show me your role models who have directly improved the world
This somewhat related to mainanence and operations and how credit/respect is apportioned, but often the people doing the work are lower level employees who aren’t famous or well-known. They aren’t necessarily acknowledged at an annual organizational celebration, or in the local media. As an example, we might think that Rob Mather is great for founding/running the Against Malaria Foundation, but we don’t know the names of the people who manufactured or delivered those anti-malaria bednets.
But here are some examples of people that I sort of, vaguely [1] consider moral role models:
There is a guy in Oakland, California who goes by PengWeather online, and he cleans up trash in his free time. From an EA perspective we could certainly criticize his actions by claiming that they aren’t effective, and that it might be better for the world if he instead donated $20 a week for a high-impact cause area. But I take inspiration from his initiative: he saw a problem, nobody was doing anything about it, so he decided to take action and make things better. People in EA talk about agency a lot, but it is rare that I see somebody doing things on their own.
Esther Duflo. She is somewhat of a celebrity among people who care about development economics, but she is also a doer. She (and the teams of people she worked with) discovered what was an wasn’t effective in a variety of situations, improving the popularity and visibility of using randomized control trials for economic field research.
Jeff Kaufman. I’ve never met him, but he chose to earn to give, and boy did he give! He has a blog, and he posts on the EA forum as well.
Generally I don’t really have role models. I’ve seen enough people express good traits and bad traits that I try to focus on specific behaviors/actions rather than on people as a whole. Think of all the people who work in virtuous fields/vocations who are also real assholes.
For example, Jeff Kaufman seems like a great guy from what I’ve read. But imagine that he has really bad emotional regulation, or he is really rude to strangers, or he isn’t considerate to others, or he is a compulsive liar. If any of those things were true, that wouldn’t change the fact that his earning to give is admirable. I try to not boil people down to a simple god/bad judgement, and instead look at people as a collection of their actions.
This somewhat related to mainanence and operations and how credit/respect is apportioned, but often the people doing the work are lower level employees who aren’t famous or well-known. They aren’t necessarily acknowledged at an annual organizational celebration, or in the local media. As an example, we might think that Rob Mather is great for founding/running the Against Malaria Foundation, but we don’t know the names of the people who manufactured or delivered those anti-malaria bednets.
But here are some examples of people that I sort of, vaguely [1] consider moral role models:
There is a guy in Oakland, California who goes by PengWeather online, and he cleans up trash in his free time. From an EA perspective we could certainly criticize his actions by claiming that they aren’t effective, and that it might be better for the world if he instead donated $20 a week for a high-impact cause area. But I take inspiration from his initiative: he saw a problem, nobody was doing anything about it, so he decided to take action and make things better. People in EA talk about agency a lot, but it is rare that I see somebody doing things on their own.
Esther Duflo. She is somewhat of a celebrity among people who care about development economics, but she is also a doer. She (and the teams of people she worked with) discovered what was an wasn’t effective in a variety of situations, improving the popularity and visibility of using randomized control trials for economic field research.
Jeff Kaufman. I’ve never met him, but he chose to earn to give, and boy did he give! He has a blog, and he posts on the EA forum as well.
Generally I don’t really have role models. I’ve seen enough people express good traits and bad traits that I try to focus on specific behaviors/actions rather than on people as a whole. Think of all the people who work in virtuous fields/vocations who are also real assholes.
For example, Jeff Kaufman seems like a great guy from what I’ve read. But imagine that he has really bad emotional regulation, or he is really rude to strangers, or he isn’t considerate to others, or he is a compulsive liar. If any of those things were true, that wouldn’t change the fact that his earning to give is admirable. I try to not boil people down to a simple god/bad judgement, and instead look at people as a collection of their actions.