Letās make nice things with biology. Working on nucleic acid synthesis screening at IBBIS. Also into dual-use risk assessment, synthetic biology, lab automation, event production, donating to global health. From Toronto, lived in Paris and Santiago, currently in the SF Bay. Website: tessa.fyi
Tessa A šø
Karma: 2,930
In the maximally repugnant world, no oneās life is all that good. I feel the sting of that. Itās hard for me to get excited about a world in which all of the people I know personally have barely-net-positive lives full of suffering and struggle, even if that world contains more people.
The Wikipedia page you linked gives a pretty not-upsetting version of the paradox:From Wikipedia, the four situations, A, A+, B-, and B of the Mere Addition Paradox, illustrated as bars of different widths and heights with āwaterā between (in the case of A+ and B-), following Parfitās book Reasons and Persons, chapter 19. whereas the thing that people find repugnant looks more like:
From the Stanford Encyclopedia page on the repugnant conclusion.
I accept the conclusion, but it feels like I am biting a bullet when I say that World Z is worth fighting for.
Yeah, I think youāre right that a possible takeaway here is ātry to minimize your leisure time, but leave yourself generous slackā, and I like the idea of building up a āmotivational runwayā that you can burn down when you need to push really hard on something.
I just still think that most people (sure, probably not Sam Bankman-Fried) are going to cause themselves needless pain by aiming for minimum leisure/āfun/āetc instead of prioritizing more important uses of a smaller number of impact-oriented hours.
To reverse your financial metaphor, I feel like I see a lot of people doing the equivalent of only buying beans and rice at the grocery store so they can donate more money to their local childrenās hospital and Iām likeā¦ hey, if youāre interested in saving childrenās lives, you might want to consider buying bednets? Also, have you looked into whether you might be able to increase your earnings, rather than focusing on not spending? I worry that āminimize leisure timeā, like āminimize grocery billā, is a goal that feels easy to optimize for while both distracting from more important goals and potentially doing some health damage.
Thanks, I appreciate this detailed response! My advice for what to do in practice is something like āfocus on output against priorities, not marginal hoursā. I no longer believe that, for most people, there is a real trade-off between hours spent on self-care* and amount of impact. If someone is making themselves miserable, I think āput real effort into becoming less depressedā is a likely good short-term bet for increasing productivity, but this post is meant to be about a general pattern, not just advice for people struggling with their mental health.
* aside: I donāt love āself-careā as a phrase, since it always conjures images of someone, like, reclining in a bubble bath whilst eating chocolates. Which is a fine thing to do, obviously, but I would love a phrase that more clearly points to ātaking the time and actions you need to feel okay doing your lifeā.
Iām also familiar with this school of thought, but Iām not sure itās empirically validated?
In the case of Dominic Cummings, I believe you are referring to this post which describes running successful political campaigns. Those seem like they might be an outlier, in that they are an extremely time-bound competition where ādo things faster than your opponentā is an obvious win? As Samuel noted, running a startup is also a case where a marginal month of delivery matters, since you likely have <1 year of runway to demonstrate to investors that you should continue being funded. The other examples you cite donāt seem to be of people optimizing for impact.
Lynette Bye put some empirical research into the post How Long Can People Reasonably Work?, but found the literature pretty disappointing. Her top-level conclusions included:First, as you work more hours, each hour becomes less productive. If I had to guess based on the research, Iād say there are steeply diminishing marginal value around 40-50 hours per week, and negative returns (meaning less total output for the day per additional hour) somewhere between 50 and 70 hours.
ā¦
Iām fairly skeptical any of this research tells us how much to work (you can see more details below). I place more confidence on the anecdotal reports of productive people. Itās common for them to report three to five hours of deep work on a top priority each day, plus several hours more of lower energy or more āfollowing curiosityā-type work (three more yet-to-be-released interviews also report in this range; one interview reports more). To be clear, I think theyāre describing consistent, intense, āwrite a book chapterā levels of focus for those three to five hours.The hyperproductive people I know seem to score well on (1) working on important things and (2) being very focused while working, but vary in how many hours of work they do per week (Iād estimate 30-50).
I am not a hyperproductive person, so Iām not sure you should take productivity advice from me, but ātry to do at least one thing I think is actually important per weekā seems to give me better results than ātry to work really hardā, since the latter can lead to hyperfocused work on things that donāt really matter.Curious if you know of any sources that were missed in Lynetteās post, or this response, though!
Thank you for your kind words! I do find it really useful to have time that is intentionally free from obligation. I do still track my time, but I have an āendorsed chillā category (which I absolutely did not circa 2018).
You might enjoy the book Essentialism by Greg McKeown. Itās written in a standard business-psych tone, so expect lots of inspiring anecdotes of corporate success and bolded subheadings, but/āand it has a number of useful strategies for prioritizing. It also frames a bunch of things I was deficient inā e.g. dropping unnecessary commitments, sleeping adequately, accepting trade-offsā as difficult skills that high-achieving people should master, which made cultivating those skills feel more appealing on an ego level.
Fair enough! I have revised the title to include āself-careā, which hopefully makes it clearer (the previous title, for later arrivals to this comment thread, was just āAiming for the minimum is dangerousā).
