EA - Have faux-evil EA energy by RobBensinger

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: Have faux-evil EA energy, published by RobBensinger on August 23, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I hear that it's a tradition on the EA Forum to start new posts by announcing the existence of a new EA cause area, rather than just saying "X seems like a good idea to me". So, new EA cause area: combat EA burnout, work/life imbalance, deference/conformity culture, guilt-steering, over-optimizing for defensibility, etc. by adopting a healthier attitude to fun, and to your own weird self. A specific mental motion that I've found useful is to lean into and delight in the following feeling: Oh shit, I found a weird way to give myself hedons! Time to hella exploit this and drive up my Hedon Score! Pride yourself in harmless evil fun, like a speedrunner discovering new exploits. Like, imagine an EA who finds out for the first time that they really enjoy some activity that's silly and random and not-respected-by-their-peers, like watching Youtube videos of people reacting to horror games. (To choose a random example of something I enjoy.) One mindset / default emotional response an EA might have to this discovery is: 'Bleh, I've found an embarrassing / un-intellectual way to waste time I could be spending on EA things. I guess I'll do this, since it's fun, but I'll keep vaguely glowering at myself as I do.' A different response: 'OMG, I found a new vaguely-socially-disapproved-of way to extract enormous numbers of Hedons!! Muhahaha!! Time to pull off the greatest hedon heist in history! ' Maybe later you'll decide that you don't want to spend your time extracting Hedons that way. But whether you stick with your new exploit or not, I suspect the latter immediate-emotional-reaction will conduce more to a sane, healthy, and mentally "alive" mindset. (And to making a more clear-headed decision about whether this fun thing is a good addition to your life.) The main part I care about here is the " muhaha I'm getting away with something" energy, rather than the focus on fun per se. You can also at, e.g., scientific research, or virtue cultivation. Though I think there's something very important about it being allowed to just do this for fun. (Possibly I should call it "evil virtue cultivation", to guard against the interpretation that "virtue" here only refers to safe, socially-approved-of, meek-and-mild virtues. Think less Christian virtue, more Aristotelian virtue — the ethos that embraces things like "the virtue of knowing how badass I am".) Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.