I am really grateful for your courage, and for making it easier for others to speak up about the mistakes senior people in our community are making. I think the world would benefit a ton from more courage from the EA community for many reasons. Thank you for setting such a positive example.
Yea, fair point. Maybe this is just reference class tennis, but my impression is that a majority of people who consider themselves EAs aren't significantly prioritizing impact in their career and donation decisions, but I agree that for the subset of EAs who do, that "heroic responsibility"/going overboard can be fraught.
Some things that come to mind include how often EAs seem to work long hours/on weekends; how willing EAs are to do higher impact work when salaries are lower, when it's less intellectually stimulating, more stressful, etc; how many EAs are willing to donate a large portion of their income; how many EAs think about prioritization and population ethics very rigorously; etc. I'm very appreciative of how much more I see these in EA world than outside it, and I realize the above are unreasonable to expect from people.
While I really like the HPMOR quote, I don't really resonate with heroic responsibility, and don't resonate with the "Everything is my fault" framing. Responsibility is a helpful social coordination tool, but it doesn't feel very "real" to me. I try to take the most helpful/impactful actions, even if they don't seem like "my responsibility" (while being cooperative and not unilateral and with reasonable constraints).
I'm sympathetic to taking on heroic responsibility causing harm in certain cases, but I don't see strong enough evidence that it causes more harm than good. The examples of moral courage from my talk all seem like examples of heroic responsibility with positive outcomes. The converse points to your bullets also generally seem more compelling to me:
1) It seems more likely to me that people taking too little responsibility for making the world better off has caused a lot more harm (like billionaires not doing more to reduce poverty, factory farming, climate change, AI risk, etc, or improve the media/disinformation landscape and political environment, etc). The harm is just much less visible since these are mostly failures of omission, not execution errors. It seems obvious to me the world could be much better off today, and the trajectory of the future could look much better than it does right now.
2) Not really the converse, but I don't know of anyone leaving an impactful role because they can't see how it will solve everything? I've never heard of anyone whose bar for taking on a job is "must be able to solve everything."
3) I see tons of apathy, greed, laziness, inefficiency, etc that lead to worse outcomes. The world is on fire in various ways, but the vast majority of people don't act like it.
4) Overvaluing conventional wisdom also causes tons of harm. How many well-resourced people never question general societal ethical norms (e.g. around the ethics of killing animals for food, or how much to donate, or how much social impact should be a priority in your career compared to salary, etc etc etc).
5) I'd argue EAs (and humans in general) are much more prone to prioritizing higher probability/certainty, lower-EV options over higher-EV, lower-probability options (Givewell donations over pro-global-health USG lobbying or political donations feels like a likely candidate). It's very emotionally difficult to do something that has a low chance of succeeding. AI safety does seem like a strong counterexample in the EA community, but I'd guess a lot of the community's members' prioritization of AI safety and specific work people do has more to do with intellectual interest and it being high-status in the community than rigorous impact-optimization.
Two cruxes for whether to err more in the direction of doing things the normal way: 1) How well you expect things to go by default. 2) How easy it is to do good vs. cause harm.
I don't feel great about 1), and honestly feel pretty good about 2), largely because I think that doing common-sense good things tends to actually be good, and doing good galaxy-brained ends-justify-the-means things that seem bad to normal people (like committing fraud or violence or whatever) are usually actually bad.
"Another thing about the abolitionist movement is that, if you look at the history of it, it actually took sixty or seventy or eighty years to actually make an effect. And some of the people who started it didn’t live to see the fruits of it. So there’s something about this giving myself to benefit others. I will never see them, I will never meet them, I will never get anything from them, whether that’s people or parts of the earth. And having this long view. And somehow it cannot be, in that case, about the limited self. It cannot be, because the limited self is not getting anything out of it. [...] But how might we have this sense of urgency without despair? Meeting the enormity of the suffering in the world with a sense of urgency in the heart, engagement in the heart, but without despair. How can we have, as human beings, a love that keeps going no matter what? And we call that ‘equanimity.’ It’s an aspect of equanimity, that it stays steady no matter what. The love, the compassion stays steady. [...] If we’re, in the practice, cultivating this sense of keeping the mind up and bright, and it’s still open, and it’s still sensitive, and the heart is open and receptive, but the consciousness is buoyant, that means it won’t sink when it meets the suffering in the world. The compassion will be buoyant."
