EA - I want to read more stories by and about the people of Effective Altruism by Gemma Paterson

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: I want to read more stories by and about the people of Effective Altruism, published by Gemma Paterson on May 12, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.TL; DRI want to read more stories by and about the people of the Effective Altruism movementBut like, fun ones, not CVsI’ve added a tag for EA origin stories and tagged a bunch of relevant posts from the forumIf I’ve missed some, please tag themThe community experiences tag has a lot of others that don’t quite fitI think it is important to emphasise the personal in the effective altruism movement - you never know if your story is enough to connect with someone (especially if you don’t fit the stereotypical EA mold)I would also be very interested in reading folks’ answers to the “What is your current plan to improve the world?” question from the EA Global application - it’s really helpful to see other people’s thought processes (you can read mine here)Why?At least for me, what grabbed and kept my attention when I first heard about EA were the stories of people on the ground trying to do effective altruism.The audacity of a group of students looking at the enormity of suffering in the world but then pushing past that overwhelm. Recognising that they could use their privileges to make a dent if they really gave it a go.The folks behind Charity Entrepreneurship who didn’t stop at one highly effective charity but decided to jump straight into making an non-profit incubator to multiply their impact - building out, in my opinion, some of the coolest projects in the movement.I love that the 80,000 hours podcast takes the concept behind Big Talk seriouslyIt’s absurd but amazing!I love the ethos of practicality within the movement. It isn’t about purity, it isn’t about perfection, it’s about actually changing the world.These are the people I’d back to build a robust Theory of Change that might just move us towards Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space CommunismMaybe that google doc already exists?I have never been the kind of person who had role models. I have always been a bit too cynical to put people on a pedestal. I had respect for successful people and tried to learn what I could from them but I didn’t have heroes.But my response to finding the EA movement was, “Fuck, these people are cool.”I think there is a problem with myth making and hero worshipping within EA. I do agree that it is healthier to Live Without Idols. However, I don’t think we should live without stories.The stories I’m more interested in are the personal ones. Of people actually going out and living their values. Examples of trades offs that real people make that allow them to be ambitiously altruistic in a way that suits them. That show that it is fine to care about lots of things. That it is okay to make changes in your life when you get more or better information.I think about this post a lot because I agree that if people think that “doing effective altruism” means they have to live like monks and change their whole lives then they’ll just reject it. Making big changes is hard. People aren’t perfect.I can trace huge number of positive changes in my life to my decision to take EA seriously but realistically it was my personal IRL and parasocial connections to the people of EA that gave me the space and support to make these big changes in my life. In the footnotes and in this post about my EA story, I’ve included a list of podcasts, blog posts and other media by people within EA that were particularly influential and meaningful to me (if you made them then thank you