Note: This post was crossposted from Planned Obsolescence by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
But we get the job done
I was twenty one when I joined Open Phil, as a zealous young EA who had idolized the organization since I was in high school (back when it was called GiveWell Labs). I worked there for over nine years, leaving about six months ago (shortly after it rebranded as Coefficient Giving). By the time I left, I was kind of a fixture in the organization, and a significant driver of culture and thought within the AI team of 45-ish people. My manager felt that a lot of people on the team would be worried to see me go, and encouraged me to convey that I believed in their work in my goodbye message.
If you read that message, I meant what I said. I do think the kind of ambitious, foresightful philanthropy that OP (ugh fine, cG) does at its best is extremely impactful, and I do think the AI team is really great and has unique strengths.
But before I articulated that, I sat at my desk for over an hour, holding back tears, struggling to compose something not totally deranged. The first goodbye draft that leapt to mind was along the lines of: “I’m leaving because I failed to figure out how to add value here for years and years and years, even though I had every opportunity and everyone else around me managed to figure it out, and whatever defects were responsible for that will probably also cause me to fail wherever I go next, but I know for sure I’ll keep failing if I stay, so I guess I have to at least try leaving on the off chance that I manage to succeed at something somewhere.”
Let me back up. For the last decade, my work has followed a bipolar rhythm. I’ll latch onto some grand vision for The Highest Impact Thing to Do and throw myself into executing on it, only to realize 6-18 months in I’m only ever going to be capable of achieving a small fraction of the grand dream and the theory of change has big holes in it and other interventions are probably higher impact actually. Then I’ll spend 2-4 months hating myself and everything I’ve ever done and casting desperately for the Actually Impactful Thing to Do until I build up a head full of steam about another vision and start all over.
I have done several rounds of this, from EA community building to researching the stuff Open Phil told me to research to running a brutal yet productive hiring round to insane philosophy to slightly less insane timelines forecasting to business operations to alignment agendas and threat modeling to funding to “advising” to finally risk assessment at METR, and have written countless dozens of other vision docs in periods of desperate searching that never budded into projects. Despite staying in one place for almost nine years, I never built something that lasted even two years. I hired many great people into cG but I never managed them for very long. Over and over, it just felt like I’d made the wrong bet, had the wrong vision; over and over, I lost faith before I doubled down. Two rounds ago it got bad enough that I took a four month leave of absence just to figure out my shit (I didn’t).
I’m aware that deep shame and dissatisfaction about your work is rooted in pride, a sense that you should be able to do so much more. And as my long-suffering husband repeatedly points out, all this shame and paranoia is wasted motion. Maybe if I strung more than two and a half thoughts together in series without freaking out that I’m wrong to work on what I’m working on right now or I’m spending too much time thinking about what to work on next or I don’t stick with things long enough or I don’t explore widely enough or I’m too biased to think about any of this the right way, I’d have the mental energy to figure out better things to do and execute on them better. I have no great reply to this. But in some core part of myself, I know — no matter what logical arguments I nod along to — I know that this paranoia is what separates me from the beasts.
I’ve often compared myself to the anxious romantic who bounces from one perfectly functional relationship to the next, overthinking and sabotaging each one in turn because they don’t feel The Spark anymore or they’re not 100% sure he’s The One. I’m blessed with an immigrant’s steely pragmatism in the romance department, and if it weren’t for my experiences with trying to decide what I should be doing, I would have less pity for those who tie themselves in knots over love.
When I left cG, a small part of me harbored a quiet hope that these old psychological strictures would suddenly burn away and a new me would rise from the ashes. Alas, I remained frustratingly myself.
But I did get something in my new role that I’d never had before: a tight-knit team working on the same thing with me. The inside of my own mind remained a bit of a suffocating and cacophonous place, but I didn’t have to spend nearly as much time in there. Most importantly, in the period where the writing was most intense, my primary coauthor was always there, day or night or weekend. In all my previous writing projects I’d fought alone through daily waves of doubt and despair for endless weeks or months. In this one, the same moments of potential despair would crop up but then the right way to articulate this crucial point or the best strategy to sidestep that conceptual minefield or the strategy for rescuing some partially-right argument would kind of just tumble out of us in conversation. For large chunks, we sat side by side writing every word together. I had never realized working could be so easy.
Leaving cG didn’t break the cycle. I am currently in the phase where I desperately re-examine whether the thing I did actually didn’t make sense and I should be doing something totally different that Actually Has Impact, as I was when I was trying to compose that goodbye message in December. I feel like we are entering the AI mid-game — everything is picking up, and the gameboard keeps shifting. No plan seems like it comes close to matching the enormity of the challenge, and I feel like we collectively only have a couple more swings to take before it’s all over, and we need to make them count. I don’t know what the best thing to do is, and I don’t know exactly what I’ll do next. But I’m tremendously grateful that this time, I don’t need to figure that out all by myself.
