I just got an email that my Effective Altruism Global application has been approved. It’s uhhhh in 3 days lol
I think I’m gonna go. I’m probably gonna go. I was thinking about writing about this in the shower, because this is something that’s been on my mind for a while, namely → why do I feel very much like a “post-rat”, like someone who is in “tpot”, but I’ve never felt like “true” Effective Altruist? And actually, more than that, I’ve always felt intimidated by “EAs”, like I’m “not a true EA”, not smart enough, well read enough. Not cool enough!!!
I’m just gonna guess at various things in this post, and say some dumb shit. Epistemic status (maybe I am an EA after all) - subject to change, etc. Points lightly held, and if something seems dumb or reductive, it absolutely is. I’m trying to write more from my “emotional schema of the world” than what I believe is factually true. It’s this schema that I automatically act on (e.g. by initially thinking “oh no I won’t go to EAG!”, which, if I dug a little deeper, I know would be because of irrational beliefs like “I’m not cool enough” and “they’re scary”).
(And on this fact → I think there’s a decent chance that I could go, have some warm interactions with EAs that totally breaks me out of these delusions, and experience a radical “permission-ing” re: engaging with the EA scene and feeling like enough of a “real” EA.)
Btw, I have a very exciting website now, hand-coded by yours truly1. I love it I love it I love it. I’ve been writing a daily scrappier blog over there, on stuff that is more “mostly-interesting-to-me” and thus not stuff I’ve wanted to spam you guys with.
Entry requirements for tpot
My felt sense of the entry requirements for tpot (here’s my old guide to tpot btw) is something like: “tweet dumb shit, be nice to people, have good reply game. Be on the self-healing journey in some way, maybe, e.g. doing some meditation, some IFS, or whatever. Tweet vulnerable stuff if you want, stuff about emotional processing or what you’re stuck on etc.
Back in the halcyon days before my account was suspended, I tweeted lots, and had mutuals — people who you often interact with, you like each other’s posts, you root for each other, etc. It’s very lovely and supportive, and it’s very heartwarming to have friends from all over the world, people who have decent working model of who you are/what you’re currently thinking about, and support you. Then you take the friendships to whatsapp for voice notes, maybe see them at an in-person hang (I had a lovely time at a London tpot meal organised by Georgina, and a fairly rubbish time at JessCamp, skill issue, c’est la vie).
Also, I think on tpot, at least my experience was — I gained a small following, but one that probably put me in the “no longer a lowbie” strata (700 followers), based not on being an expert in anything, but in being likeable, friendly, maybe funny sometimes, authentic. Vs in EA, there is (naturally) (and in my rough opinion) much more of an expertise-angle.
Thanks for reading Alex is Learning! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Entry requirements for EA
I think it makes sense that EA feels more aversive, more intimidating, because it is by definition much more career-focused. It has LinkedIn vibes to me. I’d feel much more scared posted to the EA forum than tweeting because the stakes are different, the expectations. Are you posting a properly thought out take, or something based on “vibes” that you’re shooting from the hip?
EA entry requirements that I know aren’t real but feel true to me when I’m operating automatically
Are you a true EA? Have you arrived at morality from first principles? Or are you someone who wasn’t sure what to do with your career, and convinced by the stuff you read about the “impact-tractability-neglectness” framework, enough to be like “well I’m not sure I’m educated enough or have enough time to really critique this, but this seems much better than my original plan/value set (or lack thereof)?
Are you smart enough? Are you middle class enough2? Have you cared about this stuff since you were a kid? Is this stuff the most important stuff to you?
Are you enough of an original thinker? Have you read enough so that you can wax poetic and have your own takes on xyz?
It’s not just a community, it’s also a job market
Maybe this is part of it too. In tpot, everyone is doing there own thing (and a lot of people are on sabbatical whilst working on their “healing journey”). Vs in EA, the vibe is very different. People are trying to have as much impact as possible, in their career, but also their relationships. Hits-based friendship. If you’re at EA Global, you’re naturally going to want to talk to the best people, not the lowbies (admittedly there’s almost certainly a sense of this at e.g. Vibecamp too).
