Conversely, people who have work/life balance can feel threatened by people who only care about effective altruism. If those people exist, does that mean you have to be one?
I experience a version of this. I think I’m very unlikely to feel fulfilled working on any high-priority issue without a clear work/life split, which makes me apprehensive of taking up a ‘seat’ that could have been taken by someone who’d have worked 80 hour weeks and vastly outperformed me.
I also have a softer concern about fitting in at companies that are mostly made up of dedicates: this is my outside perception of the AI safety space for example. Am I really likely to gel effectively with that culture, or might my non-dedicate status mean I end up being a net-negative addition to the team?
I guess what I’m saying is I’d l appreciate a ‘Considerations for Non-Dedicates’ section on this post!
What historical precedent do you have in mind here? The reason my intuitions initially would go in the opposite direction is a case study like invasive species in Australia.
tl;dr is when an ecosystem has evolved holding certain conditions constant (in this case geographical isolation), and that changes fairly rapidly, even a tiny change like a European rabbit can have negative consequences well beyond what was foreseen by the folks who made the change.
I won’t pretend to be an expert on how analogous climate is to this example, but if someone wanted to shift my intuitions, a good way to start would be to convince me that, for some given optimistic economic forecast, the likelihood it has missed significant knock-on negative consequences of an X degree average rise in temperature is <50%.