Fake Charity Nerd Girl

I feel like you hear a lot from people who are like “I have this natural tendency to be very scrupulous and hard on myself and self-sacrificing, and EA ideas exacerbate that, so I have to really set boundaries and practice self-care” and so on

and I feel like that experience probably gets overrepresented due to selection bias, so to do my part in correcting that I just want to say that my natural tendencies are to be kinda lazy and self-interested, and I’m really glad the EA memeplex pushes against those tendencies, even though I’m still more lazy and self-interested than I’d like to be

five years ago it felt like a really serious conflict in my mind that what was maximally good often seemed weird, or sketchy, or tacky, or unpleasant, or just plain aesthetically distasteful

these days it feels like the good is shockingly aligned with the fun, the beautiful, the awesome, the exciting, the sexy and shiny and cool

… I … don’t know what to think or how to feel about that tbh

I feel like I don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about the relative importance of things, you know?

I wanna start doing something like: whenever I hear someone mention a problem, or read about it on twitter, or think about it and get annoyed, try and calculate how bad it is and place it on a list.

I started this today and here’s what I have so far: numbers are really bullshit but I feel like it can be nice to just try to get the relative senses of things?

fact about me: I once broke up with someone after

• he said that he didn’t love me
• I was visibly upset and started crying
• he said “see? this is why I don’t think any amount of chicken suffering is commensurable with human suffering”

(just some bullshit intuitions I have, ymmv)

Obviously, optimizing for doing good isn’t the same thing as optimizing for personal happiness. And I think to whatever extent you can rewire your brain to value and seek out the first rather than the second, that’s good. I’ve been trying to do a lot of that especially the past couple years: training myself to get more pleasure and reward out of work, shaping my aesthetics and intuitions to be more utilitarian and more agentic.

But also, I think I probably won’t end up having much effect on the world either way, and I really should be going for the few cases where I have a lot of impact. And I suspect those scenarios just look, for lack of a better word, awesome: I’m awesome, my work is awesome, and my life is awesome. Maybe my life doesn’t look exactly like my or society’s preconceived notions of a good life, but it’s something I’m super excited about.

And like–I think there’s an extent to which talking about tradeoffs too much actually makes them real. I see this at work a lot. When someone says “what if we did X?” it feels like the correct and rational thing to do is to consider how valuable X is per unit time, rank it next to all existing projects, consider the other costs it might have beyond time and factor those in, and eventually slot it in on someone’s stack.

When the alternative is to say, “yeah, X sounds awesome, let’s just do it.”

Yeah, you’re always going to need at least some of the first thing; you can’t “just do” literally everything. But in practice it feels like a lot of the time the first thing just means not much gets done and the second one means a ton of shit getting done.

So anyway, I get that feeling a bit when listening to both sides of these debates. Whether it’s “people should make sacrifices” or “people shouldn’t make sacrifices,” my instinct is that maybe we shouldn’t give the sacrifices the benefit of believing in them. Maybe we should try harder to believe that we can do all the things, and then do them.

When I was younger, I think a thing that bothered me about EA was that I felt like it required me to disregard which organizations just “seemed good” and instead give to whoever had the highest convincing back-of-the-envelope estimate of impact.

Now I feel like I was thinking about it wrong. Over time I’ve come to accept long-termism and “weird” ideas/causes much more than I did when I first heard about EA, but my impressions of the reasonableness and competence of organizations and people have remained surprisingly stable. (Not to say that they haven’t changed at all, but not a ton.)

I still believe in back-of-the-envelope EV estimates–maybe more than I did before; at least, I feel less internal tension about my belief in them. But also I think they’re really hard to get right, and maybe I was trying to do them at the wrong step.

EA Global Gothic

People ask what your goals for the conference are. You feel something tugging in the back of your mind, but you can’t quite identify it. “Goals … yes …”

You ask people how their conference is. “Oh, I’m just spending the whole time in one-on-ones.” The one-on-ones are useful. The one-on-ones are always useful.

Someone has marked “interested” on the Bizzabo app. You don’t know what that means. Are you interested in them? Should you set up a one-on-one? Will they set up a one-on-one? In a panic, you close the app. For the rest of the weekend you studiously avoid eye contact.

You tell someone you went to a talk. The horror dawning on their face tells you that you have violated some dread taboo. “You know those are recorded, right?”

