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 “concession to other selfish or altruistic goals” is true to the best of my knowledge. Here’s 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 you’re 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, I’m not an expert or a parent, but my impression is it’s 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/unavoidable—not everyone is totally dedicated to impact—and (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 haven’t met any such people.
It’s 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/colleagues. 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 aren’t 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 it’s 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.
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 “concession to other selfish or altruistic goals” is true to the best of my knowledge. Here’s 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 you’re 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, I’m not an expert or a parent, but my impression is it’s 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/unavoidable—not everyone is totally dedicated to impact—and (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 haven’t met any such people.
It’s 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/colleagues. 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 aren’t 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 it’s 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.