I've most often read/heard this argument in relation to alcohol and marijuana. Something along the lines of "if we had never had this thing and we discovered it today, would we make it legal/illegal?"

I think of it in vaguely the same category as the veil of ignorance and other simple thought experiments that encourage us to step outside of our own individualized preferences.

I think that describing it as a combination of anchoring with confirmation bias seems roughly accurate. Maybe there might be an element of availability bias tossed in as well, since we latch on to the most readily available answer?

I'm not sure, but I think that Julia Galef has spoken about the concept of explanation freeze in interviews or on podcasts, so you might be able to dig up a more detailed and expansive explanation. But with some cursory Google Searching I was only able to find passing references to it, rather than more full explanations.

I really enjoyed this. Several aspects resonated with experiences I have had (or that I have observed in-person). Overall, this struck me as very balanced & grounded advice, especially for a subculture that tends to put so much weight on intelligence and rationality. Thanks for taking the time and effort to write this.

I've found explanation freeze to be a useful concept, but I haven't found a definition or explanation of it on the EA Forum. So I thought I'd share a little description of explanation freeze here so that anyone searching the forum can find it, and so that I can easily link to it.

The short version is:

explanation freeze is the tendency to stick with the first explanation we come up with.

The slightly longer explanation is:

Situations that are impossible to conclusively explain can afflict us with explanation freeze, a condition in which we come up with just one possible explanation for an event that may have resulted from any of several different causes. Since we're only considering one explanation at a time, this condition leads us to make the available evidence fit that explanation, and then overestimate how likely that explanation is. We can consider it as a type of cognitive bias or flaw, because it hinders us in our attempts to form an accurate view of reality.

Welcome to the forum, Quinn. Glad to have you here. :)

I wonder to what extend the imposter syndrome in EA is unique to EA, and to what extent it is a broader societal trend of comparing ourselves to others. This could easily turn into a long rant on social media and how comparison is the thief of joy, but I'll try to keep it concise: we generally only feel that we aren't doing enough when we see other people that are doing more, and we usually have a very superficial glance^[1] at doing more. When I feel the worst about myself is when I've made the poor decision to scroll through Facebook or LinkedIn, and I see other people doing things that I wish I was doing. Mimetic desire at it's finest. As you can imagine, I don't often scroll through those things.

Maybe these trends are both exacerbated in EA because it is a fairly online community, and it is also a fairly young community?

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   "Superficial" in the sense of us mainly seeing crafted images rather than seeing realities. I see that someone earns 250,000 USD per year and donates about half of that, but I don't as easily see A) the tradeoffs & sacrifices that person made in order to do that, or B) the unearned privilidge that allows that person to do that. Here is an image I think of often, from Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhapy.

I found this to be one of the better criticisms of EA that I've read. I appreciate that the tone wasn't highly aggressive or strident, and that it mentioned the virtue of Julie Wise/Scott Alexander-type arguments of "let's keep donating money for bednets."

I went to high school in the USA, in the 2000s, so it has been roughly twenty years. I attended a public highschool, that wasn't particularly well-funded nor impoverished. There were no ethics or philosophy courses offered. There was not education on moral philosophy, aside from that which is gained through literature in an English class (such as reading Lord of the Flies or Fahrenheit 451 or To Kill a Mockingbird).

There is a Facebook group for EA Education, but my impression is that it isn't very active.

My (uninformed, naïve) guess is that this isn't very tractable, because education tends to be controlled by the government and there are a lot of vested interests. The argument would basically be "why should we teach these kids about being a good person when we could instead use that time to teach them computer programming/math/engineering/language/civics?" It is a crowded space with a lot of competing interests already.

Some musings about experience and coaching. I saw another announcement relating to mentorship/coaching/career advising recently. It looked like the mentors/coaches/advisors were all relatively junior/young/inexperienced. This isn't the first time I've seen this. Most of this type of thing I've seen in and around EA involves the mentors/advisors/coaches being only a few years into their career. This isn't necessarily bad. A person can be very well-read without having gone to school, or can be very strong without going to a gym, or can speak excellent Japanese without having ever been to Japan. A person being two or three or four years into their career doesn't mean that it is impossible for them to have have good ideas and good advice.^[1] But it does seem a little... odd. The skepticism I feel is similar to having a physically frail person as a fitness trainer: I am assessing the individual on a proxy (fitness) rather than on the true criteria (ability to advise me regarding fitness). Maybe that thinking is a bit too sloppy on my part.

This doesn't mean that if you are 24 and you volunteer as a mentor that you should stop; you aren't doing anything wrong. And I wouldn't want some kind a silly and arbitrary rule, such as "only people age 40+ are allowed to be career coaches." And there are some people doing this kind of work that have a decade or more of professional experience; I don't want to make it sound like all of the people doing coaching and advising are fresh grads.

I wonder if there are any specific advantages or disadvantages to this 'junior skew.' Is there a meaningful correlation between length of career and ability to help other people with their careers? 

EA already skews somewhat young, but from the last EA community survey it looks like the average age was around 29. So I wonder why are the vast majority of people doing mentorship/coaching/career advising are younger than that? Maybe the older people involved in EA are disproportionality not employed for EA organizations and are thus less focused on funneling people into impactful careers? I do have the vague impression that many 35+ EAs lean more toward earn-to-give. Maybe older EAs tend to be a little more private and less focused on the EA community? Maybe older people simply are less interested, or don't view it as a priority? Maybe the organizations that employ/hire coaches all prefer young people? Maybe this is a false perception and I'm engaging in sloppy generalization from only a few anecdotes?

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   And the other huge caveat is that you can't really know what a person's professional background is from a quick glance at their LinkedIn Profile and the blurb that they share on a website, any more than you can accurately guess age from a profile photo. People sometimes don't list everything. I can see that someone earned a bachelor's degree in 2019 or 2020 or 2021, but maybe they didn't follow a "standard" path: maybe they had a 10-year career prior to that, so guesses about being fairly young or junior are totally off. As always, drawing conclusions based on tiny snippets of information with minimal context is treacherous territory.