I really enjoyed this. Deep truths that address some of my current overconfident tendencies and insecurities while being entertaining! Thank you. :) The post could’ve been even more awesome if you linked to the other insights (e.g., the post on hiring).

Hi Kat, thanks so much for your post, that’s a lot of food for thought! Do you have any examples that you’re thinking of when writing about crucial considerations, evidence, social/​psychological factors? I’d love to hear more about the specific cases where these were so important. :)

Hi Kat, Thank You!

The biggest lesson I learned from my altruistic journey so far: widen your f***ing confidence intervals

From my 20+ year career as an investor, it is my experience that your observation on confidence intervals is one of the most important lessons we can learn (and then try to implement, which is extremely hard for most people, but is beneficial to all are able to train themselves to do it).

Hi Kat, I’ve read some of your stuff and I love your thoughts, your attitude, your vibe. I just wanted to respond to this lovely post...your very open and human willingness to constructively criticize or self-audit or whatever you want to call it, is amazing...I see in it a particular quality I’d like to comment on because besides yourself, I think it might be common to the kinds of people drawn to EA...as you mention you had wanted to start “Scientific World Changers” then discovered a different way of saying a similar thing “Effective Altruism”...so you like many in EA have a scientific bent. Which is wonderful of course. But I don’t have that. I’ve spent my whole life in Art and Social Activism and Religion (now I’m not religious anymore but I did it as a profession and spent 30 years going at it hard)...anyways being a person of a very different “bent” than you and a lot of EA’ers I found your beautifully written words in this post very interesting in this way; You seem to have this science based expectation that things should go as scientific laws dictate...if you input correct stuff and the theory is correct then results should always come out the same every time—scientific method experienced! Wonderful...and then so insightfully you explain in your experience, and to great frustration this often doesn’t work...you share the “epistemic angst” producing work of Eva Vivalt which coincides with your own hard earned experience...amazing life experience you’ve had these ten years, and I feel compassion reading this account of it...and so this expectation of some kind of scientifically consistent results contrasted with real world leaves you with this hard earned wisdom that “you know nothing of doing good in the world”—yet—just as in your example that we are monkeys and even though we are monkeys who’ve gone to the moon (ie. the science worked) we are still monkeys, Kat has learned she doesn’t know anything about doing good, yet Kat has started a shitload of charities that are doing good (ie. the Kat good doing worked)...and so here’s my thought, or perspective to offer you...nothing at all counter to your amazing post, but simply to say, there’s a whole world of us humans who don’t have “scientific expectations” as I imagine you and many EA’ers have...and as a result we kind of just do things and just kind of accept the results and don’t worry too much because we just thought we’d do our best and didn’t have particularly specific expectations of how it would work out. And some of us are like Kats who’ve started a shit ton of great stuff and it mostly worked out like your stuff. Now I know many would react that yeah that’s why all the non-scientific people get such shit results, and we scientific world changers are trying to be more effective in getting our shit done! Yes I love you all and thank you all and if it weren’t for you I wouldn’t be typing on this computer because there’s no f’ing way my types would have ever invented a computer. But we did invent meditation, and songs, and poetry and some other cool stuff...so just to say, there’s another way to approach life which is not so scientific and it has some very good results...and that we both need each other, our two sides, and to find balance we could gain a lot from the other sides perspective. As an artist/​spirituality/​social thinker person I’m deeply enjoying wading in the EA scientific way of life. I’m learning so much every day. I do worry though that you guys are going to freak yourselves out on too much doom of unaligned AI causing us to ruin the millions of longterm future humans who will never get to live because we f’ed up AI alignment...it’s like imagining our screw-up holocausted all future humans...that’s a heavy load to carry...and thus my comment. Thanks.

Oh gods, please have at least 2 towels, ideally 2-3 towels a piece (1 body, 1 hands after washing post-toilet, 1 face). Damp towels are a breeding ground for pathogens.

This is the best thing I’ve read on this Forum!