Here’s a vicious cycle I’ve observed in myself. (I wasn’t aware of this for a long time.)
I) For whatever reason (often after a period of trying to accomplish something but failing), I feel terrible about myself. I might have thoughts like: “I’m a total failure. I haven’t done anything impactful in my life. I’m stupid and have no talents. I made idiotic mistakes with my career choice. I’m also really unproductive and have zero energy, so there is no hope for me anymore.”
II) Usually, I don’t really believe these thoughts and resist them. But during particularly bad periods, I just fully surrender to them. I give up. There is nothing I can do. Yes, I had no impact and won’t have any impact going forward. Yes, my life has been a waste. But whatever, fuck it, there is nothing I can do. It’s game over, I fucked up beyond redemption.
II) Paradoxically perhaps, a sense of surrender, acceptance and relief sets in. Whatever, it’s over, I can stop beating myself up. I can just do whatever, nothing matters, it’s all pointless anyways. I might watch movies, play video games or listen to music and don’t even think about doing something “productive”.
This period might last anywhere from a few hours to several days. More intense thoughts and feelings (outlined in I and II) usually lead to longer and more “committed” periods of nihilistic surrender.
IV) Weirdly enough, at some point, I end up feeling much more refreshed, motivated, and creative.
V) Of course, I now start working again and push myself hard, partly because I try to make up for all the time I wasted. Predictably, since I haven’t changed my relationship to and motivations for having impact on a more fundamental level, sooner or later I start feeling burnt out again.
“Nihilism vacations”
One theory for why a period of increased motivation follows step III) is that I actually spend some time fully committing, without guilt or doubt (because I have given up) to resting and relaxing which allows me to recover more fully.
Paradoxically, only hitting “rock bottom” allowed me to do this. Before that, I might spend weeks only being able to work a few hours a day and then being too exhausted to continue but not being able to fully commit to resting because I feel guilty about not having worked more. But this “half-assed resting” didn’t allow me to recover fully and on the next day, I still can work only a few hours, certainly not enough to feel like I deserve to rest and have fun, which perpetuates the cycle.
A related vicious circle (cf. the Matthew effect)
Generally speaking, if you obsess about having impact, the less impact you have, the more guilty and worthless you feel and the more you crave impact as this would (temporarily) relieve your feelings of worthlessness and guilt. Consequently, the less impact you have, the harder it is to stop thinking about EA, relax, rest, and recover. Due to this inability to take a break and recover, you might be stuck in a state of low mood, low creativity, and low motivation.
In contrast, the more impact you have, the easier it is to take a break from thinking about impact and just have fun and rest. You feel you deserve it, after all, you already did so much! This care-free attitude allows you to recharge your batteries and come up with new creative ideas and generally be more productive. You also feel much more comfortable taking big risks.
It’s perhaps a bit similar to how if you are poor, have an exhausting minimum-wage job, and are living from paycheck to paycheck, you don’t have the money or energy to take a break in order to find more well-paying jobs or invest in your education or skills to get better paying jobs later.
All of this is also reminiscent of Zvi’s notion of Slack.
More on individual differences in resting needs
When setting standards for productivity/effort, it’s easy to ignore individual differences and compare yourself with the most committed and hard-working EAs. In our early twenties, we lived in an EA office and noticed that some people were working 12 hours almost every day, even on weekends. We tried to match that by pushing ourselves very hard, failed, and felt lazy and selfish in comparison.
Nowadays, we believe that some people can simply work more than others, due to a variety of factors, including ones outside of one’s control. You aren’t lazy, selfish or otherwise mistaken if you can’t work as much as the most hard-working EAs. We know there are enormous individual differences in many traits that feed into productivity (defined here roughly as average hours worked per week). These traits include how much sleep you need, sleep quality, mental health (ADHD-symptoms, depression, etc.), hedonic set point, physical endurance, immune functioning, and so on. This variation seems at least partly attributable to genetics. It’s thus plausible that there will also be large interindividual differences in productivity and that some of the variance will be due to factors outside one’s control. [1]
Also, keep in mind that your ability to work hard might decrease with age, for various reasons. Don’t make the mistake of basing your standards for productive daily hours partly on what you could do when you were young (especially if you forget to factor in that the work you’re doing now might be much more difficult and less rewarding than what you did when you were younger).