People ask if you’ve made progress on your goals for the conference. You think you wrote them down somewhere on Friday, but can’t remember where. You write everything down, hoping to keep your grip on reality, but it somehow gets lost anyway.

Luke Muehlhauser has not emerged from his room the entire conference. People go into the room, and people come out. When they come out they seem … different. No one will speak of what took place, but you observe a haunted look in their eyes.

Everyone is in a one-on-one. You don’t know where these are held, or what is discussed in them. You only know that they are always productive. You wander through an empty dome, looking for someone to talk to. You realize no one can break free of the sinister glamour of one-on-ones.

Amanda Askell is telling you that true propositions are easier to argue for than false ones, and thus reasoned philosophical debate tends toward the truth. It sounds plausible. You slowly nod.

People ask if you’ve achieved your goals for the conference. What is a goal? It sounds like one of those things you had, once. Like hopes, and dreams, and fears.

What’s the best way to be effectively selfish, if you don’t discount your future self?

I was talking to someone who’s not at all altruistic the other day and it seemed like the actual actions it’s reasonable for us to take aren’t that different. If there’s a 1 bp chance you could live a happy life that lasts for a billion years, that still dominates anything you do to increase your happiness during your natural lifespan. I’d guess there’s only so much you can do to increase your personal chances of living a very long time without affecting anyone else’s (exercise? cryonics? asking random AI researchers to simulate you?). Then it might be reasonable to devote the rest of your resources to reducing existential risk (though depending on your assumptions about the current rate of scientific progress in various fields maybe it’s better to work on life extension or just increasing the rate of progress in AI/brain uploading?)

People keep asking you to have dinner. You never know if you’re on a job interview, or a career advice session, or a date, or just hanging out as friends. Only rarely do you ever find out.

People keep asking you to Skype. You forgot your Skype password years ago and have never bothered to recover it. You ask if you can meet in person instead. One day in a moment of desperation you borrow a work laptop and find your coworker still logged into Skype. You hope he doesn’t notice. You wonder how long you can keep this up.

You are applying to Open Phil. Your roommate is applying to Open Phil. Your boss’s ex-wife’s second cousin is applying to Open Phil. At least 60% of your metamours are applying to Open Phil. You feel like you have always been applying to Open Phil. You feel like you will always be applying to Open Phil.

People are always in the places you least expect them. When asked they give eerily similar reasons. “Why are you in Berkeley?” “My house was too crowded.” “Why are you in Santa Cruz?” “My house was too loud.” “Why are you in my office? You don’t even work here.” “My house has too many naked people.” You wonder what mysterious hold these houses have over their inhabitants.

Everyone around you thinks that the end of the world is imminent. “Unless Paul’s right, of course.” You wonder who this Paul is. You pray he’s right.

given up on that whole maximal altruism thing eh. good on you. the world needs more abject callousness.

Sorry, I haven’t actually given up on altruism. I don’t think occasionally annoying your friends by playing the devil’s advocate for Trump is incompatible with altruistic goals?

uhhhh if I were @theunitofcaring I would write a long and stirring essay here about how compassion and helping others is good but instead I will just say that I disagree vehemently with the claim that “the world needs more abject callousness”

Some notes I made about donations this year: I’ll flesh these out more later but just posting basic thoughts now.

Options:

• donate to Givewell top charities
  
• probably AMF and/or SCI, since those are the ones Givewell recommends based on effectiveness of current funding gaps
• SCI is nice because it doesn’t depend on the value of saving children’s lives
• cons: Givewell top charities are obviously not nearly as cost-effective as other things could potentially be
• also unsure about flow-through effects and far future
• donate to Open Phil
• not actually an option this year
• just putting it down because I suspect I’ll be excited about it when it actually becomes possible
• donate to animal welfare stuff
• ACE recommended charities are MFA, THL, GFI
• not sure about MFA and THL
• seems like Open Phil is putting a ton of funding into corporate campaigns
• and I’m not that excited about leafleting and stuff
• GFI seems promising, review here
• donate to xrisk stuff
• not sure if there are any xrisk charities whose effectiveness I feel good about
• donate to metacharities
• potentially good area because Open Phil might be less likely to fund these
• should think about ACE and REG
• other good metacharities? 

People talk about EA being this all-consuming thing sometimes, but for me it doesn’t really feel that way. Right now I’m earning to give, and so the main thing I need to do for EA is go to work every day and work hard, which is what I would want to do anyway. For the most part I don’t get paid any more money for working more hours. I guess there are things I maybe should be spending time on, like EA community-building and thinking about cause prioritization, but for the most part I think the official EA take on what I should be doing in my free time is “idk, maximize your personal happiness?”

