I wonder if this could be a potential intervention strategy to help quit addictions: we pay people to continue to do something they have so far been doing for free because they are addicted, and thus make it feel like work and less fun. Probably this would not work for everyone, but maybe for some people, as was the case with you, it could be an effective way to help them quit their addiction.
Nice post! I get the impression that the ideal is to find something you always consider to be work but is without the unbearably negative aspects, like losing money, and maybe a little bit of what you like in it.
I was really depressed working as a janitor for a grocery store: it was work, often there was lots to do quickly without enough staff, and cleaning full-time was all I did, most of which I dreaded.
Loading packages for FedEx, on the other hand, seemed like the sweet spot for blue-collar jobs: it was work, at times lots to do quickly without enough staff, but my managers treated me with respect, I got to socialize a little on the job, and even do some medium-intensity workout.
I never went to work for free. I'd rather do a short workout and chill out than load for as long as I did, but I'd also rather load than clean, any day.
Do what you love, and youâll never work a day in your life.
In a lot of ways this age-old aphorism is terrible advice and as usual, the EAs know a bit better.
âWhat makes for a dream jobâ is an EA classic[1]Â from 80,000 hours. EAs helpfully point out that passion is a very bad predictor of job satisfaction. Instead emphasizing things like world impact and challenge as better things to focus on. Which I broadly agree with, but thatâs not the point of todays blogpost. Iâm here to tell a story.
classic
Playing video games for money sucks actually
Around 2022, I got very, very addicted to a game called teamfight tactics (TFT). It has some aspects of luck, some skill, yknow: the usual recipe for an addictive video game loop.
I just spiked my cortisol thinking about this game
I would wake up, take my stimulants, play TFT, win a bit more than I would lose and adjust strategy accordingly. There was nothing I liked doing more, I would spend hours obsessing over ideal team compositions, working out the game theory, etcâŚ[2]
Anyway, after a while, I got really good at the game, like <0.01% good[3]. And since I was a student and thus piss-poor, I figured, why not? And signed up to an elo-boosting website as a booster. (these are sites where someone will pay you to rank up their account for them)[4]
This is every teenagers wet dream right? Playing video games for money? Are you kidding me?
I think it took about 15 games before I fucking hated it, and 25 until I actively despised it. Nothing was more efficient at laying bare what I actually liked about the game.
The whole process of elo-boosting makes you so alienated from your work it would make a Marxist smile. Orders come in, and you can claim them, which will automatically log you in on the account that youâre boosting and you get paid/lose money depending on win/loss. Oh yeah, did I forget to mention? You can go to work and lose money! TFT is inherently partly chance-based, so it did happen sometimes, and let me tell you, god does it feel bad to go to work and lose money. Holy shit.
Gone were moments of experimentation. Trying this may cost 8 euros that you donât have. The most efficient way was to play the most brainless meta thing you could think of.[5]Â And this just ruined all the fun.[6]Â It turns out, I liked these games precisely because there were no stakes! because they were the negation of job. (I mean, studying was kind of my âjobâ at the time, and that nearly killed my love for computer science too!)
By the way, if you want to make a free-market liberal jizz their pants, show them the demographics of an elo boosting website. Nearly all of the people there were Turkish. because of the exceptionally weak Turkish lira, so doing labour outside the country became a very good way to earn money.
I remember chatting with a (turkish) guy on this site who had a jesse pinkman profile picture: âplease donât take that order, I have a wife and kidsâ. He was serious, this is how he was paying for food. This was his actual job.[7]
In a lot of ways Iâm thankful. You can read a thousand articles but you donât really understand that turning hobbies into jobs will make you hate the thing until it actually happens to you. (sidenote: I got my first paid substack subscriber earlier this week(!), and now have similar fears regarding bloggingâŚ)[8]
Notably, some people seem isolated to this, and keep loving their hobby even after it becomes their job. I wonder whatâs going on there! Are they doing something different? Is it a person to person thing? Are they lying?!
Wonât somebody think of the YouTubers?
Every single time Iâve seen a YouTuber or Twitch streamer complain about their job, they hedge endlessly. Always adding âI know I know I have a dream jobâ and the like.
No! I believe you! Being a YouTuber probably kind of sucks! You never clock out, endless obsession with analytics, you have to make whatever YouTube algorithm demands of you, etc... And if you donât put in all this time, you will get mogged by mr beast who is so locked in on making videos he actively doesnât want a wife.[9]
One of my favorite ways to spend time currently is reading papers, watching YouTube videos or otherwise interacting with ML research. I love it so much that I am trying to build this into a career.
But I wonder sometimes, will I go into work as a researcher, and fucking hate it? I hope that day never comes, but it feels inevitable sometimes.
But maybe not! ML seems different enough that I am foolish enough to think I wonât repeat my own mistake. The goal was to make this my career from the get-go, so I will be at least partly insulated.[10]
the motivations are usually thinking you âdeserveâ a higher rank, but just got unlucky, or wanting to boast to friends. In a lot of ways this fires off all my âthatâs so patheticâ detection probes. But really who cares, this is morally equivalent to paying for gacha, if not better because ur feeding some guy in a third world country probably)
We became friends of sorts. He was so nice, I miss you buddy. The withdrawal limit on that site was like, 50 dollars, so when I had 30 dollars left on the site and could not be arsed to play one more game of TFT for money, I sent him the remainder of my balance. He was so, so thankful
that being said paid subscriptions are very much appreciated! I am still a pisspoor student! Though I promise everything on celeste land will always be free!
TL;DR
NOVAH (No Violence At Home) was incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship (now Ambitious Impact) in 2024 to test a promising idea: preventing intimate partner violence through edutainment, in our case a serialised radio drama. Over the past two years we have produced and aired two seasons in Rwanda.
We are currently evaluating our second season through a randomized controlled trial with 2,400 couples in Rwanda in partnership wi...
TL;DR
* The Long-Term Future Fund is closing down, and EA Funds is launching the Transformative AI Fund with a new full-time team.
* The fund's primary focus is technical AI safety and AI governance (including post-AGI governance), as well as supporting fields such as field-building and forecasting. We'll also consider non-GCR implications of transformative AI such as flourishing futures and digital...
The current Long Term Future Fund (LTFF) fund managers and I have decided to step back from our work on the LTFF. Because we believe LTFF donors trusted the fund managers to ensure that the funds would be used in line with the purposes of their donation, we've decided the right move is to close the fund.
While LTFF is closing, note that EA Funds has launched a new fund...
I wonder if this could be a potential intervention strategy to help quit addictions: we pay people to continue to do something they have so far been doing for free because they are addicted, and thus make it feel like work and less fun. Probably this would not work for everyone, but maybe for some people, as was the case with you, it could be an effective way to help them quit their addiction.