I've volunteered to lead a short discussion group at my local EA gathering about a more personal approach to EA, namely how to maintain motivation and sense of purpose while trying to live an effective life. Does anybody have any suggestions for readings that we could base the discussion around?
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A large fraction of "Minding Our Way" is about this: http://mindingourway.com/
This is a very important question and it is great that you are considering it. I have a few suggestions...
1. Insights and practices from the world of cognitive behavioral therapy can be quite applicable to maintaining motivation and a sense of purpose. I'd suggest the Feeling Good Podcast by David Burns (he also has several books but the Podcast is more recent and very accessible).
2. Humans aren't rational beings and to that end, understanding the heuristics and cognitive biases we regularly operate under can be instructive and provide some useful ideas for how to leverage these biases to foster a greater sense of purpose and motivation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
3. The book Drive by Daniel Pink and The Power of Habit both have some useful information relevant to maintaining a sense of motivation.
4. I've found one's mental and physical state has a large influence over their level of motivation. It can be easier to approach the issue of motivation in a less straight forward path. Improving your mental and physical state will naturally improve your ability to maintain motivation. So instead of asking "how can I be motivated" ask "how can I put myself in a state where motivation is more likely".
80,000 hours has "The Motivation Hacker" in their career guide: https://www.amazon.com/The-Motivation-Hacker-Nick-Winter-ebook/dp/B00C8N4FNK. I've been reading it and it's a) easy to read and b) makes sense. Can't personally vouch for results.
http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html
Real problems are interesting, and I am self-indulgent in the sense that I always want to work on interesting things, even if no one else cares about them (in fact, especially if no one else cares about them), and find it very hard to make myself work on boring things, even if they're supposed to be important.
My life is full of case after case where I worked on something just because it seemed interesting, and it turned out later to be useful in some worldly way. Y Combinator itself was something I only did because it seemed interesting. So I seem to have some sort of internal compass that helps me out. But I don't know what other people have in their heads. Maybe if I think more about this I can come up with heuristics for recognizing genuinely interesting problems, but for the moment the best I can offer is the hopelessly question-begging advice that if you have a taste for genuinely interesting problems, indulging it energetically is the best way to prepare yourself for a startup. And indeed, probably also the best way to live.
- The motivational hacker is great quick read, recommended by 80000 hours guide. Also The Willpower Instinct
Curated and popular this week
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This work has come out of my Undergraduate dissertation. I haven't shared or discussed these results much before putting this up. Message me if you'd like the code :)
Edit: 16th April. After helpful comments, especially from Geoffrey, I now believe this method only identifies shifts in the happiness scale (not stretches). Have edited to make this clearer.
TLDR
* Life satisfaction (LS) appears flat over time, despite massive economic growth — the “Easterlin Paradox.”
* Some argue that happiness is rising, but we’re reporting it more conservatively — a phenomenon called rescaling.
* I test rescaling using long-run German panel data, looking at whether the association between reported happiness and three “get-me-out-of-here” actions (divorce, job resignation, and hospitalisation) changes over time.
* If people are getting happier (and rescaling is occuring) the probability of these actions should become less linked to reported LS — but they don’t.
* I find little evidence of rescaling. We should probably take self-reported happiness scores at face value.
1. Background: The Happiness Paradox
Humans today live longer, richer, and healthier lives in history — yet we seem no seem for it. Self-reported life satisfaction (LS), usually measured on a 0–10 scale, has remained remarkably flatover the last few decades, even in countries like Germany, the UK, China, and India that have experienced huge GDP growth. As Michael Plant has written, the empirical evidence for this is fairly strong.
This is the Easterlin Paradox. It is a paradox, because at a point in time, income is strongly linked to happiness, as I've written on the forum before. This should feel uncomfortable for anyone who believes that economic progress should make lives better — including (me) and others in the EA/Progress Studies worlds.
