I work with a lot of PhD's and post-docs in academia and industry. My sense is that, while the incentives are nominally what they are, there is a deeper problem with using them as an excuse. If you're in an academic field to "succeed", you are in the wrong field. Academia, PhD's, post-docs and all that are about spending irrational amounts of energy and going to great depth in a subject because you want to, driven by intellectual curiosity. Some people, a small percentage, turn this into a highly paid career, but these are the exceptions, and there is a lot of luck involved - the theory you guess turns out to be right, you advisor picks a topic that turns out to be hot 10 years later, etc. You cannot control these things. But you can have a very satisfying, if not super well-paid, life. It feels like getting paid for stuff you'd happily do in your free time, arguing about to[pics you're passionate about. Once you deviate from the path of seeking the truth, you lose this. You are no longer being true to yourself. You stress about perception and luck and so much that you can't control. You envy rather than celebrate other researchers and new discoveries, It becomes psychologically stressful, you will not be happy. If you're smart enough to do a PhD but more interested in getting ahead, just become a CEO.
Thanks, this is some great perspective. It is true that I'm based in Europe and most of my direct interventions with EAs have been with Effective Giving and Animal Rights people, maybe not typical, at least in style. I do love reading EA's like Yudkowsky and MacAskill too, and often I agree with them, but I can see why many might not.
However where I would push back is on the idea that EA does not belong in the centre of the Overton window. IMHO there is hope for a post-fascist world where truth-seeking becomes again a virtue in itself. EA's themselves disagree on many things, so I'm not pushing one particular political position, but rather the idea that, when faced with challenging problems, EA-type analysis would be part of the discussion, part of the truth-seeking, with people like Scott Alexander or Elizier Yudkowsky or Will MacAskill playing the role that French intellectuals used to play - helping people to tease through the details, popularising ideas even if they can't fit in a 3-word slogan, ...
... and this becomes much easier if we can bring the concept of EA into mainstream dialogue in a positive context. Maybe we could get Billie Eilish to talk about factory farms ...
Funny but also probably the single most impactful idea this year on EA Forum. Maybe if we rephrase it it would be clear why:
imagine if we could get people who care about animal welfare on the boards of factory farms, pushing "incremental" changes which might be small for the farms but still make a huge difference for the animals. (even better if these people do not use animal care as the (sole) justification, but make economic arguments (the way Trump's cronies pretend his inane policies will help poor Americans).
Imagine if there were one farm selling meat from animals which had 50% less suffering. Not just because that would already help, but because the public might be disgusted at the gall of anyone using this as a selling point while still causing huge suffering, and might react against factory farms in general.
Imagine an industrial partner for the artificial protein industry. Sponsoring the research and reaping the profit when artificial protein becomes tastier and healthier and cheaper than dead animals. Today the factory-farming lobby is incredibly powerful at holding back progress and opposing funding, and consumers do not see this.
All that stuff about having a seat at the table is true. I live in Brussels, every few months the factory farms sponsor an army of tractors driven by angry protesters who pretend to be ordinary farmers, and go away with concessions, fewer regulations and more opponents of artificial protein. Nobody in these negotiations is thinking about animal welfare.
So maybe don't start a new factory farm yet, but there is too much good in this post to forget it!
I am constantly asking myself: what would EA's do if we had the foresight and patience of groups like the Heritage Foundation and the Koch brothers? They have moved their nasty opinions right into the centre of the Overton window, but until Plan 2025 they rarely told the world about their final goals. What would that kind of thinking look like for animal welfare? Certainly having some (closet?) vegans running factory-farms would be a big opportunity.
This is a beautiful post for many reasons. I would add one more consideration: Cost-effectiveness calculations are necessarily imperfect. They often miss secondary effects.
When you support your friend's uncle or spend quality time with your kids, you create a secondary impact. You role-model generosity in a way which encourages others, including your kids, to be generous. If these other people take this and run with it, maybe some of them will have 100 x the direct impact you could have. If you are also open about being an EA, you help others to see what EA's are really like, in a positive way.
If you focus 100% on direct effectiveness, you may miss out on this, or even have the opposite effect: "who is this person who preaches generosity but won't help her own friend in times of need?" playing into the nasty false narrative in which EA's are all about the Effective with Altruism as an afterthought.
