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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 needs to understand its “failures” better, published by mariushobbhahn on May 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I want to thank Moritz Hanke for feedback and suggestions. Introduction I recently posted “How many EAs have failed in high-risk, high-reward projects?” and got some insightful answers. Shortly afterward, Michael Dickens posted “What are some high-EV but failed EA projects?” and also got insightful answers. My main realization from the responses to both questions is that the EA community knows too little about its “failures” (at least what’s publicly available). However, I think it would be very important to understand our failed attempts better. Perceived failure has implications on people’s mental health, it has implications on which projects get started and which ones don’t and it has implications on who feels included and who doesn’t. Therefore, I want to lay out why we should know more about our “failures” and what could be done to address the problems we are currently facing. What does “failure” mean? Definition: the fact of someone or something not succeeding (Cambridge Dictionary). In an EA context, I would guess that most people mean something like “An individual or a group of people attempted something and did not achieve their goals” when they think about failure. The word failure has a very negative social connotation. Even when you are self-confident and have good mental health, failure is something scary. It means you haven’t achieved what you set out to do, that you “didn’t deliver” or “could have done better”. Part of the reason why failure feels bad is that it is often attached to your identity and not your actions--it’s very easy to go from “I failed a project” to “I am a failure”. I think this negative connotation is not only bad for mental health reasons but also for instrumental reasons (see below). Therefore, I think the EA community should think and communicate differently about “failure”. To remove the link to personal identity, I will call them failed attempts for the rest of the post. Why do failed attempts matter? Expected values A lot of reasoning in EA is based on expected values (EV). To calculate an EV, we need an estimate of the impact and an estimate of the probability of success. The probability of success is often hard to estimate but (failed) previous attempts can give us information in multiple ways. We could naively approximate the probability of success as the number of successful previous attempts divided by the number of total attempts. We can use projects of similar difficulty as a reference class for our own probability. We can use comparable people’s success rates as a reference class for our own. In all of these cases, our estimates are much more informative if we know about the failed attempts and not only the successful ones. Otherwise, we might systematically overestimate our chances of success. A culture of ambition Many of the projects that EAs are attempting are increasingly difficult to pull off. For example, there is a need for more megaprojects, many of which have a low probability of success. If we treat failed attempts as failures, we reduce the number of people trying them. If even under the best circumstances, your chances of success are less than 10%, it just makes less sense to try if you “fail” 9 times out of 10 unless people explicitly embrace your failed attempts as well. Alternatively, we should want to nurture a culture that embraces ambitious projects. This means not only talking to or about the people who succeeded but also those that attempted and didn’t succeed. Trying something with high upsides and high risk should be praised, not ignored, independent of the outcome. I think the EA community is on a good trajectory (see, e.g. this post on getting hired by EA orgs) but could do...