10 Things I’m especially glad I read in 2020
Like you, I read a lot of random stuff. Possibly like you, most of it slips through my consciousness like trout through a net.
But here are 10 pieces that I think actually changed my thinking in a lasting and substantial way. I’m really glad I read them.
Depending on who you are, maybe you should read them too.
(The unpublished pieces will be out soon).
(They are in order of my reading them, not of importance.)
1. Astronomical Waste, by Nick Bostrom
Advancing technology (or its enabling factors, such as economic productivity) even by such a tiny amount that it leads to colonization of the local supercluster just one second earlier than would otherwise have happened amounts to bringing about more than 10^29 human lives (or 10^14 human lives if we use the most conservative lower bound) that would not otherwise have existed. Few other philanthropic causes could hope to match that level of utilitarian payoff.
It’s odd that this piece is on here, since I knew the argument in it already. But seeing those truly incredible numbers is something else.
And the emotional whiplash from the twist… even though I knew it was coming, it moved me. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I won’t give it away.
2. Comparing existence and non-existence, by Hilary Greaves and John Cusbert (unpublished)
If you think that being born with a good life is better for the people in question then not being born, then it’s really hard not to be led to something like a totalist population axiology, where in particular you’re going to think that if the future would be good in the absence of extinction, then premature human extinction is an astronomically bad thing. [This quote from the podcast we did with Greaves.)
The paper hasn’t been published (I read it in preparation for our podcast episode), but it argues that people can benefit by coming into existence. My biggest worry with much of the work that I do as part of the effective altruism community is that if people don’t benefit from coming into existence, maybe my priorities are misguided, since functionally speaking I focus a lot on increasing the probability that more people will be able to exist. So this is a big deal for me.
I wasn’t totally convinced, and there are lots of other reasons in the mix for me, but this paper uniquely addresses some of my biggest ethical uncertainties.
Listen to the podcast if you want to learn about this before the paper comes out (which, given academic timelines, could be a while). I think our discussion of it is pretty good.
3. The Lean Startup, by Eirc Ries
[No quote, because I listened to this on audible and don’t have a text version.]
The Lean Startup introduced me to a kind of thinking that’s popular in the startup world but which was pretty new to me coming from academia: make stuff, test it, gather data, improve it, do it all again…. And do it fast. Be prepared to change direction, and get feedback ASAP so that you don’t waste too much time going in one direction. Make test versions of your projects that you can assess empirically. All good advice, which I am trying to implement more in my life and work.
4. The Alignment Problem, by Brian Christian
[No quote, because I listened to this on audible and don’t have a text version.]
While keeping things abstract enough for someone like me to understand, this book dives quite a bit into the various technical approaches to local alignment challenges (and helped me understand various terms I’d heard floating around by putting them in context). It’s not really about the alignment problem as effective altruists might talk about it, but it gives what I thought was a really enlightening overview of the space of various sub-problems and their successful and unsuccessful solutions, as well as the history of various issues in AI. It was also just a really well-written and enjoyable book. Here are some things I found particularly interesting
5. Thoughts on whether we’re living at the most influential time in history, by Buck Shlegeris
Will [MacAskill] thinks that the “early times are hingey” hypothesis needs to meet an incredibly high standard of evidence because it implies that we’re at an exceptional time. But this century doesn’t need to be hingey in order to be exceptional–it’s already extremely implausibly early.
I don’t know where I come down yet on the overall question of how likely it is that we’re living at the most influential time in history, and I was confused by and objected to some of what was in Shlegeris’s post. But I think it was extremely helpful in pointing out that if you think we’re in expectation very early on in human history, that should strongly impact how likely you think it is that we are living at an unusually influential time. Again, this is a pretty big deal, so any updates on this topic are a pretty big deal too.
6. Evidence, cluelessness, and the long term, by Hilary Greaves
… we’re clueless about what most of [the very long term effects] are for things like bed net distribution. Perhaps we could find some other interventions for which that’s the case to a much lesser extent. If we deliberately try to beneficially influence the course of the very far future, can we find things where we more robustly have at least some clue that what we’re doing is beneficial and of how beneficial it is? I think the answer is yes.
This post argued thoughtfully and persuasively for something that I already agreed with, but in a way that made it much clearer in my mind: considerations of our ‘cluelessness’ about the very long run effects of our actions do not undermine longtermism – the idea {roughly} that we ought to prioritizing making the very long-run future go a well as we can in our ethical decision-making.
I am a bit more sympathetic than Greaves is to what she calls Response 3 in the post, “Make bolder estimates.” That’s the idea that we should just make our subjective probability assessments of what the long run effects of different actions will be and use them unabashedly in trying to figure out what’s best. In any case she lays out the options admirably and thoroughly, and I think in so doing will help clear up a fuzzy confusion in the minds of many about longtermism and epistemics.