I agree you are doing great work in a tough environment! I've sent you a message on linkedin.
Where I might have ideas is in how to make the communication strategy more data-based. I cannot judge where you are now. But let me give an example of what I mean:
Let's say you market Beer Z, a typical lager. You know that your beer looks and tastes much the same as 50 other beers to most beer-drinkers. But somehow many of them consider Beer Z to be, say, weak. What do you do?
Multinationals have developed whole ecosystems to work on trivial problems like this, including omline surveys, focus groups, etc.
You have some ideas: you could talk about your alcohol content, you could get an NFL lineman or rugby player spokesman, you could run promotions among groups who might think weak is good, etc.
Basically, they would test these ideas, optimise down to the level of the exact words to use ("tough" or "strong" or "not like the others" ...), generate new ideas, test those, and finally design an intervention based on what would sell the most beer, based on statistically significant data.
The challenges you describe may be amenable to some of this. Who might be a great advocate foe EA? How to create a story line that has potential to go viral but focused on care? Etc.
IMHO, as a relative newbie to EA, you guys do a terrible job on PR!
I say that as a compliment. :)
EA is full of amazing, committed people who want to help animals suffer less, help poor people have better lives, help make the world better, because you CARE. And anytime I've seen EA portrayed to the general public, this caring aspect is totally omitted.
EA's are often portrayed as nerds who see the whole enterprise as an intellectual, logical game. The focus is 100% on the "effective" and 0% on the "altruism".
They show the long intellectual debates, often described as esoteric or abstract. They rarely show the long hours people spend designing, implementing and supporting projects that really help people and animals.
They often highlight the controversial arguments (longtermism, earning-to-give, for example) and ignore all the work on poverty alleviation in the world's poorest countries.
They often portray EA as guilt-washing for over-paid IT workers who ease their consciences at the luxury of their lives while others struggle by making a show of donating a small % of their wealth.
Etc.
It is absurd but true that many people, if they hear the term Effective Altruist, first think of SBF - an ultra-rich, conceited guy living a life of pure luxury - rather than the vast majority of EA people who volunteer or work for low salaries so that they can help more people.
It would be wonderful and highly impactful if we could change this perception and so encourage the millions of people who agree with our true priorities to join and support us.
I have quite a bit of second-hand experience working on brand-image and public perceptions for a big multi-national - how to research it, how to improve it, etc. Happy to help if that sounds useful.
This is all good. But AIM is still a very young organisation. The experience of 99% of successful businesses throughout history is that performance-based salary increases are one of the best long-term motivational tools.
It's not all, or mostly, about the money! Pay-rises are seen as the one tangible, non-bullshit validation that you are growing your impact over time.
People who put more in get more out, and everyone finds that fair.
I wonder if your model is sustainable for long-term employees. Yes it's very liberating, but it also means you have to self-motivate every day, even on days where you're not feeling altruistic ... It may work for some people, maybe for young, highly idealistic people without kids. If you are human, there are days when you feel less motivated, where you need a little push.
This is especially true in non-glamorous roles where there is no tangible number you can point at as a measure of what you've achieved.
And in most companies, part of the push thst motivates people comes from the annual performance and pay review. It's a game, you want to score more. You want to win. Countless research shows that "gamification" increases effort and performance, causing people to achieve more than they thought possible.
It is also a quite clear way for people to judge what is reasonable commitment to their work. Is it right to skip football practice to complete an urgent project on time? It it right to re-schedule a family vacation to travel to a project site? (stupid examples)
You are deliberately de-gamifying performance, at least in terms of salary. It is an ambitious objective. I really hope it works, but a part of me wonders if this won't lead to some more ambitious (and that's in your name) employees moving on after a few years - I hope I'm wrong.
An alternative might be to give performance-related raises but with the option to forego them, or to take only a % of your salary in a given year, based on need.
Very provocative post. A few minor comments, not criticisms!
