Thanks for asking! The first thing I want to say is that I got lucky in the following respect. The set of possible outcomes isn’t the interior of the ellipse I drew; rather, it is a bunch of points that are drawn at random from a distribution, and when you plot that cloud of points, it looks like an ellipse. The way I got lucky is: one of the draws from this distribution happened to be in the top-right corner. That draw is working at ARC theory, which has just about the most intellectually interesting work in the world (for my interests) and is also just about the most impactful place for me to work (given my skills and my models of what sort of work is impactful). I interned there for 4-5 months and I’ll be starting there full-time soon!
Now for my report card, as for how well I checked in (in the ways listed in the post):
Writing the above post was useful in an interesting way: I formed some amount of identity around “I care about things besides impact” in a way that somewhat decreased value drift. (I endorse this, I think.) This manifested as me thinking a lot over the last year about whether I’m happy. Sometimes the answer was “not really”! But I noticed this and took steps toward fixing it. In particular, I noticed when I was in Berkeley last summer that I had a need for a social group that doesn’t talk about maximizing impact all the time. This was super relevant to my criteria for choosing a living situation when I came back to Berkeley in October. I ended up choosing a “chill” group house, and I think that was the right choice.
I had the goal of keeping a monthly diary about my values. I updated it four times—in June, July, October, and March—and I think that captured most of the value. (I’m not sure that this was a particularly valuable intervention.)
Regarding the four specific non-EA things I cared about that I listed above:
Family and non-EA friends: I continue to be close with my family and remain similarly close with the non-EA friends I had at the time.
Puzzles and puzzle hunts: I continue caring about this. Empirically I haven’t done many puzzle hunts over the last year, but that was more for a lack of good opportunities. But I recently joined a new puzzle hunt team, so I might have more opportunities ahead!
Spending time in nature: yup, I continue to care about this. I went to Alaska for a few weeks last month and it was great.
Random statistical analyses: honestly, much less? Which I’m a bit sad about.
One interested that I had not listed because I had mixed feelings about how much I endorsed the interest was politics. I indeed care less about politics now (though still do a decent amount).
I also picked up an interest—I’m part of the Bayesian Choir! I’ve also been playing some small amount of tennis, for the first time since high school.
I didn’t do any of the CFAR techniques, like focusing or internal double crux.
I’d say that this looks pretty good.
I do think that there are a couple of yellow flags, though:
I currently believe that the Berkeley EA community is unhealthy (I’m not sure whether to add the caveat “for me” or whether I think it’s unhealthy, period). The main reason for this, I think, is that there’s a status hierarchy. The way I sometimes put this is: if you asked me which of my friends in college are highest status, I would’ve been like ”...what does that even mean, that question doesn’t make sense”. But unfortunately I think if you asked about people’s status in this community, I’d often have thoughts. I have a theory that this comes out of having a large group of people with really similar values and goals. To elaborate on this: in college, everyone was pursuing their own thing and had their own values, which means that different people had very different standards for what it meant for someone to be cool. (There would have been way more status if, say, everyone were trying to be a member of some society; my impression is that this caused status dynamics in parts of my college that I didn’t interact with.) In the Berkeley EA community, most people have pretty similar goals (such as furthering AI safety or having interesting conversations). If people agree on what’s important then naturally they’ll agree more on who’s good at the important things (who’s good at AI safety research, or who’s good at having interesting conversations—and by the way, there’s way more agreement in the Berkeley EA community about what constitutes an interesting conversation than there is in college).
This theory would predict that political party organizations (the Democratic and Republican parties) have a strong social status hierarchy, since they mostly share the same goals (get the party into a position of power). If I learn that actually these organizations mostly don’t have strong social status hierarchies, I’ll retract my diagnosis.
I weakly think that something about the Berkeley EA community makes it harder for me to have original thoughts. Maybe it’s that there’s so much stuff going on that I don’t spend very much time alone with my thoughts. Or maybe it’s that there’s more of a “party line” about the right takes, in a way that discourages free-thinking. Or maybe it’s that people in this community really like talking about some things but not other things, and this implicitly discourages thinking about the “other things”.
I haven’t figured out how to navigate this. These may be genuine trade-offs—a case where I can’t both work at ARC and be immune from these downsides—or maybe I’ll learn to deal with the downsides over time. I do think that the benefits of my decision to work at ARC are worth the costs for me, though.
