Operations Generalist at Anthropic & former President of UChicago Effective Altruism. Suffering-focused.
Currently testing fit for operations. Tentative long-term plan involves AI safety field-building or longtermist movement-building, particularly around s-risks and suffering-focused ethics.
Cause priorities: suffering-focused ethics, s-risks, meta-EA, AI safety, wild animal welfare, moral circle expansion.
Thing I should think about in the future: is this “enough” question even useful? What would it even mean to be “agentic/strategic enough?”
edit: Oh, this might be insidiously following from my thought around certain roles being especially important/impactful/high-status. It would make sense to consider myself as falling short if the goal were to be in the heavy tail for a particular role.
But this probably isn’t the goal. Probably the goal is to figure out my comparative advantage, because this is where my personal impact (how much good I, as an individual, can take responsibility for) and world impact (how much good this creates for the world) converges. In this case, there’s no such thing as “strategic enough”—if my comparative advantage doesn’t lie in strategy, that doesn’t mean I’m not “strategic enough” because I was never ‘meant to’ be in strategy anyway!
So the question isn’t, “Am I strategic enough?” But rather, “Am I more suited for strategy-heavy roles or strategy-light roles?”
A big concern that’s cropped up during my current work trial is whether I’m actually just not agentic/strategic/have-good-judgment-enough to take on strategy roles at EA orgs.
I think part of this is driven by low self-confidence, but part of this is the very plausible intuition that not everyone can be in the heavy tail and maybe I am not in the heavy tail for strategy roles. And this feels bad, I guess, because part of me thinks “strategy roles” are the highest-status roles within the meta-EA space, and status is nice.
But not nice enough to sacrifice impact! It seems possible, though, that I actually could be good at strategy and I’m bottlenecked by insecurity (which leads me to defer to others & constantly seek help rather than being agentic).
My current solution is to flag this for my future manager and ensure we are trialling both strategy and operations work. This feels like a supportive way for me to see where my comparative advantage lies—if I hear, “man, you suck at strategy, but your ops work is pretty good!” Then I would consider this a win!
My brain now wants to think about the scenario where I’m actually just bad at both. But then I’ll have to take the advice I give my members: “Well, then you got really valuable information—you just aren’t a great fit for these specific roles, so now you get to explore options which might be great fits instead!”
I feel like this post relies on an assumption that this world is (or likely could be) a simulation, which made it difficult for me to grapple with. I suppose maybe I should just read Bostrom’s Simulation Argument first.
But maybe I’m getting something wrong here about the post’s assumptions?
Really fantastic. Feels like this could be the new ‘utopia speech!’
Thanks for this! This is exactly the kind of programming I was thinking of when I reflected on the personal finance workshop I ran for my group.
Question—what leads you to think the below?
The happiness course increased people’s compassion and self-trust, but it may have reduced the extent to which they view things analytically (i.e. they may engage more with their emotions to the detriment of their reason).
I think there’s room for divergence here (i.e., I can imagine longtermists who only focus on the human race) but generally, I expect that longtermism aligns with “the flourishing of moral agents in general, rather than just future generations of people.” My belief largely draws from one of Michael Aird’s posts.
This is because many longtermists are worried about existential risk (x-risk), which specifically refers to the curtailing of humanity’s potential. This includes both our values—which could lead to wanting to protect alien life, if we consider them moral patients and so factor them into our moral calculations—and potential super-/non-human descendants.
However, I’m less certain that longtermists worried about x-risk would be happy to let AI ‘take over’ and for humans to go extinct. That seems to get into more transhumanist territory. C.f. disagreement over Max Tegmark’s various AI aftermath scenarios, which runs the spectrum of human/AIcoexistence.
Thanks for writing this up—I definitely feel like the uni pipeline needs to flesh out everything between the Intro Fellowship and graduating (including options for people who don’t want to be group organizers).
Re: career MVP stuff, I’m running an adaptation of GCP’s career program that has been going decently! I think career planning and accountability is definitely something uni groups could do more of.
Hmm. I am sometimes surprised by how often LW posts take something I’ve seen in other circumstances (e.g., CBT) and repackages it. This is one of those instances—which, to be fair, Scott Alexander completely acknowledges!