Thanks Will! Our first chat back at Stanford in 2019 about how valuable EA community building and university group organizing are played an important role in me deciding to prioritize it over the following several years, and I'm very grateful I did! Thanks for the fantastic advice. :)
Taking uni organizing really seriously was upstream of MATS, EA Courses/Virtual Programs, and BlueDot (shoutout to Dewi) getting started among other things. IMO this work is extremely valuable and heavily under-prioritized in the community compared to research. Group organizing can be quite helpful for training communications skills, entrepreneurship, agency, grit, improved intuitions about theories of change, management, networking/providing value to other people, general organization/ability to get things done, and many other flexible skills that from personal experience can significantly increase your impact.
Conditioned on human extinction, do you expect intelligent life to re-evolve with levels of autonomy similar to what humanity has now (which seems quite important for assessing how bad human extinction would be on longtermist grounds)? I don't think it's likely.
Maybe the underlying crux (if your intuition differs) is what proportion of human extinction scenarios (not including non-extinction x-risk) involve intelligent/agentic AIs, and/or other conditions which would significantly limit the potential of new intelligent life even if it did re-emerge. My current low-resilience impression is probably 90+%.
And the above considerations and credences make how good the next intelligent species are vs. humans fairly inconsequential.
Thanks for the feedback, and I’m sorry for causing that unintended (but foreseeable) reaction. I edited the wording of the original take to address your feedback. My intention for writing this was to encourage others to figure things out independently, share our thinking, and listen to our guts - especially when we disagree with the aforementioned sources of deference about how to do the most good.
I think EAs have done a surprisingly good job at identifying crucial insights, and acting accordingly. EAs also seem unusually willing to explicitly acknowledge opportunity cost and trade-offs (which I often find the rest of the world frustratingly unwilling to do). These are definitely worth celebrating.
However, I think our track record at translating the above into actually improving the future is nowhere near our potential.
Since I experience a lot of guilt about not being a good enough person, the EA community has provided a lot of much-needed comfort to handle the daunting challenge of doing as much good as I can. It’s been scary to confront the possibility that the “adults in charge” don’t have the important things figured out about how to do the most good. Given how the last few years have unfolded, they don’t even seem to be doing a particularly good job. Of course, this is very understandable. FTX trauma is intense, and the world is incredibly complicated. I don’t think I’m doing a particularly good job either.
But it has been liberating to allow myself to actually think, trust my gut, and not rely on the EA community/funders/orgs to assess how much impact I’m having relative to my potential. I expect that with more independent thinking, ambition, and courage, our community will do much better at realizing our potential moving forward.
I am really grateful for your courage, and for making it easier for others to speak up about the mistakes senior people in our community are making. I think the world would benefit a ton from more courage from the EA community for many reasons. Thank you for setting such a positive example.
The argument sure is a string :P
Will's list from his recent post has good candidates too:
Yea, fair point. Maybe this is just reference class tennis, but my impression is that a majority of people who consider themselves EAs aren't significantly prioritizing impact in their career and donation decisions, but I agree that for the subset of EAs who do, that "heroic responsibility"/going overboard can be fraught.
Some things that come to mind include how often EAs seem to work long hours/on weekends; how willing EAs are to do higher impact work when salaries are lower, when it's less intellectually stimulating, more stressful, etc; how many EAs are willing to donate a large portion of their income; how many EAs think about prioritization and population ethics very rigorously; etc. I'm very appreciative of how much more I see these in EA world than outside it, and I realize the above are unreasonable to expect from people.
While I really like the HPMOR quote, I don't really resonate with heroic responsibility, and don't resonate with the "Everything is my fault" framing. Responsibility is a helpful social coordination tool, but it doesn't feel very "real" to me. I try to take the most helpful/impactful actions, even if they don't seem like "my responsibility" (while being cooperative and not unilateral and with reasonable constraints).
I'm sympathetic to taking on heroic responsibility causing harm in certain cases, but I don't see strong enough evidence that it causes more harm than good. The examples of moral courage from my talk all seem like examples of heroic responsibility with positive outcomes. The converse points to your bullets also generally seem more compelling to me:
1) It seems more likely to me that people taking too little responsibility for making the world better off has caused a lot more harm (like billionaires not doing more to reduce poverty, factory farming, climate change, AI risk, etc, or improve the media/disinformation landscape and political environment, etc). The harm is just much less visible since these are mostly failures of omission, not execution errors. It seems obvious to me the world could be much better off today, and the trajectory of the future could look much better than it does right now.