More on healthy vs. unhealthy impact obsession and ‘hardcoreness’
A reader wrote that the posts seems to occasionally alternate between two contradicting views on the distinction between unhealthy and healthy impact focus:
1) Continuum view: There’s a continuum that goes from ‘doesn’t care at all about doing good’ to ‘is totally obsessed with impact’. The ‘healthy + moral’ good region is towards the obsessive end, e.g. 80-95%. But people who are, say, above the 95th percentile are (usually) unhealthy.
2) Orthogonality view: Impact focus and mental health are orthogonal. People can be 100% impact-focused but still healthy, as long as they are enjoying themselves and feel motivated by passion.
Here is my rambly reply:
As a matter of human biology / physiology / psychology, you simply cannot always think about maximizing impartial impact or take actions to this effect. Humans are biological creatures with a variety of psychological and physiological needs.
The most obvious, boring example is that you need to sleep, shower, eat, have shelter, and you need to spend some time optimizing for these things. But these examples are probably uninteresting.
Let’s take a more concrete example of Julia Wise, widely considered (rightfully so) to be one of the most altruistic and dedicated EAs. Some time ago, Julia wanted to have children. At first she tried denying herself this wish because she thought that having children is not optimal for impartial impact, all else equal (I think this is most likely correct, at least in her case).
Of course, all else is not equal. Julia realized that not having children would make her miserable and she allowed herself to have children. In one sense, Julia isn’t maximally hardcore because she is not a utilitarian robot that only cares about impartial impact and nothing else. No, she also wants to have children, simply as a desire in itself, regardless of how much impact this has.
However, in order to maximize her impact, it actually makes total sense for Julia to have children. If Julia doesn’t have children, she will be sad or even depressed. If she is sad, she is less productive, happy, motivated and creative, and thus less able to do her job well and ultimately has less impact. Thus, given her psychological desires and constraints, having children actually allows her to do more good. (See also this comment by Carl Shulman which is already mentioned in the post.)
Regarding the orthogonality view: Yes, there is a lot of truth to this. If you’re able to think about having impact and doing impactful work from a more approach-motivation oriented perspective (e.g., “this is cool and enjoyable and I’m doing meaningful work”), you can probably work many hours every week, in the long-term, than if you’re coming from a “this is my moral obligation, I need to do this, I just force myself to do this no matter if I enjoy it or not, this is irrelevant, if I don’t, I’m an evil person that is directly responsible for poor children starving to death” perspective.
So clearly the continuum view is not fully accurate.
But there are two problems here:
i) I’m skeptical that anyone is able to always 100% feel great about the impactful work they are doing, at least in the long-run. Sometimes doing the most impactful thing will be difficult and you won’t enjoy it. (See also beware surprising and suspicious convergence.)
Now, for some people, this ratio might be very small. For example, take an AI alignment researcher who’s always loved math and machine learning since they were young. They won the impact passion lottery. But still, even such people will have a few hours per week that they don’t enjoy, e.g., necessary admin work, meetings, strategic planning, and so on. For others, it may be that a much larger portion of their work is something they don’t enjoy doing. (This may be particularly the case during periods of crisis. (Of course, if you really hate 90% of the work you’re doing, you are probably not going to last long.)
ii) But even if you really love your impactful work, it’s probably good to rest and not at all think about work, at least from time to time. Doing work, even enjoyable work, involves being in the “drive system” and you sometimes probably need to be in the “rest and digest system”. But perhaps some people really need to do this only for like 30 min a day, while others need several hours a day, there are probably large interindividual differences here. (This post by Andrew Critch talks about this issue a bit.)
To sum up, I basically don’t think any existing human is maximally hardcore if you define this as “having the drives of an AI programmed with a purely utilitarian utility function”. I mean, we’re all humans and our motivations were shaped by evolution to a large extent. We have desires for belonging, acceptance, friendship, love, and so on. (Lots of individual differences here again, of course. Some people really want children, some people don’t mind not having them, some people are introverts and don’t mind being alone most of the time, other people need to talk a lot with others else they feel lonely, and so on). But I doubt there is any human who has literally none of these human desires, to any extent. That would be an evolutionary miracle.
