Some ways that these concessions can lose you >50% of your impact:
Having a child makes simultaneously founding a startup really hard (edit: and can anchor your family to a specific location)
Working in academia can force you to spend >50% of your effort researching unimportant problems as a grad student, playing politics, writing grants and such; it also has benefits but your research wonât always benefit from them so in the worst case this eats >50% of your impact
If you prioritize AI safety, and think most good AI safety research happens at places like Redwood, MIRI, Anthropic, CHAI, etc., living in the CA Bay Area can be 2x better than living anywhere else
If you prioritize US policy, living in DC can be >2x better than living anywhere else
Allocating 10% of your altruism budget to fuzzies is a good plan, and Iâm mostly worried about people trying to get fuzzies in ways that are much more costly for impact. For instance, EA student groups being optimized for being a âthriving communityâ rather than having a good theory of change, or someone earning-to-give so that they can donate for fuzzies rather than doing direct work thatâs much more impactful.
I know lots of people who are incredibly impactful and are parents and/âor work in academia. For many, career choices such as academia are a good route to impact. For many, having children is a core part of leading a good life for them and (to take a very narrow lens) is instrumentally important to their productivity So I find those claims false, and find it very odd to describe those choices as âconcession[s] to other selfish or altruistic goalsâ. We shouldnât be implying âmaximising your impact (and by implication being a good EA) is hard to make compatible with having a kidââthatâs a good way to be a tiny, weird and shrinking niche group. I found that bullet point particularly jarring and off-putting (and imagine many others would also) - especially as I work in academia and am considering having a child. This was a shame as much of the rest of the post was very useful and interesting.
Thanks for this comment, I made minor edits to that point clarifying that academia can be good or bad.
First off, I think we should separate concerns of truth from those of offputtingness, and be clear about which is which. With that said, I think âconcession to other selfish or altruistic goalsâ is true to the best of my knowledge. Hereâs a version of it that I think about, which is still true but probably less offputting, and could have been substituted for that bullet point if I were more careful and less concise:
When your goal is to maximize impact, but parts of you want things other than maximizing impact, you must either remove these parts or make some concession to satisfy them. Usually stamping out a part of yourself is impossible or dangerous, so making some concession is better. Some of these concessions are cheap (from an impact perspective), like donating 2% of your time to a cause you have personal connection to rather than the most impactful one. Some are expensive in that they remove multipliers and lose >50% of your impact, like changing your career from researching AI safety to working at Netflix because your software engineer friends think AI safety is weird. Which multipliers are cheap vs expensive depends on your situation; living in a particular location can be free if youâre a remote researcher for Rethink Priorities but expensive if by far the best career opportunity for you is to work in a particular biosecurity lab. I want to caution people against making an unnecessarily expensive concession, or making a cheap concession much more expensive than necessary. Sometimes this means taking resources away from your non-EA goals, but it does not mean totally ignoring them.
Regarding having a child, Iâm not an expert or a parent, but my impression is itâs rare for having kids to actually create more impact than not having the desire in the first place. I vaguely remember Julia Wise having children due to some combination of (a) non-EA goals, and (b) not having kids would make her sad, potentially reducing productivity. In this case, the impact-maximizer would say that (a) is fine/âunavoidableânot everyone is totally dedicated to impactâand (b) means that being sad is a more costly concession than not having kids, so having kids is the least costly concession available. Maybe for some, having kids makes life meaningful and gives them something to fight for in the world, which would increase their impact. But I havenât met any such people.
Itâs possible to have non-impact goals that actually increase your impact. Some examples are being truth-seeking, increasing your status in the EA community, or not wanting to let down your EA friends/âcolleagues. But I have two concerns with putting too much emphasis on this. First, optimizing too hard for this other goal has Goodheart concerns: there are selfish rationalists, EAs who add to an echo chamber, and people who stay on projects that arenât maximally impactful. Second, the idea that we can directly optimize for impact is a core EA intuition, and focusing on noncentral cases of other goals increasing impact might distract from this. I think itâs better to realize that most of us are not pure impact-maximizers, we must make concessions to other goals, and that which concessions we make is extremely important to our impact.
I know lots of people who are incredibly impactful and are parents and/âor work in academia
This doesnât seem like much evidence one way or the other unless you can directly observe or infer the counterfactual.
If you take OP at face value, youâre traversing at least 6-7 OOMs within choices that can be made by the same individual, so it seems very plausible that someone can be observed to be extremely impactful on an absolute scale while still operating at only 10% of their personal best, or less. (also there is variance in impact across people for hard-to-control reasons, for example intelligence or nationality).
If you prioritize US policy, being a permanent resident of a state and living in DC temporarily makes sense. But living permanently in DC forecloses an entire path through which you could have impact, i.e. getting elected to federal office. Maybe thatâs the right choice if you are a much much better fit for appointed jobs than elected ones, or if you have a particularly high-impact appointed job where you know you can accomplish more than you could in Congress. But on net I would expect being a permanent resident of DC to reduce most peopleâs policy impact (as does being unwilling to move to DC when called upon to do so).
