One thing I occasionally think about is how few "competitors" exist for CEA's products/services. I feel a little odd using this kind of terminology in a non-profit context, but to put it simplistically: if anyone wants to start up a "competing" conference for do-gooders, they can do that. In a simplistic sense there isn't anything stopping AIM, or GWWC, or High Impact Professionals, or you & I as individuals from putting on a Effective Altruism Annual Conference, or from hosting online introductory EA programs, or from providing coaching and advise to city and university EA groups.

I don't know about medical professionals, but my informal impression that the majority of adults in developed countries knows that massage reduces stress.

Personal perspective, not grounded in research: Similar to yoga or walking, I think the main issue is the counterfactual. Studies tend to show that massage is better than nothing for stress reduction, but is nothing really the baseline we want to use?

Here is a research summary from Elicit:

Research suggests that massage therapy can be effective in reducing stress levels. Multiple studies have found that massage can significantly decrease self-reported stress and anxiety (Françoise Labrique-Walusis et al., 2010; C. Heard et al., 2012; Bost & Wallis, 2006). Even brief interventions, such as a 5-minute hand or foot massage or a 15-minute weekly massage, can lower perceived stress levels (Françoise Labrique-Walusis et al., 2010; Bost & Wallis, 2006). Mechanical massage chairs have also shown promise in reducing stress for individuals with serious mental illness (C. Heard et al., 2012). While some studies have observed single-treatment reductions in physiological stress markers like salivary cortisol and heart rate, evidence for sustained physiological effects is limited (Moraska et al., 2008). Despite the need for more rigorous research, the existing literature suggests that massage therapy can be a beneficial tool for stress management, particularly in healthcare settings (Françoise Labrique-Walusis et al., 2010; Bost & Wallis, 2006).

Practice is helpful. Is there a way you can repeatedly practice finishing projects? Having the right tools/frameworks is also helpful. Maybe reading about about personal productivity and breaking large tasks down into smaller pieces would help? I also find kanban boards to be very helpful, and you can set one up in a program like Asana, or you can do it on your wall with sticky notes.

Perhaps you could describe a bit more how your failures have happened with longer-term efforts? That might allow people to give you more tailored recommendations.

I've previously written a little bit about recognition in relation to mainanence/prevention, and this passage from Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family stood out to me as a nice reminder:

We tell the story in our class about the time our CIO Craig Hergenroether’s daughter was working in another organization, and she said, “We’re taking our IT team to happy hour tonight because we got this big e-mail virus, but they did a great job cleaning it up.”

Our CIO thought, “We never got the virus. We put all the disciplines and practices in place to ensure that we never got it. Shouldn’t we celebrate that?”

What we choose to hold up and celebrate gets emulated. Therefore it is important to consider how those decisions impact the culture. Instead of firefighting behaviors, we recognize and celebrate sustained excellence: people who consistently distinguish themselves through their actions. We celebrate people who do their jobs very well every day with little drama. Craig, the CIO, took his team out to happy hour and said, “Congratulations, we did not get the e-mail virus that took out most of the companies in St. Louis and Tampa Bay.”

Overall, the Everybody Matters could is the kind of book that could have been an article. I wouldn't recommend spending the time to read it if you are already superficially familiar with the fact that an organization can choose to treat people well (although maybe that would be revelatory for some people). It was on my  to-read list due to it's mention in the TED Talk Why good leaders make you feel safe.

If you want to informally bounce ideas around about potential careers, I think that there are a number of people who would be willing to spend 15 to 30 minutes speaking with you and sharing thoughts on skills, training, career paths, etc. Not as some kind of paid scheme, but just people willing to help out a little bit. You can certainly reach out to people in your own life (relatives? professors?), but there are also quite a few people in the EA community who are willing to do this.

Thanks for sharing your write-up. I read this book a few years ago, and I remember it as partially inspirational, and partially cautionary. There are aspects of the stories that I really do find inspiring, and had the earlier years of my life happened differently I could see myself embracing some aspect of these stories. And of course, there are scenarios in these stories where these altruistic desires went to such extremes that I found them unhealthy or unhelpful.

It may seem obvious that there are downsides to being extremely altruistic, but I found it helpful to have some concrete examples of real things that people have done. I view it kind of like the difference between someone saying "don't go to that place" and "don't go to that place, because X, Y, Z things are likely to occur there."

I'm commenting on this a few years late, but for anyone reading this who wants to learn more, here is an excerpt from the book DEI Deconstructed, by Lily Zheng, along with a few references:

The “standard” best practice with resumes in the DEI space is to anonymize them, but I strongly advise caution. Proponents of resume anonymization argue that because the presence of gender and racial cues from names or hobbies can lead to hiring discrimination due to bias,²⁴ removing this information will interrupt it. They advocate for names, hobbies, profile pictures, and any other identifying information to be scrubbed from resumes and in the hiring process. However, research has documented unintended adverse consequences of resume anonymization: namely, that “neutral” characteristics that candidates from disadvantaged communities might face, like unemployment gaps, are perceived even more negatively when identifying information is removed. Additionally, companies that anonymize resumes tend to be more progressive and care more about supporting people’s identities—increasing the damage done when identity is removed from the process. As a result, for the companies that deploy it, anonymization can backfire and result in even greater demographic disparity—opposite its intended effect.²⁵ For organizations that value any aspect of their employees beyond purely skills and competencies, anonymization may harm rather than help.²⁶ While it can be tempting to remove the human element from consideration (and many third-party firms have emerged to meet precisely this demand), consider taking the time to train hiring managers to handle identity with intentionality instead and collecting regular data on outcomes to maintain accountability.

24. Bertrand, Marianne, and Sendhil Mullainathan. 2003. “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination.” National Bureau of Economic Research.

25. Behaghel, Luc, Bruno Crépon, and Thomas Le Barbanchon. 2015. “Unintended Effects of Anonymous Résumés.” American Economic Journal. Applied Economics 7 (3): 1–27.

26. White, Maia Jasper. 2020. “Eyes Wide Shut—The Case against Blind Auditions.” NewMusicBox (blog). September 10, 2020.

For anyone that wants to dig deeper, it appears that the Unintended Effects of Anonymous Résumés article is cited in several papers that could be useful to dig into, I haven't gotten around to reading them yet.

Sophia, I can't believe I didn't see this post until today. I've been interested in inclusion and accessibility-type topics for years, so I have no idea how I didn't see it when you first posted it. Things seem to have improved in some ways since August 2022, but there is still plenty of progress to be made.

Has anybody created a "Top Ten EA Jargon Words Explained"-type post? That seems like something that a person could create fairly easily, and I actually already have a comical version of it as a draft for an April Fool's post. I could easily create a post that could serve as a sort of reference page, so that people can easily link to it to explain jargon.

The 80,000 Hours team just published that "We now rank factory farming among the top problems in the world." I wonder if this is a coincidence or if this planned to coincide with the EA Forum's debate week? Combined with the current debate week's votes on where an extra $100 should be spent, these seem like nice data points to show to anyone that claims EA doesn't care about animals.

For what it is worth, you are not alone in feeling bad when you get downvotes. People have described me as a fairly confident person, and I view myself as pretty level-headed, but if I get a disagree vote without any comment or response I am also perplexed/frustrated/irritated. I often think something along the lines of "there is nothing in this comment that is stating a claim or making an argument; what could a person disagree with?"

I do wish there were a way to "break" the habit that EA forum users have to conflate up/down votes and agree/disagree votes.

Theoretically, if there was some sort of option for a user to "hide" votes (maybe on all content, or maybe just on the user's own content), do you think that would minimize the negative feelings you have relating to votes?