Edit: By figuring out ethics I mean both right and wrong in the abstract but also what the world empirically looks like so you know what is right and wrong in the particulars of a situation, with an emphasis on the latter.
I think a lot about ethics. Specifically, I think a lot about “how do I take the best action (morally), given the set of resources (including information) and constraints (including motivation) that I have.” I understand that in philosophical terminology this is only a small subsection of applied ethics, and yet I spend a lot of time thinking about it.
One thing I learned from my involvement in EA for some years is that ethics is hard. Specifically, I think ethics is hard in the way that researching a difficult question or maintaining a complicated relationship or raising a child well is hard, rather than hard in the way that regularly going to the gym is hard.
When I first got introduced to EA, I believed almost the opposite (this article presents something close to my past views well): that the hardness of living ethically is a matter of execution and will, rather than that of constantly making tradeoffs in a difficult-to-navigate domain.
I still think the execution/will stuff matters a lot, but now I think it is relatively more important to be making the right macro- and micro- decisions regularly.
I don’t have strong opinions on what this means for EA at the margin, or for individual EAs. For example, I’m not saying that this should push us much towards risk aversion or other conservatism biases (there are tremendous costs, too, to inaction!)
Perhaps this is an important lesson for us to communicate to new EAs, or to non-EAs we have some influence over. But there are so many useful differences/divergences, and I’m not sure this should really be prioritized all that highly as an explicit introductory message.
But at any rate, I feel like this is an important realization in my own growth journey, and maybe it’d be helpful for others on this forum to realize that I made this update.
Edit: By figuring out ethics I mean both right and wrong in the abstract but also what the world empirically looks like so you know what is right and wrong in the particulars of a situation, with an emphasis on the latter.
I think a lot about ethics. Specifically, I think a lot about “how do I take the best action (morally), given the set of resources (including information) and constraints (including motivation) that I have.” I understand that in philosophical terminology this is only a small subsection of applied ethics, and yet I spend a lot of time thinking about it.
One thing I learned from my involvement in EA for some years is that ethics is hard. Specifically, I think ethics is hard in the way that researching a difficult question or maintaining a complicated relationship or raising a child well is hard, rather than hard in the way that regularly going to the gym is hard.
When I first got introduced to EA, I believed almost the opposite (this article presents something close to my past views well): that the hardness of living ethically is a matter of execution and will, rather than that of constantly making tradeoffs in a difficult-to-navigate domain.
I still think the execution/will stuff matters a lot, but now I think it is relatively more important to be making the right macro- and micro- decisions regularly.
I don’t have strong opinions on what this means for EA at the margin, or for individual EAs. For example, I’m not saying that this should push us much towards risk aversion or other conservatism biases (there are tremendous costs, too, to inaction!)
Perhaps this is an important lesson for us to communicate to new EAs, or to non-EAs we have some influence over. But there are so many useful differences/divergences, and I’m not sure this should really be prioritized all that highly as an explicit introductory message.
But at any rate, I feel like this is an important realization in my own growth journey, and maybe it’d be helpful for others on this forum to realize that I made this update.