EA - "Agency" needs nuance by Evie Cottrell

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: "Agency" needs nuance, published by Evie Cottrell on September 12, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I'm trying to overcome perfectionism and post this even though some parts feel incomplete. A quarter of the word count is footnotes that didn't feel relevant enough for the main body of the post, but I wanted to include somewhere. Summary Recently, “agency” has become heavily encouraged and socially rewarded within EA, and I am concerned about the unintended consequences. The un-nuanced encouragement of “social agency” could be harmful for the community; it encourages violating social norms and social dominance. At the extreme, it can feel parasitic, with dominant individuals monopolising resources. “Agency” being a high status buzzword incentivises Goodharting– where big and bold actions are encouraged (at the expense of actions that actually achieve an individual's goals). I have an impression that, sometimes, people say “agency” and others hear “work more hours; be more ambitious; make bolder moves! Why haven’t you started a project already?!” “Agency” doesn’t entail “hustling hard” – it entails acting intentionally, and these are importantly different. Agency is not a tradeoff against rest; in fact, doing things to high standards and achieving your goals often requires tons of slack. My experience and mistakes If you feel uncomfortable when violating a social norm or taking a bold move, take this feeling into consideration, there is probably a reason for this feeling. It’s not always low cost for others to say no to requests; failing to model this can make others uncomfortable and lead to a relative overconsumption of resources. Making authorities upset with you is (emotionally and instrumentally) costly. Don’t ignore this cost when taking big and bold moves. Being too willing to ask for help made me worse at solo problem-solving. Introduction Recently, “agency” has been heavily encouraged within EA. I often feel like it’s become both a status symbol and an unquestionable good. I wrote a post on agency a few months ago, which I now think missed important caveats. While I broadly think that the world (and EA) could do with an injection of proactiveness and intentionality, I’m concerned about some of the unintended consequences. In this post, I lay out some concerns, some unexpected costs of taking agentic actions for me (and mistakes I’ve made), and things I’ve changed my mind on since my last post. Important caveats Most people don’t ask for help enough, and this post is applicable to a minority of people; This post is many layers of abstraction away from object level issues that improve the world. I’m worried about meta-conversations (like this) taking away attention from more important and relevant topics. If you’ve read the summary, I’m not sure how much benefit you’ll get from the rest of the post. Consider not reading it. “Social Agency” in moderation I’m going to define “social agency” as a willingness to make bold social moves, leverage social capital, and make trades within your social network to achieve your goals. My previous post mostly focused on encouraging social agency – “ask people for help,” “network online,” and “don’t be too constrained by social boundaries,” are some key themes. I am now concerned that this lacked nuance. Social agency is a small part of doing good. Having a network and mentors and friends-in-high-places is not enough to actually do meaningful work in the world. The other part of agency is about Actually Doing Things: the nitty-gritty, engagement with reality that actually makes things happen. Taking heroic responsibility; learning about the technical, object level details of important problems; intentionally building models of the world; noticing gaps in existing strategies; developing a plan to solve bottlenecks; executin...