I work at 80,000 Hours, talking to people about their careers; opinions I share here are my own.
Abby Hoskin
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Thanks for this write up, Will! I hope it changes the minds of people who are skeptical/unhappy about our massive funding influx.
I think a lot of EAs are not motivated to seek personal financial rewards, instead they find themselves seeking truth in graduate school/academia or trying to improve the world via non-profits. They see their similarly intelligent, well educated peers go into industry, optimizing for “make as much money as possible” and they just fundamentally do not relate to that value function. I wonder if this kind of personality type (if you can call it that) lies at the root of a lot of people’s discomfort with EA non-profit jobs suddenly paying really well.Maybe we could offer special community building grants with the option that you will work in a basement, subsisting only on baguettes and hummus? ;)
Hi Jpmos,
I think context is important here. This is not an earnest but misguided post from an undergrad with big ideas and little experience. This is a post from an organization trying to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars. You can check out their website if you want, the front page has a fundraising advertisement.
Further, there are a lot of fancy buzzwords in this post (“connectome!”) and enough jargon that people unfamiliar with the topic might think there is substance here that they just don’t understand (see Harrison’s comment: “I also know very little about this field and so I couldn’t really judge”).
As somebody who knows a lot about this field, I think it’s important that my opinion on these ideas is clearly stated. So I will state it again.
There is no a priori reason to believe any of the claims of STV. There is no empirical evidence to support STV. To an expert, these claims do not sound “interesting and plausible but unproven”, they sound “nonsensical and presented with baffling confidence”.
People have been observing brain oscillations at different frequencies and at different powers for about 100 years. These oscillations have been associated with different patterns of behavior, ranging from sleep stages to memory formation. Nobody has observed asynchrony to be associated with anything like suffering (as far as I’m aware, but please present evidence if I’m mistaken!).fMRI is a technique that doesn’t measure the firing of neurons (it measures the oxygen consumed over relatively big patches of neurons) and is extremely poorly suited to provide evidence for STV. A better method would be MEG (expensive) or EEG (extremely affordable). If the Qualia Research Institute was a truth seeking institution, they would have either run the simple experiment I proposed themselves, or had any of the neuroscientists they claim to be collaborating with run it for them.
This is a bad post and it should be called out as such. I would have been more gentle if this was a single misguided researcher and not the head of an organization that publishes a lot of other nonsense too.
Thanks for sharing this info, Claire!
I think your team correctly concluded that in-person events are enormously valuable for people making big career changes, but running in-person events are expensive and super logistically challenging. I think logistics are somewhat undervalued in the EA community, e.g. I read a lot of criticism along the lines of, “Why don’t community organizers or EAGs just do some extremely time costly thing,” without much appreciation for how hard it is to get things to happen.
From this perspective, lowering the barrier for in-person events by buying a conference venue seems like a reasonable investment. It’s fine to scrutinize the details (were there better deals given location/size constraints?), but I would like more critics of this purchase to acknowledge how buying a conference center has a lot of benefits.
I totally agree with your points on: movements that frown upon having children will repel top talent, and you can have kids and still be an über effective altruist.
I disagree with the idea that having kids makes people care more about the future. I deeply respect Julia Wise, and maybe this is true for her and other people, but I have found being a parent hasn’t really lengthened my philanthropic time horizons. I would change my mind on this if anybody has studied changes in altruistic behaviors before/after people became parents, but after having a child I’ve actually found myself more open to hyper short-termist altruism that I never would have considered pre-having children. (E.g., adopting a child makes more sense to me now. )
I also disagree on the Bryan Caplan stuff on how you can be a good parent with less effort than current USA norms dictate. Like, if you have an infant that needs to eat every 2 hours, 24 hours a day, for 3 months, there’s no way to slack on that. You can hire somebody to do it for you, you can live near helpful family, or you can be a deadbeat parent. But somebody has to do this intense amount of labor or the child will die. Things definitely get easier once kids get older, and you can just choose to let your kid read all day after school instead of driving them around to a million extracurricular activities, but Bryan’s focus on this being the “norm” that you can easily ignore reveals more about the social class of people he feels peer pressure from than what children actually normally do. I still think it’s great to have kids, even though it’s a lot of work. I just don’t like people acting like it’s not a lot of work.I think one of the main reasons EA people are underrating having kids is because they almost never interact with children? At least in graduate school, very few people have children. I’m the only student in my department with a child. I get the sense that many EAs live in similar age segregated environments. I would encourage more people to babysit their young relatives if they have the opportunity, just so they can see how fun it is :)
Thanks so much for sharing this, Michelle!
I think I agree with everything you have written. I also personally feel like my husband and I are having impactful careers despite having a toddler + 1 on the way, and I don’t think we would be massively more impactful if we were childfree.
This is due to a combination of factors:
1. Childcare time has replaced friend socialization time, basically completely. So we still have time to do a “normal” amount of work, we have just reprioritized our non-working hours.
