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This is: What drew me to EA: Reflections on EA as relief, growth, and community , published by vaidehi_agarwalla on the Effective Altruism Forum.
In this post, I want to share my outlook on discovering EA, and my early experiences in the community. For those who don’t know me, hello! My name is Vaidehi. I work on a few independent community projects such as the EA Hub and the EA Fellowship Weekend. I have a background in sociology and have done some work on understanding the careers advice landscape and community building theory.
I share this for a couple of reasons:
I haven't seen some of these points discussed a lot, at least not publicly and/or recently
I've found it useful to read about other people's different experiences, particularly when I was newer to the community
The following is a series of related but somewhat unordered thoughts.
EA as relief
There seems to be a somewhat prevalent experience that people feel overwhelmed or guilty about not doing enough when they first discover EA.[1] I have never felt this way. As someone from a developing country, it's normal to be accustomed to many of the inequalities of the world. Seeing the contrast between Singapore (where I grew up) and India it was easy to understand, more viscerally, the suffering present, and the scale of that suffering. What always motivated me was that my life was really good in most ways, and many others’ lives were not. It seems natural that we should spend most of our resources fixing that until the injustice is rectified. Seeing the inefficiencies and limitations of many charities first-hand growing up, it was obvious to me that this should be done as effectively as possible.
Discovering GiveWell was a relief. Not only was there an entire organisation that actually cared about having an impact, but through GiveWell, I also found there was the whole field of developmental economics dedicated to it, with research organizations like JPAL and on-the-ground charities. And later, through 80,000 Hours, I learnt that there was already a framework for evaluating different causes and career paths and planning your carer strategically - a convenient starting point to build off of, rather than trying to figure it all out from scratch.
On a related note, I was surprised and disappointed by the lack of discussion about the developing world in my American undergraduate college, and frustrated by the prevalent discourse norms. In EA, I found a group of people who cared about the whole world, not just their small part of it, and who didn’t need to agree on everything be part of the same community.
Most of all, what made EA compelling to me was that people actually cared about the pursuit of truth - about getting things right even when it wasn’t convenient. GiveWell's mistakes page was a really important example of this in action. Why would an organization - and a charity at that - put their mistakes out in the open, unless they really cared about improving and doing better?
I still had a lot of questions and concerns, but what kept me engaging was the fact that whenever I’d have a doubt, I’d dig deeper and find that there was more to the conversation. (I still have concerns, but now I’m working to improve them directly.)
As an aside, I am also not very motivated by the opportunity framing of EA - the idea that one cause or intervention is 100 or 1000 times better than another, which creates an exciting opportunity to act. To me, a little better is still better. It doesn't really matter if I help 1 or 10 or 10,000 beings, as long as I help as many as I can. I don't care about whether a problem is difficult, or whether there are low hanging fruits. If the problem is important enough, then it's worth trying to solve. Of course, if there are good, or even great, opportunities, it’s a no-brainer to pursue them. I’ve al...
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