It’s hard because Alice is a fictional character in stylized dialogue the author says is intended to be a bad implementation. But in the real world if someone talked like Alice did (about herself and towards Bob) I’d place good money on burnout.
Probably Bob isn’t actually the right person to raise this issue with Alice, because she doesn’t respect him enough. But I don’t think it’s worse than what she’s doing to him.
I can picture ways people could bring up capacity-improvement-for-the-greater-good that I’d be really excited about. It’s something I care about and most people aren’t interested in. It’s the way Alice (in this story, and by default in the real world) brings it up I think is counterproductive.
Hot take: Bob should be bullying Alice to do less so she doesn’t burn out.
I believe that people who agreed with Alice and had worked to increase their capacity would be more indignant, and that’s reason enough to never use this approach even if the goal is good. People hate having their work dismissed.
I think this post raises important points and handles them reasonably well. I am of course celebrating that fact mostly by pointing out disagreements with it.
I wish Alice drew a sharper distinction between Bob being honest about his beliefs, Bob bringing his actions in line with his stated beliefs, and Bob doing what Alice wants. I think pushing people to be honest is prosocial by default (within limits). Pushing people to do what you want is antisocial by default, with occasional exceptions.
And Alice’s methods can be bad, even if the goal is good. If I could push a button and have a community only of people on a long term growth trajectory, I would. But policing this does more harm than good, because it’s hard for the police to monitor. Growth doesn’t always look like what other people expect, and people need breaks. Demandng everyone present legible growth on a predictable cycle impedes growth (and pushes people to be dishonest).
My personal take here is that you should be ready to work unsustainably and miserably when the circumstances call for it, but the circumstances very rarely call for it, and those circumstances always include being very time-limited. “I’ll just take the misery” is a plan with an inherent shelf life. But the capacity to tank the misery when you need to, or to do more work with less misery, is a moral virtue and should be recognized as such. I imagine some of Alice’s frustration is that she feels like even if Bob gets less social credit than her, the gap should be bigger to reflect her larger contribution, and people use personal capacity as a reason to shrink the gap. And I think that’s a valid complaint, especially if Alice worked to create that sustainable capacity in herself where it didn’t exist before.
Count me as a vote for sharing those papers, here or in your own post.
Workers are only sterile in the most eusocial of species. In others, being a worker vs. queen is something of a choice, and if circumstances change a worker may start reproducing. There isn’t a sharp transition between cooperative breeding and eusociality.
Even in very eusocial haplodiploid species (so ants and bees, but not termites), unmated workers may reproduce after the death of the queen. They can only produce sons, but it’s still reproduction. .
The reason it still took over the macroscopic world is that evolution does not simply select for reproductive fitness
Here I define reproductive fitness as the average ability of your genes to reproduce
I think this is false by definition? The thing evolution selects for is the ability of genes to reproduce. How are you using the terms here?
The first time: I made no conscious choice about sugar consumption. One day I noticed I’d had the same dessert in my fridge for weeks without any desire to eat it. If I was alone I just had no desire for sugar. If someone prompted me to eat sugar I’d say I didn’t want to break the streak. The desire definitely came back gradually, but my watermelon consumption also trailed off gradually as it became harder to get.
The second time: desire for sugar went away the second I gave up stevia soda (which was months after restarting watermelon).
I think gut bacteria likely are in play here, but it seems like the good bacteria can be cultivated while still consuming sugar.
oh interesting. Do you have any thoughts on how long it would take for that effect to kick in?
I take a supplement (mostly for the other ingredient) that has 250-500mg of inositol. 2 lbs of watermelon has 280mg (source: first hit on google), and presumably there’s more in other foods I eat. I’d be surprised at that big an effect on sugar from such a modest change, but there could be threshold effects, or it could be a combination of things.
This is funny because my next post (not yet cross-posted here) is on inositol for anxiety.
lmk how it goes, I’d love to have more data.
