I’ve noticed a persistent competing need in effective altruist communities.
On one hand, many people want permission not to only value effective altruism. They care about doing good in the world, but they also care about other things: their community, their friendships, their children, a hobby they feel passionate about like art or sports or RPGs or programming, a cause that’s personal to them like free speech or cancer, even just spending time vegging out and watching TV. So they emphasize work/life balance and that effective altruism doesn’t have to be your only life goal.
On the other hand, some people do strive to only care about effective altruism. Of course, they still have hobbies and friendships and take time to rest; effective altruists are not ascetics. But ultimately everything they do is justified by the fact that it strengthens them to continue the work. The discourse about work/life balance can be very alienating to them. It can feel like the effective altruism community isn’t honoring the significant personal sacrifices they’re making to improve the world. In some cases, people feel like there’s a certain crab bucket mentality—you should limit how much good you do so that other people don’t feel bad—which is very toxic.
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? Are you evil, or a failure, or personally responsible for dozens of counterfactual deaths, because you care about more than one thing?
I propose that this conversation would be improved by naming the second group. I suggest calling them “EA dedicates.”
In thinking about EA dedicates, I was inspired by thinking about monks. Monks play an important role in religions with monks. They’re very admirable people who do a lot of good. The religion wouldn’t function without them. And most people are not supposed to be monks.
Why We Need Both Dedicates and Non-Dedicates
There are two reasons that the effective altruism movement should be open to people who aren’t dedicates. First, people who care about more than one thing still do an enormous amount of good. Many of the best effective altruists aren’t dedicates, such as journalist Kelsey Piper and CEA community liaison Julia Wise (as well as, of course, many people whose contributions don’t succeed in making them EA famous). It would be a tremendous mistake to expel Kelsey Piper for insufficient devotion. Quite frankly, the bednets don’t care if the person who buys them also donates to cancer research.
Second, most people caring about multiple things is good for the health of the effective altruist community. If the effective altruist community is totally wrongheaded, it’s psychologically easier to admit if that doesn’t mean losing literally everything you care about and have spent your life working for. There’s a certain comfort in being able to say “at least I still have my kids” or “at least I still have my art.” Similarly, the effective altruist movement is already quite insular. People who care about multiple things are more likely to have friends outside the community, and therefore get an outside reality check and views from outside the EA bubble. (An EA dedicate could have outside-community friends and many of them do, but it certainly seems less common.) These are merely two of the ways that having a lot of non-dedicates makes the EA community more resilient.
The advantages of being open to EA dedicates, conversely, are pretty obvious. In general, if you care about multiple things, you’re going to split your time, energy, and resources across them and have less time, energy, and resources for any particular goal. If you’re donating to cancer research, you’re not donating to farmed animal advocacy charities; if you’re using your deep-work hours on writing fiction, you’re not using them on AI risk research; if you’re sleep deprived from your new baby, you’re probably not getting much valuable effective altruist work done at all. Most of the time, assuming they don’t burn out, a dedicate is going to get more good done than a comparable non-dedicate. An example of a highly impactful effective altruist dedicate is Sam Bankman-Fried, one of the youngest billionaries in the world. Frankly, you don’t become a self-made billionaire if you have hobbies.
Should You Be A Dedicate?
Should you be a dedicate? I think this is a subject that requires a lot of thoughtful, careful consideration as part of your career planning. Being a dedicate is not for most people, and not being a dedicate doesn’t mean you’re a “bad effective altruist,” but at the same time I don’t think you should dismiss it out of hand. Devoting yourself utterly to world improvement doesn’t have to be a dreary slog. Many of the most joyful people I know are dedicates. Work you have a high level of personal fit for is often something you feel passionate about. There’s a sense of meaning and purpose to devoting yourself to world improvement: you never have to worry about ennui, about the sense that you’ll die without having any sort of impact on the world, that there’s no reason you’re alive. Dedicates don’t have bullshit jobs. When you imagine being a dedicate, imagine spending ten hours a day working on intellectually interesting problems at the edge of your ability, knowing that it matters to the world.
Many people can either be dedicates or nondedicates: for example, I think I could have gone either way, but wound up becoming a nondedicate because I married a man who very badly wanted children. Again, if you’re in that boat, it’s a very personal decision whether you should be a dedicate or not.
