80k Hours There’s concepts on high to choose a topic and standard EA stuff, but I already know that.
Morality
To actually improve the world, something needs to be different, and better than it would have been otherwise. Your impact isn’t real unless it wouldn’t have happened without you. For example, consider two soup kitchens: one has lots of volunteers, and another doesn’t. A volunteer at the crowded kitchen is making a smaller difference than than one at the second soup kitchen, where showing up might make the difference between the kitchen being open or closed.
Ofc there’s now problems to this too, because if everyone reasoned like that then nobody would be a doctor (but then at that point there would be a lack of doctors so by counterfactual reasoning that would actually be an impactful job now). Still though, it’s something I don’t think society should adopt as a whole, and should be taken quite loosely in personal scenarios.
Predictions and Probability
Expected value reasoning for simple cases:
Expected value = Probability × Value
Expected value reasoning for working on things Even though the chances of a nuclear power plant melting down are very low, safety measures to reduce these chances are worthwhile because of the consequences of such a catastrophic meltdown. The value of nuclear safety measures depends on both:
- The chances they prevent a disaster, AND
- How bad a disaster would be if one did happen.
Neither factor in isolation is enough to make a good decision. To increase the expected value of some safety measure, we could (1) increase the chances it prevents a disaster or (2) decrease how bad a disaster would be given that one does occur.
Pascal’s Mugging Expected value doesn’t work in extremes. For example if you believed there was a 99.99% chance that someone is lying when they say that you have to give them 100,000,000, according to expected value you make $10k from making that bet.
How to Not Throw Away your Career + Opportunities https://course.non-trivial.org/lessons/how-not-to-throw-away-your-best-shot https://80000hours.org/articles/college-advice/ https://ea-internships.pory.app/board
Reach high, but have backups because they will let you truly reach high. (Or alternatively burn all your ships Burning ships)