1. I strongly agree.
2. It seems that living in the Bay Area as an EA has a huge impact, and the dynamics are healthier elsewhere. (The fact that a higher concentration of EAs is worse, of course, is at least indicative of a big problem.)

This seems like a reasonable mistake for younger EAs to make, and I've seen similar mindsets frequently - but in the community, I am very happy to see that many other members are providing a voice of encouragement, but also signficantly more moderation.

But as I said in another comment, and expanded on in a reply, I'm much more concerned than you seem to be about people committing to something even more mild for their entire careers - especially if doing so as college students. Many people don't find work in the area they hope to. Even among those that do find jobs in EA orgs and similar, which is a small proportion of those who want to, some don't enjoy the things they would view as most impactful, and find they are unhappy and/or ineffective; having made a commitment to do whatever is most impactful seems unlikely to work well for a large fraction of those who would make such a pledge.

I think it's a problem overall, and I've talked about this a bit in two of the articles I linked to. To expand on the concerns, I'm concerned on a number of levels, starting from community dynamics that seem to dismiss anyone not doing direct work as insufficiently EA, to the idea that we should be a community that encourages making often already unhealthy levels of commitment by young adults into pledges to continue that level of dedication for their entire careers.

As someone who has spent most of a decade working in EA, I think this is worrying, even for people deciding on their own to commit themselves. People should be OK with prioritizing themselves to a significant extent, and while deciding to work on global priorities is laudable *if you can find something that fits your abilities and skill set*, but committing to do so for your entire career, which may not follow the path you are hoping for, seems at best unwise. Suggesting that others do so seems very bad.

So again, I applaud the intent, and think it was a reasonable idea to propose and get feedback about, but I also strongly think it should be dropped and you should move to something else.

I'm more concerned that the actual survey language is "avert" not "save" - and obviously, we shouldn't do any projects which avert DALYs.

Good post, though I think the digression bashing the Democrats was unhelpfully divisive.

Looks like it checks out: "Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does." Correspondence with Helen Keller, 1908, in The Correspondence of William James: April 1908–August 1910, Vol. 12, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004, page 135, as cited in: Academics in Action!: A Model for Community-engaged Research, Teaching, and Service (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016, page 71) https://archive.org/details/academicsinactio0000unse/page/1/mode/1up

"Neither of which current LLMs appear to be capable of."

If o1 pro isn't able to both hack and get money yet, it's shockingly close. (Instruction tuning for safety makes accessing that capability very difficult.)

My tentative take is that this is on-net bad, and should not be encouraged. I give this a 10/10 for good intent, but a 2/10 for planning and avoiding foreseeable issues, including the unilateralists curse, the likely object level impacts of the pledge, and the reputational and community impacts of promoting the idea.

It is not psychologically healthy to optimize or maximize your life towards a single goal, much less commit to doing so. That isn't the EA ideal. Promising to "maximize my ability to make a meaningful difference" is an unlimited and worryingly cult-like commitment, builds in no feedback from others who have a broader perspective about what is or is not important or useful. It implicitly requires pledgers to prioritize impact over personal health and psychological wellbeing. (The claim that it's usually the case that burnout reduces impact is a contingent one, and seems very likely to lead many people to overcommit and do damaging things.) It leads to unhealthy competitive dynamics, and excludes most people, especially the psychologically well adjusted.

I will contrast this to the giving pledge, which is very explicitly a partial pledge, requiring 10% of your income. This is achievable without extreme measures, or giving up having a normal life. The pledge was built via consultation with and advice from a variety of individuals, especially including those who were more experienced, which also seems to sharply contrast with this one.

I've referred to this latter point as candy bar extinction; using fixed discount rates, a candy bar is better than preventing extinction with certainty after some number of years. (And with moderately high discount rates, the number of years isn't even absurdly high!)

Thanks - this is helpful as a term, and closely related to privileging the hypothesis; https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2AD2LgtKgkRNPj2a/privileging-the-hypothesis The general solution, of course,is expensive but necessary; https://secondenumerations.blogspot.com/2017/03/episode-6-method-of-multiple-working.html