When we use the word “should”, we make one choice seem like the option that makes us a good person and one option seem like negative infinity.
I really like this sentence. I think it applies in many other scenarios beyond using “should.” I have experienced plenty of unproductive perfectionism arising from a mistaken belief that the perfect option is good and everything else is terrible.
Frugality needs to stay a virtue in the EA culture to not attract members who are motivated primarily by money. Not that we should be offering sleeping bags and tents on our retreats – the ”EA standard” needs to be comfortable enough to be considered by individuals of the general public. But grants should not be used to pay for excesses for a selected few (ie. fancy hotels, resorts, or domestic work).
I agree that all-inclusive resorts are unnecessary and excessive in almost all situations. Not sure what “domestic work” means. However, I worry that a heavy emphasis on frugality could promote feelings of scarcity in some EAs and thereby cause suboptimal decisions. It’s hard for people to do high quality work when they worry obsessively about money.
“AGI risk” and “AGI safety” also seem good. But they don’t immediately convey the high stakes.
Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems that “dignity” only appears once in the OP? Namely, here:
On my model, solutions to how capabilities generalize further than alignment are necessary but not sufficient. There is dignity in attacking a variety of other real problems, and I endorse that practice.
This usage appears to have nothing to do with the April Fool’s Day post.
Perhaps Soares made a subsequent edit to the OP?
But what’s often lost amongst depressed altruists is another core principle: some good things you can do matter 100x or 1000x more than others.
If you’re doing impact-oriented research, then picking an important thesis topic matters far more than whether you finish writing it in four years or five. If you’re earning to give, negotiating your salary matters far more than whether you take an additional two weeks of holiday. If you’re building community, following up with promising people matters far more than whether you postpone an event until next month.
This point is similar to Ramit Sethi’s concept of “big wins” in personal finance. I have found this to be an extremely valuable heuristic.
You don’t have enough time and energy to do everything perfectly. Some actions/decisions are much more important than others (“big wins”), so focus on doing those well. Don’t waste time on trivialities.
There’s a corollary that should be intuitive to the EA community. Someone working 40 hours per week can totally dwarf the altruistic output of someone working 60 hours per week.
Maintaining good mental health is a big win.
The first mistake has to do with an attitude towards learning. I used to not mind feeling burnt out and intellectually drained and so I’d continue studying even when I was at a state where I couldn’t have the minimum of clarity needed to genuinely think and reflect on a topic. … This is relevant because if you’d like to be good let’s say at philosophical reasoning, you should be able to charitably understand and interpret the positions you’re engaging with before taking sides.
This is a great point. In my experience, if I sit down and spend a long time thinking, I eventually stop thinking critically. I can still absorb new facts and ideas, but I lose most of my skepticism.
You’re hanging out with your utilitarian friends. Alice has a really nice looking muffin. By your best objective estimation, you would enjoy the muffin more. Alice now has to give you the muffin or be sent to 👮 utilitarian jail 👮.
This made me laugh. Poor Alice. She’s heading straight for👮 utilitarian jail 👮.
I’m having trouble understanding the focus of this post. What are its central theses? What is the TLDR?
Nitpicking, but don’t you mean 1.5x as important? If we neglect 8 hours of sleep, there are 16 hours of daily experience. If we include 8 hours of sleep, there are 24 hours of daily experience. And 24 is 1.5x as large as 16.
In 2019 I spent a few months doing 45-60 minutes per day and experienced dramatic improvements to my well-being, basically from “somewhat bad” to “quite good.” I’ve been able to maintain somewhere between “somewhat good” and “very good” for most of the time since then with only 10-20 minutes per day, which is what I had been doing for ~1 year before the more intense practice. This trend could be regression to the mean since I’ve historically had pretty high well-being. It may also be that the more intense practice resolved a particular mental difficulty I had been experiencing for ~6 months.
Note that intense meditation comes with higher risks; see Willoughby Britton’s work. I would not recommend trying 10-day retreats or the Finder’s Course without researching these risks and considering your personal risk factors.
This is a great idea! For the future, maybe make the bounty a little higher? Writing a super amazing post for this contest could take >100 hours, and the contest offers a possibility of getting paid <$20 per hour for that. I suspect there could be some 80⁄20 rule at work for the impact of these posts, so super amazing posts are especially important to incentivize.
People act like the difficult problems in front of them are the reason for the low moods they are having.
Sometimes this is true! In which case I recommend contemplating “Detach the grim-o-meter.”
Here’s a separate error that I’ve made many times: People believe that their intellectual knowledge of the world’s problems causes them to act a certain way, when in reality they act that way because of their mood.
I think this post argues that people shouldn’t obsess about elite universities as sources of talent. My paraphrasing of the title is “Most super smart students aren’t at super elite schools.”
The Kendrick Lamar joke at the top makes me cringe (like I’d feel uncomfortable sharing this post with my friends outside of EA). Otherwise I really like this post; I’m also confused about the precise meaning of “doing X is worth $$$.”
Here are some comments on the article that I sent to my family.
