This has been helpful for me. Thank you! I’ve had some inner unease about trade-offs I made between various career choices and in other morally relevant projects. Your post gives me a more principled way to think about these choices.
A practical question: Do you have some advice on the breadth and depth of inner sub-agents? There are many causes and worldviews that I could learn about, particularly being someone who easily gets distracted and hooked on new ideas. I can’t give adequate consideration to all of them, unless I group them into a manageable number of broader categories. Even that might be too much—I feel there are only so many hats that I can wear as a person, and only so many areas that I can be know sufficiently well to have impact. In recent years, this has been my work and ~3 charities that I regularly donate to. What’s a good balance here?
To put it differently: I really like the framework you propose in this post, and it already takes into account many of our limitations and reasoning inadequacies. But I might need an even more bandwidth-restricted version for my life ;-) While still avoiding the failure mode of “I don’t have enough mental bandwidth, so let me completely dismiss all new cause areas.”
Yeah, that’s an interesting challenge. One idea that makes sense to me is to split into different sub-agents when you feel like there’s an in-principle tension or tradeoff between different kinds of values. For example, in a previous post I suggested different “buckets” for the broad goals of (i) pure suffering reduction, (ii) reliable global capacity growth, and (iii) high-impact long-shots. Lots of different concrete “causes” might compete within each philosophical bucket, but I wouldn’t be tempted to break out a fourth bucket unless I felt like there was a deeper principle at stake (e.g. if I thought that human vs animal pure suffering reduction might be meaningfully different).
(There’s a separate question of how to decide what to investigate within each bucket, which is also tricky and I’m afraid I don’t have anything helpful to add there. In practice I mostly just defer to people I at least vaguely trust who seem to have looked into the area in greater depth. But as a community, we obviously benefit from people who are willing to do the hard work of novel investigations!)
This has been helpful for me. Thank you! I’ve had some inner unease about trade-offs I made between various career choices and in other morally relevant projects. Your post gives me a more principled way to think about these choices.
A practical question: Do you have some advice on the breadth and depth of inner sub-agents? There are many causes and worldviews that I could learn about, particularly being someone who easily gets distracted and hooked on new ideas. I can’t give adequate consideration to all of them, unless I group them into a manageable number of broader categories. Even that might be too much—I feel there are only so many hats that I can wear as a person, and only so many areas that I can be know sufficiently well to have impact. In recent years, this has been my work and ~3 charities that I regularly donate to. What’s a good balance here?
To put it differently: I really like the framework you propose in this post, and it already takes into account many of our limitations and reasoning inadequacies. But I might need an even more bandwidth-restricted version for my life ;-) While still avoiding the failure mode of “I don’t have enough mental bandwidth, so let me completely dismiss all new cause areas.”
Yeah, that’s an interesting challenge. One idea that makes sense to me is to split into different sub-agents when you feel like there’s an in-principle tension or tradeoff between different kinds of values. For example, in a previous post I suggested different “buckets” for the broad goals of (i) pure suffering reduction, (ii) reliable global capacity growth, and (iii) high-impact long-shots. Lots of different concrete “causes” might compete within each philosophical bucket, but I wouldn’t be tempted to break out a fourth bucket unless I felt like there was a deeper principle at stake (e.g. if I thought that human vs animal pure suffering reduction might be meaningfully different).
(There’s a separate question of how to decide what to investigate within each bucket, which is also tricky and I’m afraid I don’t have anything helpful to add there. In practice I mostly just defer to people I at least vaguely trust who seem to have looked into the area in greater depth. But as a community, we obviously benefit from people who are willing to do the hard work of novel investigations!)