Thanks for the comment and the link to the review paper!
I think most people, including researchers, don't have a good handle on what self-esteem is, or at least what truly raises or lowers it - I would expect the effect of praise to be weak, but the effect of promoting responsibility for one's emotions and actions to be strong. The closest to my views on self-esteem that I've found so far are those in N. Branden's "Six Pillars of Self-Esteem" - the six pillars are living consciously, self-acceptance, self-responsibility, self-assertiveness, living purposefully, and personal integrity.
Unfortunately, because many researchers don't follow this conception of self-esteem, I tend not to trust much research on the real-world effects of self-esteem. Honestly, though, I haven't done a hard search for any research that uses something close to my conception of self-esteem, and your comment has basically pointed out that I should get on that, so thank you!
The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness and an article about it:
Thank you for sharing some of your struggle. I’ve done a fair amount of personal development work in my life, and it greatly helped me get over work-related stress. Perhaps some of the references in this post could help you with your situation.
In particular, I’d recommend Guttormsen’s udemy course, which you can often get on sale for <$20. I hope that helps some.
Thanks for your post. I’m not exactly part of the EA “community” - I’ve never met someone who was an EA in person, but, at least from people’s online presences, it seems like EA leaders are generally thoughtful, earnest, and open to feedback. I hope your post will be some feedback they’ll consider.
From what I’ve seen of this community so far, I suspect that some EA’s reluctance to support your work could stem from a couple of things:
Note that these are just my own “outsider” impressions of EA, and I could very well be mistaken, but I hope this comment might be helpful to both you and EA’s in your efforts to do more good.
Thanks. I don't know the answer to that, although a quick search didn't yield anything too promising. I don't believe the concept of self-esteem as being primarily about personal responsibility has really caught on, so perhaps it would be better to look for studies on interventions to raise personal responsibility.
Thanks for the interesting post - definitely gives one some things to think about!
Here’s another point to consider: depending on the costs, one of the most effective interventions may be to raise the self-esteem levels of people in high income countries. Note: I’m operating under a model in which self-esteem is determined primarily by personal responsibility level, first for one’s emotions and then one’s actions (see “The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem” by N. Branden). Raising people’s self-esteem levels should raise their self-reported life satisfactions, and also likely have secondary effects on those they interact with. In addition, people who have higher self-esteem due to being more responsible are more likely to practice responsibility in terms of human and animal suffering (as by donating to causes and/or going vegetarian/vegan, with people from high income countries having more potential impact here). Of course, raising self-esteem levels in low income countries could also be quite beneficial - for instance, higher self-esteem people may be more of a driving force for raising health standards in their countries.
Thanks for the interesting post. I'm working on something like what you describe in your "Going Forward" section: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gz7eSELFcRYJLdnkE/towards-an-ethics-calculator-for-use-by-an-agi
Planning to post an update about my progress on lesswrong soon.
American Philosophical Association (APA) announces two $10,000 AI2050 Prizes for philosophical work related to AI, with June 23, 2024 deadline:
https://dailynous.com/2024/04/25/apa-creates-new-prizes-for-philosophical-research-on-ai/
https://www.apaonline.org/page/ai2050
https://ai2050.schmidtsciences.org/hard-problems/