People often want to be part of something bigger than themselves. At least for a lot of people this is pre-theoretic. Personally, Iāve felt this since I was little: to spend my whole life satisfying the particular desires of the particular person I happened to be born into the body of, seemed pointless and uninteresting.
I knew I wanted āsomething biggerā even when I was young (e.g. 13 years old). Around this age my dream was to be a novelist. This isnāt a kind of desire people would generally call āaltruistic,ā nor would my younger self have called it āaltruistic.ā But it was certainly grounded in a desire for my life to mean something to other people. Stuff like the Discworld series and Watchmen really meant something to me, and I wanted to write stuff that meant something to others in the same way.
My current dreams and worldview, after ~10 years of escalating involvement with EA, seem to me to spring from the same seed. I feel continuous with my much younger self. I want my life to mean something to others: that is the obvious yardstick. I want to be doing the most I can on that front.
The empirics were the surprising part. It turns out that the ābasic shape of the worldā is much more mutable than my younger self thought, and in light of this my earlier dreams seem extremely unambitious. Astonishingly, I can probably:
save many lives over my career at minimum, by donating to GiveWell, and likely more by doing more off the beaten path things
save <large number> of e.g. chickens from lives full of torture
be part of a pretty small set of people seriously trying to do something about truly wild risks from new AI and bioengineering technologies
It probably matters more to others that they are not tortured, or dying of malaria, or suffering some kind of AI catastrophe, than that there is another good book for them to read, especially given there are already a lot of good novelists. The seed of the impulse is the same ā wanting to be part of something bigger, wanting to live for my effect on others and not just myself. My sense of what is truly out there in the world and of what I can do about it are whatās changed.
(vibesy post)
People often want to be part of something bigger than themselves. At least for a lot of people this is pre-theoretic. Personally, Iāve felt this since I was little: to spend my whole life satisfying the particular desires of the particular person I happened to be born into the body of, seemed pointless and uninteresting.
I knew I wanted āsomething biggerā even when I was young (e.g. 13 years old). Around this age my dream was to be a novelist. This isnāt a kind of desire people would generally call āaltruistic,ā nor would my younger self have called it āaltruistic.ā But it was certainly grounded in a desire for my life to mean something to other people. Stuff like the Discworld series and Watchmen really meant something to me, and I wanted to write stuff that meant something to others in the same way.
My current dreams and worldview, after ~10 years of escalating involvement with EA, seem to me to spring from the same seed. I feel continuous with my much younger self. I want my life to mean something to others: that is the obvious yardstick. I want to be doing the most I can on that front.
The empirics were the surprising part. It turns out that the ābasic shape of the worldā is much more mutable than my younger self thought, and in light of this my earlier dreams seem extremely unambitious. Astonishingly, I can probably:
save many lives over my career at minimum, by donating to GiveWell, and likely more by doing more off the beaten path things
save <large number> of e.g. chickens from lives full of torture
be part of a pretty small set of people seriously trying to do something about truly wild risks from new AI and bioengineering technologies
It probably matters more to others that they are not tortured, or dying of malaria, or suffering some kind of AI catastrophe, than that there is another good book for them to read, especially given there are already a lot of good novelists. The seed of the impulse is the same ā wanting to be part of something bigger, wanting to live for my effect on others and not just myself. My sense of what is truly out there in the world and of what I can do about it are whatās changed.