And this all-things-considered belief is what guides my research and career decisions.
A few arguments for letting your independent impression guide your research and career decisions instead:
If everyone in EA follows the strategy of letting their independent impression guide their research and career decisions, our distribution of research and career decisions will look like the aggregate of everyone’s independent impressions, which is a decent first approximation for what our all-things-considered belief should be as a community. By contrast, if everyone acts based on a similar all-things-considered belief, we could overweight the modal scenario.
You have more detailed knowledge of your independent impression than your all-things-considered belief. If you act on your all-things-considered belief, you might take some action and then later talk to a person you were deferring to in taking that action, and realize that a better understanding of their view actually implies that the action you took wasn’t particularly helpful.
Working based on your independent impression could also be a comparative advantage if it feels more motivating since your path to impact seems more intuitively plausible.
IMO, good rules of thumb are:
Carefully consider other peoples’ beliefs, but don’t update too much on them if you don’t find the arguments for them persuasive. (There’s a big difference between “people are unconcerned about unrecoverable dystopia because of a specific persuasive argument I haven’t heard yet” and “people are unconcerned about unrecoverable dystopia because they haven’t thought about it much and it doesn’t seem like a fashionable thing to be concerned about”.)
Defer to your all-things-considered belief in research/career decisions if there’s an incentive to do so (e.g. if you can get a job working on the fashionable thing, but not the thing you independently think is most helpful).
I agree with your second and third arguments and your two rules of thumb. (And I thought about those second and third arguments when posting this and felt tempted to note them, but ultimately decided to not in order to keep this more concise and keep chugging with my other work. So I’m glad you raised them in your comment.)
I partially disagree with your first argument, for three main reasons:
People have very different comparative advantages (in other words, people’s labour is way lessfungible than their donations).
Imagine Alice’s independent impression is that X is super important, but she trusts Bob’s judgement a fair bit and knows B thinks Y is super important, and Alice is way more suited to doing Y. Meanwhile, Bob trusts Alice’s judgement a fair bit. And they both know all of this. In some cases, it’ll be best from everyone’s perspective if Alice does Y and Bob does X. (This is sort of analogous to moral trade, but here the differences in views aren’t just moral.)
Not in all cases! Largely for the other two reasons you note. All else held constant, it’s good for people to work on things they themselves really understand and buy the case for. But I think this can be outweighed by other sources of comparative advantage.
As another analogy, imagine how much the economy would be impeded if people decided whether they overall think plumbing or politics or or physics research are the most important thing in general and then they pursue that, regardless of their personal skill profiles.
I also think it makes sense for some people to specialise much more than others for working out what our all-things-considered beliefs should be on specific things.
Some people should do macrostrategy reseach, others should learn how US politics works and what we should do about that, others should learn about specific cause areas, etc.
I think it would be very inefficient and ineffective to try to get everyone to have well-informed independent impressions of all topics that are highly relevant to the question “What career/research decisions should I make?”
I think this becomes all the more true as the EA community grows, as we have more people focused on more specific things and on doingthings (vs more high-level prioritisation research and things like that), and as we move into more and more areas.
So I don’t really agree that “our distribution of research and career decisions will look like the aggregate of everyone’s independent impressions, which is a decent first approximation for what our all-things-considered belief should be as a community”, or at least I don’t think that’s a healthy way for our community to be.
I think it’s true that, “if everyone acts based on a similar all-things-considered belief, we could overweight the modal scenario” (emphasis added), but I think that need not happen. We should try to track the uncertainty in our all-things-considered beliefs, and we should take a portfolio approach.
(I wrote this comment quickly, and this is a big and complex topic where much more could be said. I really don’t want readers to round this off as me saying something like “Everyone should just do what 80,000 Hours says without thinking or questioning it”.)
We should try to track the uncertainty in our all-things-considered beliefs, and we should take a portfolio approach.
It’s not enough to just track the uncertainty, you also have to have visibility into current resource allocation. The “defer if there’s an incentive to do so” idea helps here, because if there’s an incentive, that suggests someone with such visibility thinks there is an under-allocation.
