I have two different responses (somewhat in tension with each other):
Finding “everyday” things to do will necessitate identifying what’s good to do in various situations which aren’t the highest-value activity an individual can be undertaking
This is an important part of deepening the cultural understanding of longtermism, rather than have all of the discussion be about what’s good to do in a particular set of activities that’s had strong selection pressure on it
This is also important for giving people inroads to be able to practice different aspects of longtermism
I think it’s a bit like how informal EA discourse often touches on how to do everyday things efficiently (e.g. “here are tips for batching your grocery shopping”) -- it’s not that these are the most important things to be efficient about, but that all-else-equal it’s good, and it’s also very good to give people micro-scale opportunities to put efficiency-thinking into practice
Note however that my examples would be better if they had more texture:
Discussion of the nuance of better or worse versions of the activities discussed could be quite helpful for conveying the nuance of what is good longtermist action
To the extent that these are far from the highest value activities those people could be undertaking, it seems important to be up-front about that: keeping tabs on what’s relatively important is surely an important part of the (longtermist) EA culture
I’m not sure how much I agree with “probably much less positive than some other things that could be done even by “regular people’, even once there are millions or tens of millions of longtermists”
I’d love to hear your ideas for things that you think would be much more positive for those people in that world
My gut feeling is that they are at the level of “competitive uses of time/attention (for people who aren’t bought into reorienting their whole lives) by the time there are tens of millions of longtermists”
It seems compatible with that feeling that there could be some higher-priority things for them to be doing as well—e.g. maybe some way of keeping immersed in longtermist culture, by being a member of some group—but that those reach saturation or diminishing returns
I think I might be miscalibrated about this; think it would be easier to discuss with some concrete competition on the table
Of course to the extent that these actually are arguably competitive actions, if I believe my first point, maybe I should have been looking for even more everyday situations
e.g. could ask “what is the good longtermist way to approach going to the shops? meeting a romantic partner’s parents for the first time? deciding how much to push yourself to work when you’re feeling a bit unwell?”
Ah, your first point makes me realise that at times I mistook the purpose of this “everyday longtermism” idea/project as more similar to finding Task Ys than it really is. I now remember that you didn’t really frame this as “What can even ‘regular people’ do, even if they’re not in key positions or at key junctures?” (If that was the framing, I might be more inclined to emphasise donating effectively, as well as things like voting effectively—not just for politicians with good characters—and meeting with politicians to advocate for effective policies.)
Instead, I think you’re talking about what anyone can do (including but not limited to very dedicated and talented people) in “everyday situations”, perhaps alongside other, more effective actions.
I think at times I was aware of that, but times I forgot it. That’s probably just on me, rather than an issue with the clarity of this post or project. But I guess perhaps misinterpretations along those lines are a failure mode to look out for and make extra efforts to prevent?
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As for concrete examples, off the top of my head, the key thing is just focusing more on donating more and more effectively. This could also include finding ways to earn or save more money. I think that those actions are accessible to large numbers of people, would remain useful at scale (though with diminishing returns, of course), and intersect with lots of everyday situations (e.g., lots of everyday situations could allow opportunities to save money, or to spend less time on X in order to spend more time working out where to donate).
To be somewhat concrete: In a scenario with 5 million longtermists, if we choose a somewhat typical teacher who wants to make the world better, I think they’d do more good by focusing a bit more on donating more and more effectively than by focusing a bit more on trying to cause their students to see themselves as moral actors and think clearly. (This is partly based on me expecting that it’s really hard to have a big, lasting impact on those variables as a teacher, which in turn in is loosely informed by research I read and experiences I had as a teacher. Though I do expect one could have some impact on those variables, and I think for some people it’s worth spending some effort on that.)
That said, I think it makes sense to use other examples as well as donating more and more effectively. Especially now that I remember what the purpose of this project actually is. But I am a bit surprised that donating more and more effectively wasn’t one of the examples in your list? Is there a reason for that?
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I think it’s a bit like how informal EA discourse often touches on how to do everyday things efficiently (e.g. “here are tips for batching your grocery shopping”)
I feel like that’s a bit different. If I get a dedicated EA to do everyday things more efficiently, it’s fairly obvious how that could result in more hours or dollars going towards very high impact activities. (I don’t expect every hour/dollar saved to go towards very high impact activities, but a fair portion might.)
