EA - Invisible impact loss (and why we can be too error-averse) by Lizka

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: Invisible impact loss (and why we can be too error-averse), published by Lizka on October 6, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TL;DR: It’s hard to really feel sad about impact that doesn’t happen, but it’s easy to feel sad about mistakes in existing work. This is bad because we sometimes have a choice between making a good-but-small thing or a big-but-slightly-worse thing, and the mismatch in our emotional reactions to the downsides of the two options turns into a cognitive bias that harms our decision-making. This can make us too error-averse and err too much on the side of just not doing things at all. For instance, if I’m choosing between making five imperfect cookies or one perfect cookie, I might notice the imperfections more than the four missing cookies, whereas it’s often better to just make more imperfect cookies. In some cases, we should be quite wary of mistakes. I outline where I think we’re too error-averse and where error-aversion is appropriate below. Summary of my concrete suggestions: To counteract fear of criticism, foster a culture of celebrating successes and exciting work. To notice invisible impact loss, have the phrase “invisible impact loss” rattling inside your head, and try to quantify decisions that are prone to such errors. Fight perfectionism; lean into agile project management, start half-assing, and try to determine what your real goals are. Preamble: What sparked this thought When I was on the Events Team at CEA, we had a conversation about whether to approximately double EA Global capacity at the last minute (a few weeks before the actual event) in order to admit more people who met the admissions bar. (This was the most recent conference for which capacity was a problem.) I remember starting off skeptical about the idea. After all, There would be more logistics issues; lunch lines would be long, etc. We’d have to move to two venues, which is awkward. People would have to walk from one venue to another to get to a different meeting or session. Doubling would put a lot of strain on the team, which would mean we’d be worse at responding to people, communicating things like the schedule or important COVID information, catching awesome ways to improve the conference. And in general, the experience of the average attendee would probably be worse. But someone else on the team made me realize a big thing I wasn’t fully tracking: About 500 more people who met the admissions bar would get to experience the conference. However much impact the default conference would produce — sparked collaborations, connections for years to come, inspirations for new projects, positive career changes — there would be about double that. Although the whole conversation was sparked by the idea that we had way more people we wanted to admit than slots for attendees, I wasn’t internalizing the benefit we would miss out on if we didn’t double. I couldn’t viscerally feel the loss of impact from a smaller but near-perfect conference the way I could feel my aversion to the various issues I could imagine with the bigger conference. The impact loss was invisible to me. I now actively try to notice invisible impact loss. I’ve noticed discussions on the Forum that miss this, and worry that it’s stunting work that could be extremely valuable, so I decided to write this post. Note: EA Global conferences have changed since then. You can see some discussion of this here. I should also note that the conference didn’t end up facing many of the issues I worried about while we were deciding whether to double. What causes this phenomenon? How can we push back? (Suggestions) Here are some factors I think are at play, and ideas for what we can do about them. (Please add to this in the comments!) See the summary at the top. 1. Fear of criticism We’re much, much more likely to be c...