Over the past 12 years, I almost always avoided applying for any jobs in effective altruism – though they did often seem like dream jobs – because:
I was afraid I might not be the best candidate, and if, by chance, I replace the best candidate, my work would not only be a waste but outright harmful. I’m the sort of person who’s afraid to drive a car for fear of hurting someone, and the funding allocation can affect the lives of billions or trillions of beings, so any mistakes I could make would vastly outstrip any harm I could do with a car if I tried.
That the best candidate might not make up for that harm in some other job that they do instead because they might be more socially motivated than me and not fall back on earning to give if they don’t find a charity job but rather value drift and do some mainstream stuff – in the worst case AI capabilities.
That I can survive many years of earning to give without value-drifting because I have managed to do that in the past (a USP I should capitalize on because the counterfactual of the money that I earn at a random company is very low impact, so I can generate great counterfactual impact rather than a bit of marginal impact that I’d get at a charity).
That applying for a job, being considered the best candidate, and then not living up to the expectations would feel deeply humiliating – I’d feel like fraud, feel guilty for the harm I’ve caused, feel ashamed of having betrayed all the people at the organization, feel like I can never live it down or risk running into any of them ever again at conferences and such.
That sometimes they end up hiring a world-renowned researcher like Carl Shulman, and then I’d feel ashamed of even having considered applying because just the thought of it already feels hubristic.
The upshot for me was:
To apply to places that have the funding and management capacity to hire everyone above some bar.
To time the boom and bust cycles in EA and go into grantmaking at the start of the boom cycles and ETG during the bust cycles.
To trade off funding vs. management capacity, and try to contribute to grantmaking in a way that doesn’t come at a cost in management capacity, e.g., not as employee, at times when management capacity is more limiting than funding. Or to create management capacity.
To wait for someone to reach out to me unprompted to apply for a role, because then they’ve already decided that I might be a good fit and thus taken some of the terrible responsibility off my shoulders.
A friend of mine does a lot of drunk driving and usually goes far above the speed limit. I sometimes meet with friends for optional pastime activities. The risk that I catch a cold and my performance is degraded after such a hangout is vastly more severe than the risk of my friend’s drunk speeding because of all the hundreds of thousands of lives it might affect. Conversely, my friend hasn’t killed a single person yet. So I’m in no position to judge her.
Meanwhile rejections were not a problem for me, so it’s not really “rejection sensitivity.” I talked to my friends about how I’m expected to react to them, and their advice was helpful. If I had dared to apply for particularly responsible roles, a rejection would’ve been a relief. After all, rejection is a return to safety. It’s just mixed with the shame over whatever mistakes I must’ve made in front of the interviewers. I considered not going to any conferences anymore where I might run into them, but my friends told me that’s unnecessary. And it’s true because when I decided not to hire people at my companies, I didn’t want them to avoid me afterwards even if they’ve made mistakes in the interviews.
But more recently I’ve updated in the following ways:
I heard from some hiring managers I’m friends with that even at their EA charities some applicants lie about their qualifications. It’s like these people want to cause mayhem and destruction on a global scale by replacing better candidates. Naturally, there friends didn’t hire the liars, but who knows how many slipped through and didn’t get caught. I imagine these people are rare, so the probability that I’ll replace someone better than me is higher but the severity of getting replaced by a liar is worse. So there’s a tradeoff I didn’t consider.
It seems erroneous to think that someone can likely be a better candidate than me and yet value drift more easily than me. It’s not impossible, but it’s a strange convergence of mildly contradictory traits that I should thus have discounted. Besides, small-scale 1:1 compassion has a strong pull for me, so I run a risk of value-drifting away from high scalability impact to something like therapy.
If I implicitly compare myself to Carl Shulman’s polished outputs from the past decades, I set an unrealistically high bar and will necessarily feel lacking. It stands to reason that the actual best candidate will also make mistakes and that even Carl Shulman has made mistakes. Plus, there are not enough Carl Shulmans for every position at every organization.
I’ve practiced imagining that somehow I’ve ended up committing horrendous war crimes on a global scale and how I would process the guilt and try to make it up to all the families I’ve destroyed. It helps me make my fears concrete like that and think through, step by step, how I would manage such a situation responsibly.
If you’re smart enough, self-deceptions won’t be obviously false, sometimes not false at all, but they’ll be selective and suspiciously purposeful.
I have some information that HR doesn’t have but HR also has some information that I don’t have. Ideally, we collaborate to make the optimal decision.
Finally, for anyone struggling with similar difficulties in the face of overwhelming responsibility, here’s a small example of someone processing his responsibility for a terrible accident.
I resonated with a lot of this, especially prior to 2022. Speaking only for myself, I think a lot of it was downstream of what Ozy Brennan wrote in The Life Goals of Dead People, but I was (unbeknownst to myself) much better at rationalisation than introspection, so it took a long time for me to realise this.
