Currently I’m working on doing cause prio, finding my key uncertainties, trying to figure out what the most important problem is and how I can help solve it. Every time I feel I’m getting somewhere in my thinking I come up with 10 new things to consider. Although I enjoy this as an exercise it does take up a lot of time and its hard to know how “worth it” doing this is. I‘m now wondering were a good stopping point is / what proportion of time is useful to spend on thinking about these types of questions (especially if you’re unlikely to contribute to research). Part of me thinks that I should just defer to a few people who seem to know what they’re talking about then from there start putting my skills to use rather than spending a bunch of time philosphising about who matters and whether I’m a negative utilitarian. Does anyone have any (strong) thoughts about these two approaches and if it is helpful/necessary for everyone within EA to spend significant amounts of time doing cause prio work?
My quick boring take is that you should do roughly whatever level of cause prio you enjoy doing / remain curious about / etc. I’d roughly guess that at a community level this will lead to a healthy balance in the community of deferring vs. developing inside views / critiquing / etc. (I do think it’s quite important that at least a significant fraction spend a bunch of time on cause prio to avoid deferral cascades and allow more perspectives to be heard) and plus it generally seems good for people to do whatever they enjoy. :)
Thanks for writing this up! I'm also in the midst of Working Things Out and a lot of what you've said hits home. My bottom line here is something like: I completely agree that there comes a point in most people's decisions about their lives and what to prioritise, where even though they've done all the homework and counted all the utils on each side, they mostly make the final decision based on intuition - because you ultimately can't prove most of this stuff for certain. One thing that could help you structure your cause prio is by focusing more on a key decision that it has to help you decide on, and using your sureness about that decision as a barometer for when you've caused enough prios.
> On "I come up with 10 new things to consider" - you're right that it feels like battling an intellectual hydra of crucial considerations sometimes. Have you got the sense so far that, of the 10 new things to consider, there's at least one or two that could substantially reshape your opinion? For me, even when that's not the case, having a more detailed picture can still be really good. This seems especially important for situations/roles where you'll probably end up communicating about EA to people with less context than you.
> On when to stop: Cause prio thinking and building models of different fields of research / work is definitely something you could spend literally forever on. I roughly think that this wave of EAs are stopping just a bit too early, and are jumping into trying to do useful work too quickly. I elaborate more in the next bit.
> Against lots of deferring: An argument here that motivates me is that in most EA/LTist roles you'll want to go into, it seems like time spent investing in your cause prio saves time. Specifically, it's likely to save time that your colleagues would otherwise have to spend giving you context, explaining how they orient towards the problem, etc. The more you've nailed what your view is, the better you can make (increasingly) autonomous decisions about how the projects you work on should look, etc. I think that this applies in basically any field of EA work: knowing in great detail why you care about a given cause area helps you identify which empirical facts about the world matter to your aims. This I think helps you a lot with strategy and design decisions. It also means that your team benefits more from having you on it - because your perspective is likely to be distinct in useful ways from other people's!
(I'm quite uncertain about the above and I think this sort of thing differs a lot between individuals)
Do we all need to do intense cause prio thinking?
Some off the cuff thoughts:
Currently I’m working on doing cause prio, finding my key uncertainties, trying to figure out what the most important problem is and how I can help solve it. Every time I feel I’m getting somewhere in my thinking I come up with 10 new things to consider. Although I enjoy this as an exercise it does take up a lot of time and its hard to know how “worth it” doing this is. I‘m now wondering were a good stopping point is / what proportion of time is useful to spend on thinking about these types of questions (especially if you’re unlikely to contribute to research). Part of me thinks that I should just defer to a few people who seem to know what they’re talking about then from there start putting my skills to use rather than spending a bunch of time philosphising about who matters and whether I’m a negative utilitarian. Does anyone have any (strong) thoughts about these two approaches and if it is helpful/necessary for everyone within EA to spend significant amounts of time doing cause prio work?
My quick boring take is that you should do roughly whatever level of cause prio you enjoy doing / remain curious about / etc. I’d roughly guess that at a community level this will lead to a healthy balance in the community of deferring vs. developing inside views / critiquing / etc. (I do think it’s quite important that at least a significant fraction spend a bunch of time on cause prio to avoid deferral cascades and allow more perspectives to be heard) and plus it generally seems good for people to do whatever they enjoy. :)
Thanks for writing this up! I'm also in the midst of Working Things Out and a lot of what you've said hits home. My bottom line here is something like: I completely agree that there comes a point in most people's decisions about their lives and what to prioritise, where even though they've done all the homework and counted all the utils on each side, they mostly make the final decision based on intuition - because you ultimately can't prove most of this stuff for certain. One thing that could help you structure your cause prio is by focusing more on a key decision that it has to help you decide on, and using your sureness about that decision as a barometer for when you've caused enough prios.
> On "I come up with 10 new things to consider" - you're right that it feels like battling an intellectual hydra of crucial considerations sometimes. Have you got the sense so far that, of the 10 new things to consider, there's at least one or two that could substantially reshape your opinion? For me, even when that's not the case, having a more detailed picture can still be really good. This seems especially important for situations/roles where you'll probably end up communicating about EA to people with less context than you.
> On when to stop: Cause prio thinking and building models of different fields of research / work is definitely something you could spend literally forever on. I roughly think that this wave of EAs are stopping just a bit too early, and are jumping into trying to do useful work too quickly. I elaborate more in the next bit.
> Against lots of deferring: An argument here that motivates me is that in most EA/LTist roles you'll want to go into, it seems like time spent investing in your cause prio saves time. Specifically, it's likely to save time that your colleagues would otherwise have to spend giving you context, explaining how they orient towards the problem, etc. The more you've nailed what your view is, the better you can make (increasingly) autonomous decisions about how the projects you work on should look, etc. I think that this applies in basically any field of EA work: knowing in great detail why you care about a given cause area helps you identify which empirical facts about the world matter to your aims. This I think helps you a lot with strategy and design decisions. It also means that your team benefits more from having you on it - because your perspective is likely to be distinct in useful ways from other people's!
(I'm quite uncertain about the above and I think this sort of thing differs a lot between individuals)