I commit to using my skills, time, and opportunities to maximize my ability to make a meaningful difference
I find the word maximise pretty scary here, for similar reasons to here. Analogous how GWWC is about giving 10%, a bounded amount, not “as much as you can possibly spare while surviving and earning money”
To me, taking a pledge to maximise seriously (especially in a naive conception where “I will get sick of this and break the pledge” or “I will burn out” aren’t considerations) is a terrible idea, and I recommend that people take pledges with something more like “heavily prioritise” or “keep as one of my top prioritise” or “actually put a sincere, consistent effort into, eg by spending at least an hour per month reflecting on whether I’m having the impact I want”. Of course, in practice, a pledge to maximise generally means one of those things, since people always have multiple priorities, but I like pledges to be something that could be realistically kept.
Thanks for the feedback Neel! Obviously as noted above, we released this quickly (after <12 hours of work) to get feedback exactly like this. We will focus on rewording the pledge statement to try to reduce or, if we’re especially lucky, nullify the concerns you’ve raised here.
I’d think a better way to get feedback is to ask “What do you think of this pledge wording?” rather than encourage people to take a lifelong pledge before it’s gotten much external feedback.
For comparison, you could see when GWWC was considering changing the wording of its pledge (though I recognize it was in a different position as an existing pledge rather than a new one): Should Giving What We Can change its pledge?
This seems like a reasonable mistake for younger EAs to make, and I’ve seen similar mindsets frequently—but in the community, I am very happy to see that many other members are providing a voice of encouragement, but also signficantly more moderation.
But as I said in another comment, and expanded on in a reply, I’m much more concerned than you seem to be about people committing to something even more mild for their entire careers—especially if doing so as college students. Many people don’t find work in the area they hope to. Even among those that do find jobs in EA orgs and similar, which is a small proportion of those who want to, some don’t enjoy the things they would view as most impactful, and find they are unhappy and/or ineffective; having made a commitment to do whatever is most impactful seems unlikely to work well for a large fraction of those who would make such a pledge.
I find the word maximise pretty scary here, for similar reasons to here. Analogous how GWWC is about giving 10%, a bounded amount, not “as much as you can possibly spare while surviving and earning money”
To me, taking a pledge to maximise seriously (especially in a naive conception where “I will get sick of this and break the pledge” or “I will burn out” aren’t considerations) is a terrible idea, and I recommend that people take pledges with something more like “heavily prioritise” or “keep as one of my top prioritise” or “actually put a sincere, consistent effort into, eg by spending at least an hour per month reflecting on whether I’m having the impact I want”. Of course, in practice, a pledge to maximise generally means one of those things, since people always have multiple priorities, but I like pledges to be something that could be realistically kept.
Thanks for the feedback Neel! Obviously as noted above, we released this quickly (after <12 hours of work) to get feedback exactly like this. We will focus on rewording the pledge statement to try to reduce or, if we’re especially lucky, nullify the concerns you’ve raised here.
I’d think a better way to get feedback is to ask “What do you think of this pledge wording?” rather than encourage people to take a lifelong pledge before it’s gotten much external feedback.
For comparison, you could see when GWWC was considering changing the wording of its pledge (though I recognize it was in a different position as an existing pledge rather than a new one): Should Giving What We Can change its pledge?
Glad to hear it!
This seems like a reasonable mistake for younger EAs to make, and I’ve seen similar mindsets frequently—but in the community, I am very happy to see that many other members are providing a voice of encouragement, but also signficantly more moderation.
But as I said in another comment, and expanded on in a reply, I’m much more concerned than you seem to be about people committing to something even more mild for their entire careers—especially if doing so as college students. Many people don’t find work in the area they hope to. Even among those that do find jobs in EA orgs and similar, which is a small proportion of those who want to, some don’t enjoy the things they would view as most impactful, and find they are unhappy and/or ineffective; having made a commitment to do whatever is most impactful seems unlikely to work well for a large fraction of those who would make such a pledge.