of resources that could otherwise come to EA, but I think this might be a case where the cure could be worse than the disease if we're not careful - how much funding needs to be dangled before you're willing to risk EA's assimilation into the current nonprofit industrial complex?

The meeting rooms are in the basement! If you come in through the main entrance, do a U turn to the left of the vestibule and go down the stairs. It'll be the first door to your right

Sort of related, everything studies wrote this essay in 2017 and now "wamb" is a term that my friends and I use all the time.

https://everythingstudies.com/2017/11/07/the-nerd-as-the-norm/

i'm a tag wrangler for the archiveofourown, so if you're interested in learning more about human-assisted organizational structures, feel free to slide into my dms (although I might take a while to respond).

here's an explainer put out by wired on what i and other volunteers do: https://www.wired.com/story/archive-of-our-own-fans-better-than-tech-organizing-information/

i don't think it's a stretch to say that ao3 has the best tagging system on the internet from a user perspective, but you don't get a system that good unless you pay the price, and take the tradeoffs. but yeah, just putting this on your radar if it wasn't :)


eta: I don't expect this to be a feasible solution for lw, this is more to broaden your scope on what's out there so you can make a better informed decision at the end.

Instrumentally, upgrading your class seems like a powerful intervention, so it is really surprising when someone allegedly trying to "optimize their life" is selectively ignorant about this. Moving to a higher class would probably have more impact that all meditation and modafinil combined.

I think it depends on what exactly you're optimizing your life for. Generally, being surrounded by people who are not in your class is very unpleasant, so you find the class that you belong to and settle in there.

Isusr mentioned previously, for example, that intellectualism is a middle class trait. Moving upwards into a class that doesn't value intellectualism would make my life significantly worse. Instead, I strive for status within my class and have no intention of surpassing it.

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