Jakob_J

Karma: 211

Jakob_J 5 Dec 2020 23:46 UTC
42 points
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on: My mistakes on the path to impact
Thanks for writing and sharing your insights! I think the whole EA community would be a lot healthier if people had a much more limited view of EA, striving to take jobs that have positive impact in the long run, rather than focussing so much on the much shorter-term goal of taking jobs in high-profile EA organisations, at great personal expense.

Jakob_J 12 Jan 2021 9:12 UTC
30 points
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on: Tommy Raskin: In Memoriam
This terrible news. I also did not know Tommy, but my heart really goes out to his friends and family. Reading the statement I was touched by his strength of character—he appears to have been extremely gifted, loving and humble and with a genuine interest in helping others and the world. We can all surely find great inspiration in the exemplary life Tommy led.
This is also a stark reminder that no matter how outwardly successful or happy we might appear, we all carry our share of troubles and negative feelings; doubting ourselves and our worthiness, often trying to hide our sadness and our loneliness out of shame. Though just like Tommy, we’re all merely human, we all have flaws and imperfections. We are not alone in our struggles.
For anyone who might be feeling overwhelmed and unable to cope with their negative feelings, or are just interested in more mental health resources, I would like to recommend The Feeling Good Podcast (available with most podcast apps) with David Burns (author of the book Feeling Good, though the podcast is much better). There are episodes available on suicide prevention, loneliness, perfectionism, feelings of worthlessness, COVID-19 and much more. It has drastically improved my own mood and those that I know that have listened to it, and I believe it might help others as well.

We should choose between moral theories based on the scale of the problem

Jakob_J4 Nov 2019 14:34 UTC

28 points

13 comments2 min readEA link

Jakob_J 6 May 2021 8:32 UTC
24 points
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on: Should you do a PhD in science?
PhDs get a lot of negative hype these days, so much that I wonder if it is potentially underrated it as a viable career step. I am just coming out of a PhD programme in the UK, and while I didn’t always enjoy my topic nor want to continue research in my field, I still think it is overall a positive experience. It is important to realize that most people starting PhDs are well aware of the low chances of becoming a professor, but luckily there are still many good career options outside academia (however I do think all the negative hype around academic careers probably means that it is also underrated relative to its true value). Some of the good aspects of (science) PhDs are:

- Lots of flexibility. You are basically guaranteed an income for ~4-5 years that you cannot lose no matter how poorly you do. While your supervisor certainly has some influence over what you do during this time, you are surprisingly free to work on what you want.
- High potential for growth. You get to experience just how difficult it is to become a world expert in something, albeit very niche, because most often you are the first to attempt your line of research. Learning about what has been done before in a field, how to find a viable approach, and how to overcome unexpected setbacks are very transferable skills.
- This is a bit more speculative, but I’d reckon that you have higher chances of landing an intellectually stimulating career with a PhD compared to a Master’s degree, at least in fields where credentials matter. I’d also reckon that as a PhD plus a few years experience you are likely to get promoted to leadership positions faster.
- Many fields EAs care about (nuclear security, biosafety, AI etc.) are very science-heavy fields where having a PhD is useful. For example, with a Physics PhD it would be relatively easy to get a job in either of these, since your skillset is sufficiently adaptable to most analytic fields.

Jakob_J 7 Dec 2020 15:17 UTC
15 points
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in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: My mistakes on the path to impact
I actually think the principles of deference to expertise and avoiding accidental harm are in principle good and we should continue using them. However, in EA the barrier to being seen as an expert is very low—often its enough to have written a blog or forum post on something, having invested less than 100 hours in total. For me an expert is someone who has spent the better part of his or her career working in a field, for example climate policy. While I think the former is still useful to give an introduction to a field, the latter form of expertise has been somewhat undervalued in EA.

