There’s been some discussion recently about there perhaps being a surplus of funding in EA, and not enough good places to apply funds to. I have lots of thoughts on this that I’d like to talk more about at some point, but for now I want to propose an idea that seems pretty obvious and non-controversial to me: give $1M to people like Scott Alexander and Robin Hanson.
Scott has a day job as a psychiatrist. Robin as a university professor. Those day job hours (and slack) could be spent doing other things though. If they were wealthy enough, I assume (but am not sure) they would quit their jobs and have more hours to spend doing cool things. And they both have incredible track records of doing cool things.
Scott and Robin are just the two people that come to my mind first and that I see as the most non-controversial. But I think there are many more examples. Zvi and Kaj Sotala also come to mind. Iirc they both have day jobs.
A related idea is that even people who are currently being paid to do work on ie. AI safety, I assume there is still room to spend money to improve their productivity. Ie. by hiring a maid for them, maybe it frees up X hours a week, and having the extra hours + slack would improve their productivity by enough.
Scott has been offered money to quit his job. I don’t know the full reason for why he didn’t take it. I think his observation was what his productivity on his blog doesn’t go up at all if he doesn’t have a job, I think he really values independence from funders, and his job provides him with important grounding that feels important for him to stay sane.
I think his observation was what his productivity on his blog doesn’t go up at all if he doesn’t have a job
(I’m interpreting what you’re saying as “doesn’t go up moderately” not “doesn’t go up at all”.)
That sounds implausible to me. Not having a job would mean more hours are available. Would all of those hours be spent on leisure? Is his “blogging bucket” already filled by the amount of blogging he is currently doing? What about his “doing other productive things” bucket? What about the benefits of having more slack?
As a related point, even if Scott’s productivity wouldn’t benefit from extra hours, I expect that most other people’s productivity would benefit, and ultimately I intend for my point to extend past Scott and Robin and into lots of other cool people (including yourself, actually!).
I think he really values independence from funders
What I am proposing is just “here’s a briefcase of cash, go do what you want”. Ie. no earmarks. So it should provide that independence. This of course requires a lot of trust in the recipient, but I think that for Scott as well as many other people actually, such trust would be justifiable.
and his job provides him with important grounding that feels important for him to stay sane.
It also reminds me of Richard Feynman not wanting a position at the institute for advance study.
“I don’t believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don’t have any ideas and I’m not getting anywhere I can say to myself, “At least I’m living; at least I’m doing something; I am making some contribution”—it’s just psychological.
When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don’t get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they are not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.
Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!
In any thinking process there are moments when everything is going good and you’ve got wonderful ideas. Teaching is an interruption, and so it’s the greatest pain in the neck in the world. And then there are the longer period of time when not much is coming to you. You’re not getting any ideas, and if you’re doing nothing at all, it drives you nuts! You can’t even say “I’m teaching my class.”
If you’re teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn’t do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? The elementary things are easy to think about; if you can’t think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you do think of something new, you’re rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it.
The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I’ve thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn’t do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It’s not so easy to remind yourself of these things.
So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don’t have to teach. Never.”
— Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
I suspect (and this is my interpretation of what he’s said) that Alexander’s productivity would actually go down if he quit his day job. A lot of his blogging is inspired by his psychiatric work, so he would lose that source of inspiration. Also, a lot of his best works (eg. Meditations on Moloch) were written while he was a medical school resident, working 60 hours a week outside of blogging, so it’s not clear to me that the hours of working are really taking away from his best writing. They are certainly taking away from posting as frequently—he’s been posting much more frequently now on Substack—but pressure to write daily posts might take away from work on longer high quality posts.
A lot of his blogging is inspired by his psychiatric work, so he would lose that source of inspiration.
I don’t get the impression that too much is inspired by his psychiatric work. This is partly based on my being a reader of his posts on and off over the years, and also on a brief skim of recent posts (biographies of presidents, AI safety, pregnancy interventions). But even if that source of inspiration was lost, it’d presumably be replaced by other sources of inspiration, and his writing is broad enough where at best that’d be a large net gain and at worst it’d be a small net loss.
Also, a lot of his best works (eg. Meditations on Moloch) were written while he was a medical school resident, working 60 hours a week outside of blogging, so it’s not clear to me that the hours of working are really taking away from his best writing.