I like the reminder that “showing people you are more than just their opponent” can be a simple way to orient conversations towards a productive discussion. This is really simple advice but useful in polarized/heated contexts. I feel like the post could have been shortened to just the last half, though.
Upvoted because I thought this was a novel contribution (in the context of longtermism) and because I feel some intuitive sympathy with the idea of maintaining-a-coherent-identity.
But also agree with other commenters that this argument seems to break down when you consider the many issues that much of society has since shifted its views on (c.f. the moral monsters narrative).
I still think there’s something in this idea that could be relevant to contemporary EA, though I’d need to think for longer to figure out what it is. Maybe something around option value? A lot of longtermist thought is anchored around preserving option-value for future generations, but perhaps there’s some argument that we should maintain the choices of past generations (which is, why, for example, codifying things in laws and institutions can be so impactful).
Thanks for synthesizing a core point that several recent posts have been getting at! I especially want to highlight the importance of creating a community that is capable of institutionally recognizing + rewarding + supporting failure.
What can the EA community do to reward people who fail? And—equally important—how can the community support people who fail? Failing is hard, in no small part because it’s possible that failure entails real net negative consequences, and that’s emotionally challenging to handle.
With a number of recent posts around failure transparency (one, two, three), it seems like the climate is ripe for someone to come up with a starting point.
I actually prefer “scale, tractability, neglectedness” but nobody uses that lol
I wonder if anyone has read these books here? https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/04/social-change-books-lynn-hunt/629587/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Future%20Perfect%204-19-22&utm_term=Future%20Perfect
In particular, ‘Inventing Human Rights: A History’ seems relevant to Moral Circle Expansion.
edit: I should’ve read the list fully! I’ve actually read The Honor Code. I didn’t find it that impressive but I guess the general idea makes sense. If we can make effective altruism something to be proud of—something to aspire to for people outside the movement, including people who currently denigrate it as being too elitist/out-of-touch/etc. - then we stand a chance at moral revolution.
Not to this specific article but this post seems relevant: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dqFjPFHmgFEZpg8ua/what-makes-outreach-to-progressives-hard
Thanks for this! I hadn’t thought about EA VP much but if it’s true that it is the main way for potential EAs that aren’t near existing groups to get into an EA learning pipeline (which seems reasonable), it seems likely that EA VP could be pretty important and relatively neglected.
I also am fascinated by the people first approach you’re talking about. That’s definitely the direction I have found myself leaning more towards, and I’m hoping UChicago EA will adopt similar approaches for the next year (e.g., having more 1:1s, focusing on social community).
As someone interested in messaging, I liked this! Carefully choosing one’s words—and being aware of how someone might perceive a word you use, like “consequentialism” or “moral”—can be important in ensuring a conversation goes well.
Love the addition of the emojis
(I don’t remember seeing them before but I might be wrong!)
This might be the clearest articulation I’ve seen yet of work by immigration status in the US, period. Thanks for summarizing this! It’s great to have something to point to in the future.
I really appreciate you writing this post, especially since you note “I focus on mid-career people here partly because I think EA career advice for mid-career people is undersupplied at the moment.”
I agree with the implication that more resources should be dedicated to outreach to mid-career people, especially since senior management/mentorship seems to be a bottleneck for causes like AI safety. To that end, efforts like these seem valuable!
Really enjoyed this post and the takeaways, which I thought were insightful and ~fairly novel (at least amongst EAG(x) reflections). I’m a big proponent of 3) and definitely think it can be useful to have things written up in advance of the conference, too. People may not be inclined to read it at the conference but at least they’ll have something to refer to after!
Thanks for this, Akash!
Thank you for this—I found it at least as useful as Luisa’s (fantastic) post. : )
I teared up reading this, mostly because I felt really validated in how I’ve slowly been tackling my imposter syndrome (getting feedback, reminding myself not to focus on comparisons, focusing on better mapping the world and not making useless value judgments). I also happen to think that you are a wonderful member of the EA community, who is doing good work with the Forum, so this nudges me towards thinking that if really cool people feel this way, maybe I can be a really cool person too!