In the past, I think I cared excessively about EA and me myself seeming respectable, and I think I was wrong about the tradeoffs there. As one concrete example of this, when talking to people about AI safety I avoided linking a bunch to blog posts even when I thought they were more useful to read and instead sent people links to more legitimate-seeming academic papers and people because I thought that made the field seem more credible. I think this and other similar things I did were bad.
I didn’t care about people’s character, and how much integrity they had enough in the past. I was very forgiving when I found out someone had intentionally broken a small promise to a colleague or acted in a manipulative way towards someone because in those cases, it seemed to me like the actual magnitude of the harm caused ended up being small relative to the impact of the person’s work. I now think those small harms add up and could be quite costly by adding mistrust and friction to interactions with others in the community.
I dismissed AI x-risk concerns in 2019 without making an honest attempt to learn about the arguments because it sounded weird. I think that was a reasonable thing to do given the social environment I was in. I think the really big mistake I made there though was not stating why I was unconvinced to my friends who had thought about it because I was afraid of seeming dumb due to not having read all the arguments already and because I was afraid of feeling pressured if I did try to argue about it.
I think I thought university EA group organising was the most useful thing for me to do. This seemed sensible to believe for a while but I think I stuck with it for too long because I had signed up to do it. If I had been honestly looking for evidence of the usefulness of the group organising activities I was doing, I would have realised a lot quicker that it was more useful for me to stop and do other things instead. I think this cost me ~100 hours.
Some things I got wrong in the past:
In the past, I think I cared excessively about EA and me myself seeming respectable, and I think I was wrong about the tradeoffs there. As one concrete example of this, when talking to people about AI safety I avoided linking a bunch to blog posts even when I thought they were more useful to read and instead sent people links to more legitimate-seeming academic papers and people because I thought that made the field seem more credible. I think this and other similar things I did were bad.
I didn’t care about people’s character, and how much integrity they had enough in the past. I was very forgiving when I found out someone had intentionally broken a small promise to a colleague or acted in a manipulative way towards someone because in those cases, it seemed to me like the actual magnitude of the harm caused ended up being small relative to the impact of the person’s work. I now think those small harms add up and could be quite costly by adding mistrust and friction to interactions with others in the community.
I dismissed AI x-risk concerns in 2019 without making an honest attempt to learn about the arguments because it sounded weird. I think that was a reasonable thing to do given the social environment I was in. I think the really big mistake I made there though was not stating why I was unconvinced to my friends who had thought about it because I was afraid of seeming dumb due to not having read all the arguments already and because I was afraid of feeling pressured if I did try to argue about it.
I think I thought university EA group organising was the most useful thing for me to do. This seemed sensible to believe for a while but I think I stuck with it for too long because I had signed up to do it. If I had been honestly looking for evidence of the usefulness of the group organising activities I was doing, I would have realised a lot quicker that it was more useful for me to stop and do other things instead. I think this cost me ~100 hours.