Maybe some of your reference cases are more complex than you imagine. Temperature, for example, is not trivial. Depending how you measure it (ideal gas vs electrical conductivity), you get two aifferent seemingly linear scales that agree only at the two points where you force agreement (e.g. Oc and 100C). But also even using Kelvin, it's not at all obvious that this is the correct linear scale to use. Maybe the true scale is exponential or logarithmic relative to this: (e.g. one could argue that the differencebetween 10 K and 100 K is the same as that between 100 K and 1000 K ... or you could argue (if you're a chemist, that in the correct scale 300 k is 2x 290 K which is 2x 280 K ...). Today, after mant years, we have a settled system, but it doesn't mean anything - anybody working with quantum computers will know that one degree close to 0K is a lot more "difficult" than going from 285 to 284 K, while maybe cosmologists use phrases like "10's of millions of degrees" where Celsius and Kelvin are basically the same, and only worry if the temperature changes by a million degrees ...
All this to point out that the question of measurement is rarely trivial once you get past counting things!
What people do in science and engineering is to make two lists:
what are the tangible outcomes we need? (e.g. what is the cost per kJ of energy delivered to a home? ...)
what are the physical, tangible measures we can make? (e.g. how many kg of fuel did we use? what temperature was reached? what was the % completeness of the reaction? ...)
And then, they try to build a model in which the available data will predict the desired output. Sometimes it's possible, but usually it requires a lot of assumptions, which need to be tested and validated continuously.
They always also keep in mind that all models are wrong, but some are useful, and constantly re-check if their model is useful and remind themselves of the ways it is wrong, especially if applied in and area it wasn't intended for.
In this context, IMHO asking how capable an AI is is just far too difficult and too broad. To use your football analogy, Messi might be better than anyone in the world at scoring with his left foot, but there are guys on my amateur team who would be better at defending a corner than he would.
What's most realistic is to ask more granular questions (e.g. likelihood to enable a bioterrorist to produce a new virus, likelihood to successfully complete a problem that takes a skilled human 1 week, ... ), and then look at more tangible ways to test exactly that. Which of course is what AI Safety labs do. Just as IQ is meaningful but flawed, any measure of general capability will be flawed.
All this was a long-winded way of saying that yours is a great analysis and a valuable contribution, but that with the right mentality, people have found ways to measure and predict in complex situations before. It feels that AI is another level of complexity, but the principles that give us the most insight do not change.
Great post, just seeing it now.
I work with a lot of PhD's and post-docs in academia and industry. My sense is that, while the incentives are nominally what they are, there is a deeper problem with using them as an excuse. If you're in an academic field to "succeed", you are in the wrong field. Academia, PhD's, post-docs and all that are about spending irrational amounts of energy and going to great depth in a subject because you want to, driven by intellectual curiosity. Some people, a small percentage, turn this into a highly paid career, but these are the exceptions, and there is a lot of luck involved - the theory you guess turns out to be right, you advisor picks a topic that turns out to be hot 10 years later, etc. You cannot control these things. But you can have a very satisfying, if not super well-paid, life. It feels like getting paid for stuff you'd happily do in your free time, arguing about to[pics you're passionate about. Once you deviate from the path of seeking the truth, you lose this. You are no longer being true to yourself. You stress about perception and luck and so much that you can't control. You envy rather than celebrate other researchers and new discoveries, It becomes psychologically stressful, you will not be happy. If you're smart enough to do a PhD but more interested in getting ahead, just become a CEO.
Thanks, this is some great perspective. It is true that I'm based in Europe and most of my direct interventions with EAs have been with Effective Giving and Animal Rights people, maybe not typical, at least in style. I do love reading EA's like Yudkowsky and MacAskill too, and often I agree with them, but I can see why many might not.
However where I would push back is on the idea that EA does not belong in the centre of the Overton window. IMHO there is hope for a post-fascist world where truth-seeking becomes again a virtue in itself. EA's themselves disagree on many things, so I'm not pushing one particular political position, but rather the idea that, when faced with challenging problems, EA-type analysis would be part of the discussion, part of the truth-seeking, with people like Scott Alexander or Elizier Yudkowsky or Will MacAskill playing the role that French intellectuals used to play - helping people to tease through the details, popularising ideas even if they can't fit in a 3-word slogan, ...
... and this becomes much easier if we can bring the concept of EA into mainstream dialogue in a positive context. Maybe we could get Billie Eilish to talk about factory farms ...
Clever! ...but I have quite a bit of first-hand experience in many of the areas they write accurately about ...