2. As you know (being my supervisor haha), I work for a core EA org, which has a WONDERFUL parental leave/support policy. My difficult pregnancy has been happily accommodated in every way, and I have paid parental leave when the baby comes soon, which is a huge weight off my shoulders. I know British/European moms expect this, but as an American, it really is wonderful to have this level of support from my employer. So I think working for the right org is pretty critical for being able to have an impactful career while having kids.
3. My husband founded his own EA startup, so he sets his own schedule. This also allows him to be flexible with his hours and be hyperfocused on working on high impact projects, instead of wasting the working hours he has available on stuff that’s less important.
4. My husband is also an excellent partner, who has been averaging more than 50% of the childcare (especially when I’m too pregnant to function). This is a critical factor in me being able to get work done, despite having a high energy toddler.
5. We have access to 8am-6pm daycare, which covers the normal working day. Unfortunately childcare is insanely expensive in the US. We pay over $2k per month in a high cost of living area for one child in daycare. We’re lucky to be able to afford it, but figuring out how you’re going to manage childcare should also be considered if you want to have kids + impact. Getting free childcare from grandparents is definitely the dream here. We do have some grandparent help, which allows us to do things like go to EAGs for a weekend, but basically nobody besides grandparents or people you pay seems to be interested in helping take care of children in modern Western society. (Kinda sad imo.)
6. Making new humans and trying really hard to give them happy lives seems like having a positive impact to me. I work on some longtermist causes, where it’s extremely uncertain what our work now will produce later. But literally creating a new life and taking care of it feels like it has a pretty certain positive expected value :) Or at least more than what I would be doing with my spare time otherwise!
Thanks very much for posting this update!
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[Question] What are the highest impact questions in the behavioral sciences?
In brief, asynchrony levies a complexity and homeostatic cost that harmony doesn’t. A simple story here is that dissonant systems shake themselves apart; we can draw a parallel between dissonance in the harmonic frame and free energy in the predictive coding frame.
I appreciate your direct answer to my question, but I do not understand what you are trying to say. I am familiar with Friston and the free-energy principle, so feel free to explain your theory in those terms. All you are doing here is saying that the brain has some reason to reduce “dissonance in the harmonic frame” (a phrase I have other issues with) in a similar way it has reasons to reduce prediction errors. There are good reasons why the brain should reduce prediction errors. You say (but do not clearly explain why) there’s a parallel here where the brain should reduce neural asynchrony/dissonance in the harmonic frame. You posit neural asynchrony is suffering, but you do not explain why in an intelligible way. “Dissonant systems shake themselves apart.” Are you saying dissonant neural networks destroy themselves and we subjectively perceive this as suffering? This makes no sense. Maybe you’re trying to say something else, but I have made my confusion about the link between suffering and asynchrony extremely clear multiple times now, and you have not offered an explanation that I understand.
I’ve learned that neuroimaging data pipelines are often held together by proverbial duct tape, neuroimaging is noisy, the neural correlates of consciousness frame is suspect and existing philosophy of mind is rather bonkers, and to even say One True Thing about the connection between brain and mind is very hard (and expensive) indeed. I would say I expect you to be surprised by certain realities of neuroscience as you complete your PhD, and I hope you can turn that into determination to refactor the system towards elegance, rather than being progressively discouraged by all the hidden mess.
I mean, I’ve done ~7 peer reviewed conference presentations on my multiple fmri research projects, and I also do multi-site longitudinal research into the mental health of graduate students (with thousands of participants), but thanks for the heads up ;)
I agree neuroimaging is extremely messy and discouraging, but you’re the one posting about successfully building an fmri analysis pipeline to run this specific analysis to support your theory. I am very annoyed that your response to my multiple requests for any empirical data to support your theory is you basically saying “science is hard”, as opposed to “no experiment, dataset, or analysis is perfect, but here is some empirical evidence that is at least consistent with my theory.”
I wish you came at this by saying, “Hey I have a cool idea, what do you guys think?” But instead you’re saying “We have a full empirical theory of suffering” with as far as I can tell, nothing to back this up.
So glad somebody is finally fixing Swapcard!
I thought this was a surprisingly good article! Many journalists get unreasonably snarky about EA topics (e.g., insinuate that people who work in technology are out of touch awkward nerds who could never improve the world; suggest EA is cult-like; make fun of people for caring about literally anything besides climate change and poverty). This journalist took EA ideas seriously, talked about the personal psychological impact of being an EA, and correctly (imo) portrayed the ideas and mindsets of a bunch of central people in the EA movement.
This is such cool research! Thanks to everybody who contributed :)
I’ve found the majority of EA University Club members drift out of the EA community and into fairly low impact careers. These people presumably agree with all the EA basic premises, and many of them have done in depth EA fellowships, so they aren’t just agreeing to ideas in a quick survey due to experimenter demands, acquiescence bias, etc.
Yet, exposure to/agreement with EA philosophy doesn’t seem sufficient to convince people to actually make high impact career choices. I would say the conversion rate is actually shockingly low. Maybe CEA has more information on this, but I would be surprised if more than 5% of people who do Introductory EA fellowships make a high impact career change.
So I would be super excited to see more research into your first future direction: “Beyond agreement with basic EA principles, what other (e.g., motivational or cognitive) predictors are essential to becoming more engaged and making valuable contributions?”