Jakob_J 8 Jan 2021 20:05 UTC
14 points
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in reply to: Harrison Durland’s comment on: The Folly of “EAs Should”
Yes, I agree that when we are trying to maximise the amount of good we do with limited resources, these local charities are not likely to be a good target for donations. However, as you mention, EA is different from utilitarianism because we don’t believe everyone should use all or most of their resources to do as much good as possible.
So when we spend money on ourselves or others for reasons other than trying to maximise the good this might also include donations to local causes. It seems inconsistent to say that we can spend money on whatever we want for ourselves, but if we choose to spend money on others, it can’t be for those in our community.
My point was therefore about communication: it’s not correct to say that EAs should never donate to local causes, when what we mean is that donating to local causes is unlikely to bring about the most good (but people might have other reasons for doing so anyway).

Jakob_J 18 Jan 2021 10:45 UTC
13 points
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on: What is going on in the world?
- Most human effort is being wasted on endeavors with no abiding value.
- Nothing we do matters for any of several reasons (moral non-realism, infinite ethics, living in a simulation, being a Boltzmann brain, ..?)
Things certainly feel very doom & gloom right now, but I still think there is scope for optimism in the current moment. If I had been asked in February last year what the best and worst outcomes would have been of the pandemic a year later, I would probably have guessed a whole lot worse than what turned out to be the case. I also don’t think that we are living in some special age of incompetent governance right now, and I would argue that throughout history we have come up with policies that have been disastrously wrong one way or the other. Competence have appeared elsewhere—as Tyler Cowen has argued, businesses seem unusually competent in the current crises compared to governments. Where would we have been without supermarkets’ supply chains, Amazon, Pfizer, Zoom etc during the pandemic? According to this article there are more reasons to be optimistic than pessimistic right now:
- As people lose jobs and income, many go hungry. Projections from the Food and Agricultural Organization point to an increase in the global number of chronically undernourished from 8.9 to around 9.9 per cent. A terrible outcome, but it still represents a reduction by a quarter since 2000.
- It took mankind 3,000 years to develop a vaccine against polio and smallpox. Moderna designed a vaccine against Covid-19 in two days. Had we faced this new coronavirus in 2005, we would not have had the technology to even imagine such mRNA vaccines, if it had appeared in 1975 we would not have the ability to read the genome of the virus, if it came in 1950, we would not have had a single ventilator on the planet.
- [T]he progress of the last few decades has been so fast, and human creativity under duress so impressive, that even major setbacks only pushes us back a few years. Only three years in history have been better in terms of GDP per capita, extreme poverty and child mortality – 2017, 2018 and 2019.

Jakob_J 15 May 2021 13:47 UTC
11 points
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on: EA is a Career Endpoint
Don’t try to wake up and save the world. Don’t be bycatch. Take 15 years and become a domain expert. Take a career and become a macrostrategy expert. Mentor. Run small and non-EA projects. Circle back to EA periodically with your newfound skills and see what a difference you can make then. There is absolutely no way we can have a longtermist movement if we can’t be longtermist about our own lives and careers. But if we can, then we can.

Many social movements I have been a part of (political, sports, religious etc.) have a sort of “more is more” aspect to them that I see a lot in EA. The basic idea is this: it is fine if you just want try things out, but the more involved you are in the organization, the more events you go to, the more you align your life around the mission of the organization, the better. To a large part, this is why I have often experienced “organizational burnout”: when due to changing circumstances I cannot or do not want to be as involved anymore, it is often easier to quit altogether rather than to scale things back. With most of my commitments these days I try to follow a “less is more” approach, where I try to capture about ~10% of the scope of an organization or movement. The 10% scope of EA seems to be the thinking that we should consider how important a problem is when choosing a career or where to donate our funds. If we get more involved than this, there is a danger of not being able to sustain it over a long time. The other advantage of being minimally involved is that we can join a larger number of organizations and get a diverse and rich set of benefits that exceed what any one organization can provide.

