But I’d be very hesitant of advocating in general for people to sacrifice more stuff to work hard on the most urgent problems. People vastly overestimate the stability of their motivation and mental life. If you plan your life with the assumption that you’ll always be as motivated as you are right now, you’ll probably achieve less than if you take some precautions.
I’d say plan for at least 20 years of productivity. This means you want to build relationships with people who support you, invest in finding good down-time activities to keep you refreshed, and don’t burn yourself out. Be ambitious! Test your limits until you crash, but make sure you can recover and learn from it rather than taking permanent damage.
On average do I think EAs would do better with more self-sacrifice or less? It varies, and it’s important enough that I think advice should be more granular than just “do more”.
When considering self-sacrifice, it is also important to weigh-in the effects on other people. IE, every person that “sacrifices something for the cause” increases the perception that “if you want to work on this, you need to give up stuff”. This might in turn turn people off from joining the cause in the first place. So even if the sacrifice increases the productivity of that one person, the total effect might still be negative.
People vastly overestimate the stability of their motivation and mental life.
”...even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”
Seems very likely in my case.
Yes, I think it’s crunch time.
But I’d be very hesitant of advocating in general for people to sacrifice more stuff to work hard on the most urgent problems. People vastly overestimate the stability of their motivation and mental life. If you plan your life with the assumption that you’ll always be as motivated as you are right now, you’ll probably achieve less than if you take some precautions.
I’d say plan for at least 20 years of productivity. This means you want to build relationships with people who support you, invest in finding good down-time activities to keep you refreshed, and don’t burn yourself out. Be ambitious! Test your limits until you crash, but make sure you can recover and learn from it rather than taking permanent damage.
On average do I think EAs would do better with more self-sacrifice or less? It varies, and it’s important enough that I think advice should be more granular than just “do more”.
When considering self-sacrifice, it is also important to weigh-in the effects on other people. IE, every person that “sacrifices something for the cause” increases the perception that “if you want to work on this, you need to give up stuff”. This might in turn turn people off from joining the cause in the first place. So even if the sacrifice increases the productivity of that one person, the total effect might still be negative.
The rest was helpfully calibrating, thank you