Perhaps you mean that EAs sometimes talk about this stuff in e.g. a Medium article aimed at the general public, perhaps partly with the intention of showing people how EA-style thinking is useful in a domain they already care about and thereby making them more likely to move towards EA in future. I do see how that is similar to the everyday longtermism project and examples.
But still, in that case the increased everyday efficiency of these people could fairly directly cause more hours/dollars to go towards high impact activities, if these people do themselves become EAs/EA-aligned. So it still feels a bit different.
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I’m not sure how important or valid any of these points are, and, as noted, overall I really like the ideas in this post.
I believe the framing in the 80,000 Hours podcast was something like when we run out of targeted things to do. But if we include global warming, depending on your temperature increase limit, we could easily spend $1 trillion per year. If people in developed countries make around $30,000 a year and they donate 10% of that, that would require about 300 million people. And of course there are many other global catastrophic risks. So I think it’s going to be a long time before we run out of targeted things to do. But it could be good to do some combination of everyday longtermism and targeted interventions.
I spent a little while thinking about this. My guess is that of the activities I list:
Alice and Bob’s efforts look comparable to donating (in external benefit/effort) when the longtermist portfolio is around $100B-$1T/year
Clara’s efforts looks comparable to donating when the longtermist portfolio is around $1B-$10B/year
Diya’s efforts look comparable to donating when the longtermist portfolio is around $10B-$100B/year
Elmo’s efforts are harder to say because they’re closer to directly trying to grow longtermist support, so the value diminishes as the existing portfolio gets larger just as for donations, and it more depends on underlying quality
All of those numbers are super crude and I might well disagree with myself if I came back later and estimated again. They also depend on lots of details (like how good the individuals are at executing on those strategies).
Perhaps most importantly, they’re excluding the internal benefits—if these activities are (as I suggest) partly good for practicing some longtermist judgement, then I’d really want to see them as a complement to donation rather than just a competitor.
I appreciate the pushback!
I have two different responses (somewhat in tension with each other):
Finding “everyday” things to do will necessitate identifying what’s good to do in various situations which aren’t the highest-value activity an individual can be undertaking
This is an important part of deepening the cultural understanding of longtermism, rather than have all of the discussion be about what’s good to do in a particular set of activities that’s had strong selection pressure on it
This is also important for giving people inroads to be able to practice different aspects of longtermism
I think it’s a bit like how informal EA discourse often touches on how to do everyday things efficiently (e.g. “here are tips for batching your grocery shopping”) -- it’s not that these are the most important things to be efficient about, but that all-else-equal it’s good, and it’s also very good to give people micro-scale opportunities to put efficiency-thinking into practice
Note however that my examples would be better if they had more texture:
Discussion of the nuance of better or worse versions of the activities discussed could be quite helpful for conveying the nuance of what is good longtermist action
To the extent that these are far from the highest value activities those people could be undertaking, it seems important to be up-front about that: keeping tabs on what’s relatively important is surely an important part of the (longtermist) EA culture
I’m not sure how much I agree with “probably much less positive than some other things that could be done even by “regular people’, even once there are millions or tens of millions of longtermists”
I’d love to hear your ideas for things that you think would be much more positive for those people in that world
My gut feeling is that they are at the level of “competitive uses of time/attention (for people who aren’t bought into reorienting their whole lives) by the time there are tens of millions of longtermists”
It seems compatible with that feeling that there could be some higher-priority things for them to be doing as well—e.g. maybe some way of keeping immersed in longtermist culture, by being a member of some group—but that those reach saturation or diminishing returns
I think I might be miscalibrated about this; think it would be easier to discuss with some concrete competition on the table
Of course to the extent that these actually are arguably competitive actions, if I believe my first point, maybe I should have been looking for even more everyday situations
e.g. could ask “what is the good longtermist way to approach going to the shops? meeting a romantic partner’s parents for the first time? deciding how much to push yourself to work when you’re feeling a bit unwell?”