FWIW, my matching symptom buddy says he also got good results from ketotifen and naltrexone
A repost from the discussion on NDAs and Wave (a software company). Wave was recently publicly revealed to have made severance dependent on non-disparagement agreements, cloaked by non-disclosure agreements. I had previously worked at Wave, but negotiated away the non-disclosure agreement (but not the non-disparagement agreement).
But my guess is that most of the people you sent to Wave were capable of understanding what they were signing and thinking through the implications of what they were agreeing to, even if they didn’t actually have the conscientiousness / wisdom / quick-thinking to do so. (Except, apparently, Elizabeth. Bravo, @Elizabeth!)
I appreciate the kudos here, but feel like I should give more context.
I think some of what led to me to renegotiate was a stubborn streak and righteousness about truth. I mostly hear when those traits annoy people, so it’s really nice to have them recognized in a good light here. But that righteous streak was greatly enabled by the fact that my mom is a lawyer who modeled reading legal documents before signing (even when it’s embarrassing your kids who just want to join their friends at the rockclimbing birthday party), and that I could afford to forgo severance. Obviously I really wanted the money, and I couldn’t afford to take this kind of stand every week. But I believe there were people who couldn’t even afford to add a few extra days, and so almost had to cave
To the extent people in that second group were unvirtuous, I think the lack of virtue occurred when they didn’t create enough financial slack to even have the time to negotiate. By the time they were laid off without a cushion it was too late. And that’s not available to everyone- Wave paid well, but emergencies happen, any one of them could have a really good reason their emergency fund was empty.
So the main thing I want to pitch here is that “getting yourself into a position where virtue is cheap” is an underrated strategy.
There’s also a dynamic of something like… this is one of those issues where being too interested in the problem is correlated with being bad at solving it. Obviously you have to compromise on this a little or these kinds of things never get done, but if someone’s only qualification is interest I think the EV is very negative.
That sounds really discouraging, so I want to tell @tailcalled: I think it’s great you care about people are want to prevent them from being hurt. I think the easiest, least risky way to do that is to create abundance so people have less dependence on any one entity and are thus less vulnerable. The more parties being thrown by people who aren’t creeps (or harboring creeps), the easier it is to avoid the parties that are. So I’d encourage you to start by building socially, rather than investigation.
One thing that struck me reading your post was the number of times I wanted to say “no, you”. Issues where you see mistreatment of vegans or bad epistemics from omnivores, and I see the symmetric bad behavior from vegans[1]. My guess is we’re both accurately describing things we’ve seen, and we’re both activated and protective after engaging in a lot of interactions where the other party was acting in bad faith. And those situations just take a lot of time to wind backwards, even though I think we’ve both done admirable jobs of it here.
I few things I thing are important and could possibly be addressed in a quick response:
You’re worried my posts will lead more people to eat meat. AFAIK the practical effects have been dozens of vegans getting tested (with some portion of those starting vegan supplements), and one and a half people saying the posts were a component leading them to consider adding meat in once or twice a week (and those came much later, not as a result of the testing posts). People are more likely to report supplements than diet changes, but I also think my posts deserve more responsibility for the tests and supplements than for the dietary changes. It would mean a great deal to me to have this empirical fact either explicitly disagreed with or acknowledged.
But you’re right my posts probably weren’t optimal for maximizing the number of vegans in the world. Probably because I wasn’t optimizing for that, because I don’t think it’s as important as you or other vegan advocates do. I consider this a direct consequence of EA vegan advocacy’s failure to provide basic nutritional education to the vegans it created. If you don’t want omnivores running your vegan education, provide it yourself.
You bring up EA/rat optimization drive as the root cause of nutritional issues. I think your description is confused but there is some core vibe I agree with, and I agree people would be better off relaxing that cosntraint on themselves. But I have no idea how to fix it. Meanwhile, for most existing naive vegans there’s a $20 bill on the floor, in the form of some simple tests and supplements. I do write posts along the lines of “chill out” and maybe they’re even helpful, but they have nowhere near the surgical problem-solving capacity of “hey here is a major problem you can fix with a pill.”