Jakob_J 5 Mar 2019 11:52 UTC
11 points
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on: After one year of applying for EA jobs: It is really, really hard to get hired by an EA organisation
Thanks for sharing, and thanks to everyone for adding their own perspectives to this discussion. I would like to offer my view, which is informed by having gone through difficult periods myself.
I think its a mistake to get too involved with the view that getting a job in an EA org is the only way to make a difference in the world, or indeed to ourselves. In order to stay healthy I think we need to realize that there are other things that matter in the world than EA, such as our relations and our wellbeing. If we get too emotionally attached to the idea of making a huge, cosmic difference to the world by working at an EA org, we can get carried away and forget that we also have a responsibility towards ourselves. As an added benefit, if we take care of ourselvces we are happier, more resilient, can take on more risk, and more willing to work towards a long-term goal, all of which are good personality traits to eventually have higher impact in life.

Jakob_J 8 Jan 2021 11:40 UTC
10 points
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in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: The Folly of “EAs Should”
“Most supporters of EA don’t tell people not to go out to nice restaurants and get gourmet food for themselves, or not to go the the opera, or not to support local organizations they are involved with or wish to support, including the arts.”
Thanks, I agree with this statement! However, in Halsteads comment it said
“I just think it is true that EAs shouldn’t donate to their local opera house, pet sanctuary, homeless shelter or to their private school, and that is what makes EA distinctive.”
I think it would be good to be clearer in our communication and say that we don’t consider local opera houses, pet sanctuaries, homeless shelters, or private schools to be good cause areas, but there might be other good reasons for you to donate to them. For example, maybe you like opera and you want to help your local opera house survive during the pandemic, or you got a new dog from a pet sanctuary and want to donate some money in return, or perhaps your kids private school is fundraising for scholarships for disadvantaged students and you want to contribute. In my view, the claim EA is making isn’t that we shouldn’t donate to these places, same as that its not telling us not to buy a car or go to restaurants, but that your earmarked “EA budget” should be spent on the causes that do the most good.

Jakob_J 10 Oct 2020 15:38 UTC
8 points
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on: Jakob_J’s Shortform
Are emergencies different from non-emergencies? A new paper ( https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11098-020-01566-0 ) argues that the obligation of saving a drowning child is different from the obligation of donating to effective charities in order to save a life. They claim that in emergencies where we can directly intervene to save a life, we are obliged as participants in an informal insurance scheme in society to intervene even at great cost to ourselves. Through this model they aim to explain the “common sense” moral intuition that it is worse to ignore a drowning child than to not donate $3000 to the Against Malaria Foundation. Overall an interesting read that may be of interest to EA-aligned folks.

Jakob_J 7 Jan 2021 20:23 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: The Folly of “EAs Should”
“I just think it is true that EAs shouldn’t donate to their local opera house, pet sanctuary, homeless shelter or to their private school”
This is a very minor point, but I don’t quite understand what EA has against cultural establishments like opera houses and museums. Of course, counting the number of lives saved one shouldn’t donate to museums, but that kind of misses the point that these institutions might be offering free or discounted tickets in exchange for charitable donations. If they switched over to everyone paying a full price they would probably still get a similar revenue, but it would be an objectively worse situation since fewer people would get the chance to visit.

Jakob_J 6 Dec 2020 8:54 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: MichaelA’s comment on: My mistakes on the path to impact
Hi Michael, thanks for your reply!
I agree with everything you are saying, and I did not mean to imply that people should not consider working at explicit EA organisations. Indeed, I would also be interested at working at one of them at some point!
The point I wanted to make is that the goal of “getting a job at an EA organisation” in itself is a near-term career goal, since it does not answer many of the questions choosing a career entails, many of which have been highlighted in the post above as well as by 80,000 hours. I am thinking of questions like:
How do I choose a field where I would both enjoy the work and have an impact?
How do I avoid significant negatives that would stop me having a meaningful and happy life and career?
How do I build the skills that make me attractive in the field I want to work in?
Of course, we’ll never get everything right, but this is a more nuanced view than focussing all your efforts on getting a job at an EA organisation. I would also like to see more discussions of “hybrid” careers, where one for example builds a career as an expert in the Civil Service and then joins an EA organisation or acts as an advisor during a one year break to exchange experiences.