Assuming agree on the empirical facts (i.e., self-reported happiness isn't increasing), there are a few potential explanations:
* Hedonic adaptation: as life gets
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In recent months, the CEOs of leading AI companies have grown increasingly confident about rapid progress:
* OpenAI's Sam Altman: Shifted from saying in November "the rate of progress continues" to declaring in January "we are now confident we know how to build AGI"
* Anthropic's Dario Amodei: Stated in January "I'm more confident than I've ever been that we're close to powerful capabilities... in the next 2-3 years"
* Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis: Changed from "as soon as 10 years" in autumn to "probably three to five years away" by January.
What explains the shift? Is it just hype? Or could we really have Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)[1] by 2028?
In this article, I look at what's driven recent progress, estimate how far those drivers can continue, and explain why they're likely to continue for at least four more years.
In particular, while in 2024 progress in LLM chatbots seemed to slow, a new approach started to work: teaching the models to reason using reinforcement learning.
In just a year, this let them surpass human PhDs at answering difficult scientific reasoning questions, and achieve expert-level performance on one-hour coding tasks.
We don't know how capable AGI will become, but extrapolating the recent rate of progress suggests that, by 2028, we could reach AI models with beyond-human reasoning abilities, expert-level knowledge in every domain, and that can autonomously complete multi-week projects, and progress would likely continue from there.
On this set of software engineering & computer use tasks, in 2020 AI was only able to do tasks that would typically take a human expert a couple of seconds. By 2024, that had risen to almost an hour. If the trend continues, by 2028 it'll reach several weeks.
No longer mere chatbots, these 'agent' models might soon satisfy many people's definitions of AGI — roughly, AI systems that match human performance at most knowledge work (see definition in footnote).
This means that, while the compa
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SUMMARY:
ALLFED is launching an emergency appeal on the EA Forum due to a serious funding shortfall. Without new support, ALLFED will be forced to cut half our budget in the coming months, drastically reducing our capacity to help build global food system resilience for catastrophic scenarios like nuclear winter, a severe pandemic, or infrastructure breakdown. ALLFED is seeking $800,000 over the course of 2025 to sustain its team, continue policy-relevant research, and move forward with pilot projects that could save lives in a catastrophe. As funding priorities shift toward AI safety, we believe resilient food solutions remain a highly cost-effective way to protect the future. If you’re able to support or share this appeal, please visit allfed.info/donate.
Donate to ALLFED
FULL ARTICLE:
I (David Denkenberger) am writing alongside two of my team-mates, as ALLFED’s co-founder, to ask for your support. This is the first time in Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disaster’s (ALLFED’s) 8 year existence that we have reached out on the EA Forum with a direct funding appeal outside of Marginal Funding Week/our annual updates. I am doing so because ALLFED’s funding situation is serious, and because so much of ALLFED’s progress to date has been made possible through the support, feedback, and collaboration of the EA community.
Read our funding appeal
At ALLFED, we are deeply grateful to all our supporters, including the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which has provided the majority of our funding for years. At the end of 2024, we learned we would be receiving far less support than expected due to a shift in SFF’s strategic priorities toward AI safety.
Without additional funding, ALLFED will need to shrink. I believe the marginal cost effectiveness for improving the future and saving lives of resilience is competitive with AI Safety, even if timelines are short, because of potential AI-induced catastrophes. That is why we are asking people to donate to this emergency appeal
This is a very important question and it is great that you are considering it. I have a few suggestions...
1. Insights and practices from the world of cognitive behavioral therapy can be quite applicable to maintaining motivation and a sense of purpose. I'd suggest the Feeling Good Podcast by David Burns (he also has several books but the Podcast is more recent and very accessible).
2. Humans aren't rational beings and to that end, understanding the heuristics and cognitive biases we regularly operate under can be instructive and provide some useful ideas for how to leverage these biases to foster a greater sense of purpose and motivation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
3. The book Drive by Daniel Pink and The Power of Habit both have some useful information relevant to maintaining a sense of motivation.
4. I've found one's mental and physical state has a large influence over their level of motivation. It can be easier to approach the issue of motivation in a less straight forward path. Improving your mental and physical state will naturally improve your ability to maintain motivation. So instead of asking "how can I be motivated" ask "how can I put myself in a state where motivation is more likely".