Another important and related issue is self-deception. Imagine an EA who really wants to think of himself as being maximally altruistic, hardcore and as having lots of impact. What if his intrinsic interests and talents actually aren’t perfectly aligned with the interests and talents optimal for having impact (and the prior is that there is at least some mismatch)? Well, one way out would be to rationalize that the activities they tend to enjoy are also the most impactful ones. (To be clear, I think in most cases this happens subconsciously, not least because we may not know our intrinsic interests very well.) That’s another reason for dispelling the “stigma” associated with not being 100% hardcore.
Anyways, to summarize, I’d say that neither the continuum or the orthogonality view is a fully accurate description. There is a lot of truth to the orthogonality view in that changing your attitudes and relationship with having impact probably can substantially improve your mental health without reducing the amount of impact you have (or even improving it). However, there is also some truth to the continuum view because you probably sometimes need to take a break from thinking about impact otherwise you risk becoming overwhelmed and overexerted. Another point against the orthogonality view which is probably somewhat controversial: sometimes the most impactful action will be unpleasant and you may need to sacrifice some of your happiness or mental health (temporarily!), especially in moments of crisis if you really want to maximize impact. (I could give examples.) But doing this too often can easily backfire and leave you burnt out and risks long-lasting psychological damage that severely reduces your ability to have impact going forward. So, as a general rule, you want to do this very rarely.
Another personal example: There are people who can play video games for more than 24 hours, or even much longer (with occasional short breaks). The longest time I (David) was ever able to play was ~16 hours at a LAN party when I was 13. After that time, I was exhausted and needed to rest and sleep, even though I really wanted to play more and keep up with my friends. My 13-year old self was very fit and very motivated to play Diablo 2. My sense is that factors outside my control (e.g., genetics) largely contributed to this discrepancy between me and my friends who could play for much longer. It seems plausible that some of these factors are at least partly responsible for me not being able to work more in general.
Appendix B: Really random musings
The burnout-surrender-recovery cycle
Here’s a vicious cycle I’ve observed in myself. (I wasn’t aware of this for a long time.)
I) For whatever reason (often after a period of trying to accomplish something but failing), I feel terrible about myself. I might have thoughts like: “I’m a total failure. I haven’t done anything impactful in my life. I’m stupid and have no talents. I made idiotic mistakes with my career choice. I’m also really unproductive and have zero energy, so there is no hope for me anymore.”
II) Usually, I don’t really believe these thoughts and resist them. But during particularly bad periods, I just fully surrender to them. I give up. There is nothing I can do. Yes, I had no impact and won’t have any impact going forward. Yes, my life has been a waste. But whatever, fuck it, there is nothing I can do. It’s game over, I fucked up beyond redemption.
II) Paradoxically perhaps, a sense of surrender, acceptance and relief sets in. Whatever, it’s over, I can stop beating myself up. I can just do whatever, nothing matters, it’s all pointless anyways. I might watch movies, play video games or listen to music and don’t even think about doing something “productive”.
This period might last anywhere from a few hours to several days. More intense thoughts and feelings (outlined in I and II) usually lead to longer and more “committed” periods of nihilistic surrender.
IV) Weirdly enough, at some point, I end up feeling much more refreshed, motivated, and creative.
V) Of course, I now start working again and push myself hard, partly because I try to make up for all the time I wasted. Predictably, since I haven’t changed my relationship to and motivations for having impact on a more fundamental level, sooner or later I start feeling burnt out again.
“Nihilism vacations”
One theory for why a period of increased motivation follows step III) is that I actually spend some time fully committing, without guilt or doubt (because I have given up) to resting and relaxing which allows me to recover more fully.
Paradoxically, only hitting “rock bottom” allowed me to do this. Before that, I might spend weeks only being able to work a few hours a day and then being too exhausted to continue but not being able to fully commit to resting because I feel guilty about not having worked more. But this “half-assed resting” didn’t allow me to recover fully and on the next day, I still can work only a few hours, certainly not enough to feel like I deserve to rest and have fun, which perpetuates the cycle.
