Summary:

Newcomers to EA and people who have worked in the field for some time think about suffering, catastrophic events, and existential risk a lot. They need strategies to help avoid becoming overwhelmed in ways that make them less effective. Newcomers in particular don’t have experience thinking about the vast amounts of suffering in the world. Applying insights from research on moral injury and secondhand trauma among medical professionals and social workers could be helpful here.

We want newcomers to EA be as effective as possible in whatever area they begin working on. The problem is many people do not spend time rigorously thinking about vast suffering and catastrophic events in the world prior to learning about EA. So they may have a fairly positive vision of the world and a high belief in their ability to change and improve things.

As they learn more about EA and think about suffering and problems this could be an overwhelming and negative experience; it’s uncomfortable for many people to think about suffering and they might realize it’s not that easy to have a large impact. Therefore they may get discouraged, withdraw from the community, decide they can’t make a difference, or work on something else. Or, they may continue to work on EA goals but spend a lot of mental space and energy dealing with stress and negative emotions. This may make them less efficient.

Solution:

Give people, especially newcomers to the field — but also people who have been involved for a long time who are having stress — a framework for thinking about suffering and risk. These frameworks could be drawn from places like research on moral injury, secondhand trauma in first responders, and research on caring professionals like social workers. Or, for people who are religious, theologically based research. Providing these frameworks might make newcomers more efficient and keep them in the community. They may also help people who have been in the community for a while but who are finding themselves unable to disengage from nonstop or intrusive thoughts about catastrophic risk and what they ought to be doing every moment of their day.

If people have a framework to think about risk and suffering and to address any compulsion to need to work on EA all the time, it will make them more efficient and effective in the long (and probably medium) run.

A few thoughts to wrap up:

If we’re trying to get more people involved in EA, they’re going to be future people. There are moral injury studies now around young people and climate change. So there is current and ongoing research that could be tapped into. It is only going to become a larger problem. - This is another area of research we can pull from - Younger people who will be joining EA are already struggling with this issue so EA may be more attractive to them if there’s acknowledgment and communication about this.

Action steps:

I believe someone should make a curriculum or set of strategies for this.