That’s a really interesting point. Maybe I’m wrong then. Maybe I don’t understand the subtleties of what makes for good writing. But even so, writing is only one thing. I expect that with more time people like Scott would come up with other cool things to pursue in addition to writing.
Zvi and Kaj Sotala also come to mind. Iirc they both have day jobs.
Appreciate the thought!
I used to have funding from EA sources to work on my own projects for a number of years. I basically gave it up because working on those projects didn’t feel motivating enough and it seemed to me like I’d probably be happier doing something else and keeping any EA stuff as a hobby on the side. (This feels like it’s been the right choice.)
I see. Thanks for the response. I’m starting to suspect that this is a common sentiment, wanting some sort of normalcy and doing other stuff on the side.
I’m curious, was that funding you received no strings attached? If not, I wonder if moving to no strings attached would change how you feel.
I’m curious, was that funding you received no strings attached?
Pretty much, yes.
Though it’s worth noting that this didn’t entirely eliminate a feeling of needing to do something useful with my time. Even when I had guaranteed funding to do basically whatever I wanted for a while (say a year), there was still the question of whether the same source would be willing to fund me for another year if I didn’t do enough useful things during that time. And if they decided that they didn’t and then I’d need to find another funder or a real job, what would that source think about me having spent a year without accomplishing anything concrete that I could point at.
So in practice even no-strings-attached funding still doesn’t let you completely stop worrying about getting results, unless the source credibly commits to providing that funding for a significant fraction of your remaining lifetime. I find that one of the advantages of having a more “normal” day job rather than weird EA funding is that it guarantees that I’m spending at least part of my time on something that helps ensure I can also find another “normal” job later, if need to be. Rather than needing to stress out that if I don’t get anything useful done today, then there’s nothing really forcing me to do anything useful tomorrow either, nor anything forcing me to do anything useful the day after that, and I really hope that a whole year won’t pass with me doing nothing useful until finally the EAs will get tired of funding me and I’ll have burned whatever employability I had in the “normal” job market too.
Gotcha. That was a really helpful response, and it makes a lot of sense.
unless the source credibly commits to providing that funding for a significant fraction of your remaining lifetime
What if this happened for you? Suppose you received the funding in a lump sum with no strings attached. Would you prefer that over having the day job? How do you expect it would affect the impact you would have on the world?
What if this happened for you? Suppose you received the funding in a lump sum with no strings attached.
Hmm. Certainly it’d make me feel a bit safer, but I’m not sure if it would change what I actually did in a short-term basis at least. My EA-productivity is limited more by motivational and emotional issues than time, and if I did manage to debug those issues enough that time would become the limiting factor, then I might feel fine asking for short-term funding anyway since I would no longer feel doubtful about my productivity.
I could definitely imagine it being helpful anyway, though I’m sufficiently uncertain about this that I think I’d feel bad about accepting any such offer. :)
Hearing this, it re-opens a line of thought that’s been swimming in the back of my mind for quite some time: that helping EA people with mental health is a pretty high-yielding pursuit. Lots of people (including myself) deal with stuff, I presume. And if you can help such people, you can improve productivity by something like, I don’t know, 10-200%?
But how do you help them? I don’t think I have any great ideas here.
I assume most people have access to a therapist if they wanted one.
Maybe motivation to see a therapist is the problem, not access. But there’s plenty of people talking about and normalizing therapy nowadays, and I’m not sure how fruitful it’d be to continue that process.
Maybe difficulty finding the right therapist is the crux? Especially for rationalist-types who have “weird” issues. Maybe. Maybe expanding and/or branching off of something like the Secular Therapy Project would be worthwhile. Or the SlateStarCodex Psychiat-list.
Maybe we just need better models of how the mind works and how to repair psychiatric pain. But the world of clinical psychology research already has this covered. Right? Maybe, maybe not. It does seem difficult to break into and have a real impact. However, you Kaj seem to me like one of the few people who might have a comparative advantage in pursuing something like that. I’m thinking of your Multiagent Models of Mind sequence. I was really impressed by it. I’m not sure how much of it was actually novel — maybe parts were, maybe not really, I don’t really know — but along the lines of Non-Expert Explanation, I think there’s a good amount of value in framing things differently. And in popularizing worthwhile things! That sequence helped me arrive at a pretty good understanding of my own psychological issues, I think, whereas before that I was pretty lost. The understanding hasn’t translated to actually feeling any better, but that’s n=1 and beside the point. Speaking of which, what is my point? I think it’s just to consider all of this food for thought. I can’t say I’m confident in the broader points I’m making.
