As one practical upshot of this, I helped 80k make a round of updates to their online articles in light of FTX. See more.

More on what moderation might mean in practice here: 

https://80000hours.org/2023/05/moderation-in-doing-good/

I really liked this post. I find the undergrad degree metaphor useful in some ways (focus on succeeding in your studies over 4 years, but give a bit of thought to how it sets you up for the next stage), but since the end game is only 3 years (rather than a normal 40 year career), overall it seems like your pacing and attitude could end up pretty different.

Maybe the analogy could be an undergrad where their only goal is to get the "best" graduate degree possible. Then high school = early game, undergrad = midgame, graduate degree = end game. Maybe you could think of "best" as "produce the most novel & useful result in their thesis" or "get the highest possible score".

Another analogy could be an 18 year old undergrad who knows they need to retire at age 25, but I expect that throws the analogy off a lot, since if impact is the goal, I wouldn't spend 4 years in college in that scenario.

Yes I agree that could be a good scenario to emerge from this – a very salient example of this kind of thinking going wrong is one of the most helpful things to convince people to stop doing it.

The 80k team are still discussing it internally and hope to say more at a later date.

 
Speaking personally, Holden's comments (e.g. in Vox) resonated with me. I wish I'd done more to investigate what happened at Alameda.

If you're tracking the annual change in wealth between two periods, you should try to make sure the start at the end point are either both market peaks or both market lows.

e.g. from 2017 to 2021, or 2019 to Nov 2022 would be valid periods for tracking crypto.

If you instead track from e.g. 2019 to 2021, then you're probably going to overestimate.

Another option would be to average over periods significantly longer than a typical market cycle (e.g. 10yr).

Thanks!

My social life is pretty much only people who aren't in the EA community at this point.

Small comment on this:

actively fighting against EA communities to become silos and for EA enterprises to have workers outside EA communities would be of great value 

It depends on the org, but for smaller orgs that are focused on EA community building, I still think it could make sense for them to pretty much only people who are very interested in EA. I wouldn't say the same about e.g. most biorisk orgs though.

Yes, I'd basically agree – he didn't influence the thinking that much but he did impact what you could get paid to do (and that could also have long term impacts on the structure of the community).

Though, given income inequality, the latter problem seems very hard to solve. 

That's useful - my 'naive optimizing' thing isn't supposed to be the same thing as naive utilitarianism, but I do find it hard to pin down the exact trait that's the issue here, and those are interesting points about confidence maybe not being the key thing.

Just a small clarification, I'm not saying we should abandon the practical project, but it could make sense to (relatively speaking) focus on more tractable areas / dial down ambitions / tilt more towards the intellectual project until we've established more operational competence. 

I also agree dissociating has significant costs that need to be weighed against the other reasons.