And like, there’s something scary about that? Sometimes on a weekend afternoon I’ll find myself switching from activity to activity, opening and closing a book, starting and stopping a TV show, because the only point of anything right now is to maximize my happiness, and if I’m not really enjoying myself then why am I doing this? I find myself imposing structures, deciding “I will go to Mass every Sunday,” even though I don’t quite know what the point of that is either. And then I go, even though I’m tired and I want to sleep in and I don’t exactly enjoy it, because that seems better somehow than sleeping in and drinking tea in bed and watching Outlander.

I’ve been fantasizing more about having kids lately, and probably part of that is normal biological clock stuff, but I think part of it is that once I have kids, I won’t be trying to be happy anymore, I’ll be trying to make my kids happy. And that seems like a more fulfilling thing to live by. 

When I was a kid, I always thought my mom’s life seemed kind of terrible. After a week of school, all I wanted was to do was play with Barbies and read books and dress up in costumes and generally have fun. Whereas my mom didn’t seem to have fun on weekends, really: when she wasn’t taking us to lessons and activities and playdates, she was cleaning the house or gardening or dropping off the dry cleaning. Even her fun was work: she’d invite friends over for dinner, but that meant hours of grocery shopping and cooking and cleaning up. Now I see it differently; she has a very firm conception of what a good life looks like for her family, and she works to achieve it. And that seems really appealing.

man I get really annoyed when people are like “look at how we allow people to say insufficiently feminist things without ostracizing them! this is why we don’t have any women”

but this is probably unreasonable, right?

I want to be like This is Erasing Antifeminist Women but I’m sure statistically women are more feminist and more likely to be turned off by people saying insufficiently feminist stuff

I mean when I think about how groups can be more welcoming to women my first thought is “well you can start by not talking about basketball all the time” and I think if a woman got mad at me because she was a huge basketball fan that would be kind of silly

(I mean there could be other differences between the two cases, like maybe the freedom to be honest about your political beliefs is more important to group belonging than the freedom to talk about LeBron whenever he comes to mind, but the general principle is the same)

today we were talking about the argument that talking about AI risk publicly was actually a really bad move, because various corporations and governments’ response to being told about AI risk was “hey superintelligent AI? that sounds cool we should try to build one!”

and now I’m wondering if AGCbtIitSH?! is actually part of Eliezer’s brilliant plan to discredit himself enough that everyone will stop taking the idea of superintelligent AI seriously

The average marriage lasts for 100,000 hours. If used well, you can use this time to improve the lives of hundreds of people.

A lot of people will tell you simply to “marry whoever you’re passionate about.” At 100,000 Hours, we think you can do a lot better. Research shows that passion before marriage is actually a poor predictor of how happy you’ll be in your marriage. Better ways to ensure happiness are dating lots of people before marriage to get an idea of your compatibility along different dimensions, marrying someone with whom you share similar interests and values, and taking an IAT to check if you have positive associations with your future spouse.

Everyone wants a happy marriage, but if you’re reading this it’s probably because you want more from your marriage than just happiness for your and your spouse–you want to help the world. Luckily, these two goals don’t have to conflict. For one thing, an unhappy marriage will make you less productive, helping no one. For another, making a marital decision that makes the world a better place is one of the best ways to find personal fulfillment in your marriage. Below is a quick introduction to our social impact marriage advice.

Question 1: EA or non?

This is probably the biggest issue. It really depends on how committed of an EA you are. If you’re very committed, the best course of action is to marry someone who is on the margin of being an EA, but is unlikely to stick with it without your influence. If you’re on the less committed end of the EA spectrum (do you sneak dairy products when no one’s looking? fantasize about owning a yacht?), try marrying someone particularly moral. Ideally just thinking about their reaction should be enough to stop you doing anything wrong.

Question 2: What should I consider before I marry a non?

If you’re a woman marrying a man, be careful–unfortunately men adopting the ideologies of their wives is frequently seen as low-status. In any case, make sure your spouse is someone who gets along with EAs socially and is not firmly anti-EA–these are good indicators of EA potential. And your spouse’s potential to contribute to the EA movement–by getting a high-paying job or doing valuable direct work–is an important consideration as well.

