Having been an investment banker for many years working with top flight partners in Magic Circle firms in London my particular concern is that it can be very corrosive to long term morality, particularly as you rise to partner level. The moral choices you are often asked by clients to assist them in making in favour of financial return would I imagine affect most people. With the hours that such jobs require, minimising contact with an effective altruism community I would worry about a corporate lawyer losing their commitment to effective altruism as other moral guidance came to the fore.
With the hours that such jobs require, minimising contact with an effective altruism community I would worry about a corporate lawyer losing their commitment to effective altruism as other moral guidance came to the fore.
Interesting to have you take on this as someone who’s been there David. People are familiar with these concerns of value drift, but I think underrate their application to themselves, because it’s hard to imagine one’s own values changing at a time when one’s very absorbed in them. Nonetheless, many effective altruists are currently in a very favourable setting for EA ideas (being students with several EA friends), and it’d be natural for some to drop off when they move to the sort of environment you describe.
That is a well known bias isn’t it? I forget the scientific name of it—but its part of our tendency to see the world as fixed and ourselves in control of our actions that when we see ourselves in the future—we fail to imagine changes in our personality and values but instead project ourselves into that time as we currently are, relatedly we consistently underestimate how much we have changed already and how different we are from the people we were in the past because we are bad at noticing how our values and personalities change over time.
Having been an investment banker for many years working with top flight partners in Magic Circle firms in London my particular concern is that it can be very corrosive to long term morality, particularly as you rise to partner level. The moral choices you are often asked by clients to assist them in making in favour of financial return would I imagine affect most people. With the hours that such jobs require, minimising contact with an effective altruism community I would worry about a corporate lawyer losing their commitment to effective altruism as other moral guidance came to the fore.
Interesting to have you take on this as someone who’s been there David. People are familiar with these concerns of value drift, but I think underrate their application to themselves, because it’s hard to imagine one’s own values changing at a time when one’s very absorbed in them. Nonetheless, many effective altruists are currently in a very favourable setting for EA ideas (being students with several EA friends), and it’d be natural for some to drop off when they move to the sort of environment you describe.
That is a well known bias isn’t it? I forget the scientific name of it—but its part of our tendency to see the world as fixed and ourselves in control of our actions that when we see ourselves in the future—we fail to imagine changes in our personality and values but instead project ourselves into that time as we currently are, relatedly we consistently underestimate how much we have changed already and how different we are from the people we were in the past because we are bad at noticing how our values and personalities change over time.
End of History Illusion sounds like what you’re looking for.