Based on a nearly universal sense (reading/personal experience/conversations with doctors) that it’s hard to find an in-network psychiatrist/psychologist who’s will to see a new patient, my prior on this is very low.
>motivation
That would help too. But there’s probably a large set of people who could be helped if the “access” barrier was reduced/removed on its own.
>difficulty?
Agreed for both rationalists and non-rationalists.
>knowing how to fix brains?
Which condition(s) specifically come to mind when you think of something that “clinical psychology research already has...covered”? I was unable to think of one off the top of my head.
Based on a nearly universal sense (reading/personal experience/conversations with doctors) that it’s hard to find an in-network psychiatrist/psychologist who’s will to see a new patient, my prior on this is very low.
Huh, that is very much not the experience I’ve had personally, or that people I’ve spoke with have had. I’ve found that it can be difficult to find a therapist who you like, but to find a therapist who just accepts your insurance and is willing to see you/new patients, I’ve never spoke with someone who has had trouble with that. Context: I’m in America.
Which condition(s) specifically come to mind when you think of something that “clinical psychology research already has...covered”? I was unable to think of one off the top of my head.
Well I’m not sure how well they really do have it covered (hence my saying “Maybe, maybe not.”). I was just thinking about the fact that there is in fact a large group of people working on it, and they seem to have made at least some non-trivial amount of progress. Ie. cognitive behavioral therapy.
and I’ll have burned whatever employability I had in the “normal” job market too.
This is probably moot, but I’d like to argue against this sentiment and share part of my own story.
I myself am a programmer and have a lot of anxiety about getting fired and being unable to find another job. And so I’ve spent a good amount of time trying to debug this. Part of that debugging is asking True Self what he actually thinks. And this is his ~answer.
It is totally implausible that my fears end up actually being realized. Think of it like this:
Plan A is to keep my current job. I worry about getting fired, but it is pretty unlikely to actually happen. Look at the base rate. It’s low. And I have control over my performance. I can scale it up if I start to worry that I’m getting into risky territory.
Plan B is, if I get fired, to apply to, let’s call them “reach jobs” (like a reach school when you apply to colleges) and get one of them. Seems somewhat plausible.
Plan C is to mass apply to normal jobs that are in my ballpark. It might take a few months, but it seems highly likely I’d eventually get one of them.
Plan D1 is to ask friends and family for referrals.
Plan D2 is to lower my standards and apply to jobs that I’m overqualified for (and perhaps adjust the resume I use to apply to mitigate against the failure mode of “he would never actually accept this position”).
Plan D3 is to push even further into my network, asking former coworkers, former classmates, and friends of friends for referrals.
Plan D4 is to just have my girlfriend support me.
Plan E is to do something adjacent, like work as a coding bootcamp instructor or maybe even in QA.
Plan F is to do something like work at a library or a coffee shop. I worked at a library (actually two) in college and it was great. It was low stress and there was plenty of time to screw around on my laptop doing my own thing.
Even if I get “knocked off track” and end up at D2 or whatever, I can always work my way back up. It’d be a setback, but probably nothing too crazy.
And that’s actually something I ended up going through. After doing a coding bootcamp and working as a programmer for about a year and a half, I took a year off to self-study computer science, and then about three more years working on a failed startup. It was a little tough finding a job after that, but I managed. From there I worked my way up. Today I actually just accepted an offer at one of those “reach jobs”.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that taking time off doing EA stuff might be a setback in terms of your ability to get back into the “normal” job market, but I expect that it’d only knock you down a rung or so. I don’t think it’d completely knock you of the ladder. Maybe your ladder doesn’t look exactly like mine with A through F — I’m pretty fortunate to have the life circumstances I have — but I expect that it’s a lot longer than it feels. And even if you do get knocked down a rung, I expect that for you too it’d just be a temporary setback, nothing that’d knock you off course too significantly.
That’s not where I expected this was going to go. (Wasn’t there some sort of microgrants project somewhere ahile back? I don’t know if that was EA, but...)