2) Not really the converse, but I don't know of anyone leaving an impactful role because they can't see how it will solve everything? I've never heard of anyone whose bar for taking on a job is "must be able to solve everything."
3) I see tons of apathy, greed, laziness, inefficiency, etc that lead to worse outcomes. The world is on fire in various ways, but the vast majority of people don't act like it.
4) Overvaluing conventional wisdom also causes tons of harm. How many well-resourced people never question general societal ethical norms (e.g. around the ethics of killing animals for food, or how much to donate, or how much social impact should be a priority in your career compared to salary, etc etc etc).
5) I'd argue EAs (and humans in general) are much more prone to prioritizing higher probability/certainty, lower-EV options over higher-EV, lower-probability options (Givewell donations over pro-global-health USG lobbying or political donations feels like a likely candidate). It's very emotionally difficult to do something that has a low chance of succeeding. AI safety does seem like a strong counterexample in the EA community, but I'd guess a lot of the community's members' prioritization of AI safety and specific work people do has more to do with intellectual interest and it being high-status in the community than rigorous impact-optimization.
Two cruxes for whether to err more in the direction of doing things the normal way: 1) How well you expect things to go by default. 2) How easy it is to do good vs. cause harm.
I don't feel great about 1), and honestly feel pretty good about 2), largely because I think that doing common-sense good things tends to actually be good, and doing good galaxy-brained ends-justify-the-means things that seem bad to normal people (like committing fraud or violence or whatever) are usually actually bad.
Thank you for the kind words Jonas!
Your comment reminded me of another passage from one of my favorite Rob talks, Selflessness and a Life of Love:
Thanks Will! Our first chat back at Stanford in 2019 about how valuable EA community building and university group organizing are played an important role in me deciding to prioritize it over the following several years, and I'm very grateful I did! Thanks for the fantastic advice. :)
Taking uni organizing really seriously was upstream of MATS, EA Courses/Virtual Programs, and BlueDot (shoutout to Dewi) getting started among other things. IMO this work is extremely valuable and heavily under-prioritized in the community compared to research. Group organizing can be quite helpful for training communications skills, entrepreneurship, agency, grit, improved intuitions about theories of change, management, networking/providing value to other people, general organization/ability to get things done, and many other flexible skills that from personal experience can significantly increase your impact.
Conditioned on human extinction, do you expect intelligent life to re-evolve with levels of autonomy similar to what humanity has now (which seems quite important for assessing how bad human extinction would be on longtermist grounds)? I don't think it's likely.
Maybe the underlying crux (if your intuition differs) is what proportion of human extinction scenarios (not including non-extinction x-risk) involve intelligent/agentic AIs, and/or other conditions which would significantly limit the potential of new intelligent life even if it did re-emerge. My current low-resilience impression is probably 90+%.
And the above considerations and credences make how good the next intelligent species are vs. humans fairly inconsequential.
Thanks for the feedback, and I’m sorry for causing that unintended (but foreseeable) reaction. I edited the wording of the original take to address your feedback. My intention for writing this was to encourage others to figure things out independently, share our thinking, and listen to our guts - especially when we disagree with the aforementioned sources of deference about how to do the most good.
I think EAs have done a surprisingly good job at identifying crucial insights, and acting accordingly. EAs also seem unusually willing to explicitly acknowledge opportunity cost and trade-offs (which I often find the rest of the world frustratingly unwilling to do). These are definitely worth celebrating.
However, I think our track record at translating the above into actually improving the future is nowhere near our potential.
Since I experience a lot of guilt about not being a good enough person, the EA community has provided a lot of much-needed comfort to handle the daunting challenge of doing as much good as I can. It’s been scary to confront the possibility that the “adults in charge” don’t have the important things figured out about how to do the most good. Given how the last few years have unfolded, they don’t even seem to be doing a particularly good job. Of course, this is very understandable. FTX trauma is intense, and the world is incredibly complicated. I don’t think I’m doing a particularly good job either.
But it has been liberating to allow myself to actually think, trust my gut, and not rely on the EA community/funders/orgs to assess how much impact I’m having relative to my potential. I expect that with more independent thinking, ambition, and courage, our community will do much better at realizing our potential moving forward.