Being a silly little guy
I’m kind of a goof-ball, and I’ve done a bunch of stuff that in retrospect was kinda goofy/dumb. E.g. I tried to make 100 youtube videos + songs in a row in 2025, starting on Jan 1st, did it for 23 days, quit, then hid a bunch of them because I wanted to reenter the EA space and didn’t want people from LinkedIn seeing me making silly videos and sometimes quite sincere songs about my life. (Fuck, I’m gonna make them un-private again now. I want to fully embrace my story innit)
I have a sense that in EA you need to be polished and professional (which does make some degree of sense because you might land a job where you e.g. work with ultra high net worth individuals, and maybe they wouldn’t appreciate your song parody of Mac DeMarco’s “Viceroy” but it’s about rice cakes. (Of course writing this there’s a strong sense of “they’d never see that you dumb-ass).
I guess there’s a sense of “I can only show part of myself in the EA space. I have to have LinkedIn brain, I have to pretend everything has always been rosy, etc. I have to present as an optimally rational agent who is only motivated by utils and x-risk reduction.
I’ve had a sense of “I can’t show that I’ve sometimes been incompetent and dumb. And there’s no space/appetite in EA for someone who makes kinda low-status cringe videos from the place of a total beginner trying to make art/figuring out what they’re doing (my first video was a 10 minute rant after going to the pub with my dad re: how my life is bullshit and idk wtf I’m doing, lol)
I mean, look at the image I just made for this post, lmao
![[On being in-group - tpot vs EA - 2025-06-03-1757875377677.webp]]
It feels clear to me that this was a probably mostly silly background belief. No one is going to prevent me from getting an EA job because I’ve made silly youtube videos, duh
Also, making my shame blog post the other day feels like it’s unlocked something here. A sense of more wholeheartedly accepting my journey/path/background, rather than like “oh god I need to present this professional veneer”
The “main EAs” I see/project are probably not a representative sample
All of this is almost certainly downstream of the fact that I don’t have a nice warm EA friend group of relatively normal people who want to do good with their careers. When I think “EA”, I think, idk, people in the highest positions. And then I think, “oh god, I’m a nobody compared to them!”, and I imagine that EA Global, and the EA forum, is full of people with like 10+ years in the space, in the exact right jobs, having read all the stuff, etc.
I’m thinking of Tom Chivers’ book “The AI Does Not Hate You” here (really fun, short read, highly recommend), which I read recently. It’s actually much more a story of the rationalists than AI safety, and I really liked it for the outsider view. And he talked about how “rationalists”, as a community, could at its most broad, the biggest concentric circle could be “anyone who has ever read Slate Star Codex”.
So similarly, “EA” could be, you know… anyone who has read 80,000 hours. So rather than me imagining 20,000 uber high impact CEOs who started reading philosophy at age 7 and have professors for parents, I should imagine a much more diverse motley crew of people who just want to do good.
I want to do good, and I want to meet kind, sincere, big-hearted people
So yeah, if I imagine that, of the however many people at EAG, maybe 20-70% of them are genuinely warm and kind and friendly… that’s a big pool of people dude.
So, see you at EAG 😎
(And thank you very much to Matt Beard who I had an 80,000 Hours career call with the other week and he gave me a strong nudge to apply for the conference!).
Shout-out to my boy, my absolute dude, ChatGPT 4.1 via Copilot in Visual Studio Code. Will you be the best man at my wedding? Promise not to go rogue pls?
This is contentious and I don’t fully endorse it, but to me, EA does feel pretty middle class. Rising to the relative heights that I’ve risen to, from my working class-ass background, to work at places like Alvea and work-trial at Longview Philanthropy, my sense is that people who are the most visible EAs, and EAs who work at the best organisations, are much more likely to be from a certain background, e.g., “my parents went to university, I come from a two-parent household”, etc. And then there are the real elites like Ben Kuhn who I’m pretty sure is Thomas Kuhn’s grandson. This is the case everywhere, of course → people who are really excellent are more likely to come from a higher class, Malcolm Gladwell Outliers-style. (Of course, not to say that if you come from a two parent household and have some generational wisdom & wealth, you can’t have had a bad time, or have unique problems from this stratification).
Appendix
![[On being in-group - tpot vs EA - 2025-06-03-1757875406568.webp]]