This isn’t the main point of this post, but I feel like it’s a common criticism of EA so feel like it might be useful to voice my disagreement with this part:
It’s also the case that individual maximization is rarely optimal for groups. Capitalism harnesses maximization to provide benefits for everyone, but when it works, that leads to diversity in specializations, not crowding into the single best thing. To the extent that people ask “how can I be maximally impactful,” I think they are asking the wrong question—they are part of a larger group, and part of the world as a whole, and they can’t view their impact as independent from that reality.
I think viewing yourself as an individual is not in tension with viewing yourself as part of a whole. Your individual actions constitute a part of the whole’s actions, and they can influence other parts of that whole. If everyone in the whole did maximize the impact of their actions, the whole’s total impact would also be maximized.
diversity in specializations, not crowding into the single best thing.
100% agree. But again I don’t think that’s in tension with thinking in terms of where one as an individual can do the most good—it’s just that for different people, that’s different places.
I don’t think we disagree—but there is a naïve approach I’ve seen people take, where they tell people that even though there are other critical tasks, everyone should be working on technical AI safety regardless of their fit, because it’s the most important thing to work on.
This isn’t the main point of this post, but I feel like it’s a common criticism of EA so feel like it might be useful to voice my disagreement with this part:
I think viewing yourself as an individual is not in tension with viewing yourself as part of a whole. Your individual actions constitute a part of the whole’s actions, and they can influence other parts of that whole. If everyone in the whole did maximize the impact of their actions, the whole’s total impact would also be maximized.
100% agree. But again I don’t think that’s in tension with thinking in terms of where one as an individual can do the most good—it’s just that for different people, that’s different places.
I don’t think we disagree—but there is a naïve approach I’ve seen people take, where they tell people that even though there are other critical tasks, everyone should be working on technical AI safety regardless of their fit, because it’s the most important thing to work on.