Jakob_J 4 Feb 2022 14:07 UTC
4 points
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on: Jakob_J’s Shortform
In general, I don’t spend much time worrying about “neglectedness” in the ITN framework. I think that is because while many important problems are not neglected in an absolute sense (e.g. climate change), it is still the case that some solutions will be much more effective than others within each problem area. Therefore, one may have a large impact on less neglected problems by simply focusing on more effective solutions.

Jakob_J 11 Oct 2020 10:42 UTC
4 points
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on: Can my self-worth compare to my instrumental value?
Great post! I’ve also experienced similar things during my time with EA. I think there are several ways to approach the issue of self-worth:
1. Its important to realize that EA is not the same as utilitarianism and therefore does not suffer from the problem of demandingness (this is also discussed in the latest 80K podcast with Benjamin Todd). EA does not prescribe how much of resources we should share, only that the ones we do share should be distributed in an effective way.
2. Unfortunately there is a tendency in EA to undervalue “small” contributions (i.e. those made by care workers, nurses, GPs etc). I think we need to realize that every contribution people can make to the common good is good no matter how small. I don’t think that someone who saves less than one life in expectation should feel any worse than people who saves thousands or millions of lives. In any case, I wouldn’t go around telling people that they should feel worthless if they are not working on something super important for humanity (if that was the case we’d need to reach more than 99% of humans on earth to tell them that they are worthless). This is clearly an absurd position, so why should we be telling ourselves that?

Jakob_J 31 May 2023 10:16 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
on: The bullseye framework: My case against AI doom
Thank you for writing this well-argued post—I think its important to keep discussing exactly how big P(doom) is. However, and I say this as someone who believes that P(doom) is on the lower end, it would also be good to be clear about what the implications would be for EAs if P(doom) was low. It seems likely that many of the same recommendations—reduce spending on risky AI technologies and increase spending on AI safety—would still hold, at least until we get a clearer idea of the exact nature of AI risks.

Jakob_J 27 Oct 2020 8:56 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Austin’s comment on: AaronBoddy’s Shortform
I agree with most of the benefits, but think that the “employees may freely choose to leave” part may be somewhat contentious. People need money to survive, and one argument that is often brought forward is that Amazon has driven a lot of smaller businesses out of the market, so that employees may not have that many choices of where to work any more.

Jakob_J 4 Nov 2019 15:16 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: EdoArad’s comment on: We should choose between moral theories based on the scale of the problem
Thanks! I have only recently started thinking about it in terms of scale so I am mainly basing it on my own intuitions (I am also not a philosopher, so not sure if I would be able to formalize the arguments). However, if I were to try to make a prescriptive version I would probably start by saying that we have obligations to each other (i.e. like parents have obligations to their children), and at each “scale” or population size, some of these obligations cancel out (a state doesn’t have obligations to a particular child but to its children in general). At the largest scale, the only obligation left is to preserve life itself, which is why utilitarianism works so well here.

Jakob_J 31 Aug 2019 6:36 UTC
3 points
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on: How to Make Billions of Dollars Reducing Loneliness
Nice post. Your friend wrote that
“Lately, I’ve been having an alarming amount of conversations arise about the burdens of loneliness, alienation, rootlessness, and a lack of belonging that many of my peers feel, especially in the Bay Area”,
which made me wonder if there are geographical areas or cities in the western world that have a particularly high level of connection and community? Maybe those cities could be studied and promising cultural characteristics be spread to other cities and communities?

Jakob_J 14 Jun 2019 17:10 UTC
3 points
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on: What books or bodies of work, not about EA or EA cause areas, might be beneficial to EAs?
Thanks for posting! I have an analytic background and have therefore found it particularly useful to shore up on “soft skills” from books like:

Working with emotional intelligence, Daniel Goleman

Daring greatly, Brené Brown

The wilderness, Brené Brown

I also read articles and listen to podcasts from Harvard Business Review on emotional intelligence, leadership, and management.

Jakob_J

We should choose be­tween moral the­o­ries based on the scale of the problem

We should choose between moral theories based on the scale of the problem