It doesn’t look to me like it would go to people like Scott or Robin either. I am arguing that it should because they are productive people and it would enable them to spend more time being productive via removing the need for a day job, especially if there is a surplus of money available.
I seem to have heard from a relatively good source about a study that people who are unemployed feel worse even though they have maintained the same level of well-being. (I don’t remember where it was and I can’t provide a link, maybe someone else can?)
There’s been some discussion recently about there perhaps being a surplus of funding in EA, and not enough good places to apply funds to. I have lots of thoughts on this that I’d like to talk more about at some point, but for now I want to propose an idea that seems pretty obvious and non-controversial to me: give $1M to people like Scott Alexander and Robin Hanson.
Scott has a day job as a psychiatrist. Robin as a university professor. Those day job hours (and slack) could be spent doing other things though. If they were wealthy enough, I assume (but am not sure) they would quit their jobs and have more hours to spend doing cool things. And they both have incredible track records of doing cool things.
Scott and Robin are just the two people that come to my mind first and that I see as the most non-controversial. But I think there are many more examples. Zvi and Kaj Sotala also come to mind. Iirc they both have day jobs.
A related idea is that even people who are currently being paid to do work on ie. AI safety, I assume there is still room to spend money to improve their productivity. Ie. by hiring a maid for them, maybe it frees up X hours a week, and having the extra hours + slack would improve their productivity by enough.
Scott has been offered money to quit his job. I don’t know the full reason for why he didn’t take it. I think his observation was what his productivity on his blog doesn’t go up at all if he doesn’t have a job, I think he really values independence from funders, and his job provides him with important grounding that feels important for him to stay sane.
I see, thanks for clarifying.
(I’m interpreting what you’re saying as “doesn’t go up moderately” not “doesn’t go up at all”.)
That sounds implausible to me. Not having a job would mean more hours are available. Would all of those hours be spent on leisure? Is his “blogging bucket” already filled by the amount of blogging he is currently doing? What about his “doing other productive things” bucket? What about the benefits of having more slack?
As a related point, even if Scott’s productivity wouldn’t benefit from extra hours, I expect that most other people’s productivity would benefit, and ultimately I intend for my point to extend past Scott and Robin and into lots of other cool people (including yourself, actually!).
What I am proposing is just “here’s a briefcase of cash, go do what you want”. Ie. no earmarks. So it should provide that independence. This of course requires a lot of trust in the recipient, but I think that for Scott as well as many other people actually, such trust would be justifiable.
That sounds very reasonable to me.
It also reminds me of Richard Feynman not wanting a position at the institute for advance study.
“I don’t believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don’t have any ideas and I’m not getting anywhere I can say to myself, “At least I’m living; at least I’m doing something; I am making some contribution”—it’s just psychological.
When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don’t get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they are not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.
Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!
In any thinking process there are moments when everything is going good and you’ve got wonderful ideas. Teaching is an interruption, and so it’s the greatest pain in the neck in the world. And then there are the longer period of time when not much is coming to you. You’re not getting any ideas, and if you’re doing nothing at all, it drives you nuts! You can’t even say “I’m teaching my class.”
If you’re teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn’t do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? The elementary things are easy to think about; if you can’t think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you do think of something new, you’re rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it.
The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I’ve thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn’t do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It’s not so easy to remind yourself of these things.
So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don’t have to teach. Never.”
— Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
I suspect (and this is my interpretation of what he’s said) that Alexander’s productivity would actually go down if he quit his day job. A lot of his blogging is inspired by his psychiatric work, so he would lose that source of inspiration. Also, a lot of his best works (eg. Meditations on Moloch) were written while he was a medical school resident, working 60 hours a week outside of blogging, so it’s not clear to me that the hours of working are really taking away from his best writing. They are certainly taking away from posting as frequently—he’s been posting much more frequently now on Substack—but pressure to write daily posts might take away from work on longer high quality posts.
I don’t get the impression that too much is inspired by his psychiatric work. This is partly based on my being a reader of his posts on and off over the years, and also on a brief skim of recent posts (biographies of presidents, AI safety, pregnancy interventions). But even if that source of inspiration was lost, it’d presumably be replaced by other sources of inspiration, and his writing is broad enough where at best that’d be a large net gain and at worst it’d be a small net loss.
