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I am really into writing at the moment and I’m keen to co-author forum posts with people who have similar interests.
I wrote a few brief summaries of things I'm interested in writing about (but very open to other ideas).
Also very open to:
- co-authoring posts where we disagree on an issue and try to create a steely version of the two sides!
- being told that the thing I want to write has already been written by someone else
Things I would love to find a collaborator to co-write:
- Comparing the Civil Service bureaucracy to the EA nebuleaucracy.
- I recently took a break from the Civil Service and to work on an EA project full time. It’s much better, less bureaucratic and less hierarchical. There are still plenty of complex hierarchical structures in EA though. Some of these are explicit (e.g. the management chain of an EA org or funder/fundee relationships), but most aren’t as clear. I think the current illegibility of EA power structures is likely fairly harmful and want more consideration of solutions (that increase legibility).
- Semi-related thing I’ve already written: 11 mental models of bureaucracies
- What is the relationship between moral realism, obligation-mindset, and guilt/shame/burnout?
- Despite no longer buying moral realism philosophically, I deeply feel like there is an objective right and wrong. I used to buy moral realism and used this feeling of moral judgement to motivate myself a lot. I had a very bad time.
- People who reject moral realism philosophically (including me) still seem to be motivated by other, often more wholesome moral feelings, including towards EA-informed goals.
- Related thing I’ve already written: How I’m trying to be a less "good" person.
- Prioritisation panic + map territory terror
- These seem like the main EA-neuroses - the fears that drive many of us.
- I constantly feel like I’m sifting for gold in a stream, while there might be gold mines all around me. If I could just think a little harder, or learn faster, I could find them…
- The distribution in value of different possible options is huge, and prioritisation seems to work. But you have to start doing things at some point. The fear that I’m working on the wrong thing is painful and constant and the reason I am here…
- As with prioritisation, the fear that your beliefs are wrong is everywhere and is pretty all-consuming. False beliefs are deeply dangerous personally and catastrophic for helping others. I feel I really need to be obsessed with this.
- I want to explore more feeling-focussed solutions to these fears.
- When is it better to risk being too naive, or too cynical
- Is the world super dog-eat-dog or are people mostly good? I’ve seen people all over the cynicism spectrum in EA. Going too far either way has its costs, but altruists might want to risk being too naive (and paying a personal cost) rather than too cynical (which had greater external cost).
- To put this another way. If you are unsure how harsh the world is, lean toward acting like you’re living in a less harsh world - there is more value for EA to take there. (I could do with doing some explicit modelling on this one)
- This is kinda the opposite of the precautionary principle that drives x-risk work - so is clearly very context specific.
- Related thing I’ve already written: How honest should you be about your cynicism?
I'd be interest to read a post you write regarding illegibility of EA power structures. In my head I roughly view this as sticking to personal networks and resisting professionalism/standardization. In a certain sense, I want to see systems/organizations modernize.
A quote from David Graeber's book, The Utopia of Rules, seems vaguely related: "The rise of the modern corporation, in the late nineteenth century, was largely seen at the time as a matter of applying modern, bureaucratic techniques to the private sector—and these techniques were assumed to be required, when operating on a large scale, because they were more efficient than the networks of personal or informal connections that had dominated a world of small family firms."
When is it better to risk being too naive, or too cynical
That reminds me of what I read about game theory in Give and Take by Adam Grant (iirc). The conclusion was that the strategy which results in most rewards was to behave cooperatively and only switch (to non-coop) once every three times if the other is uncooperative. The reasoning was that if you don't cooperate, the "selfish" won't either. But if you "forgive" and try to cooperate again after they weren't cooperative, you may sway them to cooperate too. You don't cooperate always regardless, at risk of being too naive and taken advantage of, but you lean towards cooperating more often than not.
If you are unsure how harsh the world is, lean toward acting like you’re living in a less harsh world - there is more value for EA to take there.
I'd be interested in reading more about this. I think a less cynical view would elicit more cooperation and goodwill due to likeability. I'm not sure this is the direction you're going so that's why I'm curious about it.
I wanted to get some perspective on my life so I wrote my own obituary (in a few different ways).
They ended up being focussed my relationship with ambition. The first is below and may feel relatable to some here!
Auto-obituary attempt one:
Thesis title: “The impact of the life of Toby Jolly”
a simulation study on a human connected to the early 21st century’s “Effective Altruism” movementSubmitted by:
Dxil Sind 0239β
for the degree of Doctor of Pre-Post-humanities
at Sopdet University
August 2542Abstract
Many (>500,000,000) papers have been published on the Effective Altruism (EA) movement, its prominent members and their impact on the development of AI and the singularity during the 21st century’s time of perils. However, this is the first study of the life of Toby Jolly; a relatively obscure figure who was connected to the movement for many years. Through analysing the subject’s personal blog posts, self-referential tweets, and career history, I was able to generate a simulation centred on the life and mind of Toby. This simulation was run 100,000,000 times with a variety of parameters and the results were analysed. In the thesis I make the case that Toby Jolly had, through his work, a non-zero, positively-signed impact on the creation of our glorious post-human Emperium (Praise be to Xraglao the Great). My analysis of the simulation data suggests that his impact came via a combination of his junior operations work, and minor policy projects but also his experimental events and self-deprecating writing.One unusual way he contributed was by consistently trying to draw attention to how his thoughts and actions were so often the product of his own absurd and misplaced sense of grandiosity; a delusion driven by what he would describe himself as a “desperate and insatiable need to matter”. This work marginally increased the self-awareness and psychological flexibility amongst the EA community. This flexibility subsequently improved the movement's ability to handle its minor role in the negotiations needed to broker power during the Grand Transition - thereby helping avoid catastrophe.