Some ways that these concessions can lose you >50% of your impact:
Having a child makes simultaneously founding a startup really hard (edit: and can anchor your family to a specific location)
Working in academia can force you to spend >50% of your effort researching unimportant problems as a grad student, playing politics, writing grants and such; it also has benefits but your research wonât always benefit from them so in the worst case this eats >50% of your impact
If you prioritize AI safety, and think most good AI safety research happens at places like Redwood, MIRI, Anthropic, CHAI, etc., living in the CA Bay Area can be 2x better than living anywhere else
If you prioritize US policy, living in DC can be >2x better than living anywhere else
Allocating 10% of your altruism budget to fuzzies is a good plan, and Iâm mostly worried about people trying to get fuzzies in ways that are much more costly for impact. For instance, EA student groups being optimized for being a âthriving communityâ rather than having a good theory of change, or someone earning-to-give so that they can donate for fuzzies rather than doing direct work thatâs much more impactful.
I know lots of people who are incredibly impactful and are parents and/âor work in academia. For many, career choices such as academia are a good route to impact. For many, having children is a core part of leading a good life for them and (to take a very narrow lens) is instrumentally important to their productivity
So I find those claims false, and find it very odd to describe those choices as âconcession[s] to other selfish or altruistic goalsâ. We shouldnât be implying âmaximising your impact (and by implication being a good EA) is hard to make compatible with having a kidââthatâs a good way to be a tiny, weird and shrinking niche group. I found that bullet point particularly jarring and off-putting (and imagine many others would also) - especially as I work in academia and am considering having a child. This was a shame as much of the rest of the post was very useful and interesting.
Thanks for this comment, I made minor edits to that point clarifying that academia can be good or bad.
First off, I think we should separate concerns of truth from those of offputtingness, and be clear about which is which. With that said, I think âconcession to other selfish or altruistic goalsâ is true to the best of my knowledge. Hereâs a version of it that I think about, which is still true but probably less offputting, and could have been substituted for that bullet point if I were more careful and less concise:
When your goal is to maximize impact, but parts of you want things other than maximizing impact, you must either remove these parts or make some concession to satisfy them. Usually stamping out a part of yourself is impossible or dangerous, so making some concession is better. Some of these concessions are cheap (from an impact perspective), like donating 2% of your time to a cause you have personal connection to rather than the most impactful one. Some are expensive in that they remove multipliers and lose >50% of your impact, like changing your career from researching AI safety to working at Netflix because your software engineer friends think AI safety is weird. Which multipliers are cheap vs expensive depends on your situation; living in a particular location can be free if youâre a remote researcher for Rethink Priorities but expensive if by far the best career opportunity for you is to work in a particular biosecurity lab. I want to caution people against making an unnecessarily expensive concession, or making a cheap concession much more expensive than necessary. Sometimes this means taking resources away from your non-EA goals, but it does not mean totally ignoring them.
Regarding having a child, Iâm not an expert or a parent, but my impression is itâs rare for having kids to actually create more impact than not having the desire in the first place. I vaguely remember Julia Wise having children due to some combination of (a) non-EA goals, and (b) not having kids would make her sad, potentially reducing productivity. In this case, the impact-maximizer would say that (a) is fine/âunavoidableânot everyone is totally dedicated to impactâand (b) means that being sad is a more costly concession than not having kids, so having kids is the least costly concession available. Maybe for some, having kids makes life meaningful and gives them something to fight for in the world, which would increase their impact. But I havenât met any such people.
Itâs possible to have non-impact goals that actually increase your impact. Some examples are being truth-seeking, increasing your status in the EA community, or not wanting to let down your EA friends/âcolleagues. But I have two concerns with putting too much emphasis on this. First, optimizing too hard for this other goal has Goodheart concerns: there are selfish rationalists, EAs who add to an echo chamber, and people who stay on projects that arenât maximally impactful. Second, the idea that we can directly optimize for impact is a core EA intuition, and focusing on noncentral cases of other goals increasing impact might distract from this. I think itâs better to realize that most of us are not pure impact-maximizers, we must make concessions to other goals, and that which concessions we make is extremely important to our impact.
This doesnât seem like much evidence one way or the other unless you can directly observe or infer the counterfactual.
If you take OP at face value, youâre traversing at least 6-7 OOMs within choices that can be made by the same individual, so it seems very plausible that someone can be observed to be extremely impactful on an absolute scale while still operating at only 10% of their personal best, or less. (also there is variance in impact across people for hard-to-control reasons, for example intelligence or nationality).
If you prioritize US policy, being a permanent resident of a state and living in DC temporarily makes sense. But living permanently in DC forecloses an entire path through which you could have impact, i.e. getting elected to federal office. Maybe thatâs the right choice if you are a much much better fit for appointed jobs than elected ones, or if you have a particularly high-impact appointed job where you know you can accomplish more than you could in Congress. But on net I would expect being a permanent resident of DC to reduce most peopleâs policy impact (as does being unwilling to move to DC when called upon to do so).