A few arguments for letting your independent impression guide your research and career decisions instead:
If everyone in EA follows the strategy of letting their independent impression guide their research and career decisions, our distribution of research and career decisions will look like the aggregate of everyone’s independent impressions, which is a decent first approximation for what our all-things-considered belief should be as a community. By contrast, if everyone acts based on a similar all-things-considered belief, we could overweight the modal scenario.
You have more detailed knowledge of your independent impression than your all-things-considered belief. If you act on your all-things-considered belief, you might take some action and then later talk to a person you were deferring to in taking that action, and realize that a better understanding of their view actually implies that the action you took wasn’t particularly helpful.
Working based on your independent impression could also be a comparative advantage if it feels more motivating since your path to impact seems more intuitively plausible.
IMO, good rules of thumb are:
Carefully consider other peoples’ beliefs, but don’t update too much on them if you don’t find the arguments for them persuasive. (There’s a big difference between “people are unconcerned about unrecoverable dystopia because of a specific persuasive argument I haven’t heard yet” and “people are unconcerned about unrecoverable dystopia because they haven’t thought about it much and it doesn’t seem like a fashionable thing to be concerned about”.)
Defer to your all-things-considered belief in research/career decisions if there’s an incentive to do so (e.g. if you can get a job working on the fashionable thing, but not the thing you independently think is most helpful).
I agree with your second and third arguments and your two rules of thumb. (And I thought about those second and third arguments when posting this and felt tempted to note them, but ultimately decided to not in order to keep this more concise and keep chugging with my other work. So I’m glad you raised them in your comment.)
I partially disagree with your first argument, for three main reasons:
People have very different comparative advantages (in other words, people’s labour is way less fungible than their donations).
Imagine Alice’s independent impression is that X is super important, but she trusts Bob’s judgement a fair bit and knows B thinks Y is super important, and Alice is way more suited to doing Y. Meanwhile, Bob trusts Alice’s judgement a fair bit. And they both know all of this. In some cases, it’ll be best from everyone’s perspective if Alice does Y and Bob does X. (This is sort of analogous to moral trade, but here the differences in views aren’t just moral.)
Not in all cases! Largely for the other two reasons you note. All else held constant, it’s good for people to work on things they themselves really understand and buy the case for. But I think this can be outweighed by other sources of comparative advantage.
As another analogy, imagine how much the economy would be impeded if people decided whether they overall think plumbing or politics or or physics research are the most important thing in general and then they pursue that, regardless of their personal skill profiles.
I also think it makes sense for some people to specialise much more than others for working out what our all-things-considered beliefs should be on specific things.
Some people should do macrostrategy reseach, others should learn how US politics works and what we should do about that, others should learn about specific cause areas, etc.
I think it would be very inefficient and ineffective to try to get everyone to have well-informed independent impressions of all topics that are highly relevant to the question “What career/research decisions should I make?”
I think this becomes all the more true as the EA community grows, as we have more people focused on more specific things and on doing things (vs more high-level prioritisation research and things like that), and as we move into more and more areas.
So I don’t really agree that “our distribution of research and career decisions will look like the aggregate of everyone’s independent impressions, which is a decent first approximation for what our all-things-considered belief should be as a community”, or at least I don’t think that’s a healthy way for our community to be.
See also
I think it’s true that, “if everyone acts based on a similar all-things-considered belief, we could overweight the modal scenario” (emphasis added), but I think that need not happen. We should try to track the uncertainty in our all-things-considered beliefs, and we should take a portfolio approach.
(I wrote this comment quickly, and this is a big and complex topic where much more could be said. I really don’t want readers to round this off as me saying something like “Everyone should just do what 80,000 Hours says without thinking or questioning it”.)
Good points.
It’s not enough to just track the uncertainty, you also have to have visibility into current resource allocation. The “defer if there’s an incentive to do so” idea helps here, because if there’s an incentive, that suggests someone with such visibility thinks there is an under-allocation.