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Crossposted from Samstack
Many of the exceptional young people I work with keep getting stuck in the same way. They want to do impactful work, but believe they have to make a choice:
All four dichotomies are false and often come at the cost of fulfilling your values. Here’s how to spot them and choose an option more aligned with your values.
Being a student is hard! You probably don’t have a solid source of income past a loan which is swallowed by rent. On the surface, it makes sense for people to do boring, “normal” jobs like tutoring or doing menial research tasks at their uni.
However, these external commitments are often distractions from your actual goals. They are framed as necessary evils, using up your time and energy because you need money from somewhere! They take your scarcest resource, evenings, weekends, attention, and convert it into rent money with little to no compounding benefit. You finish the year with money you’ve already spent and nothing important to show for your work.
What I’ve done and what I would push you to do is find work that pays comparably (or better) AND contributes to the things you care about.
Concretely this could look like:
If you don’t feel qualified for these things yet, read my previous post on why you should apply anyway!
I just did my final exams for my Maths and Philosophy degree. I attended a single lecture this year, worked more than full time for most of the year building Leaf, helping run ERA, facilitating BlueDot, etc. and am now being headhunted for roles with hundreds of applicants with literally decades more experience than me!
This is an example of being ruthless about what university is for and the results you can achieve. Past that threshold, you are Goodharting your degree by revising for the point of a final grade.
Some practical lessons:
You can manufacture far more career capital outside the curriculum than the gap between a First and a 2:1 will ever give you[1]. Nobody at the orgs I want to work at has ever asked me about my degree classification. They've asked about the things I spent my time doing instead of uni: about scaling Leaf, about my writing, about what I've shipped.
A glorified hero sacrifices everything for the cause, no matter the cost. Through blood, sweat and tears they give up any chance of happiness for the possibility of success. That’s the Messianic figure we’re used to hearing about through fiction. It’s not the model of what doing important work looks like.
A lot of people have an implicit assumption that you can either be happy doing something that doesn’t matter or choose to overcome the pull for comfort in favour of doing something hard. But that isn’t always the case.
For me, being burnt out does not make me 0.9x more impactful to the point where I should just grin and bear it. It’s more like 0.3x and sometimes even negative! I’m sluggish, make worse decisions and feel terrible. Taking a day off is probably better than carrying on in that state.
If you are working on impact and feel like Sisyphus, you probably are not only not doing the thing you’d be happiest in, but also the thing that you’d genuinely be best at. So you have a choice: do the unhappy thing even though it is less impactful than the happy thing or sort out your priorities and have both ends at once.
AI Safety is incredibly fluid and role descriptions are often suggestions more than mandates. All of the employers I’ve spoken to work with their employees to find the things they love because that’s what they’re actually best at.
The people who could be paying you want you to do the thing you enjoy most and you should too!
Rest is super important, and you shouldn’t feel bad about taking it. Not just when you physically can no longer work, but as a preemptive measure. Health is not the absence of illness, that’s a neutral state. Instead actual health is about happiness and being above the baseline; if you are always aiming for the neutral, you never achieve this.
This sort of self investment is a type of upskilling. The skill of sustainable impact where every day you are able to commit 2x as much because you genuinely have the capacity and want to, not the version who stays at the same point constantly and shows up at 0.9x because that’s all they have left.
If you assume, like me, there is some moral responsibility to have an impact, there is also some instrumental responsibility to (within reason) do things that further this. I think self care is that type of instrumental thing and as such is a moral responsibility!
Maybe you’re convinced that minimising X-risk is the most important thing to work on, but in practice this looks like sacrificing the cause you’ve always cared about. Instead of your local community, you are grinding something that feels immaterial.
Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote about this years ago, but it needs to be repeated! He describes fuzzies (the things that make you feel like a good person) and utilons (the thing that maximises your impact calculus) and how they don’t always align.
A lot of people convince themselves to give up the fuzzies, sacrificing something that is integral to their identity. I don’t think this sacrifice works and can be less impactful in the long run.
For me, that means being vegan, and being outspoken about mental health, neurodivergent rights, and trans rights. Human and animal welfare matter to me viscerally in a way X-risk doesn't always. Engaging in these causes keeps me grounded and reminds me why I care about X-risk in the first place. This renewed conviction enables me to do the more abstract work better.
When I do these things, I am not ignoring impact calculus, I’m taking my fuzzies as a factor. Even if I would choose AI Safety work over the more personal causes in an isolated trolley problem scenario, our choices are not independent and choosing the latter every so often lets me optimise harder for the former.
What actually gives you motivation? What makes you feel like a good person? Restores your faith in humanity? Do those things, not in spite of maximising utilons, but because of it!
There’s a world where a happy, sustainably paid, graduated version of you has been working on what they care about most and is in an excellent position to do that work with extreme momentum.
All of these false dichotomies put that version up against some practical constraint; money, studying, mental health and cause prioritisation are just common examples, but it could be anything stopping you from pursuing your values. Don’t let them!
Next time you find yourself not pursuing your actual values out of “necessity”, question what’s needed to change that. Then make the answer a reality!
The only caveat I will add here is that if you really value post-graduate education, you should take grades more seriously. However, you should still do the “smart” learning to improve your grades. Plus this is an example of using uni for what you want anyway.
