Thanks for writing this. I found it useful and have shared it with others.
I’ve also heard a number of people tell me that EA or AI safety efforts caused them to lose the ability to have serious hobbies, or serious intellectual interests, and I would guess this was harmful to long-term AI safety potential in most cases.
If you’d be up for sharing, I’d be pretty interested in a rough estimate of how many specific people you know of who have had this experience (and maybe also how many were “people who (IMO) have a better shot and a better plan than most for reducing AI risk.”)
To be clear, I totally buy that this happens and there’s a problem here. I just find it useful to get some sense of the prevalence of this kind of thing.
I can think of five easily who spontaneously said something like this to me and who I recall specific names and details about. And like 20 more who I’m inclined to project it onto but there was some guesswork involved on my part (e.g., they told me about trouble having hobbies and about feeling kinda haunted by whether it’s okay to be “wasting” their time, and it seemed to me these factors were connected, but they didn’t connect them aloud for me; or I said I thought there was a pattern like this and they nodded and discussed experiences of theirs but in a way that left some construal to me and might’ve been primed. Also I did not name the 20, might be wrong in my notion of how many).
In terms of the five: two “yes better shot IMO,” three not. For the 20, maybe 1/4th “better short IMO”.
Thanks for writing this. I found it useful and have shared it with others.
If you’d be up for sharing, I’d be pretty interested in a rough estimate of how many specific people you know of who have had this experience (and maybe also how many were “people who (IMO) have a better shot and a better plan than most for reducing AI risk.”)
To be clear, I totally buy that this happens and there’s a problem here. I just find it useful to get some sense of the prevalence of this kind of thing.
I can think of five easily who spontaneously said something like this to me and who I recall specific names and details about. And like 20 more who I’m inclined to project it onto but there was some guesswork involved on my part (e.g., they told me about trouble having hobbies and about feeling kinda haunted by whether it’s okay to be “wasting” their time, and it seemed to me these factors were connected, but they didn’t connect them aloud for me; or I said I thought there was a pattern like this and they nodded and discussed experiences of theirs but in a way that left some construal to me and might’ve been primed. Also I did not name the 20, might be wrong in my notion of how many).
In terms of the five: two “yes better shot IMO,” three not. For the 20, maybe 1/4th “better short IMO”.