EA - Announcing VIVID: A new EA organization aspiring to scale effective self-improvement and reflection by GidiKadosh

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: Announcing VIVID: A new EA organization aspiring to scale effective self-improvement & reflection, published by GidiKadosh on October 19, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary We’re excited to announce VIVID - a new organization aspiring to scale effective self-improvement & reflection. With an investment of $1.75M from the Future Fund regranting program, we’re building an app that helps individuals find the most effective ways to remove internal obstacles. Over the course of the next two years, VIVID will focus mainly on EAs. Our new app is available here. The app is soon coming out of beta phase, so we’re looking for feedback, positive and negative! You can send feedback easily by taking a screenshot anywhere on the app. Overview There is an inherent problem with self-change advice. On the one hand, it has to be generic because it must be applicable to a wide range of subjects and individuals. On the other hand, individuals can’t really apply the generic advice as it is - they need to complete the last mile of customization in order to apply it.This is the point of failure of many good theories and best practices that are found in self-help books, academic articles, and even advice from therapists - they are often lost in adaptation. There are two possible solutions to this problem. The first is to make customization easier. The second is to assume that we don’t need to create all of the possible customized self-change plans that could ever exist, but rather just find the most effective ones for common problems. For instance, find the five most effective plans for the specific context of impostor syndrome within the specific context of EA. How can we find them? And do so for thousands of other common use cases? This is why we started VIVID. The VIVID app helps individuals find the most effective ways to remove internal obstacles, by allowing extensive customization and self-testing, and by empowering wellbeing professionals to assist in this process.With VIVID, individuals continuously self-improve by working on multiple plans - each plan addressing a mindset that underlies an internal obstacle. One of VIVID's cofounders is Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar - a leading expert in positive psychology, who taught two of Harvard's most popular courses of all time. Ben-Shahar is the author of several worldwide best-selling books, and his upcoming book discusses the methodology of VIVID. Theory of change Our theory of change is divided into two main parts: Short-term: Assist promising individuals in overcoming internal obstacles. This means faster progress on the world's most pressing problems when used by high-impact individuals like EAs. VIVID is meant to grow better at this point over time - the main idea behind its design is that it learns over time which self-change methods are most effective for each category (e.g. self-esteem, guilt, friendship, etc.), and for which user profiles. Long-term: The a priori chances of projects such as this becoming widespread are low (but we’re optimistic!). However, the upsides are stellar. We could: Broadly promote the value of self-reflection. We believe that this point is of high importance, particularly in terms of mitigating risks associated with value lock-in (this idea is explained in WWOTF, ch. 3, and we will share a more thorough write-up about this soon). Accelerate progress in the wellbeing field and align it with large-scale evidence. In other words, we may discover scalable methods to improve wellbeing and individual potential in dozens of common use cases, relevant both to high-income and low-income countries. There are very few interventions that aim to improve wellbeing at scale, which is generally important - but depending on your assumptions regarding the current baseline of wellbeing, it might be even more important. Fig...