EA - Introducing the Effective Altruism Addiction Recovery Group by Devin Kalish

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: Introducing the Effective Altruism Addiction Recovery Group, published by Devin Kalish on July 20, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Since posting my article on alcoholism, I have, somewhat in the background, been trying to organize an EA recovery group with a few other interested people. This group would, ideally, be broadly defined and include alcoholism, which so far seems like the most common problem, but also other addictions, either to drugs, or more behavioral ones such as eating disorders. We have not had any meetings yet, but I have set up a Discord server which can be accessed here:Based on a poll I set up, I am leaning towards 5:00 PM EST July 25th as our initial meeting time. This meeting is meant more to discuss logistics and administration than to be a conventional group therapy meeting of any kind, although it might drift in that direction at points as well. So far I have not set any explicit rules, and don't want to before our first meeting, when I can get input from others. Given this, I am hoping no one does anything particularly ban-worthy before this time, as I will have to judge/get input on a case by case basis, and will prefer to start with warnings barring obviously intentional bad behavior. As a starting point, if you are EA or EA adjacent and have an addiction like one of those mentioned in the beginning, consider yourself invited.When the final rules are put in place I will likely more formally restrict it, and in the meantime I would prefer that you only come onto the server if you are, suspect you are, or have struggled with an addiction in the past. I will most likely also be welcoming to people with professional mental/community health experience, but before discussing the rules in a meeting, I would prefer that people who have a more impersonal interest in this project don't join right away. I do not plan to enforce this before the rules are set however, so long as you behave well. I am only posting this link while the project is still so half-baked because I would prefer to have more people present at an initial meeting where important matters of this sort are decided, rather than a small handful of the people who will eventually want to join. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me through my DMs.Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org