While I very much liked this post overall, I think I feel some half-formed scepticism or aversion to some of the specific ideas/âexamples.
In particular, when reading your list of âexamples of everyday longtermism in pursuit of this proxyâ, I found myself feeling something like the following:
These actions do seem net positive, but also probably much less positive than some other things that could be done even by âregular peopleâ, even once there are millions or tens of millions of longtermists. So I would be happy about people doing these things, but I also feel a bit worried that pointing to them as good examples would reduce how often the more valuable actions are done.
This could occur because individual people then spend too much time/âenergy trying to do the sort of actions in those examples, reducing the time/âenergy they devote to higher value actions
Or it could occur via the package of EA/âlongtermist ideas itself becoming âdilutedâ
EA/âlongtermism come to be seen too much as âthe movement promoting actions like [those examples]â. This could reduce how much it inclines new people towards higher value actions. It could also perhaps reduce how much it attracts certain people who could be quite impactful but wouldnât be excited by the âdilutedâ version of the movement.
Or it could occur via a psychological process along the lines of people feeling theyâve hit their quota from altruism once theyâve done the sort of things in those examples, and thus not being motivated to do more/âother things
I seem to recall that thereâs at least some evidence that something like this happens in the context of climate change: something like that, if people take small personal actions, that then reduces their inclination to do other things, even if the other things would be more important
But I canât remember where I read this, and I donât know if it was just one study vs being settled science
This all seems more likely/âworrisome given that, compared to some higher value actions people couldâve taken, the sort of actions in your examples are things that are probably easier to do, closer to what people mightâve done anyway, and more likely to make one feel virtuous/âproud (given that they more obviously align with commonsense morality)
But Iâm not sure how important these worries are. And maybe they can all be readily addressed just through careful choices of examples, avoiding emphasising the examples too much/âin the wrong way, also mentioning other higher value activities, etc.
It might be interesting to compare that to everyday environmentalism or everyday antispeciesism. EAs have already thought about these areas a fair bit and have said interesting things about in the past.
In both of these areas, the following seems to be the case:
donating to effective nonprofits is probably the best way to help at this point,
some other actions look pretty good (avoiding unnecessary intercontinental flights and fuel-inefficient cars, eating a plant-based diet),
other actions are making a negligibly small difference per unit of cost (unplugging your phone charger when youâre not using it, avoiding animal-based food additives),
there are some harder-to-quantify aspects that could be very good or not (activism, advocacy, etc.),
there are some virtues that seem helpful for longer-term, lasting change (becoming more aware of how products you consume are made and what the moral cost is, learning to see animals as individuals with lives worth protecting).
EAs are already thinking a lot about optimizing #1 by default, so perhaps the project of âeveryday longtermismâ could be about exploring whether actions fall within #2 or #3 or #4 (and what to do about #4), and what the virtues corresponding to #5 might look like.
I have two different responses (somewhat in tension with each other):
Finding âeverydayâ things to do will necessitate identifying whatâs good to do in various situations which arenât 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 whatâs good to do in a particular set of activities thatâs 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 itâs a bit like how informal EA discourse often touches on how to do everyday things efficiently (e.g. âhere are tips for batching your grocery shoppingâ) -- itâs not that these are the most important things to be efficient about, but that all-else-equal itâs good, and itâs 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 whatâs relatively important is surely an important part of the (longtermist) EA culture
Iâm not sure how much I agree with âprobably much less positive than some other things that could be done even by âregular peopleâ, even once there are millions or tens of millions of longtermistsâ
Iâd 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 âcompetitive uses of time/âattention (for people who arenât bought into reorienting their whole lives) by the time there are tens of millions of longtermistsâ
It seems compatible with that feeling that there could be some higher-priority things for them to be doing as wellâe.g. maybe some way of keeping immersed in longtermist culture, by being a member of some groupâbut 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 âwhat is the good longtermist way to approach going to the shops? meeting a romantic partnerâs parents for the first time? deciding how much to push yourself to work when youâre feeling a bit unwell?â
Ah, your first point makes me realise that at times I mistook the purpose of this âeveryday longtermismâ idea/âproject as more similar to finding Task Ys than it really is. I now remember that you didnât really frame this as âWhat can even âregular peopleâ do, even if theyâre not in key positions or at key junctures?â (If that was the framing, I might be more inclined to emphasise donating effectively, as well as things like voting effectivelyânot just for politicians with good charactersâand meeting with politicians to advocate for effective policies.)