Aiming for the minĀiĀmum of self-care is dangerous
+1, distinguishing between āNo degree requirementā, āBachelorsā, āMastersā all would be helpful. You could borrow from the 80k board and separate out the āAcademic Degreeā requirements from the āRelevant Experienceā requirements (e.g. ā< 1 Yearā, ā1-2 yearsā, ā2 or more yearsā)
If youāre looking for resources on mental health, you might enjoy some of the upvoted posts under the self-care tag, including Mental Health Resources Tailored for EAs and Resources on Mental Health and Finding a Therapist.
FYI for anyone else who might crosspost Brian Tomasik posts: I learned thanks to a crosspost of The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering that he doesnāt like crossposting since it makes updating the content of posts more difficult. I have updated my crossposts from him to only include the summary paragraphs and a table of contents (with a caveat that the contents are as of the time of cross-posting).
When NTI launched the Biosecurity Innovation and Risk Reduction Initiative in 2018, five proposals were highlighted, which all seem to have translated into current initiatives:
Financial Incentives for Biotechnology Investors to Improve Biosecurity
Standards for Funders, Grantees, and Publishers to Identify and Mitigate Biological Risks
Establishing a Seal of Approval to Incentivize the Adoption of Biosecurity Norms
Iād be curious to hear you answers to any of the recently-shared Hamming Questions for Project Planning for those initiatives. Copying the first three questions here:
What are the most important problems for this project, and what is stopping you (/āNTI) from working on them right now?
What is the limiting factor on the projectās growth and progress?
What problems in this project are the largest order of magnitude? What changes could you make that would result in a 100x or 1000x increase in this projectās positive impact?
What do you think are the most important security (Iām especially interested in biosecurity) projects being done outside of the USA/āUK? More generally, what are the organizations or projects you would suggest EAs based outside the USA or UK try to get involved with?
Well, thanks for leaving feedback despite being unsure! I appreciate it since this is my first time doing a bunch of crossposts, and Iām trying to figure out a good format.
The EA forum team is going to back-date these posts to their original dates so they can be voted on in the review. Would you still have benefited from the note being at the beginning if this postās date indicated that itās from 2014?
(On my first few cross-posts, I placed the āhey, this is a crosspostā note as a header, but I noticed it was removed when the forum team backdated the posts; decided to try entering it as a footer instead for my latest batch of crossposts.)
I messed around making an Airtable of biosecurity-related early-career opportunities earlier this year, more or less for my own reference.
Hereās a link, which might be of interest both from a data design perspective and because you might not have all of the internships listed there (though note that it lists a bunch of non-internship things as well): https://āāairtable.com/āāshr1WyRk3o9PdbbIl
One thing thatās a bit unclear to me from the form: is this more of a job board, or more of a list of regularly-occurring internships?
(If job board, some Boreal-summer internships Iād think to link will not be posted yet; if list of orgs /ā programs that regularly host internships, then the āApplication Deadlineā would be a time of year rather than a specific date.)
Linking the recent post about this: EA Internship & Research Opportunities for Undergraduates
Thanks for taking the time to put together this list, this is great! I found that a few of these were on the forum already:
Why Charities Usually Donāt Differ Astronomically in Expected Cost-Effectiveness
A post you can upvote about Sendwave: Why and how to start a for-profit company serving emerging markets
New UK aid strategy ā prioritising research and crisis response
For the cage-free campaigns summarized in the vox article you linked, there are ~20 posts under the corporate cage-free campaigns tag, not sure which which you think is the best.
Using the tax system and stock market to donate more: a few basic strategies is a more recent posts that references https://āāreducing-suffering.org/āāshould-altruists-leverage-investments/āā, might be a good upvote (many of the other links are referenced in various forum posts, too, this is just one highlight)
Crossposted yesterday: [Crosspost] Reducing Risks of Astronomical Suffering: A Neglected Priority
I have crossposted the following, and may crosspost more if I feel like it (and will add them to this list if I do:
Brian Tomasik ā Differential Intellectual Progress as a Positive-Sum Project
Paul Christiano ā Machine intelligence and capital accumulation
Carl Shulman ā What portion of a boost to global GDP goes to the poor?
Carl Shulman ā How migration liberalization might eliminate most absolute poverty
Also, to my pleasant shock, if you copy-paste from one website into the EA Forum WYSIWYG editor, it formats tables and images correctly? This makes cross-posting way easier than Iād realized!
I donāt think I quite understand this reply. Are you saying that (check all that apply):
In your experience, the people involved in discussions do embrace redistribution and fairness as core values, they are just placing more value on future people.
Actual longtermists also advocate for near-term redistributive causes, so criticism about resource allocation within the movement away from the global poor and towards longtermism doesnāt make sense (i.e. itās not zero-sum).
Redistributive commitments are only one part of the āfoundational valuesā, and Toby and others in the longtermist camp are still motivated by the same underlying impartial utilitarianism, so pointing at less emphasis on redistribution is an unfair nitpick.
Is this necessary? I feel like many people judge their lives as worth living even though their day-to-day experiences contain mostly pain. I wonder if weāre imagining different definitions for ābarely-net-positiveā. Maybe you mean āadding up the magnitude of moment-to-moment negative or positive qualia over someoneās entire lifeā (hedonistic utilitarianism) whereas I am usually imagining something more like āon reflection, the person judges their life as worth livingā (kinda preference utilitarian).