That’s a really interesting point. Maybe I’m wrong then. Maybe I don’t understand the subtleties of what makes for good writing. But even so, writing is only one thing. I expect that with more time people like Scott would come up with other cool things to pursue in addition to writing.
This on why quitting sometimes backfires: https://applieddivinitystudies.com/2020/09/01/quitting/
Appreciate the thought!
I used to have funding from EA sources to work on my own projects for a number of years. I basically gave it up because working on those projects didn’t feel motivating enough and it seemed to me like I’d probably be happier doing something else and keeping any EA stuff as a hobby on the side. (This feels like it’s been the right choice.)
I see. Thanks for the response. I’m starting to suspect that this is a common sentiment, wanting some sort of normalcy and doing other stuff on the side.
I’m curious, was that funding you received no strings attached? If not, I wonder if moving to no strings attached would change how you feel.
Pretty much, yes.
Though it’s worth noting that this didn’t entirely eliminate a feeling of needing to do something useful with my time. Even when I had guaranteed funding to do basically whatever I wanted for a while (say a year), there was still the question of whether the same source would be willing to fund me for another year if I didn’t do enough useful things during that time. And if they decided that they didn’t and then I’d need to find another funder or a real job, what would that source think about me having spent a year without accomplishing anything concrete that I could point at.
So in practice even no-strings-attached funding still doesn’t let you completely stop worrying about getting results, unless the source credibly commits to providing that funding for a significant fraction of your remaining lifetime. I find that one of the advantages of having a more “normal” day job rather than weird EA funding is that it guarantees that I’m spending at least part of my time on something that helps ensure I can also find another “normal” job later, if need to be. Rather than needing to stress out that if I don’t get anything useful done today, then there’s nothing really forcing me to do anything useful tomorrow either, nor anything forcing me to do anything useful the day after that, and I really hope that a whole year won’t pass with me doing nothing useful until finally the EAs will get tired of funding me and I’ll have burned whatever employability I had in the “normal” job market too.
Gotcha. That was a really helpful response, and it makes a lot of sense.
What if this happened for you? Suppose you received the funding in a lump sum with no strings attached. Would you prefer that over having the day job? How do you expect it would affect the impact you would have on the world?
Glad it was helpful :)
Hmm. Certainly it’d make me feel a bit safer, but I’m not sure if it would change what I actually did in a short-term basis at least. My EA-productivity is limited more by motivational and emotional issues than time, and if I did manage to debug those issues enough that time would become the limiting factor, then I might feel fine asking for short-term funding anyway since I would no longer feel doubtful about my productivity.
I could definitely imagine it being helpful anyway, though I’m sufficiently uncertain about this that I think I’d feel bad about accepting any such offer. :)
I see. Thanks again for the explanation!
Hearing this, it re-opens a line of thought that’s been swimming in the back of my mind for quite some time: that helping EA people with mental health is a pretty high-yielding pursuit. Lots of people (including myself) deal with stuff, I presume. And if you can help such people, you can improve productivity by something like, I don’t know, 10-200%?
But how do you help them? I don’t think I have any great ideas here.
I assume most people have access to a therapist if they wanted one.
Maybe motivation to see a therapist is the problem, not access. But there’s plenty of people talking about and normalizing therapy nowadays, and I’m not sure how fruitful it’d be to continue that process.
Maybe difficulty finding the right therapist is the crux? Especially for rationalist-types who have “weird” issues. Maybe. Maybe expanding and/or branching off of something like the Secular Therapy Project would be worthwhile. Or the SlateStarCodex Psychiat-list.
Maybe we just need better models of how the mind works and how to repair psychiatric pain. But the world of clinical psychology research already has this covered. Right? Maybe, maybe not. It does seem difficult to break into and have a real impact. However, you Kaj seem to me like one of the few people who might have a comparative advantage in pursuing something like that. I’m thinking of your Multiagent Models of Mind sequence. I was really impressed by it. I’m not sure how much of it was actually novel — maybe parts were, maybe not really, I don’t really know — but along the lines of Non-Expert Explanation, I think there’s a good amount of value in framing things differently. And in popularizing worthwhile things! That sequence helped me arrive at a pretty good understanding of my own psychological issues, I think, whereas before that I was pretty lost. The understanding hasn’t translated to actually feeling any better, but that’s n=1 and beside the point. Speaking of which, what is my point? I think it’s just to consider all of this food for thought. I can’t say I’m confident in the broader points I’m making.