Funny but also probably the single most impactful idea this year on EA Forum. Maybe if we rephrase it it would be clear why:
So maybe don't start a new factory farm yet, but there is too much good in this post to forget it!
I am constantly asking myself: what would EA's do if we had the foresight and patience of groups like the Heritage Foundation and the Koch brothers? They have moved their nasty opinions right into the centre of the Overton window, but until Plan 2025 they rarely told the world about their final goals. What would that kind of thinking look like for animal welfare? Certainly having some (closet?) vegans running factory-farms would be a big opportunity.
This is a beautiful post for many reasons. I would add one more consideration: Cost-effectiveness calculations are necessarily imperfect. They often miss secondary effects.
Hi Tess,
I agree you are doing great work in a tough environment! I've sent you a message on linkedin.
Where I might have ideas is in how to make the communication strategy more data-based. I cannot judge where you are now. But let me give an example of what I mean:
Let's say you market Beer Z, a typical lager. You know that your beer looks and tastes much the same as 50 other beers to most beer-drinkers. But somehow many of them consider Beer Z to be, say, weak. What do you do?
Multinationals have developed whole ecosystems to work on trivial problems like this, including omline surveys, focus groups, etc.
You have some ideas: you could talk about your alcohol content, you could get an NFL lineman or rugby player spokesman, you could run promotions among groups who might think weak is good, etc.
Basically, they would test these ideas, optimise down to the level of the exact words to use ("tough" or "strong" or "not like the others" ...), generate new ideas, test those, and finally design an intervention based on what would sell the most beer, based on statistically significant data.
The challenges you describe may be amenable to some of this. Who might be a great advocate foe EA? How to create a story line that has potential to go viral but focused on care? Etc.
Fantastic!
IMHO, as a relative newbie to EA, you guys do a terrible job on PR!
I say that as a compliment. :)
EA is full of amazing, committed people who want to help animals suffer less, help poor people have better lives, help make the world better, because you CARE. And anytime I've seen EA portrayed to the general public, this caring aspect is totally omitted.
It is absurd but true that many people, if they hear the term Effective Altruist, first think of SBF - an ultra-rich, conceited guy living a life of pure luxury - rather than the vast majority of EA people who volunteer or work for low salaries so that they can help more people.
It would be wonderful and highly impactful if we could change this perception and so encourage the millions of people who agree with our true priorities to join and support us.
I have quite a bit of second-hand experience working on brand-image and public perceptions for a big multi-national - how to research it, how to improve it, etc. Happy to help if that sounds useful.
This is all good. But AIM is still a very young organisation. The experience of 99% of successful businesses throughout history is that performance-based salary increases are one of the best long-term motivational tools.
It's not all, or mostly, about the money! Pay-rises are seen as the one tangible, non-bullshit validation that you are growing your impact over time.
People who put more in get more out, and everyone finds that fair.
I wonder if your model is sustainable for long-term employees. Yes it's very liberating, but it also means you have to self-motivate every day, even on days where you're not feeling altruistic ... It may work for some people, maybe for young, highly idealistic people without kids. If you are human, there are days when you feel less motivated, where you need a little push.
This is especially true in non-glamorous roles where there is no tangible number you can point at as a measure of what you've achieved.
And in most companies, part of the push thst motivates people comes from the annual performance and pay review. It's a game, you want to score more. You want to win. Countless research shows that "gamification" increases effort and performance, causing people to achieve more than they thought possible.
It is also a quite clear way for people to judge what is reasonable commitment to their work. Is it right to skip football practice to complete an urgent project on time? It it right to re-schedule a family vacation to travel to a project site? (stupid examples)
You are deliberately de-gamifying performance, at least in terms of salary. It is an ambitious objective. I really hope it works, but a part of me wonders if this won't lead to some more ambitious (and that's in your name) employees moving on after a few years - I hope I'm wrong.
An alternative might be to give performance-related raises but with the option to forego them, or to take only a % of your salary in a given year, based on need.
Fair, It seems you know more about this than I do! Thanks!
Very provocative post. A few minor comments, not criticisms!
All this was a long-winded way of saying that yours is a great analysis and a valuable contribution, but that with the right mentality, people have found ways to measure and predict in complex situations before. It feels that AI is another level of complexity, but the principles that give us the most insight do not change.