Progress Open Thread: January 2021
The Progress Open Thread is a place to share good news, big or small.
See this post for an explanation of why we have these threads.
What goes in a progress thread comment?
Think of this as an org update thread for individuals. You might talk about...
Securing a new job, internship, grant, or scholarship
Starting or making progress on a personal project
Helping someone else get involved in EA
Making a donation you feel really excited about
Taking the Giving What We Can pledge or signing up for Try Giving
Writing something you liked outside the Forum (whether itās a paper youāve submitted to a journal or just an insightful Facebook comment)
Any of the above happening to someone else, if you think theyād be happy for you to share the news
Other EA-related progress in the world (disease eradication, cage-free laws, cool new research papers, etc.)
Toby Ord contributed 7 pages to the latest UN Human Development Report. The material wonāt be new to anyone whoās read The Precipice, but itās heartening to see this kind of thing matter-of-factly added to such a major document.
I like that Ord explicitly tied x-risk management to the concept of sustainability. Iāve noticed that sustainability is a longtermist concept because it considers the needs of future generations, but I donāt think thereās been much crosstalk between advocates of sustainability and EA-style longtermism.
At the end of each year, I like to check in on Future Crunchās annual ā99 Good News Storiesā post. I donāt necessarily see every inclusion as good (āChinaās birthrate fell again!ā), but they nicely aggregate a lot of global health and development stories.
Some of my favorite inclusions from this year (note: havenāt closely filtered to detect possible exaggerations or cloudy data, would appreciate knowing if anything sounds fishy):
Cautionānegative outlook!
The IEAās annual report on access to electricity highlights that the pandemic had a huge negative impact on progress, and raise concerns about the potential for recovery. Furthermore, if the relevant SDG policies would continue as they are then they predict about 62% of people in sub-saharan africa with electricity (today we are at 48%). They suggest that further $35 billion per year is needed to get global worldwide access to electricity by 2030.
Thanks for providing the additional context! Progress Thread or no, itās still useful to hear when weāve gone off-track from a progress goal, or seen a trend get worse.
āI have no idea what the hell Iām doing.ā
Do you ever feel this?
Itās terrifying to really begin building an organization, especially one with as grand an ambition as saving the world, with a good chance of failure from any number of directions.
And to wonderā¦ Am I taking the right action with this choice? Is this even the right choice to be focusing on?
Past me precommitted to work on this for a year for a reason. He knew I would face self-doubt.
Knowing that of all the sources of failure, the biggest ones are endogeneous.
And it sucks, going through a metaruminatory loop, knowing that I canāt just fix my errors. That my own awareness of my bugs is itself an impediment.
To be uncertain whether the uncertainty is the kind to accept, or the kind to change.
To be frozen in fear, imagining others observing my frozenness and feedbacking to me that this is unacceptable if I want to strive to perform at the tempo that they feel confident is symbolic and symbiotic of progress.
I am a longtermist. Morever I am a ponderer, a dilettante, an explorer. Yet I am also supposed to āmove fast and break thingsā. I need to be hypercompetent in 47 different ways, yet I need to expose my incompetency to learn how to be competent.
And the Pointed Questions from Projections Of Mine.
āWhatās your plan?ā
Well, uh, like, itās a fractal ball of wibbly wobbly stuff. Very ambitious endgoal as compass. I have a very clear plan but itās not descriptively legible to you and it very quickly decomposes into a bunch of question marks.
āHow is your thing different from X?ā
Itās, uh, itās not all about X. Thatās just a necessary utility to start with that I want to play with partly because itās aesthetically interesting--
āThings arenāt working at this pace, you should take on this collaborator for increased motivation and success.ā
Well, how will that result in 20 years? Are all of their incentives aligned? Cofoundership is like a marriage.
And:
āGiven youāre sharing all of this lack of confidence, maybe itās a sign this isnāt the thing to work on?ā
That oneās just in my head, I think (unless thereās an illegible memory behind it). But Iāll respond: I think the probably correct answer is that I would feel the same regardless of what I was working on to the point where I took the thing seriously enough to start feeling these feelings when hitting roadblocks. The hypothetical asker probably is typicalminding from their own differing psychology.
Itās also the highest-impact thing to work on uncertain, counterfactually neglected projects! Probably. In my worldview, at least.
āIs it really neglected though? What if there are competitors better than us? There are more competent organizations already out there, arenāt there? Shouldnāt we just go work for them?ā
Uh. Well. I mean. I donāt know. Can I work for another human being? Typically not? Most people canāt take most jobs though, right? Neither of us knows how to fly a jet plane.
āThatās a problem then. You should fix whatās keeping you from getting a Real Job.ā
Oh...kay? Like I havenāt debugged bits and pieces of that? And why would it matter? The world is burning and if you want to stop that you have to git gud at things that are related to putting the fire out.
āYou should just go to college.ā
And put off working on important things for years? How am I going to learn more than through a startup? The option palette that comes to mind for you is conveniently shaped from a high-level ghost perspective that doesnāt take into account that I am in the territory, not the map, and am navigating trailhead by trailhead. Your statement has no skin in the game. It sounds like youāre saying youāre not confident in my ability to bite and chew off high-variance objectives. (Maybe everyone in the process of constructing success gets shit-tested by people with bad advice.)
