Well, I work as a researcher in animal welfare, but I think that longtermist stuff is orders of magnitude more important, so if I was left to do whatever I want, I'd start looking into longtermism and try to find my place there. And I might quit my job and do that one day, but I'm not fully sure if researchers would have more impact if left to do what they want.

In terms of which cause to work on, OpenPhil thought more about which cause should receive how much money than I or probably any other researchers did. So I'm unsure if allocation between causes would be better if everyone did what they wanted. Maybe more people would work on interesting, obvious, or high-status problems. This applies not just to major cause-areas, but also to problems within causes.

In terms of what concrete projects to work on, I think that managers often know better what research would be more impactful because they are often more senior. And maybe researchers need less coordination and are more motivated if they work on what they want, but I think that the impact the project will have depends much more on the topic. And it's great to be able to abandon projects when they no longer seem impactful, but needing to justify abandoning to your manager seems like a good safeguard against abandoning projects too much. And that is all I'd need to do to abandon my current project if I had a good reason to do that.

In practice, I sometimes was allowed to work on what I wanted, and sometimes I was given projects, and I haven't noticed a clear correlation in which projects end up seeming more impactful in retrospect. I'm thinking about my two projects that seem most impactful per hour spent. In one case, I was passionately opposed to doing the project, argued against it in person, and wrote a longish document about why it's a bad idea. I was told to do it anyway and I'm happy I did. In another case, everyone I talked to told me that the project I wanted to do was a very bad idea. I did it anyway during a free week we have at Rethink Priorities where we can do whatever we want, and later people who opposed the project agreed that it was a good idea. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

I am not being as effective as I could be - AI x-risk is real enough that it's the only thing I ought to be doing. Funding is not a serious obstacle in my life path.

I have skills and interest in ecology and believe it is an area I can have outsized impact by 1) updating philosophy across the field 2) improving longterm outcomes via gearing up highly effective projects and 3) leading by example. (I might be foolish) Sometimes it seems this is a crowded endeavor and sometimes it seems extremely neglected. In either case it makes me very happy so perhaps this is simply my selfish life path.

I would not be working on my current ecology-related job, but somehow researching and experimenting with ecological outcomes if I had infinite money and no reputational risk. However I am learning important things in my current role and researching other people's ecological experiments in my free time so it's close to optimal. I can pursue my altruistic goals more directly in a few years time when I have more experience, alliances, and specific concrete steps ready.

In my case, yes. I'm sure there's other people doing more useful things than I am, but I think I'm doing the most useful thing I can be doing with my current set of skills/experience/connections.

It would probably be quite difficult to change paths if I thought that was no longer the case though.

Is there a true optimum? How would know its been reached?