COO Successif, Trustee Effective Ventures UK, and member of the Talos Network board
Co-Director EA Germany 2023ā24, entrepreneur for over 25 years, member of the EA Munich organizer team since 2020.
Patrick Gruban šø
Karma: 2,394
I like the framing and would like to see more discussion around this! Iāve left a comment on this post that has some overlap.
Thank you for the write-up. This was very helpful in getting a better understanding of the reactions from the academic field.
Donāt start with X-risk or alignment, start with a technical problem statement such as āuncontrollabilityā or āinterpretabilityā and work from there.
Karl von Wendt makes a similar point in Letās talk about uncontrollable AI where he argues āthat we talk about the risks of āuncontrollable AIā instead of AGI or superintelligenceā. His aim is āto raise awareness of the problem and encourage further research, in particular in Germany and the EUā. Do you think this could be a better framing? Do you think there is some framing that might be better suited for different cultural contexts, like in Germany, or does that seem neglectable?
Thank you for doing the research and writing it up, I found this very helpful!
Thank you for sharing, I think your post will resonate with many people and show them they are not alone in their struggles. Iāve gone through similar phases of depression, guilt, feelings of rejection and not allowing myself to seek help or complain as Iām much better off than 99% of the world. This sucks.
The Celebrating Failure at the fUnconference that Ludwig mentioned felt cathartic to me as people shared professional and personal failures. In EA weāre an unusual community as we try hard and constantly fail at our expectations. This goes for people applying for jobs as well as leaders of EA orgs. A coach recently told me most calls with them turn to mental health problems at some point.
I hope you will find a community that supports you. I have proposed Masterminds as a format and am in talks to see how we can make it happen. But Iāve heard of more similar remote formats and interventions that are planned and am hopeful we will see some soon.
As a side note: What helped me in the last months were the 80K talk where Will MacAskill talks about his depression and the one with Sam Bankman-Fried where he agrees that most people will fail trying:
So I think there are really compelling reasons to think that the āoptimal strategyā to follow is one that probably fails ā but if it doesnāt fail, itās great. But as a community, what that would imply is this weird thing where you almost celebrate cases where someone completely craps out ā where things end up nowhere close to what they could have been ā because thatās what the majority of well-played strategies should end with. I donāt think that we recognize that enough as a community, and I think there are lots of specific instances as well where we donāt incentivize that.
Also really helpful was the book by Julian Simon where he talks about overcoming depression in a very relatable way (link via Rob Wiblin).
I shudder to think that someone who donates any amount to AMF would ever feel bad about it, yet I know how hard it can be to convince oneself otherwise.
I recently read the Notes From a Pledger who I similarly far away from a hub and is ok with donating. The comment by Michelle Hutchinson touched me as it brought back the realisation that weāre already doing so much more than most people in donating. Itās great to aim high and try to get a job in EA but there is no shame in failing, getting a normal job and continuing with donations.
Just trying and failing is something to be celebrated as most people never try. Thank you for trying!
Having spent two weeks in Cape Town this March and meeting Jordan there I can confirm that itās a great city to be in and I would love to see an EA coworking space there. Thank you for taking the initiative!
Thanks, done
I can see your concern and coming up with a new name could be nice. On the other hand, I suspect most EAs wouldnāt be too concerned if we use a tool internally in a way that works for us while itās also being used by others for less useful purposes.
Interesting. I read your post while researching for this one and found it very interesting. To me, it seemed that you were describing something bigger and more encompassing than a Mastermind that seems restricted in size, topics and frequency of meetings. But there is definitely some overlap and itās one of the few posts on the forum around the deliberate groups and their setup.
Thanks, Iāve made it bold at the top.
Thank you for this post, I was thinking along similar lines and am grateful that you wrote this down. I would like to see the number of people grow that make decisions around career, donations and volunteering based on the central EA question regardless of whether they call themselves EA. More than a billion people live in high income countries alone and I find it conceivable that 1-10% would be open to making changes in their lives depending on the action they can take. But for EA to accommodate 10-100 million people I also assume different shopfronts in addition to the backend capabilities (having enough charities that can handle vast amounts of donations, having pipelines for charity entrepreneurship that can help these charities grow, consulting capacity to help existing organizations to switch to effectiveness metrics etc). If we look at the movement from the perspective of scaling to these numbers I assume we will see a relatively short term saturation in longtermist cause areas. Currently we donāt seem to be funding restricted in that area and I donāt see a world where millions working on these problems will be better than thousands. So from this perspective I would like us to think about longer view and build the capacity now for a big EA movement that will be less effective on the margin while advocating for the most effective choices now in parallel.
Why do you think a conversion rate of 5% is shockingly low? Depending on the intervention this can be a high rate in marketing. A fellowship seems like a relatively small commitment and changing the career is a relatively high ask. As weāre not emphasizing earning to give as much as before I would also expect many people to not find high impact work.
Thank you for writing this! I found it very helpful as I only saw headlines about Gato before and am not watching developments in AI closely. I liked the length and style of writing very much and would appreciate similar posts in future.
I share your worries about the effects on culture. At the same time I donāt see this vision as bad:
For many months, they will sit down many days a week and ask themselves the question āhow can I write this grant proposal in a way that person X will approve ofā or āhow can I impress these people at organization Y so that I can get a job there?ā, and they will write long Google Docs to their colleagues about their models and theories of you, and spend dozens of hours thinking specifically about how to get you to do what they want, while drawing up flowcharts that will include your name, your preferences, and your interests.