7. The Great CEO Within, by Matt Mochary
And when you do find a partner, avoid one cardinal mistake: do not create a 50/50 partnership. While 50/50 sounds like an ideal, it actually leads to real pain if there is no easy way to break a deadlock. Unanimous decisions are tiresome to create day after day after day. Knowing that one person has the ability to decide actually eases the burden for all involved, and leads to far better outcomes.
This book is just chock full of extremely actionable, unflowry, straightforward, well-organised advice. If you are planning to at some point run a company, nonprofit, programme, or team, I recommend it.
8. What is the likelihood that civilizational collapse would directly lead to human extinction (within decades)? + some other not-yet-published stuff, by Lusia Rodriguez.
The population loss would have to be incredibly extreme to lead to extinction. The minimum viable population (100–1,000 people, assuming a sufficient balance of the sexes) is really, really small compared to the current population: Just 0.00001% of the people alive today would need to survive for repopulation to be possible. In a sense, there’s a really “high bar” for extinction. To get there from a catastrophe that caused 90%, 99%, or even 99.9% population death seems to actually require one to hold exceptionally pessimistic views about how survivors would fare in the event of civilizational collapse.
I helped out with editing for this piece, so it might have had more of an impact on me because of how much time I spent with it. But I think it’s a pretty big deal: Luisa crunches the numbers, and although (and she would kick me if I didn’t emphasis this) the analysis is very preliminary and not systematic, what she found strongly suggests that catastrophes that fail to cause extinction outright are very unlikely to cause it by leading to ‘dwindling’. I’d thought this was a plausible scenario before for things like great power conflict and catastrophic pandemics, so this was a pretty big update for me
9. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by Eliezer Yudkowsky
“Visualize the scene, Mr. Potter. Let your imagination fill in the details. Slytherin’s Monster – probably some great serpent, so that only a Parselmouth may speak to it – has finished imparting all of the knowledge it possesses to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. It conveys to him Salazar’s final benediction, and warns him that the Chamber of Secrets must now remain closed until the next descendant of Salazar should prove cunning enough to open it. And he who will become the Dark Lord nods, and says to it -“
“Avada Kedavra,” said Harry, suddenly feeling sick to his stomach.
This is another surprise one for me. I wanted to read this just because I knew a lot of people had liked it. But I thought there was a good chance I’d be annoyed by it because it’s a fan fic (and for some reason I thought that might annoy me?), and because it’s about an 11-year-old child prodigy with a superior attitude.
But it’s incredible. First of all, the story is great. The mystery, the interconnecting parts, the characters. It’s a serious page turner and it makes me feel like a little kid – I haven’t wanted to stay in bed all day reading a book for a long time. And there are some nice rationality lessons thrown in, though not many I wasn’t already aware of. It’s also got some good moral quandaries, as any good drama should.
But the thing that gets me is the main character’s attitude. Harry Potter in Yudkowsky’s telling is extremely creative, independent minded, and willful. When something seems unideal to him, he doesn’t passively note it. He notices it, envisions a way for it to be better, makes a plan to make it that way, and executes that plan. His plans don’t always work (and in real life they’d work even less often), but sometimes they do. He sees himself as an agent in the world.
I’m not that passive, but I think I could be more of an agent in the world. In fact, it’s my top personal development priority for 2021: become more creative and willful (I’m still working on making that concrete…). Don’t see the world as immutable or how things “just are” or assume they can’t be improved. See how things might be better, and then make them better.
Harry Potter’s way of being is not in my view all-things-considered best, for reasons that might be clear if you read the book. But I feel pretty unworried about becoming too much like him, so I am happy to take this 11 year old fictional boy as a partial role model for the year.
10. How to plan your career, by Benjamin Todd and the 80,000 Hours team
You have 80,000 hours of working time in your life. If you’re lucky enough to have options for how to spend that time, it’s worth really thinking about how to spend it best – both for your own wellbeing and for the world in general. If you can increase the positive impact or happiness you gain from your career by 1%, that would be worth spending 800 hours on, which is about 5 months of full-time work. We think this process can help you increase the positive impact of your career more than that — perhaps much more — in much less time.
I was heavily involved in the writing of this piece, but I think that doesn’t explain its impact on me. I didn’t feel that *moved* by the piece until I started going through it as a user over my holiday break, which I did partly to test it out to figure out what I should fix for our readers, and partly to work on my own career plans.
I’m actually still in the middle of the process. But I’ve done the part where you brainstorm longer term career options, and honestly, it’s very exciting. I am going through the process with a friend, which I think makes a big difference, and we helped brainstorm ideas for each other. Having so many ideas on the table and throwing around thoughts for realising them feels empowering. I’m looking forward to finishing and getting my career plan written up all tidy-like and sticking it on my wall.
Note this article is still in beta mode — revealingly, I have a numbered list of 83 small changes I’d like to make to it — and I’m only ⅔ of the way through!
