EA - If you fail, you will still be loved and can be happy; a love letter to all EAs by howdoyousay?

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: If you fail, you will still be loved and can be happy; a love letter to all EAs, published by howdoyousay? on July 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Content warning: self-doubt, mental health, cosmic insignificance, unkind behaviour within EA interpersonal / professional circles Epistemic status: highly confident based on my EA experience, and that experienced second-hand in EA. Decided not to back this stuff up empirically with research on e.g. psychological safety, because I think such subjective arguments should stand on their own. Tl;dr: Help your fellow EAs, and yourself... believe that they are enough; that their self-worth is not connected to whether they win or lose at what they do; to how smart they're seen, or how effective; that they are worthy as they are walk more lightly down our paths towards big altruistic ambitions, and feel we are allowed to be happy whether we succeed or fail "Whether you succeed or not, I love you. And you will be happy either way" This expression - either verbatim or a paraphrase - is what I've been lucky to receive from partners, friends and family every time I was doing something that I cared a lot about; usually applying for what I thought was a high impact job. I think it's been the difference between tens to hundreds of hours of self-doubt and picking my life apart, and hours smiling. And from late night conversations with many EA friends and acquaintances, not to mention the trove of self-doubt confessions to be found on this forum, I'm convinced we all need to start telling each other a version of this. "Whether you succeed or not, I love you". Content warning: self-doubt, mental health, unkind behaviour within EA interpersonal / professional circles (This starts out rough, skip to the final paragraph if you want the positives.) I think a lot of EAs doubt their peers feel this stable positive regard towards them. Many worry about doing something stupid which is not seen as a mistake but as an indication that they are "not smart enough"; that they'll then be excluded from collaborations if they slip up; or they'll be downgraded in other people's estimations if they don't succeed at getting a certain job or scholarship or whatever. Some friends of mine are even afraid of throwaway comments resulting in this. This is pretty rough. I've experienced something similar but not quite the same. I've had people I was close to question whether I was "smart enough" when discussing esoteric EA topics, and behave unkindly towards me. You can have intrinsic self-worth and believe it is not pegged to your success. But you'll still suffer a lot if you think that the worth others ascribe to you is pegged to your success. I'd say I had strong intrinsic self-worth when I had the "smart enough" experience above, and it did corrode my sense of self. But as well as my own first-hand experiences, I've observed others EAs behave this way towards others; for example, people discussing whether someone is really smart / capable based on things like how an internship went. Revising their opinion of their 'innate talent' and their opinion of them overall. I'm glad to say I've seen the opposite; people discussing how that person could have done better when they failed, but still backing them as a person and helping them move forward. Why am I so against this? It's ironic in how much it runs counter to purported EA values; we're EAs because we value flourishing and want to end suffering for all, explicitly because we think (people's) experiences matter; yet this is once common mechanism through which EA directly contributes to not great experiences for people. Success or failure at T-1 very often is not even much of an update. Every success / failure we have is just one indicator on the long and hopeful path to making a difference, and means even...