I hope you won’t mind me asking you a few Hamming questions in the spirit of hyper-prioritization. (Feel free to ignore this, it feels like quite aggressive move for me ask, I’d be happy to chat 1:1 too.)
- Why becoming a public intellectual falls under “things that will greatly positively change the world or your personal life”? For you personally and for others.
- Why is it worth to try to be a polymath in 21st century?
I find it interesting that you feel like promoting of the fast world mindset might be rude or cause a backlash because to me that feels like a mainstream view. A lot of advice on how to cope with AI is essentially equivalent to “you need to try harder”, maybe with some qualifiers of what that might exactly look like.[1]
I’d say that I am hyper-prioretising Slow World because it is what makes life worth living. And if there is not much life left, it is even more important to have good experiences while it is possible?
I don’t care much about things that I consider somewhat trivial. These include hanging out with friends at the pub, people getting married, or stuff like that.
I care about the Big Things (the “Big Questions” in philosophy, politics, morality, physics, biology, psychology, big historical trends, technology), and I care about them on a global or even cosmic scale
I am curious, why do you care about Big Things without small things? Are Big Things not underpinned by values of small everyday things?
That was my impression for example from “Planning a career in the age of A(G)I—w Luke Drago, Josh Landes & Ben Todd” event in April.
I think I am personally
(and I’d love others to embrace it). However, I am making choices that are different from your own, so I guess I put some of them here in the comments to highlight that being onboard with the principle will yield different results based one’s preferences.
So here is me putting money where my mouth is[1]:
having kids
treating spending time with friends as last opportunity ever
this usually results in making effort to fly to meet them
offering to pay friends and family to visit me (symmetric with one above but less conventional)
getting driver’s license with the expectation that it would only be meaningful to use for a few years not a lifetime
saying what I think and writing it down publicly, including writing these comments now
trying to be less risk-averse in general
I guess I also have an underlying intuition that we are about to enter the period of turmoil, so I am trying to take advantage of functioning infrastructure like commercial flights or mortgages while it lasts.
and I guess putting mouth back there too?
Hi Rafael, thanks for the post!
I have a few thoughts to share, I will post them as separate comments to help structure discussion.
Thank you for your thoughtful replies, Michelle.
Meta: below is a very non-generous view of 80k one-on-one career advising (kinda bitter to be honest). I will probably be raising points that the 80k team thought about over the years and decided against for a good reason but I have not seen them publicly discussed. I will be very happy to be wrong about this.
To sum up: 80k one-on-one career advising has a small negative effect on the world
Why
80k is the place to go for career advice (with low capacity) making it harder for new organizations/projects/initiatives to launch in this space.
A month-long period of reviewing the application is prohibitive and disappointing.
It is extremely upsetting for people to apply and get turned down, especially if they found 80k materials at some emotional time (releasing they are not satisfied with their current job or studies). It is very hard to not interpret this as “you are not good enough”.
I believe CEA had to deal with similar sentiment after changing the EAG acceptance policy when a lot of people who used to be accepted were suddenly not accepted.
By focusing on people “for whom you’ll have useful things to say”, you talk to people who do not need additional resources (like guidance or introductions) for increasing their impact. The contrafactual impact is low.
For example, testimonials on the website include PhD Student in Machine Learning at Cambridge and the President of Harvard Law School Effective Altruism.
By focusing on people for whom you already have useful things to say, you are not putting resources into figuring out how to make the vast majority of people who do not fit these criteria more impactful, effectively losing them.
I have an impression that 80k accepted a long time ago that that wait time will just have to be pretty long. Here is a bunch of ideas to shorten the wait time that I don’t think were attempted historically:
removing sign up form from the website when the waitlist is too long
introduce extra filter like asking people to pay (donate to an effective charity of their choice) small-ish amount ($5-50) as an extra filter
use lottery to determine who to have a call with instead of a longer initial review
hire more advisors
The advising page also says that
It costs hundreds of dollars to provide this service to a single person.
It is not clear to me that the price of having in-house career advisors is justified. I think there are a lot of people (like a hundred) in the community who could gladly volunteer a couple of hours per month to do career advising and would be super excited about the opportunity to help out and share their knowledge and connections with the newcomers.
I believe a structure that has a small experienced 80k career advisor team (2-4 people) managing a community of vetted experienced EA volunteers would be a much more promising way to go. Or alternatively have the community fully self-organise for this project.
Very Bad Wizards: The One with Peter Singer (released in April, 2020)
short timeline pill
I also found it hard to short-timeline-pill family and friends, and I try when asked about advice for the future but mostly so I feel I am being true to myself, not to convince anyone.
[1]
It is quite impressive how avoidant people are of this topic, even when trying to philosophise about alternatives to capitalism or deciding what to do when faced with golden handcuffs when their startup gets acqui-hired.