In 1972 philosopher Peter Singer suggested using metrics rather than emotion to direct charitable giving.
Not sure what he’s talking about. I think the main point of Famine, Affluence, and Morality is that if you can help someone without a significant cost to yourself, you should.
Effective altruism also seems to be related to the “work to give” movement. Workers will rationalize high-paying jobs by giving most of their income away. Actually, when you work, you already give to society, but that is too complex for some to understand.
Earning to give is only a small part of EA, and I don’t think it’s typically a post hoc rationalization. And EAs understand very well that working directly on problems can give to society—see the first WSJ article I sent.
An organization known as GiveWell will tell you what charities are effective. I did a little digging, and I’m not so sure they’re effective at all. Yes, they direct money toward malaria nets and treatments for parasitic worms, but they also supply supplements for vitamin A deficiency, though genetically modified “golden” rice already provides vitamin A more effectively. Hmmm, seems like a move backward.
It’s plausible that the best way to reduce vitamin A deficiency is to invest in multiple strategies at once. But if he gave a thorough argument that donating to “golden” rice infrastructure fights vitamin A deficiency more effectively per dollar than vitamin A supplementation, then I wouldn’t be surprised to see GiveWell change its recommendations.
William MacAskill, a major effective-altruism booster, told the Washington Post that more should be spent on “preparing for low-probability, high-cost events such as pandemics.” That’s a bit like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.
The author’s comment seems quite silly to me.
And Mr. Bankman-Fried’s various entities, along with Cari Tuna and others, have put up about $19 million for a future California ballot measure, the California Pandemic Early Detection and Prevention Act, which would add a 0.75% tax on incomes over $5 million to raise up to $15 billion over 10 years. Catch that? Someone else pays. Effective, but not exactly selfless.
I don’t see anything wrong with SBF promoting a tax on extremely wealthy people to prevent pandemics (unless the resulting pandemic prevention efforts are less valuable than what the wealthy people would do with their money otherwise). In general, I’m sure some taxes are totally worth promoting.
I don’t care if altruists spend their own money trying to prevent future risks from robot invasions or green nanotech goo, but they should stop asking American taxpayers to waste money on their quirky concerns.
Pandemic prevention is not a “quirky” concern!
And “effective” is in the eye of the beholder. Effective altruism proponent Steven Pinker said last year, “I don’t particularly think that combating artificial intelligence risk is an effective form of altruism.”
Yes, EAs don’t agree on everything, nor do I think they should. There’s an emphasis within EA on updating your beliefs in response to new evidence, such as reasonable arguments from other people.
Development economist Lant Pritchett finds it “puzzling that people’s [sic] whose private fortunes are generated by non-linearity”—Facebook, Google and FTX can write code that scales to billions of users—“waste their time debating the best (cost-effective) linear way to give away their private fortunes.”
So the argument is that when deciding where to donate your money, you should use the same tactics that earned you that money in the first place? It’s unclear how “cost-effectiveness” is the same as “linearity.” Maybe he’s advocating for donating to interventions that are like unicorn startups—interventions that could be hugely beneficial if they succeed, but probably won’t do much. If so, this is kind of exactly what Open Philanthropy is doing (“hits-based giving”).
He notes that “national development” and “high economic productivity” drive human well-being. So true. History has proved that capitalism is the most effective and altruistic system.
It’s fully possible to believe in EA principles and support capitalism. But high economic productivity can come with damaging externalities, such as increased risk of global catastrophes from new technologies.
There are only four things you can do with your money: spend it, pay taxes, give it away or invest it. Only the last drives productivity and helps society in the long term.
That seems totally incorrect. GiveWell estimates that donations to its recommended charities have averted over 100,000 deaths.
Eric Hoffer wrote in 1967 of the U.S.: “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” That’s true even of allegedly altruistic ones.
This is one of the few points in the article that I like. EA (which EA headquarters likes to describe as “a project”) resembles a cult in some ways: people worry about future catastrophes, care about “doing good,” think about weird ideas, and dream about growing the movement.
The Inside View also focuses on AI alignment. There’s a YouTube channel with videos of the interviews. Sometimes there are interview highlights on LessWrong.
This list is great. I recommend adding the new Intro to ML Safety course and the ML Safety Scholars Program. Or maybe everyone is supposed to read Charlie’s post for the most up-to-date resources? It’s worth clarifying.
Such a drug would be enormously valuable. If it worked, presumably it would give people at least one extra waking hour per day, and maybe the “higher resilience and productivity” side effects would be real too.
This would probably increase the rate of technological advancement, including the advancement of AI capabilities. I worry that increasing AI capabilities will shorten AGI timelines.
I like most of this article.
I dislike this point, perhaps because it faintly promotes using utilitarianism to suppress normal human feelings. I think a healthier approach is to accept these feelings without obsessing over them. Additionally, the thought “Well, these are problems for other people, but not for me thanks to being a dedicate!” reminds me of blind faith, escapism, avoiding the least convenient possible world, and once-and-for-allism.
I think the same can be said for many non-dedicates.