EtG @ Deepmind
You should consider that living in such conditions will likely lead to burnout.
Altruism is a marathon not a sprint. You should focus on having a high impact over your whole career, which will involve not pushing yourself literally as hard as possible all the time. You are only human, regardless of what your ethics say.
That said, there are cases of people living somewhat as you describe and giving a lot of money away - see here
How much time do you spend on deciding where to donate? Or do you mostly have enough trust to delegate to e.g. GiveWell in your decisions?
Relatedly, do you spend much time evaluating the donations from previous years for impact?
(As a smaller scale EtGer myself I often struggle with how much time I should be spending on these things, which are plausibly extremely important)
I'll ask the obvious awkward question:
Staff numbers are up ~35% this year but the only one of your key metrics that has shown significant movement is "Job Vacancy Clickthroughs".
What do you think explains this? Delayed impact, impact not caught by metrics, impact not scaling with staff - or something else?
I definitely think it's an (the most?) important argument against. Some of this comes down to your views on timelines which I don't really want to litigate here.
I guess I don't know how much research leading to digital people is likely to advance AI capabilities. A lot of the early work was of course inspired by biology, but it seems like not much has come of it recently. And it seems to me that we can focus on the research needed to emulate the brain, and try not to understand it in too much detail.
+1 to this. It's a tough one because I do think we old-timers have something to offer in terms of perspective, but I share your sense of not having much energy to engage.
I also have a stronger interest in the direct cause areas these days, than in the meta-cause of EA.