Some people may be psychologically cut out for being a dedicate, but not have a high level of personal fit for any jobs where being a dedicate even makes sense as a thing to do. Not all dedicates go to an Ivy League school, but jobs like technical AI safety researcher, startup founder, program officer at a major foundation, or farmed-animal welfare corporate relations specialist all require very particular sets of abilities. If your abilities point you more in the direction of being (say) a teacher, then being a dedicate is probably not for you.
You may wish to try out being a dedicate for a period of six months or so.
Being a dedicate, unlike being a monk, is not a lifelong commitment. On the outside view, looking at other social movements, we can expect a lot of effective altruists to be dedicates in their early- to mid-twenties, then to shift to not being dedicates as they age. If this happens to you, don’t worry: the investments in yourself you made as a dedicate will continue to pay off as a non-dedicate effective altruist.
I think a lot of people might also do best alternating between being a dedicate and being a non-dedicate. For example, if you want children, you might be a dedicate before you have kids, switch to prioritizing children while your children are young, and then become a dedicate again as an empty nester. You might also become a dedicate during a big project—founding a charity or a company, for example—and then once your project is stable return to your much-neglected hobbies and friendships.
Considerations for Dedicates
You don’t have work/life balance in the conventional sense: it’s not at all uncommon for dedicates to work eighty-hour weeks. However, you are not an ascetic. If you burn out, it doesn’t do any good for anyone. You need to exercise. You need to go to the doctor and the dentist. You need to have friendships. You need to take some time for rest and recreation. You probably need to sometimes go on vacation (and, no, if you spend the entire time networking it is not a vacation). These are basic human needs.
Take care not to overextend yourself. If you’re the sort of person who’s suited to being a dedicate, then work is exciting and fascinating and you want to do more of it, but if you take on more projects than any human being can reasonably do it is not good for anyone. Preserve your slack. Emergencies are going to come up; you don’t want to always be running on fumes.
It’s very easy, as a dedicate, to decide that human connection is so much deadweight that can be cut off in order to have more hours for work. But you have the same needs for emotional support and companionship that any other human does. If you have no one to talk to about your problems, no one who would visit you in the hospital if you got hit by a car, no one you can invite to a movie that you want to go see, that is a serious problem that will lead to burnout.
Of course, many dedicates are quite introverted, and you shouldn’t assume that you need to be the coolest guy at the party with hundreds of friends. Many dedicates I know have done well with a '“committed secondary relationship,” either platonic or romantic: relationships which don’t have the level of life entanglement and interaction normal to primary relationships in our culture, which aren’t “going up the relationship escalator,” but which are loving and intimate and intended to last a long time if not a lifetime.
At the same time, you need to be picky about who you get that companionship and emotional support from. Being a dedicate is incomprehensible to most people, and it is also the single most important fact about your life. A non-dedicate effective altruist can marry someone who is indulgent of effective altruism as their partner’s quirk; a dedicate should not. You don’t want someone who is going to try to convince you that you should spend less time on your work. Your friends need to be completely on board with your life’s work.
In conclusion: I think that there are multiple valid ways to engage with effective altruism. One major difference is between people who care about multiple things and people who have decided that their life’s work should be world improvement. More explicitly making this distinction will improve conversations and make people better able to make good career decisions.
See also Altruism as a central purpose.
+1, I think that's a good framing of being a dedicate.
(And also doesn't say that doing good is all that matters, but rather that it's your most important and driving life project.)
Thank you for writing this; I enjoyed it and thought it was novel (to me). The monk analogy seems particularly instructive.
Still - I feel uneasy because I'm not sure which category I fall into, nor which I want to fall into. Probably just because binaries are not (usually) perfect binaries!
I really like this post. That said, I don’t think this is true: “dedicates don’t have bullshit jobs.” We might have different definitions of bullshit though.
Dedicates don’t take jobs without doing an impact analysis, agreed.
However, dedicates may choose to sacrifice the chance to work 10 hour days on interesting problems, to take strategic jobs in non-EA orgs or government agencies that involve a lot of day-to-day bullshit. They do this in the hopes that they might have a shot at impact when the time is right. I think it’s good that they’re willing to do this and wouldn’t want their sacrifice mistaken for being a non-dedicate.
For me, thinking of relationships and hobbies in an instrumental way takes away from how much joy and energy and meaning etc. I get from them. So in practice I expect most "EA dedicates" should instrumentally just live a life of a "non-dedicate", i.e. to value their relationships with their parents, siblings, partners and friends for their own sake.
