Here’s a report on Positive AI Economic Futures published by the World Economic Forum and supported by the Center for Human-Compatible AI (CHAI).
Caro
Karma: 1,073
I think this is totally fair and another reason not to do the Pentathlon: the Pentathlon is often particularly useful for the two weeks of the competition, but the habits often don’t hold very well after. If you want to make the habits endure, I recommend setting up strong systems during the Pentathlon and holding yourself accountable for keeping them afterwards. For example, the Pentathlon’s sleep target will possibly lead you to set up an alarm on your phone, your computer, or your programmed lightbulbs, etc. to go to bed on time. Set up a target of keeping them for one month after the Pentathlon, and set up an accountability system for that (a bet with a friend, a bet with a friend you met during the Pentathlon, etc).
There are often discussions on the Pentathlon Slack about these questions so people can help each other problem-solve!
Yes! If people are interested in joining an “EA Forum” team, they can either coordinate here or via EA Forum DMs. Otherwise, join as an individual and specify you want to join an EA Forum team and we’ll match you with others!
You can definitely join as an individual! You’ll then be matched to an EA team (probably made of other individuals). Would love to have you!
For another counterargument to your point about the fact that some positions don’t look attractive to people who are overqualified, here’s Ben West’s article. I personally think that making the position challenge and a growth opportunity make people more motivated and excited.
This was such a great post and I was nodding along throughout the whole article, except for the part about the importance of hiring people who are “strategically aligned”.
I think that you often need people at the top of the organization to deeply share the org’s ethics and long-term goals, otherwise you find yourself in very-long debates about theories of change, which ultimately affect a lot of the decisions (I wonder if you have experienced this?). The exception to this is when you find non-EA, but exceptional people who share EA goals while also having their own perspectives and motivations, who are quite flexible and open-minded—those can indeed bring a fresh perspective. But I think those people are rare enough that it would make sense to filter at least a little bit in the interview about the long-term goals, ethics, values of the person, and how they would approach the org’s theory of change.
Exciting! Do you have a deadline for people filling this?
Thank you for writing this! I like the concept and word “Dedicate”. This piece resonates a lot with me.
A small idea of a potentially high-impact consultancy: you may want to consider specializing in helping EAs figure out what physical health problems they have and recommending steps they can take to improve those. (I realize after writing this that you underlined that you don’t like clinical work that much so maybe the following isn’t that useful.)
One of the pieces of advice of 80,000 Hours is to take care of your physical health and notably avoid back issues.
We were surprised to learn that the biggest risk to our productivity is probably back pain: it’s now the leading cause of ill-health globally, at least by some measures.5 Our co-founder, Will, was suddenly taken out for months by chronic lower-back pain.
Repetitive strain injury (RSI) is also a hazard of modern workplaces, and can even permanently damage your ability to type or use a mouse.
Will spoke to over ten health professionals about his back pain before he got any useful advice. This isn’t uncommon either, since the causes of much back pain are unknown,6 and it can be hard to treat.
Nevertheless, you can reduce your chances of back pain and RSI in a couple of ways. First, correctly set up your desk and maintain good posture – see advice here, here and here. Second, regularly change position (the pomodoro technique is useful). Third, exercise regularly.
These steps sound trivial, but statistically, it’s pretty likely you’ll face a bout of bad back pain at some point in your life, and you’ll thank yourself for making these simple investments.
A quite large number of people in EA have some types of physical health issues. Advising EA orgs on how they should think about the ergonomics of their offices would be helpful. I would personally be interested in, for example, having a video call with someone who could tell me if my chair, my back, etc. are in the right positions and in general how to have a better posture. I would bet that many EAs would be interested in that as well (if the consultant was actually good, of course!).
Other than ergonomics, there is also a need for a consultancy that would help people find out what weird “health” things they have -there was a job opening as a Medical Mysteries Investigator at Non-Linear, and I’m guessing there’s still a high demand for this type of role.
EAs have the particular need for quite evidenced-based stuff if possible.
You could test whether this idea is viable by setting up a few calls with friends to improve their ergonomics, get feedback, check with your professors, etc. Then set up a few cheap or free calls for EAs to improve their ergonomics or read a bunch of papers on what health problems they could have (and of course, they’d need to discuss that with their doctor).
Basically, setting up your own consultancy based on your comparative advantage may be really great—if you like the job! You could have a large impact by reducing the physical health risks of several (maybe dozens of? hundreds of?) people. Of course, it’s better to consider several options before settling down.
Good luck!
I found this post interesting!
I would highly recommend this book “Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong”.Eric Barker (from the blog “Barking Up the Wrong Tree”) gives advice based on hundreds of papers on the topic.
