Substack shill @ parhelia.substack.com
I think this is a joke, but for those who have less-explicit feelings in this direction:
I strongly encourage you to not join a totalizing community. Totalizing communities are often quite harmful to members and being in one makes it hard to reason well. Insofar as an EA org is a hardcore totalizing community, it is doing something wrong.
Rereading your post, I'd also strongly recommend prioritizing finding ways to not spend all free time on it. Not only do I think that that level of fixating is one of the worst things people can do to make themselves suffer, it also makes it very hard to think straight and figure things out!
One thing I've seen suggested is dedicating time each day to use as research time on your questions. This is a compromise to free up the rest of your time to things that don't hurt your head. And hang out with friends who are good at distracting you!
I'm really sorry you're experiencing this. I think it's something more and more people are contending with, so you aren't alone, and I'm glad you wrote this. As somebody who's had bouts of existential dread myself, there are a few things I'd like to suggest:
I hope this helps!
Thanks for the Possible Worlds Tree shout-out!
I haven't had capacity to improve it (and won't for a long time), but I agree that a dashboard would be excellent. I think it could be quite valuable even if the number choice isn't perfect.
"Give a man money for a boat, he already knows how to fish" would play off of the original formation!
It's pretty common in values-driven organisations to ask for an amount of value-alignment. The other day I helped out a friend with a resume for an organisation which asked for people applying to care about their feminist mission.
In my opinion this is a reasonable thing to ask for and expect. Sharing (overarching) values improves decision-making and requiring for it can help prevent value drift in an org.
Hi Remmelt,
Just following up on this — I agree with Benjamin’s message above, but I want to add that we actually did add links to the “working at an AI lab” article in the org descriptions for leading AI companies after we published that article last June.
It turns out that a few weeks ago the links to these got accidentally removed when making some related changes in Airtable, and we didn’t notice these were missing — thanks for bringing this to our attention. We’ve added these back in and think they give good context for job board users, and we’re certainly happy for more people to read our articles.
We also decided to remove the prompt engineer / librarian role from the job board, since we concluded it’s not above the current bar for inclusion. I don’t expect everyone will always agree with the judgement calls we make about these decisions, but we take them seriously, and we think it’s important for people to think critically about their career choices.