Instead, I think youâre talking about what anyone can do (including but not limited to very dedicated and talented people) in âeveryday situationsâ, perhaps alongside other, more effective actions.
I think at times I was aware of that, but times I forgot it. Thatâs 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 theyâd 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 itâs 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 itâs 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 wasnât one of the examples in your list? Is there a reason for that?
---
I think itâs a bit like how informal EA discourse often touches on how to do everyday things efficiently (e.g. âhere are tips for batching your grocery shoppingâ)
I feel like thatâs a bit different. If I get a dedicated EA to do everyday things more efficiently, itâs fairly obvious how that could result in more hours or dollars going towards very high impact activities. (I donât expect every hour/âdollar 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/âdollars to go towards high impact activities, if these people do themselves become EAs/âEA-aligned. So it still feels a bit different.
---
Iâm 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 itâs 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 Bobâs efforts look comparable to donating (in external benefit/âeffort) when the longtermist portfolio is around $100B-$1T/âyear
Claraâs efforts looks comparable to donating when the longtermist portfolio is around $1B-$10B/âyear
Diyaâs efforts look comparable to donating when the longtermist portfolio is around $10B-$100B/âyear
Elmoâs efforts are harder to say because theyâre 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, theyâre excluding the internal benefitsâif these activities are (as I suggest) partly good for practicing some longtermist judgement, then Iâd really want to see them as a complement to donation rather than just a competitor.
While I very much liked this post overall, I think I feel some half-formed scepticism or aversion to some of the specific ideas/âexamples.
In particular, when reading your list of âexamples of everyday longtermism in pursuit of this proxyâ, I found myself feeling something like the following:
These actions do seem net positive, but also probably much less positive than some other things that could be done even by âregular peopleâ, even once there are millions or tens of millions of longtermists. So I would be happy about people doing these things, but I also feel a bit worried that pointing to them as good examples would reduce how often the more valuable actions are done.
This could occur because individual people then spend too much time/âenergy trying to do the sort of actions in those examples, reducing the time/âenergy they devote to higher value actions
Or it could occur via the package of EA/âlongtermist ideas itself becoming âdilutedâ
EA/âlongtermism come to be seen too much as âthe movement promoting actions like [those examples]â. This could reduce how much it inclines new people towards higher value actions. It could also perhaps reduce how much it attracts certain people who could be quite impactful but wouldnât be excited by the âdilutedâ version of the movement.
See also this and this
Or it could occur via a psychological process along the lines of people feeling theyâve hit their quota from altruism once theyâve done the sort of things in those examples, and thus not being motivated to do more/âother things
I seem to recall that thereâs at least some evidence that something like this happens in the context of climate change: something like that, if people take small personal actions, that then reduces their inclination to do other things, even if the other things would be more important
But I canât remember where I read this, and I donât know if it was just one study vs being settled science
This all seems more likely/âworrisome given that, compared to some higher value actions people couldâve taken, the sort of actions in your examples are things that are probably easier to do, closer to what people mightâve done anyway, and more likely to make one feel virtuous/âproud (given that they more obviously align with commonsense morality)
But Iâm not sure how important these worries are. And maybe they can all be readily addressed just through careful choices of examples, avoiding emphasising the examples too much/âin the wrong way, also mentioning other higher value activities, etc.
It might be interesting to compare that to everyday environmentalism or everyday antispeciesism. EAs have already thought about these areas a fair bit and have said interesting things about in the past.