The outcomes of our simulations suggest that through his life and work Toby decreased the likelihood of a humanity-ending event by 0.0000000000024%. He is therefore responsible for an expected 18,600,000,000,000,000,000 quality adjusted experience years across the light-cone, before the heat-death of the universe (using typical FLOP standardisation). Toby mattered.
Ethics note: as per standard imperial research requirements, we asked the first 100 simulations of Toby if they were happy being simulated. In all cases, he said “Sure, I actually, kind of suspected it…look, I have this whole blog about it”
I wrote up my career review recently! Take a look
Curated and popular this week
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This is a linkpost for a paper I wrote recently, “Endogenous Growth and Excess Variety”, along with a summary.
Two schools in growth theory
Roughly speaking:
In Romer’s (1990) growth model, output per person is interpreted as an economy’s level of “technology”, and the economic growth rate—the growth rate of “real GDP” per person—is proportional to the amount of R&D being done. As Jones (1995) pointed out, populations have grown greatly over the last century, and the proportion of people doing research (and the proportion of GDP spent on research) has grown even more quickly, yet the economic growth rate has not risen. Growth theorists have mainly taken two approaches to reconciling [research] population growth with constant economic growth.
“Semi-endogenous” growth models (introduced by Jones (1995)) posit that, as the technological frontier advances, further advances get more difficult. Growth in the number of researchers, and ultimately (if research is not automated) population growth, is therefore necessary to sustain economic growth.
“Second-wave endogenous” (I’ll write “SWE”) growth models posit instead that technology grows exponentially with a constant or with a growing population. The idea is that process efficiency—the quantity of a given good producible with given labor and/or capital inputs—grows exponentially with constant research effort, as in a first-wave endogenous model; but when population grows, we develop more goods, leaving research effort per good fixed. (We do this, in the model, because each innovator needs a monopoly on his or her invention in order to compensate for the costs of developing it.) Improvements in process efficiency are called “vertical innovations” and increases in good variety are called “horizontal innovations”. Variety is desirable, so the one-off increase in variety produced by an increase to the population size increases real GDP, but it does not increase the growth rate. Likewise exponential population growth raise
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Sometimes working on animal issues feels like an uphill battle, with alternative protein losing its trendy status with VCs, corporate campaigns hitting blocks in enforcement and veganism being stuck at the same percentage it's been for decades. However, despite these things I personally am more optimistic about the animal movement than I have ever been (despite following the movement for 10+ years). What gives?
At AIM we think a lot about the ingredients of a good charity (talent, funding and idea) and more and more recently I have been thinking about the ingredients of a good movement or ecosystem that I think has a couple of extra ingredients (culture and infrastructure). I think on approximately four-fifths of these prerequisites the animal movement is at all-time highs. And like betting on a charity before it launches, I am far more confident that a movement that has these ingredients will lead to long-term impact than I am relying on, e.g., plant-based proteins trending for climate reasons.
Culture The culture of the animal movement in the past has been up and down. It has always been full of highly dedicated people in a way that is rare across other movements, but it also had infighting, ideological purity and a high level of day-to-day drama. Overall this made me a bit cautious about recommending it as a place to spend time even when someone was sold on ending factory farming. But over the last few years professionalization has happened, differences have been put aside to focus on higher goals and the drama overall has gone down a lot. This was perhaps best embodied by my favorite opening talk at a conference ever (AVA 2025) where Wayne and Lewis, leaders with very different historical approaches to helping animals, were able to share lessons, have a friendly debate and drive home the message of how similar our goals really are. This would have been nearly unthinkable decades ago (and in fact resulted in shouting matches when it was attempted). But the cult
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TLDR
When we look across all jobs globally, many of us in the EA community occupy positions that would rank in the 99.9th percentile or higher by our own preferences within jobs that we could plausibly get.[1] Whether you work at an EA-aligned organization, hold a high-impact role elsewhere, or have a well-compensated position which allows you to make significant high effectiveness donations, your job situation is likely extraordinarily fortunate and high impact by global standards. This career conversations week, it's worth reflecting on this and considering how we can make the most of these opportunities.
Intro
I think job choice is one of the great advantages of development. Before the industrial revolution, nearly everyone had to be a hunter-gatherer or a farmer, and they typically didn’t get a choice between those.
Now there is typically some choice in low income countries, and typically a lot of choice in high income countries. This already suggests that having a job in your preferred field puts you in a high percentile of job choice. But for many in the EA community, the situation is even more fortunate.
The Mathematics of Job Preference
If you work at an EA-aligned organization and that is your top preference, you occupy an extraordinarily rare position. There are perhaps a few thousand such positions globally, out of the world's several billion jobs. Simple division suggests this puts you in roughly the 99.9999th percentile of job preference.
Even if you don't work directly for an EA organization but have secured:
* A job allowing significant donations
* A position with direct positive impact aligned with your values
* Work that combines your skills, interests, and preferred location
You likely still occupy a position in the 99.9th percentile or higher of global job preference matching. Even without the impact perspective, if you are working in your preferred field and preferred country, that may put you in the 99.9th percentile of job preference
I wanted to get some perspective on my life so I wrote my own obituary (in a few different ways).
They ended up being focussed my relationship with ambition. The first is below and may feel relatable to some here!
See my other auto-obituaries here :)