FWIW, my other day job (I have two part-time ones) is related.
Oh, cool!
>access if they wanted one
Based on a nearly universal sense (reading/personal experience/conversations with doctors) that it’s hard to find an in-network psychiatrist/psychologist who’s will to see a new patient, my prior on this is very low.
>motivation
That would help too. But there’s probably a large set of people who could be helped if the “access” barrier was reduced/removed on its own.
>difficulty?
Agreed for both rationalists and non-rationalists.
>knowing how to fix brains?
Which condition(s) specifically come to mind when you think of something that “clinical psychology research already has...covered”? I was unable to think of one off the top of my head.
Huh, that is very much not the experience I’ve had personally, or that people I’ve spoke with have had. I’ve found that it can be difficult to find a therapist who you like, but to find a therapist who just accepts your insurance and is willing to see you/new patients, I’ve never spoke with someone who has had trouble with that. Context: I’m in America.
Well I’m not sure how well they really do have it covered (hence my saying “Maybe, maybe not.”). I was just thinking about the fact that there is in fact a large group of people working on it, and they seem to have made at least some non-trivial amount of progress. Ie. cognitive behavioral therapy.
This is probably moot, but I’d like to argue against this sentiment and share part of my own story.
I myself am a programmer and have a lot of anxiety about getting fired and being unable to find another job. And so I’ve spent a good amount of time trying to debug this. Part of that debugging is asking True Self what he actually thinks. And this is his ~answer.
It is totally implausible that my fears end up actually being realized. Think of it like this:
Plan A is to keep my current job. I worry about getting fired, but it is pretty unlikely to actually happen. Look at the base rate. It’s low. And I have control over my performance. I can scale it up if I start to worry that I’m getting into risky territory.
Plan B is, if I get fired, to apply to, let’s call them “reach jobs” (like a reach school when you apply to colleges) and get one of them. Seems somewhat plausible.
Plan C is to mass apply to normal jobs that are in my ballpark. It might take a few months, but it seems highly likely I’d eventually get one of them.
Plan D1 is to ask friends and family for referrals.
Plan D2 is to lower my standards and apply to jobs that I’m overqualified for (and perhaps adjust the resume I use to apply to mitigate against the failure mode of “he would never actually accept this position”).
Plan D3 is to push even further into my network, asking former coworkers, former classmates, and friends of friends for referrals.
Plan D4 is to just have my girlfriend support me.
Plan E is to do something adjacent, like work as a coding bootcamp instructor or maybe even in QA.
Plan F is to do something like work at a library or a coffee shop. I worked at a library (actually two) in college and it was great. It was low stress and there was plenty of time to screw around on my laptop doing my own thing.
Even if I get “knocked off track” and end up at D2 or whatever, I can always work my way back up. It’d be a setback, but probably nothing too crazy.
And that’s actually something I ended up going through. After doing a coding bootcamp and working as a programmer for about a year and a half, I took a year off to self-study computer science, and then about three more years working on a failed startup. It was a little tough finding a job after that, but I managed. From there I worked my way up. Today I actually just accepted an offer at one of those “reach jobs”.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that taking time off doing EA stuff might be a setback in terms of your ability to get back into the “normal” job market, but I expect that it’d only knock you down a rung or so. I don’t think it’d completely knock you of the ladder. Maybe your ladder doesn’t look exactly like mine with A through F — I’m pretty fortunate to have the life circumstances I have — but I expect that it’s a lot longer than it feels. And even if you do get knocked down a rung, I expect that for you too it’d just be a temporary setback, nothing that’d knock you off course too significantly.
That’s not where I expected this was going to go. (Wasn’t there some sort of microgrants project somewhere ahile back? I don’t know if that was EA, but...)
It doesn’t look to me like it would go to people like Scott or Robin either. I am arguing that it should because they are productive people and it would enable them to spend more time being productive via removing the need for a day job, especially if there is a surplus of money available.
I seem to have heard from a relatively good source about a study that people who are unemployed feel worse even though they have maintained the same level of well-being. (I don’t remember where it was and I can’t provide a link, maybe someone else can?)