In both of these areas, the following seems to be the case:
donating to effective nonprofits is probably the best way to help at this point,
some other actions look pretty good (avoiding unnecessary intercontinental flights and fuel-inefficient cars, eating a plant-based diet),
other actions are making a negligibly small difference per unit of cost (unplugging your phone charger when youâre not using it, avoiding animal-based food additives),
there are some harder-to-quantify aspects that could be very good or not (activism, advocacy, etc.),
there are some virtues that seem helpful for longer-term, lasting change (becoming more aware of how products you consume are made and what the moral cost is, learning to see animals as individuals with lives worth protecting).
EAs are already thinking a lot about optimizing #1 by default, so perhaps the project of âeveryday longtermismâ could be about exploring whether actions fall within #2 or #3 or #4 (and what to do about #4), and what the virtues corresponding to #5 might look like.
I appreciate the pushback!
I have two different responses (somewhat in tension with each other):
Finding âeverydayâ things to do will necessitate identifying whatâs good to do in various situations which arenât 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 whatâs good to do in a particular set of activities thatâs 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 itâs a bit like how informal EA discourse often touches on how to do everyday things efficiently (e.g. âhere are tips for batching your grocery shoppingâ) -- itâs not that these are the most important things to be efficient about, but that all-else-equal itâs good, and itâs 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 whatâs relatively important is surely an important part of the (longtermist) EA culture
Iâm not sure how much I agree with âprobably much less positive than some other things that could be done even by âregular peopleâ, even once there are millions or tens of millions of longtermistsâ
Iâd 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 âcompetitive uses of time/âattention (for people who arenât bought into reorienting their whole lives) by the time there are tens of millions of longtermistsâ
It seems compatible with that feeling that there could be some higher-priority things for them to be doing as wellâe.g. maybe some way of keeping immersed in longtermist culture, by being a member of some groupâbut 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 âwhat is the good longtermist way to approach going to the shops? meeting a romantic partnerâs parents for the first time? deciding how much to push yourself to work when youâre feeling a bit unwell?â
Ah, your first point makes me realise that at times I mistook the purpose of this âeveryday longtermismâ idea/âproject as more similar to finding Task Ys than it really is. I now remember that you didnât really frame this as âWhat can even âregular peopleâ do, even if theyâre not in key positions or at key junctures?â (If that was the framing, I might be more inclined to emphasise donating effectively, as well as things like voting effectivelyânot just for politicians with good charactersâand meeting with politicians to advocate for effective policies.)
Instead, I think youâre talking about what anyone can do (including but not limited to very dedicated and talented people) in âeveryday situationsâ, perhaps alongside other, more effective actions.
I think at times I was aware of that, but times I forgot it. Thatâs 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 theyâd 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 itâs 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 itâs 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 wasnât one of the examples in your list? Is there a reason for that?
---
I feel like thatâs a bit different. If I get a dedicated EA to do everyday things more efficiently, itâs fairly obvious how that could result in more hours or dollars going towards very high impact activities. (I donât expect every hour/âdollar 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/âdollars to go towards high impact activities, if these people do themselves become EAs/âEA-aligned. So it still feels a bit different.
---
Iâm 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 itâs 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.
AgreeâI think an interesting challenge is âwhen does this become better than donating 10% to the top marginal charity?â
I spent a little while thinking about this. My guess is that of the activities I list:
Alice and Bobâs efforts look comparable to donating (in external benefit/âeffort) when the longtermist portfolio is around $100B-$1T/âyear
Claraâs efforts looks comparable to donating when the longtermist portfolio is around $1B-$10B/âyear
Diyaâs efforts look comparable to donating when the longtermist portfolio is around $10B-$100B/âyear
Elmoâs efforts are harder to say because theyâre 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, theyâre excluding the internal benefitsâif these activities are (as I suggest) partly good for practicing some longtermist judgement, then Iâd really want to see them as a complement to donation rather than just a competitor.