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Welcome 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: EA Dedicates, published by ozymandias on June 23, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I’ve noticed a persistent competing need in effective altruist communities. On one hand, many people want permission not to only value effective altruism. They care about doing good in the world, but they also care about other things: their community, their friendships, their children, a hobby they feel passionate about like art or sports or RPGs or programming, a cause that’s personal to them like free speech or cancer, even just spending time vegging out and watching TV. So they emphasize work/life balance and that effective altruism doesn’t have to be your only life goal. On the other hand, some people do strive to only care about effective altruism. Of course, they still have hobbies and friendships and take time to rest; effective altruists are not ascetics. But ultimately everything they do is justified by the fact that it strengthens them to continue the work. The discourse about work/life balance can be very alienating to them. It can feel like the effective altruism community isn’t honoring the significant personal sacrifices they’re making to improve the world. In some cases, people feel like there’s a certain crab bucket mentality—you should limit how much good you do so that other people don’t feel bad—which is very toxic. Conversely, people who have work/life balance can feel threatened by people who only care about effective altruism. If those people exist, does that mean you have to be one? Are you evil, or a failure, or personally responsible for dozens of counterfactual deaths, because you care about more than one thing? I propose that this conversation would be improved by naming the second group. I suggest calling them “EA dedicates.” In thinking about EA dedicates, I was inspired by thinking about monks. Monks play an important role in religions with monks. They’re very admirable people who do a lot of good. The religion wouldn’t function without them. And most people are not supposed to be monks. Why We Need Both Dedicates and Non-Dedicates There are two reasons that the effective altruism movement should be open to people who aren’t dedicates. First, people who care about more than one thing still do an enormous amount of good. Many of the best effective altruists aren’t dedicates, such as journalist Kelsey Piper and CEA community liaison Julia Wise (as well as, of course, many people whose contributions don’t succeed in making them EA famous). It would be a tremendous mistake to expel Kelsey Piper for insufficient devotion. Quite frankly, the bednets don’t care if the person who buys them also donates to cancer research. Second, most people caring about multiple things is good for the health of the effective altruist community. If the effective altruist community is totally wrongheaded, it’s psychologically easier to admit if that doesn’t mean losing literally everything you care about and have spent your life working for. There’s a certain comfort in being able to say “at least I still have my kids” or “at least I still have my art.” Similarly, the effective altruist movement is already quite insular. People who care about multiple things are more likely to have friends outside the community, and therefore get an outside reality check and views from outside the EA bubble. (An EA dedicate could have outside-community friends and many of them do, but it certainly seems less common.) These are merely two of the ways that having a lot of non-dedicates makes the EA community more resilient. The advantages of being open to EA dedicates, conversely, are pretty obvious. In general, if you care about multiple things, you’re going to split your time, energy, and resources across them and have less time, energy, and resources for any particular goal. If you’re donatin...