Any update on where you have landed now, on the other side of this process?
Thanks for asking! The first thing I want to say is that I got lucky in the following respect. The set of possible outcomes isn’t the interior of the ellipse I drew; rather, it is a bunch of points that are drawn at random from a distribution, and when you plot that cloud of points, it looks like an ellipse. The way I got lucky is: one of the draws from this distribution happened to be in the top-right corner. That draw is working at ARC theory, which has just about the most intellectually interesting work in the world (for my interests) and is also just about the most impactful place for me to work (given my skills and my models of what sort of work is impactful). I interned there for 4-5 months and I’ll be starting there full-time soon!
Now for my report card, as for how well I checked in (in the ways listed in the post):
Writing the above post was useful in an interesting way: I formed some amount of identity around “I care about things besides impact” in a way that somewhat decreased value drift. (I endorse this, I think.) This manifested as me thinking a lot over the last year about whether I’m happy. Sometimes the answer was “not really”! But I noticed this and took steps toward fixing it. In particular, I noticed when I was in Berkeley last summer that I had a need for a social group that doesn’t talk about maximizing impact all the time. This was super relevant to my criteria for choosing a living situation when I came back to Berkeley in October. I ended up choosing a “chill” group house, and I think that was the right choice.
I had the goal of keeping a monthly diary about my values. I updated it four times—in June, July, October, and March—and I think that captured most of the value. (I’m not sure that this was a particularly valuable intervention.)
Regarding the four specific non-EA things I cared about that I listed above:
Family and non-EA friends: I continue to be close with my family and remain similarly close with the non-EA friends I had at the time.
Puzzles and puzzle hunts: I continue caring about this. Empirically I haven’t done many puzzle hunts over the last year, but that was more for a lack of good opportunities. But I recently joined a new puzzle hunt team, so I might have more opportunities ahead!
Spending time in nature: yup, I continue to care about this. I went to Alaska for a few weeks last month and it was great.
Random statistical analyses: honestly, much less? Which I’m a bit sad about.
One interested that I had not listed because I had mixed feelings about how much I endorsed the interest was politics. I indeed care less about politics now (though still do a decent amount).
I also picked up an interest—I’m part of the Bayesian Choir! I’ve also been playing some small amount of tennis, for the first time since high school.
I didn’t do any of the CFAR techniques, like focusing or internal double crux.
I’d say that this looks pretty good.
I do think that there are a couple of yellow flags, though:
I currently believe that the Berkeley EA community is unhealthy (I’m not sure whether to add the caveat “for me” or whether I think it’s unhealthy, period). The main reason for this, I think, is that there’s a status hierarchy. The way I sometimes put this is: if you asked me which of my friends in college are highest status, I would’ve been like ”...what does that even mean, that question doesn’t make sense”. But unfortunately I think if you asked about people’s status in this community, I’d often have thoughts. I have a theory that this comes out of having a large group of people with really similar values and goals. To elaborate on this: in college, everyone was pursuing their own thing and had their own values, which means that different people had very different standards for what it meant for someone to be cool. (There would have been way more status if, say, everyone were trying to be a member of some society; my impression is that this caused status dynamics in parts of my college that I didn’t interact with.) In the Berkeley EA community, most people have pretty similar goals (such as furthering AI safety or having interesting conversations). If people agree on what’s important then naturally they’ll agree more on who’s good at the important things (who’s good at AI safety research, or who’s good at having interesting conversations—and by the way, there’s way more agreement in the Berkeley EA community about what constitutes an interesting conversation than there is in college).
This theory would predict that political party organizations (the Democratic and Republican parties) have a strong social status hierarchy, since they mostly share the same goals (get the party into a position of power). If I learn that actually these organizations mostly don’t have strong social status hierarchies, I’ll retract my diagnosis.
I weakly think that something about the Berkeley EA community makes it harder for me to have original thoughts. Maybe it’s that there’s so much stuff going on that I don’t spend very much time alone with my thoughts. Or maybe it’s that there’s more of a “party line” about the right takes, in a way that discourages free-thinking. Or maybe it’s that people in this community really like talking about some things but not other things, and this implicitly discourages thinking about the “other things”.
I haven’t figured out how to navigate this. These may be genuine trade-offs—a case where I can’t both work at ARC and be immune from these downsides—or maybe I’ll learn to deal with the downsides over time. I do think that the benefits of my decision to work at ARC are worth the costs for me, though.