A related vicious circle (cf. the Matthew effect)
Generally speaking, if you obsess about having impact, the less impact you have, the more guilty and worthless you feel and the more you crave impact as this would (temporarily) relieve your feelings of worthlessness and guilt. Consequently, the less impact you have, the harder it is to stop thinking about EA, relax, rest, and recover. Due to this inability to take a break and recover, you might be stuck in a state of low mood, low creativity, and low motivation.
In contrast, the more impact you have, the easier it is to take a break from thinking about impact and just have fun and rest. You feel you deserve it, after all, you already did so much! This care-free attitude allows you to recharge your batteries and come up with new creative ideas and generally be more productive. You also feel much more comfortable taking big risks.
It’s perhaps a bit similar to how if you are poor, have an exhausting minimum-wage job, and are living from paycheck to paycheck, you don’t have the money or energy to take a break in order to find more well-paying jobs or invest in your education or skills to get better paying jobs later.
All of this is also reminiscent of Zvi’s notion of Slack.
More on individual differences in resting needs
When setting standards for productivity/effort, it’s easy to ignore individual differences and compare yourself with the most committed and hard-working EAs. In our early twenties, we lived in an EA office and noticed that some people were working 12 hours almost every day, even on weekends. We tried to match that by pushing ourselves very hard, failed, and felt lazy and selfish in comparison.
Nowadays, we believe that some people can simply work more than others, due to a variety of factors, including ones outside of one’s control. You aren’t lazy, selfish or otherwise mistaken if you can’t work as much as the most hard-working EAs. We know there are enormous individual differences in many traits that feed into productivity (defined here roughly as average hours worked per week). These traits include how much sleep you need, sleep quality, mental health (ADHD-symptoms, depression, etc.), hedonic set point, physical endurance, immune functioning, and so on. This variation seems at least partly attributable to genetics. It’s thus plausible that there will also be large interindividual differences in productivity and that some of the variance will be due to factors outside one’s control. [1]
Also, keep in mind that your ability to work hard might decrease with age, for various reasons. Don’t make the mistake of basing your standards for productive daily hours partly on what you could do when you were young (especially if you forget to factor in that the work you’re doing now might be much more difficult and less rewarding than what you did when you were younger).
More on healthy vs. unhealthy impact obsession and ‘hardcoreness’
A reader wrote that the posts seems to occasionally alternate between two contradicting views on the distinction between unhealthy and healthy impact focus:
1) Continuum view: There’s a continuum that goes from ‘doesn’t care at all about doing good’ to ‘is totally obsessed with impact’. The ‘healthy + moral’ good region is towards the obsessive end, e.g. 80-95%. But people who are, say, above the 95th percentile are (usually) unhealthy.
2) Orthogonality view: Impact focus and mental health are orthogonal. People can be 100% impact-focused but still healthy, as long as they are enjoying themselves and feel motivated by passion.
Here is my rambly reply:
As a matter of human biology / physiology / psychology, you simply cannot always think about maximizing impartial impact or take actions to this effect. Humans are biological creatures with a variety of psychological and physiological needs.
The most obvious, boring example is that you need to sleep, shower, eat, have shelter, and you need to spend some time optimizing for these things. But these examples are probably uninteresting.
Let’s take a more concrete example of Julia Wise, widely considered (rightfully so) to be one of the most altruistic and dedicated EAs. Some time ago, Julia wanted to have children. At first she tried denying herself this wish because she thought that having children is not optimal for impartial impact, all else equal (I think this is most likely correct, at least in her case).
Of course, all else is not equal. Julia realized that not having children would make her miserable and she allowed herself to have children. In one sense, Julia isn’t maximally hardcore because she is not a utilitarian robot that only cares about impartial impact and nothing else. No, she also wants to have children, simply as a desire in itself, regardless of how much impact this has.
However, in order to maximize her impact, it actually makes total sense for Julia to have children. If Julia doesn’t have children, she will be sad or even depressed. If she is sad, she is less productive, happy, motivated and creative, and thus less able to do her job well and ultimately has less impact. Thus, given her psychological desires and constraints, having children actually allows her to do more good. (See also this comment by Carl Shulman which is already mentioned in the post.)
