I’ve used the phrase “entertainment for EAs” a bunch to describe a failure mode that I’m trying to avoid with my career. Maybe it’d be useful for other people working in meta-EA, so I’m sharing it here as a quick draft amnesty post.
There’s a motivational issue in meta-work where it’s easy to start treating the existing EA community as stakeholders. The real stakeholders in my work (and meta-work in general) are the ultimate beneficiaries — the minds (animal, human, digital?) that could benefit from work I help to initiate. But those beneficiaries aren’t present to me — they aren’t my friends, they don’t work in the same building as me. To keep your eyes on the real prize takes constant effort.
When your attention slips, you could end up working on ‘entertainment for EAs’, i.e. something which gets great feedback from EAs, but only hazily, if at all, affects the ultimate beneficiaries. Obviously this is something for me to watch out for in my work — I want my work on the Forum to lead to impact, but I’m also likely to hear enthusiastic feedback if I host an event that is really fun, even if it doesn’t ultimately lead to anything else.
This doesn’t just affect my work though. My “entertainment for EAs” detector goes off whenever:
a) I hear a theory of change that routes through the EA community, i.e. helping EAs with productivity, mental health, etc…
b) I hear about a content project (blog, podcast) which sounds like it’ll mostly appeal to EAs.
I’m not saying that these projects won’t turn out to be valuable — for example I felt this scepticism towards Asterisk when it began, and now I’m very glad they exist, and working on improving the mental health/ productivity of existing workers can sometimes be more cost-effective than finding and hiring new workers — but I think we should approach them with initial scepticism. This is a classic case of a surprising and suspicious convergence, e.g. the thing we should fund just happens to also be something we’d benefit from directly — that merits a “hmmm”.
Draft amnesty post, and I only had 10 minutes to write this, so I won’t add anything else, but I thought it may be valuable to share, even in its current form.
Also, if you see me doing something on the Forum that looks plausibly like entertainment for EAs, message me/ comment! I’d appreciate being held to account on this.
The relationship between how fun your movement is for participants and its overall effectiveness is non-linear. You need to offer selfish rewards for (most) people to join. Offer too few selfish rewards and you're going to have a small, ineffective movement no matter how good your ideas are or how qualitatively good the few people you do have are.
I agree that entertaining EAs has no terminal value, but it has huge instrumental value. Few people seem to be trying to make EA interesting and fun on that score. People's main experience with EA seems to be getting pitched on jobs and then not getting them. Not fun!
There's real work to be done getting people excited to earn to give and spread the ideas in their spare time. Done well enough, it can even improve your direct work talent pool!
As much as I mostly agree with this, I selfishly want to soak up a little of your love and "entertainment" from time to time. I'm keen to keep the forum vibrant and nurturing to our souls, it's going to be hard to avoid fun from time to time.
So when the gratuitous, meaningless fun hits the forum, I might not be reporting to @Toby Tremlett🔹 and the fun police.... ;)
Haha yes this is true - and at the risk of ruining the fun (in the same way a joke is ruined when you explain it), things which help the community have fun together can be justified in terms of retention/ motivation. So entertainment per se isn't bad, it's just a reason for some extra scepticism.
Not sure if this distinction is made in the original post, but I'd say that the convergence in this case is not surprising since there is a fairly obvious explanation for it, but it is all the more suspicious since the alternative explanation for doing “entertainment for EAs” is the immediate fun and recognition one gets from it (rather than that one merely has an emotional connection to the cause).
Overall, I guess it's good to have an “entertainment for EAs detector" that is not very sensitive, so that it only goes off when big amounts of resources are at stake. E.g. not when it's about writing a fun post or buying pizza for attendees but when it's about... buying an abbey.
I still kinda feel this way about Asterisk (my opinion would change if I learned that the readership wasn't just EAs)
As a developer of fellowships and courses in EA, this is something I constantly consider as a failure mode-- building something that's interesting, and delights impressive participants, but doesn't have a strong ToC that actually makes the world lower suffering in expectation. Thanks for making this post, it's a really important consideration that might be given too little credence much of the time!
Thanks Damin!
I think the forum itself falls into this category.
Thanks for writing and posting this! I've had these sorts of feelings floating around in my head for a while, but this is the best term I've heard for it.
Just to throw in some grist, I actually think it would be good if you thought of your work as producing entertainment for EAs (honestly, before I clicked through I thought that's what this post was going to be about). It's a nice catch-phrase.
Interesting - why do you think that?
I agree with your general point, i.e., we shouldn't forget that EA meta work is a means to an end rather than an end in itself. I'm also very suspicious of most 'X but for EAs' initiatives.
However, I also think it's useful to have proximate objectives, and 'entertain EAs' is probably a good proximate objective for someone doing your work (if I've understood your role correctly[1]). Similarly, I think 'build a community for Dutch EAs' is a good proximate objective for us at EA Netherlands.
My general vibes-based take is that most people doing analogous work in the social impact space over-prioritise these proximate objectives, but most people in the meta EA space currently under-prioritise them.
The failure mode we want to avoid isn't 'EAs are entertained/find community through my work'. Instead, it's either 'EAs are entertained/find community through my work but it doesn't improve their thinking or coordination' OR 'EAs are not entertained/finding community through my work and therefore it doesn't improve their thinking or coordination'.
(To be clear: I don't think we should spend more resources on inward-facing work - in fact I think we should reallocate towards outward-facing work. I just think those doing inward-facing work should put more weight on proximate objectives.)
Faciliate the creation of EA-related content → EAs engage with it → this improves their thinking/coordination/decisions → better impact
Object level I agree, though ironically I think we would agree this also falls into the entertainment category (as evinced by myself and a whole bunch of people posting on this)
Object level I agree, though ironically I think we would agree this also falls into the entertainment category (as evidenced ny myself and a whole bunch of people posting on this)
Cool post, I've had the same feeling but didn't think of a good word for it.