Imagine a global health charity that wants to get on the GiveWell Top Charities list. Wouldnāt we want it to spend much time thinking about how to get there, ultimately changing the way it works in order to come up with the evidence needed to get included? For example, Helen Keller International was founded more than 100 years ago and its vitamin A supplementation program is recommended by GiveWell. I would love to see more external organisations change in order to get EA grants instead of us trying to reinvent the wheel where others might already be good.
Organisations getting started or changing based on the available funding of the EA community seems like a win to me. As long as they have a mission that is aligned with what EA funders want and they are internally mission-aligned we should be fine. I donāt know enough about Anthropic for example but they just raised $580M mainly from EAs while not intending to make a profit. This could be a good signal to more organisations out there trying to set up a model where they are interesting to EA funders.
In the end, it comes down to the research and decision making of the grantmaker. GiveWell has a process where they evaluate charities based on effectiveness. In the longterism and meta space, we often donāt have such evidence so we may sometimes rely more on the value alignment of people. Ideally, we would want to reduce this dependence and see more ways to independently evaluate grants regardless of the people getting them.
I was also surprised to be seeing management and scaling organisations described as ārarely peopleās favourite activitiesā, this seems to be a strong claim. For me, itās the most motivating activity and Iām trying to find an organisation where I can contribute in this area.
He might be referring to Gary Wang as he does later in the text, but not sure about this
For travel I calculate what offsetting would have cost, take the amount from my travel budget and donate it to EA recommend climate charities (via Effektiv Spenden in Germany).
Thank you so much Max for writing this! I started a draft forum post for a proposal just yesterday. My idea was to have groups of EAs that aim high and fail often and that support each other. Knowing that others are in similar situations and having a smallish group to discuss the strain and celebrate trying might make things easier. I at least would like it. I was planning to the share the draft with you anyway and would love to get your take on it.
Thank you for this post that touches on the important point of demandingness. Personally, I can see it in two ways.
On a global level giving 10% to effective causes is relatively rare. Giving What We Can has grown impressively but still, less than 1 in every 50.000[1] of the worldās high-income population have taken it. 10% is higher than the average donations that are below 2% of GDP. Even in the EA survey, only 1ā3 have said to donate at least this amount. While some of the top areas in EA seem less funding constraint, there is still much room for spending until for example GiveDirectly canāt give away any more money. In that sense, Iām very grateful to anyone who is able and willing to commit to giving 10% or more of their income and would not want to exclude them from seeing themselves as Effective Altruists. If weāve funded everything that is equivalent to GiveDirectlyās impact or we have at least 50 Mio. people donating 10+% then Iād revisit this but currently, there is still enough to do.
On a personal level, the concept of demandingness has no limit. 10% is just a Schelling point, something that is easy to communicate for people new to the movement, a goal to be reached. Doing good better doesnāt stop there and it doesnāt stop at thinking about donations. I like the framing of excited altruism better or altruism as a central purpose. Another framing could be that of aiming higher: Continuously stretching for ways to have more impact while taking care of oneself. Each of these framings will have its supporters and I would encourage anyone to select the one that motivates them best. At the same time, the community and its support structure are very important to keep people healthy and motivated when they feel they are failing at their self-set goals.
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Taking the number of 500 Mio. high-income people in the world and 8500 GWWC members
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Itās interesting that this comment talks about more generalist roles being mentioned at EAG that havenāt been publicised. I wonder if it is more likely that specialist roles get āofficiallyā publicised, while the more generalist ones are likelier to not be, maybe to the extent of only living in someoneās head in the style, āwe could really do with someone to help us out on operationsā¦ā
As I was only looking for operations roles I donāt know if there is a difference to specialists. At the moment there seems to be a lot of dynamics with orgs getting new funding and being able to expand quickly. People at the orgs might be able to tell you they are in the process of writing a job post or they might already have a document but not have posted it publicly. Also for some jobs I assume it might be easier to approach people or networks before posting them and then dealing with many applications. But this is only speculation.
What I would find really useful as more of a generalist is advice around āhereās how to use your skill stack to get a job in EAā.
My impression is that often co-founders of organisations donāt know themselves what a generalist might be doing in a year as everything is changing quickly. This seems to be very similar to startups. When hiring I would always point out that a job title in a contract should be seen as a starting point and might have little overlap with the actual job a few months in.
The upside is that as a generalist in a small and growing organisation you can bring your specific talents to the table and have the chance to change the role so that it fits your strengths. You can then help outsource or hire talent that can cover your weaknesses.
For mid-career people, it feels like runway may be less of an impact relative to the knowledge you may be giving up something with a guaranteed impact, even if it may not be optimal, on the basis of uncertain factors.
In terms of giving up something, you might try to get a sabbatical at your current company to try out direct EA work for a year. If this doesnāt work out you might discuss quitting on good terms so that theyād be willing to hire you again if they have a job open after a year. It might be useful to research how likely this would work out for you.
For the general framing of impact, I personally ask myself: How can I increase the expected value of the EA community having a bigger impact? Especially in longtermist organisations, the additional dollar donated might be much less useful at the moment than being a co-founder or an early employee of a new organisation. This can be still true if the organisation has a high risk of failure but might do a lot of good if it succeeds.
I see that this can make it hard for many mid-career people to change jobs and leave a secure position. But in willing to do it, youāre filling a neglected gap. The counterfactual expected value of your work might be one or two orders of magnitude higher than earning to give.
Thank you for this post, I find it very helpful for clarifying my thoughts when working on community building strategy.