I checked this post because I think I’m among those who could benefit from reading about why ‘imperfection is okay’, even though I’ve seen the saying before.
After reading your post fully, it doesn’t seem like I’m the intended audience. (oh well. maybe this will be of interest to you or other EA forum readers anyways.)
Once you [take the obvious actions to avoid being net negative], and can reasonably expect your life impact to be in the green, I think you should feel good about your existence
I don’t feel bad about my existence, to be clear. I also don’t feel good about it, even though I’m more ‘in the green’ in expectation than nearly all humans via longtermist (AI alignment) research.
Life is not graded on a curve. The best physicist in ancient Greece could not calculate the path of a falling apple. There is no guarantee that adequacy is possible given your hardest effort; therefore spare no thought for whether others are doing worse.
If I only have an impact that’s better-than-that-of-nearly-any-other-human, the quantity of tragedy in the world will remain around the same huge number.
This is not a situation where “my decision is correlated with that of enough other agents, that I/we just need to be better-than-had-I/we-not-existed to have a scale-shifting collective impact”.
A metaphor I like is the situation of Eliezer’s Hirou after being Isekai’d into the world of The Sword of Good, where the non-human sentient orc species is being abused and enslaved. Sure, Hirou could just not participate in that, make a few effective donations, and otherwise be inactive in that world, and they’d be net-positive compared to if they didn’t exist. But because they also uniquely have the ability to complete the ritual to end all the tragedy in that world.. shouldn’t they do that instead? Isn’t aiming for anything less ‘not good enough’, given their unique situation?
This is ~how I and maybe some other alignment researchers feel about our actual situations. It’s also a much more demanding standard, because alignment is hard, we can’t just magically complete the ritual like Hirou does. It’s a standard I’m probably not yet doing good enough under, but I think it’s the correct one for me to try to follow, because anything less fails to save the world.
(I think the standard of “Don’t be net-negative,” or perhaps “donate some excess income such that you’re left with good living standards but still do an extraordinary quantity of good” are good standards for most humans, to be clear.)
(Also, disclaimer for some who might need it: “what level of impact do I consider ‘good enough’ for myself” has to be subjectively-chosen. Our values tell the full picture of what actions we’d consider more or less good, in which there is no technical ‘good enough threshold’. For many, judging themselves to be not-good-enough could reduce their effectiveness and so they should choose a less demanding standard, since it is after all a choice.)
“But how does Nemamel grow up to be Nemamel? She was better than all her living competitors, there was nobody she could imitate to become that good. There are no gods in dath ilan. Then who does Nemamel look up to, to become herself?”
… If she’d ever stopped to congratulate herself on being better than everyone else, wouldn’t she then have stopped? Or that’s what I remember her being quoted as saying. Which frankly doesn’t make that much sense to me? To me it seems you could reach the Better Than Everybody key milestone, celebrate that, and then keep going? But I am not Nemamel and maybe there’s something in there that I haven’t understood yet.”
… It was the pride of the very smart people who are smarter than the other people, that they look around themselves, and even if they aren’t the best in the world yet, there’s still nobody in it who seems worthy to be their competitor, even the people who are still better than them, aren’t enough better. So they set their eyes somewhere on the far horizon where no people are, and walk towards it knowing they’ll never reach it.”
… And that’s why when people congratulated her on being better than everybody, she was all, ‘stop that, you only like me that much because you’re thinking about it all wrong’, compared to some greater vision of Civilization that was only in her own imagination.”
I first learned this lesson in my youth when, after climbing to the top of a leaderboard in a puzzle game I’d invested >2k hours into, I was surpassed so hard by my nemesis that I had to reflect on what I was doing. Thing is, they didn’t just surpass me and everybody else, but instead continued to break their own records several times over.
Slightly embarrassed by having congratulated myself for my merely-best performance, I had to ask “how does one become like that?”
My problem was that I’d always just been trying to get better than the people around me, whereas their target was the inanimate structure of the problem itself. When I had broken a record, I said “finally!” and considered myself complete. But when they did the same, they said “cool!”, and then kept going. The only way to defeat them, would be by not trying to defeat them, and instead focus on fighting the perceived limits of the game itself.
To some extent, I am what I am today, because I at one point aspired to be better than Aisi.
To be clear, I’m all in favor of aiming higher! Just suggesting that you needn’t feel bad about yourself if/when you fall short of those more ambitious goals (in part, for the epistemic benefits of being more willing to admit when this is so).
I checked this post because I think I’m among those who could benefit from reading about why ‘imperfection is okay’, even though I’ve seen the saying before.
After reading your post fully, it doesn’t seem like I’m the intended audience. (oh well. maybe this will be of interest to you or other EA forum readers anyways.)
I don’t feel bad about my existence, to be clear. I also don’t feel good about it, even though I’m more ‘in the green’ in expectation than nearly all humans via longtermist (AI alignment) research.
As Eliezer writes, which I continually quote:
If I only have an impact that’s better-than-that-of-nearly-any-other-human, the quantity of tragedy in the world will remain around the same huge number.
This is not a situation where “my decision is correlated with that of enough other agents, that I/we just need to be better-than-had-I/we-not-existed to have a scale-shifting collective impact”.
A metaphor I like is the situation of Eliezer’s Hirou after being Isekai’d into the world of The Sword of Good, where the non-human sentient orc species is being abused and enslaved. Sure, Hirou could just not participate in that, make a few effective donations, and otherwise be inactive in that world, and they’d be net-positive compared to if they didn’t exist. But because they also uniquely have the ability to complete the ritual to end all the tragedy in that world.. shouldn’t they do that instead? Isn’t aiming for anything less ‘not good enough’, given their unique situation?
This is ~how I and maybe some other alignment researchers feel about our actual situations. It’s also a much more demanding standard, because alignment is hard, we can’t just magically complete the ritual like Hirou does. It’s a standard I’m probably not yet doing good enough under, but I think it’s the correct one for me to try to follow, because anything less fails to save the world.
(I think the standard of “Don’t be net-negative,” or perhaps “donate some excess income such that you’re left with good living standards but still do an extraordinary quantity of good” are good standards for most humans, to be clear.)
(Also, disclaimer for some who might need it: “what level of impact do I consider ‘good enough’ for myself” has to be subjectively-chosen. Our values tell the full picture of what actions we’d consider more or less good, in which there is no technical ‘good enough threshold’. For many, judging themselves to be not-good-enough could reduce their effectiveness and so they should choose a less demanding standard, since it is after all a choice.)
More wisdom from Eliezer (from a quote I found via Nevin’s comment):
I first learned this lesson in my youth when, after climbing to the top of a leaderboard in a puzzle game I’d invested >2k hours into, I was surpassed so hard by my nemesis that I had to reflect on what I was doing. Thing is, they didn’t just surpass me and everybody else, but instead continued to break their own records several times over.
Slightly embarrassed by having congratulated myself for my merely-best performance, I had to ask “how does one become like that?”
My problem was that I’d always just been trying to get better than the people around me, whereas their target was the inanimate structure of the problem itself. When I had broken a record, I said “finally!” and considered myself complete. But when they did the same, they said “cool!”, and then kept going. The only way to defeat them, would be by not trying to defeat them, and instead focus on fighting the perceived limits of the game itself.
To some extent, I am what I am today, because I at one point aspired to be better than Aisi.
To be clear, I’m all in favor of aiming higher! Just suggesting that you needn’t feel bad about yourself if/when you fall short of those more ambitious goals (in part, for the epistemic benefits of being more willing to admit when this is so).