Question 3: What about children?

Whether or not to have children is an important and contentious issue we won’t get into at the moment. If you’ve decided not to reproduce, marry someone who is firmly in agreement with you. If you want to be really safe, we recommend marrying a man–men are less likely to decide later in life that they want children after all.

If you do want to have children, remember that shared environment never explains any variance in anything, so by far the biggest parenting decision you’ll make is whose genetic material you want to combine yours with. An EA spouse will make your kids more likely to be EA (obviously the most important thing) and beyond that look for high intelligence, conscientiousness, charisma, attractiveness, and anything else that’s a predictor of career success.

Question 4: What about MtG?

It’s a common misconception that we recommend all EAs “marry to give,” or marry a high-net-worth individual with the intent of redirecting much of their wealth to effective causes. In retrospect, we emphasized this idea too much in our early days, and as the most controversial of our suggestions it attracted a lot of press. In fact, we recommend that only a small fraction of EAs pursue MtG. MtG is probably best suited to attractive people, those with good social skills, those who fit in well in high-status and wealthy circles, and women looking to marry men–hardly a large percentage of the EA community. And if you do think that MtG is a good fit for you, we recommend that you still marry someone you like. Marrying someone you dislike is likely to lead to burnout and unhappiness, which will make you less effective in your other goals.

Question 5: Okay, I have a good idea of what I’m looking for in a spouse now. How I do find one?

If you’re looking for an EA spouse, try looking in EA communities, either online or IRL. Otherwise, try your school or workplace or asking around among friends. And of course, there’s EACupid, where you can fill out a short quiz and our recommendation engine will find the optimal spouse for you!

The thing about making EA more welcoming though is that it seems hard to determine what discourse norms will actually get you more people on net.

I mean, I’m an EA because I think the philosophical arguments are correct. But I never would have even listened to the arguments if I hadn’t been drawn in by the community first. And what drew me in about the community?

• full of programmers and philosophers
  
• willing to argue about the methodology of studies or the details of population ethics at very little provocation
• conversations about the Silmarillion (which I haven’t even read but still)
• capable of discussing the pros and cons of murdering babies in a calm and rational manner
• ridiculous thought experiments and in-group jargon
• the kind of place where you can refer to the thin line between feminism and literally Voldemort and no one will storm out of the room

Like high-variance strategies are a thing, “make EA as non-weird as possible” seems unlikely to actually be the best way to do recruitment.

I don’t know when religion got so consumerist, or if it always has been and I just wasn’t paying attention.

I have a friend who goes to church whenever she feels like it, usually twice a year, and prays when she wants something. Another friend who says she wants her kids to believe in God, not so they can act on their religion but just so they think there’s someone looking out for them, to make things easier. And I think that’s normal. Most people I know ask what God can do for them, not what they can do for God.

(Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace)

People tell me that the Catholic Church is okay but they really need to liberalize on same-sex marriage and contraception if they want to appeal to the younger generation, like they’re the Republican party or something, like divinely inspired truth obeys the median voter theorem.

(Grant that I may not so much seek to be understood as to understand)

I don’t believe that there is a god but I alieve that He is a demanding god. Jesus didn’t tell us to try to be pretty okay people: that’s what we try to do anyway. That’s the baseline. He told us go sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and follow me. 

(Where there is despair, let me sow hope)

That’s why I think effective altruism is a more real religion then most religions. We give you the sacred texts to read and tell you to come to services every week. We ask everything of you and in return we give your life a joyful purpose. We tell you to lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven and that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God and we mean it.

(For it is in giving that we receive)

so my little sister sent me this email

I was inspired by your blog and especially the article on defective altruism to write a poem.  Some people might say it’s a waste of time, but I think there’s nothing more important than converting people to the doctrine of effective altruism, so I wrote a poem to definitively prove that effective altruists are better than people who give to charity only in an attempt to look kind.  

You warm, you soft, superior gods 

who live in castles preaching your love 

who pose beside the wretches you help 

saying, shouting, “Look! I’m so kind!" 

But kindness isn’t what you possess; 

it’s wanting joy to fill every mind. 

It’s looking past what keeps us apart 

to find you want what’s best for us all. 

It’s seeing how your efforts could help, 

a want to do the most that you can. 

And wanting, then, to do the most good 

is never mean, it’s perfectly kind. 

And all you guys just suck.

(disclaimer I do not actually endorse hostile messaging)