Other things make this distinction messy:
There is probably a distinction where some EAs would or wouldn't push the button that turns them into an omniscient utility maximizer who would always just take the action that is doing the most good. I would push this button because the lives and the suffering and the beauty that are at stake are so much more important than me and my other values. But in practice I think I will probably never need the distinction between EA dedicates and non-dedicates.
I appreciated this post.
I've recently been tweeting about why EA isn't about "doing the most good" with all your resources.
A big reason is that the original purpose of EA was to have broader appeal and be more defensible than utilitarianism – of interest to anyone with"doing good" as one of their goals, rather than their only goal.
However, I also don't want to discourage the people who do make doing good their central purpose, and are aligned in doing that.
This distinction might help – dedicates can be praised and respected, without implying that you need to be a dedicate in order to be an EA.
Maybe we can also develop a more nuanced discussion about who should be a dedicate and who shouldn't. Another concern I have now is people feeling pressure to prioritise doing good more, even when parts of them are conflicted about it; or people who pretend that doing good is their main goal when it actually isn't. I often think in terms of alignment – being a dedicate is good when your main drives & parts of your life are aligned with doing that; but otherwise it's likely to cause problems (though could still be worth doing for a few years, and going back to the lay life afterwards, as you say).
This said, I'm not sure the actual term 'dedicate' is ideal – I'd want to consider a bunch of alternatives before trying to introduce it. I think "making doing good your central purpose" is a good direction for the framing – since it doesn't sound self-sacrificial. I think there are also problems caused by adding a stronger distinction e..g in buddhism, my impression is the monks have tended to get more status and become out of touch with the lay people & real world problems; so more blurring might have been ideal.
A minor thing, but I disagree with "[as a dedicate] Your friends need to be completely on board with your life’s work." It might be true for your life partner, but I think dedicates often have some close friends who aren't "completely on board" with your life's work, and it can be fine – even a positive.
Thank you for writing this! I like the concept and word "Dedicate". This piece resonates a lot with me.
Thank you for naming this. I think you've sketched the distinction very well.
Pretty sure I'll find this useful in future big decisions.
Discussion from 6 years ago: Against Segregating EAs gives reasons why having this binary distinction might be counterproductive, but comments suggest that even at the time it was useful.
The top comment even proposes "Dedicated EAs", is it a coincidence or has the term been used elsewhere?
There is some discussion here about 10% and 50% EAs, which I think is analogous. I'm a little uncomfortable with your characterization of Julia Wise as a non-dedicate as she and Jeff donate 50% and now both have EA jobs.
Do you not consider EtG a way to be a dedicate?
If someone pushes towards maximizing their earnings, even if they don’t top out that high, I would consider them to be a dedicate. Being a teacher isn’t the best starting point for EtG, but there are highly paid adjacent options. Or someone who would make for a good teacher would probably also be able to find a different career.
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!
As a fellow non-dedicate, I like to discuss expectations around working hours in the "any questions" section of an interview anyway, since personally I wouldn't want to accept a job where they expect a lot more than a 40-hour week from me. That way, they also get this info about me to use in their decision, so I know if they make me an offer they think I'm the best candidate, having considered these factors. I think being open like this is probably the best way to treat this area of uncertainty (rather than not applying), since the employer will have the better overview of other candidates.
(EDIT: To be clear, I don't think it's necessary to raise this at this stage: the employer seems unlikely to assume that applicants will work more than a standard working week by default, since many people don't do that. And I don't think it makes sense for the burden to be on people who will only work a standard working week to raise that in the recruitment process. I just mean that if you're concerned about the effect of accepting a job where you'll perform less well because of sticking to standard hours, I think discussing it with the employer before accepting is a good way to handle that.)
I think that having people with clear work/life split around can also be helpful. Partly since it helps make the culture more welcoming to other such people and, as Ozymandias argues, being open to non-dedicates is often helpful. But I also think the added diversity of perspectives can be helpful for everyone: for example it could help dedicates have a better work/life balance, in cases where they're too far towards the "work" end on pure-impact grounds. For example, they might not naturally think of ideas for work/life boundaries that, after they're raised, they would endorse on impact grounds. (I don't think it's clearly always better to add more non-dedicates to a work environment or anything, but I think there are considerations in both directions.)