Over the past 12 years, I almost always avoided applying for any jobs in effective altruism – though they did often seem like dream jobs – because:
I was afraid I might not be the best candidate, and if, by chance, I replace the best candidate, my work would not only be a waste but outright harmful. I’m the sort of person who’s afraid to drive a car for fear of hurting someone, and the funding allocation can affect the lives of billions or trillions of beings, so any mistakes I could make would vastly outstrip any harm I could do with a car if I tried.
That the best candidate might not make up for that harm in some other job that they do instead because they might be more socially motivated than me and not fall back on earning to give if they don’t find a charity job but rather value drift and do some mainstream stuff – in the worst case AI capabilities.
That I can survive many years of earning to give without value-drifting because I have managed to do that in the past (a USP I should capitalize on because the counterfactual of the money that I earn at a random company is very low impact, so I can generate great counterfactual impact rather than a bit of marginal impact that I’d get at a charity).
That applying for a job, being considered the best candidate, and then not living up to the expectations would feel deeply humiliating – I’d feel like fraud, feel guilty for the harm I’ve caused, feel ashamed of having betrayed all the people at the organization, feel like I can never live it down or risk running into any of them ever again at conferences and such.
That sometimes they end up hiring a world-renowned researcher like Carl Shulman, and then I’d feel ashamed of even having considered applying because just the thought of it already feels hubristic.
The upshot for me was:
To apply to places that have the funding and management capacity to hire everyone above some bar.
To time the boom and bust cycles in EA and go into grantmaking at the start of the boom cycles and ETG during the bust cycles.
To trade off funding vs. management capacity, and try to contribute to grantmaking in a way that doesn’t come at a cost in management capacity, e.g., not as employee, at times when management capacity is more limiting than funding. Or to create management capacity.
To wait for someone to reach out to me unprompted to apply for a role, because then they’ve already decided that I might be a good fit and thus taken some of the terrible responsibility off my shoulders.
A friend of mine does a lot of drunk driving and usually goes far above the speed limit. I sometimes meet with friends for optional pastime activities. The risk that I catch a cold and my performance is degraded after such a hangout is vastly more severe than the risk of my friend’s drunk speeding because of all the hundreds of thousands of lives it might affect. Conversely, my friend hasn’t killed a single person yet. So I’m in no position to judge her.
Meanwhile rejections were not a problem for me, so it’s not really “rejection sensitivity.” I talked to my friends about how I’m expected to react to them, and their advice was helpful. If I had dared to apply for particularly responsible roles, a rejection would’ve been a relief. After all, rejection is a return to safety. It’s just mixed with the shame over whatever mistakes I must’ve made in front of the interviewers. I considered not going to any conferences anymore where I might run into them, but my friends told me that’s unnecessary. And it’s true because when I decided not to hire people at my companies, I didn’t want them to avoid me afterwards even if they’ve made mistakes in the interviews.
But more recently I’ve updated in the following ways:
I heard from some hiring managers I’m friends with that even at their EA charities some applicants lie about their qualifications. It’s like these people want to cause mayhem and destruction on a global scale by replacing better candidates. Naturally, there friends didn’t hire the liars, but who knows how many slipped through and didn’t get caught. I imagine these people are rare, so the probability that I’ll replace someone better than me is higher but the severity of getting replaced by a liar is worse. So there’s a tradeoff I didn’t consider.
It seems erroneous to think that someone can likely be a better candidate than me and yet value drift more easily than me. It’s not impossible, but it’s a strange convergence of mildly contradictory traits that I should thus have discounted. Besides, small-scale 1:1 compassion has a strong pull for me, so I run a risk of value-drifting away from high scalability impact to something like therapy.
If I implicitly compare myself to Carl Shulman’s polished outputs from the past decades, I set an unrealistically high bar and will necessarily feel lacking. It stands to reason that the actual best candidate will also make mistakes and that even Carl Shulman has made mistakes. Plus, there are not enough Carl Shulmans for every position at every organization.
I’ve practiced imagining that somehow I’ve ended up committing horrendous war crimes on a global scale and how I would process the guilt and try to make it up to all the families I’ve destroyed. It helps me make my fears concrete like that and think through, step by step, how I would manage such a situation responsibly.
If you’re smart enough, self-deceptions won’t be obviously false, sometimes not false at all, but they’ll be selective and suspiciously purposeful.
I have some information that HR doesn’t have but HR also has some information that I don’t have. Ideally, we collaborate to make the optimal decision.
Finally, for anyone struggling with similar difficulties in the face of overwhelming responsibility, here’s a small example of someone processing his responsibility for a terrible accident.
I resonated with a lot of this, especially prior to 2022. Speaking only for myself, I think a lot of it was downstream of what Ozy Brennan wrote in The Life Goals of Dead People, but I was (unbeknownst to myself) much better at rationalisation than introspection, so it took a long time for me to realise this.
Ohhh! I love that post! Gotta link it to my excessively guilty friends! <3