It strikes me as pretty odd that this nice story about career choice and neglectedness, with some realistic-feeling dialogue of people talking about their career paths, is also about a future space civilization with seven-dimensional warp drives? I spent half the story wondering if we were just incidentally in the future for fun, or if there was going to be some intensely and uniquely warp-drive-related plot element that tied into the EA theme...
Hi Jackson! I chose to set this story in an (admittedly very science-fictional) future civilization for a couple of reasons:
I was trying to write a story that a random person with no familiarity would find interesting enough to actually read. I think most people would be pretty unlikely to read a story if it were billed as “two people talk about their jobs,” and much more likely to read a story about a spaceship pilot.
Part of the point of the story is that the analytic frameworks of effective altruism aren’t just applicable to our time period, but can (at least in theory) be applied anywhere with the opportunity to do good.
It strikes me as pretty odd that this nice story about career choice and neglectedness, with some realistic-feeling dialogue of people talking about their career paths, is also about a future space civilization with seven-dimensional warp drives? I spent half the story wondering if we were just incidentally in the future for fun, or if there was going to be some intensely and uniquely warp-drive-related plot element that tied into the EA theme...
Hi Jackson! I chose to set this story in an (admittedly very science-fictional) future civilization for a couple of reasons:
I was trying to write a story that a random person with no familiarity would find interesting enough to actually read. I think most people would be pretty unlikely to read a story if it were billed as “two people talk about their jobs,” and much more likely to read a story about a spaceship pilot.
Part of the point of the story is that the analytic frameworks of effective altruism aren’t just applicable to our time period, but can (at least in theory) be applied anywhere with the opportunity to do good.