I had the same exact reaction! “Only $200 for one attendee? In this economy? What is that, 20 bananas?”
In my research I have found Princeton graduate students experience higher rates of moderate to severe depression (21.99%-27.90%) and anxiety (24.53%-27.80%) compared to national averages (8.75% for depression, 5.1% for anxiety). We had over 900 respondents (~30% response rate), and used a difficulty to reach technique to check our results generalize to non-respondents, which most other studies of this kind do not do.
As a result, I am very confident PhD students are more depressed and anxious than the general population, and I am very hesitant to recommend doing a PhD.
EA Funds That Exist 2024 (Linkpost)
As somebody currently involved in a university group, I am extremely sympathetic towards the EA Munich group, even though they might have made a mistake here. There is a huge amount of pressure to avoid controversial topics/speakers, and it seems like they did not have a lot of time to make a decision in light of new evidence. I have hosted Peter Singer for multiple events (and am glad to have done so), but it has led to multiple uncomfortable confrontations that the average student group (e.g., knitting society) just does not have to deal with.
This highlights why Larks’ post is so important. When groups face decisions about when to carry out or cancel an event, having an explicit framework for this decision making would be incredibly helpful. I’m very glad to see Julia Wise/CEA engage with this post, as I think it would be helpful for both CEA and local groups to decide at the beginning of term/before inviting speakers what qualifies people to be speakers.
The main (in my opinion, reasonable) principles elucidated in this post as I read it are:
1. Openness to unusual ideas is one of the guiding principles of Effective Altruism; groups should uphold and promote this.
2. Fundamental cause research that challenges existing ideas to the movement is important; we should not punish people for engaging in it.
But it is also important to consider what *disqualifies* people from speaking.
The most critical thing to me would be a speaker’s history of promoting ideas in bad faith. (E.g., promoting ideas that have been clearly falsified with scientific evidence; deliberately falsifying data in order to push a specific agenda.) I am sure there are other factors that would also make sense to consider! It would be helpful for them to be elucidated somewhere.
The Symmetry Theory of Valence sounds wrong to me and is not substantiated by any empirical research I am aware of. (Edited to be nicer.) I’m sorry to post a comment so negative and non-constructive, but I just don’t want EA people to read this and think it is something worth spending time on.
Credentials: I’m doing a PhD in Neuroscience and Psychology at Princeton with a focus on fMRI research, I have a masters in Neuroscience from Oxford, I’ve presented my fMRI research projects at multiple academic conferences, and I published a peer reviewed fMRI paper in a mainstream journal. As far as I can tell, nobody at the Qualia Research Institute has a PhD in Neuroscience or has industry experience doing equivalent level work. Keeping in mind credentialism is bad, I am still pointing out their lack of neuroscience credentials compared to mine because I am confused by how overwhelmingly confident they are in their claims, their incomprehensible use of neuro jargon, and how dismissive they are of my expertise. (Edited to be nicer.) https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/team
There are a lot of things I don’t understand about STV, but the primary one is:
If there is dissonance in the brain, there is suffering; if there is suffering, there is dissonance in the brain. Always.
Please provide evidence that “dissonance in the brain” as measured by a “Consonance Dissonance Noise Signature” is associated with suffering? This should be an easy study to run. Put people in an fMRI scanner, ask them to do things that make them feel suffering/feel peaceful, and see how the CDNS changes between conditions. I’m willing to change my skepticism about this theory if you have this evidence, but if you have this evidence, it seems bizarre that you do not lead with it?
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Edit: I have asked multiple times for empirical evidence to support these claims, but Mike Johnson has not produced anything.
I wish I could make more specific criticisms about why his theory makes no sense theoretically, but so much of what he is saying is incomprehensible, it’s hard to know where to start. Here’s a copy paste of something he said in a comment that got buried below about why suffering == harmonic dissonance:
He’s using “predictive coding frame” as fancy jargon here in what I’m guessing is a reference to Karl Friston’s free-energy principle work. Knowing the context and definition of these words, his explanation still makes no sense.
All he is doing here is saying that the brain has some reason to reduce “dissonance in the harmonic frame” in a similar way it has reasons to reduce prediction errors (ie mistakes in the brain’s predictions of what will happen in an environment). There are good reasons why the brain should reduce prediction errors. Mike offers no clear explanation for why the brain would have a reason to reduce neural asynchrony/”dissonance in the harmonic frame”. His unclear explanation is that dissonance == suffering, but… WHY. There is no evidence to support this.
He says “Dissonant systems shake themselves apart.” Is he saying dissonant neural networks destroy themselves and we subjectively perceive this as suffering? This makes no theoretical sense AND there’s no evidence to support it.
Edit 2: My lab is working on fmri based neurofeedback to improve mental health outcomes of depressed patients, if neurofeedback to reduce psychological suffering is something you’re interested in. (This is not my personal research focus, I’m just familiar with the challenges in fMRI neurofeedback paradigms.) Here’s a paper from my primary and secondary academic advisors: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.07.137943v1.abstract