āMy point is to do a scoped-down version of the thing you want in a training environment with plenty of slack.ā
Which isā¦ sort of what Iām doing, with my R&D and slow MVP-building?
āBut you should speed up and go faster.ā
Wha--? But you just said--
āWork on a different side-project that will make more money faster.ā
Thatās Goodharting! Thatās Mara and/āor Moloch! Why the hell would you think thatās more impactful than directly working on a thing of actual value rather than perceived value?
āWell you need money to comfortably work on an altruistic project.ā
So then shouldnāt Iā¦ ask for fundraising?
āJustify why you think you deserve fundraising over ALL the other effective altruists asking for it, who are clearly more competent than you and have way more stuff on their resume.ā
Iā¦ okay. Iāll meek out as small an income as I can to survive.
āYou should get funding if this is a serious project. Also where is your website, why arenāt you writing a nicely-worded whitepaper, where is your Github repo with code youāve written, where is your stamp of approval from Prestigious Institution? Where the hell is your funding, how can I take this seriously if no one else has confidence in you enough to fund it?ā
Well I have my Patreon...
āAre you really providing enough benefits to the world to justify that? Havenāt you bought too many Taco Bell burritos, with meat in them to boot? Is it okay that your Patreon has grown statistically bigger than most peopleās yet you donāt slave to provide artistic compensations like they do?ā
Well I was just applying for foodstamps during the previous Focusmate session earlier...
āDo we deserve foodstamps!? We are taking from the collective coffer. We are privileged and if weāre taking benefits then weāre lazy, good-for-nothingāā
YES. WE DO. SHUT UP. WE ARE WORKING ON SECURING CIVILIZATIONāS CONTINUED EXISTENCE. I THINK WE HAVE JUSTIFIED THAT RELATIVE TO OTHER BENEFICIARIES.
āIsnāt that pretty entitled of you to assume that your project is 99.99% more valuable than anything else? Your ego seems pretty involved in this.ā
Yes. I am pretty emotionally invested with the mission. Critiques of it are bucket-errored with attacks on my survival. Perhaps this is a crux of my insecurity. I feel I have to succeed at saving the world and therefore this project. I would like to be more dispassionately objective about the situation.
āWhy not just maintain a portfolio of projects?ā
Which ones, of the 20-50 ideas I have? Where does the buck stop in oneās decision to invest various amounts of resources in different things? Arenāt we supposed to focus on high-potential things and Kelly bet with our resources?
(The solution actually I think is that you can multitask if itās constructing a vertical of synergistic components.)
Why is failure so bad anyway? We just keep on trying until we hit a homerun; the costs of swinging are actually basically nil, all perceptions otherwise.
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Few want to hear vulnerable talk such as this, at least in my broader culture. Evolutionarily, we donāt want to have leaders who are losers, or we will, well, lose in the zero-sum games if we are part of their coalition. We want certain answers to important questions. Even if itās a lie, as long as itās confident and leads to strong coordination, and we believe others believe it even if we donāt, then weāll accept lies from strong leaders who donāt apologize for their bullshit. I find the levels of intentionality fascinating as a lens into understanding much social behavior.
Well, my serotonin isnāt high enough, bucko. If you ask me anything skeptical Iāll basically assume Iām about to be ostracized from the tribe forever for my flagrant stupidity.
I suppose therefore my only recourse is to register my Forever Incompetency in the face of all possible agents. There is always a human or an AI that is better. There is always a more advantaged comparator. Iām never not going to be this way against the biggest challenge I can, so I might as well get used to it and half ass it with everything Iāve got.
None of this is to say I donāt have plenty confidence, or longterm grit. I just wanted to get this out there before I was tempted to make progress reports look shinier than they are, constantly adjusting the rough draft to make it look nice and impeachable, a possibility which becomes so costly that I end up not writing it.
We arenāt in as many zero-sum games as we think. I think there is a fierce, blazing positive-sum game ahead of us, read to be built. On the Ethereum blockchain, naturally. ;)
I have made quite a bit of progress in the past month, subjectively speaking. Just donāt ask me to quickly justify that statement in a few words. :)
And since I notice I didnāt Declare it in the previous post, I will note:
I am committing a year of my life to making this work.
If this post resonated with you in some way and you want to talk, you can book a call here.
I started a new āWhat I believeā series on my Sunyshore blog about my ethical beliefs. The first post in the series is about why I believe total utilitarianism is closest to the correct ethical theory and its implications for society. Iām also working on a post about privacy and civil liberties. In the future, I might write a post for the āWhat I believeā series about effective altruism.
Iāve already gotten valuable feedback from members of the EA community whoāve critiqued my use of the Harsanyi original-position thought experiment. The goal of this post wasnāt to present a bulletproof argument for utilitarianism but to explain my personal reasons for supporting it. Still, I appreciate all constructive feedback.
I like it, and look forward to see what you write on privacy (Iām feeling somewhat conflicted on this subject, and Iām curious as to how much gains we can have from privacy-preserving computation technologies). I want to encourage you to linkpost these to the forum! Is there a particular reason you arenāt doing so?
Yeah, I didnāt really linkpost this because I didnāt think that a basic introduction to utilitarianism would fit in with the kinds of stuff that people usually post, which deals with philosophical topics at a more sophisticated level. But I can post it and the rest of the series!