Regarding the orthogonality view: Yes, there is a lot of truth to this. If you’re able to think about having impact and doing impactful work from a more approach-motivation oriented perspective (e.g., “this is cool and enjoyable and I’m doing meaningful work”), you can probably work many hours every week, in the long-term, than if you’re coming from a “this is my moral obligation, I need to do this, I just force myself to do this no matter if I enjoy it or not, this is irrelevant, if I don’t, I’m an evil person that is directly responsible for poor children starving to death” perspective.
So clearly the continuum view is not fully accurate.
But there are two problems here:
i) I’m skeptical that anyone is able to always 100% feel great about the impactful work they are doing, at least in the long-run. Sometimes doing the most impactful thing will be difficult and you won’t enjoy it. (See also beware surprising and suspicious convergence.)
Now, for some people, this ratio might be very small. For example, take an AI alignment researcher who’s always loved math and machine learning since they were young. They won the impact passion lottery. But still, even such people will have a few hours per week that they don’t enjoy, e.g., necessary admin work, meetings, strategic planning, and so on. For others, it may be that a much larger portion of their work is something they don’t enjoy doing. (This may be particularly the case during periods of crisis. (Of course, if you really hate 90% of the work you’re doing, you are probably not going to last long.)
ii) But even if you really love your impactful work, it’s probably good to rest and not at all think about work, at least from time to time. Doing work, even enjoyable work, involves being in the “drive system” and you sometimes probably need to be in the “rest and digest system”. But perhaps some people really need to do this only for like 30 min a day, while others need several hours a day, there are probably large interindividual differences here. (This post by Andrew Critch talks about this issue a bit.)
To sum up, I basically don’t think any existing human is maximally hardcore if you define this as “having the drives of an AI programmed with a purely utilitarian utility function”. I mean, we’re all humans and our motivations were shaped by evolution to a large extent. We have desires for belonging, acceptance, friendship, love, and so on. (Lots of individual differences here again, of course. Some people really want children, some people don’t mind not having them, some people are introverts and don’t mind being alone most of the time, other people need to talk a lot with others else they feel lonely, and so on). But I doubt there is any human who has literally none of these human desires, to any extent. That would be an evolutionary miracle.
Another important and related issue is self-deception. Imagine an EA who really wants to think of himself as being maximally altruistic, hardcore and as having lots of impact. What if his intrinsic interests and talents actually aren’t perfectly aligned with the interests and talents optimal for having impact (and the prior is that there is at least some mismatch)? Well, one way out would be to rationalize that the activities they tend to enjoy are also the most impactful ones. (To be clear, I think in most cases this happens subconsciously, not least because we may not know our intrinsic interests very well.) That’s another reason for dispelling the “stigma” associated with not being 100% hardcore.
Anyways, to summarize, I’d say that neither the continuum or the orthogonality view is a fully accurate description. There is a lot of truth to the orthogonality view in that changing your attitudes and relationship with having impact probably can substantially improve your mental health without reducing the amount of impact you have (or even improving it). However, there is also some truth to the continuum view because you probably sometimes need to take a break from thinking about impact otherwise you risk becoming overwhelmed and overexerted. Another point against the orthogonality view which is probably somewhat controversial: sometimes the most impactful action will be unpleasant and you may need to sacrifice some of your happiness or mental health (temporarily!), especially in moments of crisis if you really want to maximize impact. (I could give examples.) But doing this too often can easily backfire and leave you burnt out and risks long-lasting psychological damage that severely reduces your ability to have impact going forward. So, as a general rule, you want to do this very rarely.
Another personal example: There are people who can play video games for more than 24 hours, or even much longer (with occasional short breaks). The longest time I (David) was ever able to play was ~16 hours at a LAN party when I was 13. After that time, I was exhausted and needed to rest and sleep, even though I really wanted to play more and keep up with my friends. My 13-year old self was very fit and very motivated to play Diablo 2. My sense is that factors outside my control (e.g., genetics) largely contributed to this discrepancy between me and my friends who could play for much longer. It seems plausible that some of these factors are at least partly responsible for me not being able to work more in general.
The link to Carl’s comment doesn’t work for me, but this one does.
This link from the main text to the same comment also doesn’t work for me:
Thanks for pointing this out! I corrected both links.