And yes, I do talk about $20 bills for omnivores (or just unrelated to diet) when I find them, but most of the problems with omnivorism are more complicated or involve giving up things people like, which is just much harder.
E.g. you see all the places not offering vegan meals. I see vegan meals at Lightcone and Constellation. EAG serves only vegan meals (even when the caterer is unequipped for this). My impression is CEA’s general policy is vegan-only. The upcoming Manifest conference explicitly promises vegetarian and vegan food. Atlas Fellowship workshops’ chefs would technically serve meat, but you could tell their focus was on the vegan food.
You see omnivores as having bad epistemics and not giving their real reasons. I see the omnivores I knew in 2016 who were actively pursuing information about animal suffering and reducitarianism/ameliatarianism, until bad vegan advocates ground that curiosity down. Advocates who wouldn’t acknowledge the existence of trade offs, or differences in ability to be vegan, or wouldn’t let the discussion be about anything except veganism and vegetarianism even when vegetarianism was higher net suffering than the complicated thing the omnivore was considering.
Hi Martin- I really appreciate the thought and detail that went into this post, it was well worth the wait.
I have a lot of things I want to clarify, but suspect it just doesn’t make sense to do so in this format. One option would be to try out LW’s new Dialogue format. However I’d need to start this week, and it sounds like that’s not an option for you. If this is a thing where money can help, I have some grant money and a good dialogue would be a good use of it, but I understand it probably can’t. In which case hopefully you’ll see my next post when things clear up and we can talk then.
I forget how long they gave us at first (my deadline got extended). I do think that companies should give people long deadlines for this, and short deadlines are maybe the most antisocial part of this? People are predictably stressed out and have a lot to deal with (because they’ve been laid off or fired), and now they have to read complicated paperwork, find a lawyer, and negotiate with a company? That’s a lot.
Non-disparagement and non-disclosure feel complicated to me and I can see how strong blanket statements became the norm, but using tight deadlines to pressure people on significant legal and financial decisions seems quite bad.
But my guess is that most of the people you sent to Wave were capable of understanding what they were signing and thinking through the implications of what they were agreeing to, even if they didn’t actually have the conscientiousness / wisdom / quick-thinking to do so. (Except, apparently, Elizabeth. Bravo, @Elizabeth!)
I appreciate the kudos here, but feel like I should give more context.
I think some of what led to me to renegotiate was a stubborn streak and righteousness about truth. I mostly hear when those traits annoy people, so it’s really nice to have them recognized in a good light here. But that righteous streak was greatly enabled by the fact that my mom is a lawyer who modeled reading legal documents before signing (even when its embarrassing your kids who just want to join their friends at the rockclimbing birthday party), and that I could afford to forgo severance. Obviously I really wanted the money, and I couldn’t afford to take this kind of stand every week. But I believe there were people who couldn’t even afford to add a few extra days, and so almost had to cave
To the extent people in that second group were unvirtuous, I think the lack of virtue occurred when they didn’t create enough financial slack to even have the time to negotiate. By the time they were laid off without a cushion it was too late. And that’s not available to everyone- Wave paid well, but emergencies happen, any one of them could have a really good reason their emergency fund was empty.
So the main thing I want to pitch here is that “getting yourself into a position where virtue is cheap” is an underrated strategy.
This is one benefit to paying people well, and a reason having fewer better-paid workers is sometimes better than more people earning less money. If your grants or salary give you just enough to live as long as the grants are immediately renewed/you don’t get fired, even a chance of irritating your source of income imperils your ability to feed yourself. 6 months expenses in savings gives you the ability to risk an individual job/grant. Skills valued outside EA give you the ability to risk pissing off all of EA and still be fine.
I’m emphasizing risk here because I think it’s the bigger issue. If you know something is wrong, you’ll usually figure out a way to act on it. The bigger problem is when you some concerns but they legitimately could be nothing, but worry that investigating will imperil your livelihood.