Thanks for this post! I’ve been wondering about how to think about this too.
Some burgeoning ideas:
Maybe try to understand new people’s moral priorities, e.g. understand if they ‘score’ high on “Expansive Altruism” and “Effectiveness-focused” scales. If they actually genuinely ‘score’ [1] high on those moral inclinations, I would tend to trust them more.
Maybe start a clearance process, in the sense of checking the background of people, etc. National security of countries also has to deal with this type of alignment problem.
Teach people how to be intense, ambitious, and actually optimize for the right thing. I think that people may be really interested in doing the highest impact thing but they don’t have the “thinking methods” and general “super ambitious social environment” about those. People who push for high intensity and know what to prioritize are extremely rare and precious. Having workshops or online classes about successful (large) project prioritization, calculating the EV of a project, increasing its ambition, and calculating and reducing risks, may be useful.
- ^
Noting that it would be easy to Goodhart those existing scales. So this would be mostly through conversations and in-depth interactions.
I’ll be able to do phonebanking on Tuesday from 10am to 1pm PT on Tuesday—join then!
And I’m happy to help coordinate outside of this!
Lots of useful insights. At this point, I’m more on the side of doing this, which is not fanning the flames.
″ How should I respond to takes on EA that I disagree with?
Maybe not at all — it may not be worth fanning the flames.
If you do respond, it helps to link to a source for the counter-point you want to make. That way, curious people who see your interaction can follow the source to learn more.”
Agree with this point. Jeffrey Ladish wrote “US Citizens: Targeted political contributions are probably the best passive donation opportunities for mitigating existential risk”.
He says:
Recently, I’ve surprised myself by coming to believe that donating to candidates who support policies which reduce existential risks is probably the best passive donation opportunity for US citizens. The main reason I’ve changed my mind is that I think highly aligned political candidates have a lot of leverage to affect policies that could impact the long-term future and are uniquely benefited from individual donations.
If you’re not a US citizen, you can volunteer for a campaign (that’s legal!).
It’s quite hard to know and I don’t know what the Team Campaign thinks about it.
There is a good article on Vox about the evidence base for those things “Gerber and Green’s rough estimate is that canvassing can garner campaigns a vote for about $33, while volunteer phone-banking can garner a vote for $36 — not too different, especially when you consider how imprecise these estimates necessarily are.” Not exactly what you answered but can give you a sense of direction.”
I also think that helping Carrick would be super good!
Regarding phone banking, I wouldn’t be that interested in paying for volunteers. The most important factor in the effectiveness of the calls is that the caller is genuinely enthusiastic about the candidate - basically, if the caller is really interested, the person on the other end of the line has three times more chances of being convinced than if the caller is not really enthusiastic about the candidate. (I don’t have the specific paper this was in.) So it’s great if you get your friends to call, but they need to be “in”!
Other ways to contribute:
donating until Sunday to get really good ads in front of voters (max $2,900) (it’s less effective than a few days ago, but still valuable!) and/or get your friends to donate!
Talk to your friends about Carrick’s policy proposals on topics they’re interested in.
Talk to people on social media about why you’re genuinely excited about Carrick winning.
The campaign can only use the first $2,900 in the primary campaign, but they can use the rest in the general election if they win the primary. If they don’t win the primary, the options are either returning the remaining money to you or passing it along to another campaign.
Additional funding right now would be financing better and more personal ads that still work in these final days.
As you’ve already given $2,900, I may recommend:
Directly going to Oregon and knocking on doors!
Phone banking
Talk to your Oregon friends living in District 6 or who have connections to it
Saying why you care about voting for Carrick on social media
It’s about every Monday—the next one being in three days.
However, I recommend that you sign up even outside of these slots because there are still opportunities to do phone calls!
Kuhan is probably right. However, after speaking to someone on Team Carrick today, it seems like there is still room for funding for the campaign’s ads, which are different from the PAC’s ads and show more Carrick talking directly to people. So giving now still makes sense (for the next 48 hours) even though the effects are smaller than a few days ago.
For what it’s worth, these different considerations can be true at the same time:
“He may have his own axe to grind.”: that’s probably true, given that he’s been fired by CEA.
“Kerry being at CEA for four years makes it more important to pay serious attention to what he has to say even if it ultimately doesn’t check out.”: it also seems like he may have particularly useful information and contexts.
“He’s now the program manager at a known cult that the EA movement has actively distanced itself from”: it does seem like Leverage is shady and doesn’t have a very good culture and epistemic, which doesn’t reflect greatly on Kerry.
So I would personally be inclined to pay close attention to his criticisms of CEA. At the same time, I would need more “positive” contexts from others to be able to trust what he says.