EA - EA might systematically generate a scarcity mindset that produces low-integrity actors by Severin

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: EA might systematically generate a scarcity mindset that produces low-integrity actors, published by Severin on April 25, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Epistemic status: Highly speculative quick Facebook post. Thanks to Anna Riedl for nudging me to share it here anyway.Something I've noticed recently is that people who are in a bad place in their lives tend to have a certain sticky sleazy black holey feel to them. Something around untrustworthiness, low integrity, optimizing for themselves regardless of the cost for the people around them. I've met people like that, and I think when others felt around me like my energy was subtly and indescribably off, it was due to me being sticky in that way, too.Game-theoretically, it makes total sense for people to be a bit untrustworthy while they are in a bad place in their life. If you're in a place of scarcity, it is entirely reasonable to be strategic about where you put your limited resources. Then, it's just reasonable to only be loyal to others as long as you can get something out of it yourself and to defect as soon as they don't offer obvious short-term gains. And similarly, it make sense for the people around you to be a bit weary of you when you are in that place.And now, a bit of a hot take: I think most if not all of Effective Altruism's recent scandals have been due to low-integrity sticky behavior. And, I think some properties of EA systematically make people sticky.We might want to invest some thought and effort into fixing them. So, here's some of EA's sticky-people-producing properties I can spontaneously think of, plus first thoughts on how to fix them that aren't supposed to be final solutions:1. UtilitarianismYudkowsky wrote a thing that I think is true:"Go three-quarters of the way from deontology to utilitarianism and then stop. You are now in the right place. Stay there at least until you have become a god."Meanwhile, SBF and probably a bunch of other people in EA (including me at times) have gone all four quarters of the way. If there's no upper bound to when it is enough to make the numbers go up, you'll be in a place of scarcity no matter what, and will be incentivized to defect indefinitely.I think an explicit belief of "defecting is not a good utilitarian strategy" doesn't help here: Becoming sticky is not a decision, but a subtle shift in your cognition that happens when your animal instincts pick up that your prefrontal cortex thinks you are in a place of scarcity.Basically, I think Buddhism is what utilitarianism would be if it made sense and was human-brain-shaped: Optimizing for global optima, but from a place of compassion and felt oneness with all sentient beings, not from the standpoint of a technocratic puppet master.2. Ever-precarious salariesEA funders like to base their allocation of funds on evidence, and they like to be able to adjust course quickly as soon as there are higher expected-value opportunities. From the perspective of naive utilitarianism, this completely makes sense.From the perspective of grantees, however, it feels like permanently having to justify your existence. And that is a situation that makes you go funny in the head in a way that is not conducive to getting just about any job done, unless it's a job like fraud that inherently involves short-term thinking and defecting on society. Whether or not you treat people as trustworthy and competent, you'll tend to find that you are right.I don't know how to fix this. Especially at the place we are at now, where both the FTX collapse and funders' increased cautiousness made the precarity of EA funding even worse. Currently, I'm seeing two dimensions to at least partially solving this issue:Building healthier, more sustainable relationships between community members. That's why I'm building Authentic R...