EA - Military Service as an Option to Build Career Capital by Molly

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: Military Service as an Option to Build Career Capital, published by Molly on August 9, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Background You might be interested in this post if you’re just kind of curious about the military or if you’re actually considering it as a career option. I was commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Army on July 4th, 2011. There aren’t a lot of EAs with a military background, so I thought it’d be useful to offer some thoughts and perspective on what EAs and might get out of military service. This post is U.S.-centric. My service in the military has been as a lawyer, so my experience has been atypical in a lot of ways; then again, there is no one typical military experience. My perspective is also Army-centric, and I have less insight into the Navy or Air Force (or Marines or Space Force or Coast Guard). But some things about military service are pretty universal - I’ll try to focus more on those. The post is organized thematically by aspects of military service that could be valuable to EAs. Internalizing a Foreign Ethic When I first joined the Army, everything about being a soldier was absurdly foreign to me. I basically had to play-act to get through my day. Whenever I used the words “sir” or “ma’am” I felt like I was secretly mocking people. Lifting my hand to my hat to salute felt so unnatural, I actually started humming a patriotic little horn ditty under my breath to try to convince my brain that saluting was the proper thing to do. But if you do anything long enough it begins to feel natural. This happened to me with a million little habits of military life: blousing my boots, doing push-ups (even lawyers do push-ups), standing at attention when a general enters the room, putting my hair in a bun, saying “roger” as an acknowledgement. After a while, my memories morphed in adaptation. I found myself recalling a pre-military conversation with my beloved political theory professor, an aged Gandhi scholar, and in my memory I called him “sir.” In reality he would’ve physically recoiled had I ever done such a thing. These microdoses of cultural conditioning were related to and symbolic of a greater underlying shift that occurred in me over the years. I internalized a culture and an ethic very different from my native one. I began to see the beauty in things that had once been an anathema to me: traditional gender roles, hierarchy, nationalism. I didn’t lose my original values; I expanded on them. I became more humble about them, and related better to people who didn’t hold them. I think EAs are a uniquely skilled group at steelmanning others’ points of view. But noticing when something is in need of steelmanning is its own skill, different from the skill of actually doing the steelmanning. Having some emotional connection to an ethic very different from prevailing EA ethics, or the prevailing ethics of cultures that EAs tend to come from, makes this kind of noticing easy in contexts where those two ethics are in conflict. But my suspicion is that an emotional connection to multiple ethical frameworks allows for general practice in perspective-taking (though not everyone will be inclined to practice perspective-taking). As a consequence, someone who has two (or more) different ethical frameworks that they feel a deep connection to may be more likely to notice when an entirely different ethical framework is being strawmanned or should be better steelmanned. On the flip side, it’s possible that being acculturated to a different ethical framework could also help EAs be better calibrated about which criticisms of EA should be taken seriously. As a group, EAs tend to be so aware of the failure mode of not taking feedback well, that we forget about the failure mode of incorporating feedback that wasn’t actually in furtherance of our goals, or was ju...