EA - Changing the world through slack and hobbies by Steven Byrnes

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Changing the world through slack & hobbies, published by Steven Byrnes on July 21, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. (Also posted on LessWrong) Introduction In EA orthodoxy, if you're really serious about EA, the three alternatives that people most often seem to talk about are (1) “direct work” in a job that furthers a very important cause; (2) “earning to give”; (3) earning “career capital” that will help you do those things in the future, e.g. by getting a PhD or teaching yourself ML. By contrast, there’s not much talk of: (4) being in a job / situation where you have extra time and energy and freedom to explore things that seem interesting and important. But that last one is really important! Examples For example, here are a bunch of things off the top of my head that look like neither “direct work” nor “earning-to-give” nor “earning career capital”: David Denkenberger was a professor of mechanical engineering. As I understand it (see here), he got curious about food supplies during nuclear winter, and started looking into it in his free time. One thing led to another, and he now leads ALLFED, which is doing very important and irreplaceable work. (Denkenberger seems to have had no prior formal experience in this area.) I’m hazy on the details, but I believe that Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Bostrom developed much of their thinking about AGI & superintelligence via discussions on online mailing lists. I doubt they were being paid to do that! Meanwhile, Stuart Russell got really into AGI safety / alignment during a sabbatical. The precursor to GiveWell was a “charity club” started by Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, where they and other employees at their hedge fund “pooled in money and investigated the best charities to donate the money to” (source), presumably in their free time. I mean seriously, pretty much anytime anybody anywhere has ever started something really new, they were doing it in their free time before they were paid for it. Three ingredients to a transformative hobby Ingredient 1: Extra time / energy / slack Honestly, I wasn’t really sure whether to put it on the list at all. Scott Alexander famously did some of his best writing during a medical residency—not exactly a stage of life where one has a lot of extra free time. (See his discussion here.) Another excellent blogger / thinker, Zvi Mowshowitz, has been squeezing his blogging / thinking into his life as a pre-launch startup founder and parent. Or maybe those examples just illustrate that, within the “time / energy / slack” entry, “time” is a less important component than one might think. As they say, “if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it”. (Well, within limits—obviously, as free time approaches literally zero, hobbies approach zero as well.) Note a surprising corollary to this ingredient: “direct work” (in the EA sense) and transformative hobbies can potentially work at cross-purposes! For example, at my last job, I was sometimes working on lidar for self-driving cars, and sometimes working on military navigation algorithms, and meanwhile I was working on AGI safety as a hobby (more on which below). Now, I really want there to be self-driving cars ASAP. I think they’re going to save lots of lives. They’ll certainly save me a lot of anguish as a parent! And we had a really great technical approach to automobile lidar—better than anything else out there, I still think. And (at certain times) I felt that the project would live or die depending on how hard I worked to come up with brilliant solutions to our various technical challenges. So during the periods when I was working on the lidar project, and I had extra time at night, or was thinking in the shower, I was thinking about lidar. And thus my AGI safety hobby progressed slower. By contrast—well, I have complicated op...