EA - Crisis Boot Camp: lessons learned and implications for EA by Nicole Ross

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: Crisis Boot Camp: lessons learned and implications for EA, published by Nicole Ross on June 24, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Over the last 7+ months at work, I've needed to handle or support several crises (I'm on the US EV board and, in normal times, head of the community health and special projects team). It's been a crisis-handling boot camp, so I want to share my lessons learned.I expect to learn more in the coming months, and it's plausible that longer-term ramifications could change my lessons learned, but I wanted to share my reflections at this point.My reason for writing this: I generally think that at least some of us (maybe many of us) may go through many more crises and that the world has a decent chance of getting even crazier due to AI. I want us to learn from crises and make updates to be better prepared for next time. I'm worried about people returning to normal without making relevant updates on many levels. Hopefully, some of my lessons learned will contribute to people making updates and folks being more prepared next time!Handling yourself in a crisis:Expand your thinking1. Hold multiple hypotheses at onceGenerally, people struggle to hold more than one or two hypotheses simultaneously, and this struggle seems even stronger during a crisis.The world is complicated, and being confident about what's true is tough. When people make plans, though, they often focus only on the hypothesis that they think is most likely, or at best, their top two hypotheses.For a hypothetical example, imagine the following scenario:You're working on getting life-sustaining and valuable resources to your allies in a place with a lot of organized crime. Pretty frequently, your supplies are stolen. You suspect Person X is behind it. One day he disappears, and a lot of supplies are missing. You need to move to the next location to get the supplies in the right hands. What should you do?Create multiple hypotheses! You are assuming X is behind the theft. In that world, you might want to move on without him and think through things like "Does he know where we're going to be next? Is he going to steal more? How should we update our security measures?".Other hypotheses you should consider:Maybe he was kidnapped, in which case it would be pretty shitty to leave him.Perhaps he was working with someone else. Are they on your team too?It could be a coincidence, and he didn't show up for another reason (e.g., incompetence, sickness).Each of these hypotheses has different likelihoods; sometimes, hypotheses are not mutually exclusive. E.g., X might be behind the theft and working with others on your team; X may be incompetent and indirectly connected to the theft.In my experience, people focus on only 1-2 hypotheses and hold those too tightly, even if they give lip service to multiple hypotheses. You should be looking for evidence for and against many different hypotheses and endeavor to track updates to many of them. Two particularly salient implications of this are:If you don't hold multiple hypotheses at once, you might jump to a conclusion, which makes it less likely you make the best decision.If you don't consider what you'd do in different worlds, you miss cheap and/or important ways to mitigate harm or realize the upside.How to do it: I've found it helpful to literally write down several hypotheses. Then I take a step back and ask myself:Would I be surprised if none of these are true?What worlds are these hypotheses neglecting to consider?What's missing?Usually, there are more relevant hypotheses to write down and track.2. Think beyond black-and-white binariesIt's easy to default to thinking in black-and-white binaries when the array of paths available to you is way more expansive.For example, imagine that you have to navigate a disagreement bet...