(Views my own, not my employer's.)
I think this is a very insightful piece. I have spent 35 years as an “altruism dedicate “ and now adding the “effective” to it. I’ve literally been a monk and helped start a monastery. I’ve never bought a TV or a new car or owned real estate or bought a new piece of furniture. I haven’t even had a car for twenty years (actually someone gave me a car for a few months before I sold it:) I’ve intentionally lived in places of poverty.
I just mention this because I’m very happy the author is a non-dedicate. And the reason why is that I know from deep experience battling my own ego and observing dedicates who were more famous than me, how deeply tied ego and self worth can be to your dedicate status. Dedicates kinda can’t help themselves, they just have a burning passion that drives them. I haven’t only been a religious dedicate, I evolved into a secular humanist social activist based in the arts. And social activists and monks/clerics are cut from the same cloth and generally have huge egos and often times are abusive to the mental health of those around or “under” them.
The dynamic of “ I’m a dedicate” and so I can do anything as means to my end including both not paying attention to others mental health and causing stress is very prevalent. If a dedicate had written this piece it’s likely it would have been less well received and maybe mildly annoying to those smart enough to see through it but also for those looking for some meaning in their life it could have been the rallying cry that drew them in to the authors ego sphere.
In the trading world there’s a phenomenon called “exit liquidity” - when a new stock or token first debuts and a bunch of people all buy in during the first 24 hours or so and the price sky rockets straight up. Well there had already been a group of very early inside investors who got in BEFORE the public debut at say 1 dollar a share. Now as the price skyrockets to 80 then 100 then 120 these early insiders start selling at massive profit. With all the selling the price drops again. So if you bought in at 60 and watched it go up excitedly, but while you were sleeping that night didn’t notice it going back down to 5…you were the insiders exit liquidity. You provided the cash for them to make their enormous gains. It’s kind of like all the young soldiers they send into battle who are likely to die they call cannon fodder. Often times ego driven “dedicates” need cannon fodder followers as their exit liquidity. Over 35 years I’ve observed it repeatedly and even here in EA I’ve read about it happening in some corners. It’s the same driving force behind our sad tradition of powerful men sexually abusing less powerful women “under” them.
It’s the hidden potential harm factor whenever you have a movement like EA that breeds passionate world changers. You must stay on top of it.
We need passionate world changers, but being dedicated to developing helpful terms and the people who will adopt and live them out like dedicate/non-dedicate with care to how they can stoke the ego is important.
Be a humble dedicate and a proud non-dedicate and never ever imagine either has any value other than being helpful to assigning roles effectively.
Worth adding that there is also a historic aspect to the Dedicate / Non-Dedicate distinction in that EA’s origins were in more of a totalising, thrifty, monkish, Dedicate approach and over time Non-Dedicates have become more significant.
I very much like that this post encourages inclusion of how much people are able (or willing to) contribute to EA.
It was very easy for me to talk to people telling me how important it was to have balance in my life and do some fun non-EA things, but then I would see examples of EAs who work long hours and love their work and feel like I'm not making as much of an impact as the people who make EA their life.
I think this post clarifies part of the confusion because it makes it explicit that it is healthy for the EA community to have both, and just because I am not ready (or will ever be ready) to be a dedicate doesn't mean that it's a bad thing just because I'm doing less EA stuff than an EA dedicate.
To me, I feel like this distinction feels less polarizing than "hardcore" vs. "softcore" EAs since I feel like dedicates are seen as good, and "softcore" doesn't sound as nice of a phrase to describe people.
Does the first rule out the second? And does the second rule out the first?
It seems like another value of non-dedicates is that they can help communicate EA to people who might not be exposed to it from dedicates, or who might not be receptive to EA messages coming from dedicates. Non-dedicates may have relationships, credibility and knowledge in non-EA spaces that gives them a measure of impact that dedicates won't have. That seems useful for spreading EA's reach, and, hopefully, impact.
I like most of this article.
I dislike this point, perhaps because it faintly promotes using utilitarianism to suppress normal human feelings. I think a healthier approach is to accept these feelings without obsessing over them. Additionally, the thought "Well, these are problems for other people, but not for me thanks to being a dedicate!" reminds me of blind faith, escapism, avoiding the least convenient possible world, and once-and-for-allism.
I think the same can be said for many non-dedicates.