On individual advice: I’d add something about remembering that you are always in charge and should set your own boundaries. You choose what you want to do with your life, how much of EA you accept, and how much you want to use to influence your choices. If you’re a professional acrobat and want to give 10% of your income to effective charities, that’s a great way to be an EA. If someone points out that you also have a degree in computer science and could go work on AI safety, it’s fine to reply “I know but I don’t want to do that”. You don’t need to defend or justify your choices on EA grounds.
(That doesn’t mean you might not want to defend some choice you’ve made. The research side of EA is all about making and breaking down claims about what actions do the most good. But people’s personal choices about how to act don’t themselves constitute claims about the best way to act.)
EA is a highly intellectual community, so I worry that people feel the need to justify or defend anything they do or any choice they make though an EA lens, and this might make EA infiltrate their life more than they are actually comfortable with and fail to set the right boundaries. People should do EA things because and to the extent that they want to, and the EA community should be there as a resource to help them do that. But EA should justify itself to you, not the other way round.
I don’t buy this. Perhaps I don’t understand what you mean.
To press, imagine we’re at the fabled Shallow Pond. You see a child drowning. You can easily save them at minimal cost. However, you don’t. I point out you could easily have done so. You say “I know but I don’t want to do that”. I wouldn’t consider that a satisfactory response.
If you then said “I don’t need to justify my choices on effective altruist grounds” I might just look at your blankly for a moment and say “wait, what has ‘effective altruism’ got to do with it? What about, um, just basic ethics?” Our personal choices often do or could affect other people.
I don’t think that people should endlessly self-flaggelate about whether they are doing enough. You need to recognise it’s a marathon, not a sprint, and there are serious limits to what we can will ourselves to do, even if think it would be a good idea in principle. And it’s important to be as kind, forgiving, and accepting to ourselves as we think we should be to others we love. But what youve said, taken as face value, seems carte blanche for not trying.
I guess I’d be much more likely to assume good intentions to someone who says ‘yeah, I don’t want to work on AI safety’, than someone who says ‘yeah I don’t want to step into a shallow pond to rescue a child’. In the first example I’d think something like ‘ok, this person has considered working in this area, decided again it, and doesn’t want to explain their reasoning to me at this point in time’. I think that’s fine. It can be quite draining to repeatedly be asked to justify to others why you’re not working in the area they judge to be the highest priority.
On individual advice: I’d add something about remembering that you are always in charge and should set your own boundaries. You choose what you want to do with your life, how much of EA you accept, and how much you want to use to influence your choices. If you’re a professional acrobat and want to give 10% of your income to effective charities, that’s a great way to be an EA. If someone points out that you also have a degree in computer science and could go work on AI safety, it’s fine to reply “I know but I don’t want to do that”. You don’t need to defend or justify your choices on EA grounds.
(That doesn’t mean you might not want to defend some choice you’ve made. The research side of EA is all about making and breaking down claims about what actions do the most good. But people’s personal choices about how to act don’t themselves constitute claims about the best way to act.)
EA is a highly intellectual community, so I worry that people feel the need to justify or defend anything they do or any choice they make though an EA lens, and this might make EA infiltrate their life more than they are actually comfortable with and fail to set the right boundaries. People should do EA things because and to the extent that they want to, and the EA community should be there as a resource to help them do that. But EA should justify itself to you, not the other way round.
I don’t buy this. Perhaps I don’t understand what you mean.
To press, imagine we’re at the fabled Shallow Pond. You see a child drowning. You can easily save them at minimal cost. However, you don’t. I point out you could easily have done so. You say “I know but I don’t want to do that”. I wouldn’t consider that a satisfactory response.
If you then said “I don’t need to justify my choices on effective altruist grounds” I might just look at your blankly for a moment and say “wait, what has ‘effective altruism’ got to do with it? What about, um, just basic ethics?” Our personal choices often do or could affect other people.
I don’t think that people should endlessly self-flaggelate about whether they are doing enough. You need to recognise it’s a marathon, not a sprint, and there are serious limits to what we can will ourselves to do, even if think it would be a good idea in principle. And it’s important to be as kind, forgiving, and accepting to ourselves as we think we should be to others we love. But what youve said, taken as face value, seems carte blanche for not trying.
I didn’t think Askell’s comment was advocating not trying. The examples given—giving 10% and going into AI safety- were pretty demanding.
I guess I’d be much more likely to assume good intentions to someone who says ‘yeah, I don’t want to work on AI safety’, than someone who says ‘yeah I don’t want to step into a shallow pond to rescue a child’. In the first example I’d think something like ‘ok, this person has considered working in this area, decided again it, and doesn’t want to explain their reasoning to me at this point in time’. I think that’s fine. It can be quite draining to repeatedly be asked to justify to others why you’re not working in the area they judge to be the highest priority.
Agreed! I wrote a post about exactly this. Julia Wise also has a good one on similar topics.