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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 should taboo "EA should", published by Lizka on March 29, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Tl;dr: In Forum posts and in conversations, you’ll hear (and find yourself saying) that “EA should” do something. But “EA” is not an agent, and it’s hard for “EA” to do anything. I think we should try to notice these moments and explicitly think through who the subject of that sentence could be. Disclaimers: Written quickly. I might have missed important considerations — feel free to point them out, and I may correct the post or add them in! I am not claiming that all “EA should” posts and statements in the past have been unhelpful. I just think that many of them would be (even) more helpful if they were reworded. I’m not including specific instances of the issue because I don’t want to single anyone out. My guess is that most of us have said something like this, as I certainly have! Why “EA should” is an unhelpful phrasing “EA should” is often vague. Statements like this can be interpreted in too many ways, which makes them less helpful than they could be. For instance, “EA should do more to help with COVID” could mean anything from “the EA movement has underestimated the severity of COVID” to “it is your duty as an EA to help with COVID” (and beyond). Vagueness also makes you much harder to argue with, and I believe that being easy to argue with is a virtue. Responsibility gets diffused. Nobody naturally thinks “oh, you’re telling me that I should do this,” and so fewer people take ownership of the issue. Suppose that you’ve discovered a very significant gap in EA work. If you write a post like “EA should do more to help with COVID,” you might mean, “EA funders should fund vaccine distribution” or maybe “someone with operations skills should improve vaccine distribution systems.” With these rewordings, grantmakers or people with ops skills might sit up and notice that this post or message is for them. (It’s almost a passive formulation.) Also: You are part of EA. This might not apply in all situations, but— if you think that, say, 80,000 Hours should have a problem profile for a problem that they’ve neglected to list, you might just want to write a version of the problem profile and publish it. Or, if you think someone should start a PA Agency, you could try to directly make that happen. (Related EA Forum tag.) Specifying the statement could help you check that it’s true or identify a more specific bottleneck. Suppose you find yourself saying, “EA should rely more on personal assistants.” Then you think to yourself, “ok, I guess I’m saying EA grantmakers should be willing to fund you for PAs.” So you go check, and see that apparently, grantmakers are funding PAs. So maybe you think to yourself, “But there are still lots of EAs without personal assistants who should probably still have some. Maybe 80K should recommend that people go into that as a career path!” And you check, and see that that, too has happened. I don’t know what the real bottleneck here is, or if it’s even a problem, but it’s possible that at this point you conclude that either there are serious coordination issues (in which case maybe you’ll write a post about how valuable it would be if someone could coordinate a personal assistant service for EAs) or that there’s just not that much demand for one reason or another. Types of “EA should” moments and how we can turn them into something more useful (examples) Below are some example “EA should” statements and their translations (rephrasing the statements without using “EA should”), sorted by the types of meanings they would have. Someone in the EA community should do a specific thing “EA should have a PA agency!” Might become “Someone (maybe you!) should start an EA PA agency!” “EA should fund XYZ” Might turn into “the Long-Term Future Fund should fund ...