Thanks a lot for that comment, Dennis. You might not believe it (judging by your comment towards the end), but I did read the full thing and am glad you wrote it all up!
I come away with the following conclusions:
It is true that we often credit individuals with impacts that were in fact the results of contributions from many people, often over long times.
However, there are still cases where individuals can have outsize impact compared to the counterfactual case where they do not exist.
It is not easy to say in advance which choices or which individuals will have these outsize influences …
… but there are some choices which seem to greatly increase the chance of being impactful.
Put in this way, I have very little to object. Thanks for providing that summary of your takeaways, I think that will be quite helpful to me as I continue to puzzle out my updated beliefs in response to all the comments the essay has gotten so far (see statements of confusion here and here).
For example, anyone who thinks that being a great teacher cannot be a super-impactful role is just wrong. But if you do a very simplistic analysis, you could conclude that. It’s only when you follow through all the complex chain of influences that the teacher has on the pupils, and that the pupils have on others, and so on, that you see the potential impact.
That’s interesting. I think I hadn’t really considered the possibility of putting really good teachers (and similar people-serving professions) into the super-high-impact category, and then my reaction was something like “If obviously essential and super important roles like teachers and nurses are not amongst the roles a given theory considers relevant and worth pursuing, then that’s suspicious and gives me reason to doubt the theory.” I now think that maybe I was premature in assuming that these roles would necessarily lie outside the super-high-impact category?
The real question, even of not always posed very precisely, is: for individuals who, for whatever reason, finds themselves in a particular situation, are there choices or actions that might make them 100x more impactful? [...] And yet, it feels like there are choices we make which can greatly increase or decrease the odds that we can make a positive and even an outsize contribution. And I’m not convinced by (what I understand to be) your position that just doing good without thinking too much about potential impact is the best strategy.
I think the sentiment behind those words is one that I wrongfully neglected in my post. For practical purposes, I think I agree that it can be useful and warranted to take seriously the possibility that some actions will have much higher counterfactual impact than others. I continue to believe that there are downsides or perils to the counterfactual perspective, and that it misses some relevant features of the world; but I can now also see more clearly that there are significant upsides to that same perspective and that it can often be a powerful tool for making the world better (if used in a nuanced way). Again, I haven’t settled on a neat stance to bring my competing thoughts together here, but I feel like some of your comments above will get me closer to that goal of conceptual clarification—thanks for that!
Thanks a lot for that comment, Dennis. You might not believe it (judging by your comment towards the end), but I did read the full thing and am glad you wrote it all up!
Put in this way, I have very little to object. Thanks for providing that summary of your takeaways, I think that will be quite helpful to me as I continue to puzzle out my updated beliefs in response to all the comments the essay has gotten so far (see statements of confusion here and here).
That’s interesting. I think I hadn’t really considered the possibility of putting really good teachers (and similar people-serving professions) into the super-high-impact category, and then my reaction was something like “If obviously essential and super important roles like teachers and nurses are not amongst the roles a given theory considers relevant and worth pursuing, then that’s suspicious and gives me reason to doubt the theory.” I now think that maybe I was premature in assuming that these roles would necessarily lie outside the super-high-impact category?
I think the sentiment behind those words is one that I wrongfully neglected in my post. For practical purposes, I think I agree that it can be useful and warranted to take seriously the possibility that some actions will have much higher counterfactual impact than others. I continue to believe that there are downsides or perils to the counterfactual perspective, and that it misses some relevant features of the world; but I can now also see more clearly that there are significant upsides to that same perspective and that it can often be a powerful tool for making the world better (if used in a nuanced way). Again, I haven’t settled on a neat stance to bring my competing thoughts together here, but I feel like some of your comments above will get me closer to that goal of conceptual clarification—thanks for that!