Ah, your first point makes me realise that at times I mistook the purpose of this “everyday longtermism” idea/project as more similar to finding Task Ys than it really is. I now remember that you didn’t really frame this as “What can even ‘regular people’ do, even if they’re not in key positions or at key junctures?” (If that was the framing, I might be more inclined to emphasise donating effectively, as well as things like voting effectively—not just for politicians with good characters—and meeting with politicians to advocate for effective policies.)
Instead, I think you’re talking about what anyone can do (including but not limited to very dedicated and talented people) in “everyday situations”, perhaps alongside other, more effective actions.
I think at times I was aware of that, but times I forgot it. That’s probably just on me, rather than an issue with the clarity of this post or project. But I guess perhaps misinterpretations along those lines are a failure mode to look out for and make extra efforts to prevent?
---
As for concrete examples, off the top of my head, the key thing is just focusing more on donating more and more effectively. This could also include finding ways to earn or save more money. I think that those actions are accessible to large numbers of people, would remain useful at scale (though with diminishing returns, of course), and intersect with lots of everyday situations (e.g., lots of everyday situations could allow opportunities to save money, or to spend less time on X in order to spend more time working out where to donate).
To be somewhat concrete: In a scenario with 5 million longtermists, if we choose a somewhat typical teacher who wants to make the world better, I think they’d do more good by focusing a bit more on donating more and more effectively than by focusing a bit more on trying to cause their students to see themselves as moral actors and think clearly. (This is partly based on me expecting that it’s really hard to have a big, lasting impact on those variables as a teacher, which in turn in is loosely informed by research I read and experiences I had as a teacher. Though I do expect one could have some impact on those variables, and I think for some people it’s worth spending some effort on that.)
That said, I think it makes sense to use other examples as well as donating more and more effectively. Especially now that I remember what the purpose of this project actually is. But I am a bit surprised that donating more and more effectively wasn’t one of the examples in your list? Is there a reason for that?
---
I feel like that’s a bit different. If I get a dedicated EA to do everyday things more efficiently, it’s fairly obvious how that could result in more hours or dollars going towards very high impact activities. (I don’t expect every hour/dollar saved to go towards very high impact activities, but a fair portion might.)
Perhaps you mean that EAs sometimes talk about this stuff in e.g. a Medium article aimed at the general public, perhaps partly with the intention of showing people how EA-style thinking is useful in a domain they already care about and thereby making them more likely to move towards EA in future. I do see how that is similar to the everyday longtermism project and examples.
But still, in that case the increased everyday efficiency of these people could fairly directly cause more hours/dollars to go towards high impact activities, if these people do themselves become EAs/EA-aligned. So it still feels a bit different.
---
I’m not sure how important or valid any of these points are, and, as noted, overall I really like the ideas in this post.
I believe the framing in the 80,000 Hours podcast was something like when we run out of targeted things to do. But if we include global warming, depending on your temperature increase limit, we could easily spend $1 trillion per year. If people in developed countries make around $30,000 a year and they donate 10% of that, that would require about 300 million people. And of course there are many other global catastrophic risks. So I think it’s going to be a long time before we run out of targeted things to do. But it could be good to do some combination of everyday longtermism and targeted interventions.
Agree—I think an interesting challenge is “when does this become better than donating 10% to the top marginal charity?”
I spent a little while thinking about this. My guess is that of the activities I list:
Alice and Bob’s efforts look comparable to donating (in external benefit/effort) when the longtermist portfolio is around $100B-$1T/year
Clara’s efforts looks comparable to donating when the longtermist portfolio is around $1B-$10B/year
Diya’s efforts look comparable to donating when the longtermist portfolio is around $10B-$100B/year
Elmo’s efforts are harder to say because they’re closer to directly trying to grow longtermist support, so the value diminishes as the existing portfolio gets larger just as for donations, and it more depends on underlying quality
All of those numbers are super crude and I might well disagree with myself if I came back later and estimated again. They also depend on lots of details (like how good the individuals are at executing on those strategies).
Perhaps most importantly, they’re excluding the internal benefits—if these activities are (as I suggest) partly good for practicing some longtermist judgement, then I’d really want to see them as a complement to donation rather than just a competitor.