Note: Written in a bit of a rush, but I think that captures how it felt to be me in the throes of epistemic upheaval.
Aaron Gertler
I read the newspaper every morning from age ~11 to age ~18. Once I’d stopped following local sports, I was left to read only the national news + op-eds. Around age 15, I added a bunch of blogs and news sites to my daily routine.
My impression: Everything was on fire. Every issue was roughly equally important, aside from one issue with a recent flare-up (often based on a single incident) that received special attention for a week and then faded back into the fire. Suffering was everywhere. Systems couldn’t be trusted. Lone heroes (or small groups, at best) would bring change to small pieces of the world, but the everything-is-on-fire-ness of the situation didn’t seem to change.
I kept a journal for “problems I want to solve someday”, and it got longer and longer. I had realistic expectations — maybe I’d be able to make a small dent in one of the problems, and be one of the lone heroes in the news. And maybe technology would make things better rather than worse. Or at least the world would keep not ending.
Still, I left high school feeling bitter and cynical. Then, as a college freshman, I read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which opened my eyes to a new way of thinking about the universe — something that could actually be changed, drastically, for the better, by just a few people who focused on the right problems. I became less cynical. But I still read the same news sites as I had before, and got a similar perspective from my college coursework, and kept recording issues in my journal,
As a sophomore, I read “Privileging the Question”, and it spun my head around.
I’d never really considered that the media’s portrayal of reality could be systematically different than the actual shape of reality. Sure, I knew that media could be biased — but I’d never considered that media from different “sides” could be uniformly pushing me to focus on a tiny set of contentious, controversial issues that would make me click, rather than the issues that actually affected the most people, or bore the greatest risk to our future.
This article drove me to start reading more LessWrong, in hopes of figuring out which questions were actually most important to think about. I soon found GiveWell, and effective altruism, and realized that my “problems I want to solve someday” journal wasn’t actually going to guide my future. I was very happy about this, because it meant that a huge number of smart people had spent years systematically thinking about something I’d only ever dabbled in.
LessWrong and GiveWell inspired me to try to think more clearly, and to prioritize, prioritize, prioritize.
(Sadly, I don’t remember other specific articles from that era which had really strong effects on me. But I do think that Rationality: from AI to Zombies is worth reading despite the length. It really held up when I revisited the material in 2017.)
Here’s another story that happened a few years later. It’s another epistemic mistake, showing that I hadn’t quite become perfectly rational despite my college epiphany.
After I graduated from college, I went to the highest-paid job I could find, at a software company in a very cheap city. I wanted to save money so I could be flexible later. So far, so good.
I started an EA group at the company, which kept me thinking about effective altruism on a regular basis even without my college group. It wasn’t nearly as fun to run as the college group — people who work full-time jobs are hard to convince to come to meetings, and my co-organizers kept getting other jobs and leaving. But I still felt like “part of EA”.
Eventually, I decided to move on from the company. So I applied to GiveWell, got to the very last step of the application process… and got rejected. Well, I thought, I guess it makes sense that I’m not qualified for an EA job. My grades weren’t great, and I was never a big researcher in college. Time to figure out something else to do.
(Notice the mistake yet?)
I moved to San Diego (where my soon-to-be-wife was living). I spent the next 18 months as a freelance tutor and writer, and feeling generally dissatisfied with my life. My city’s EA group tended to meet far away, I didn’t have a car, I was busy with married life, and I gradually became less and less engaged with EA.
Through an old connection, I was introduced to a couple who ran a private EA-aligned foundation and lived in my city. I ended up doing some part-time operations work for them. This involved a lot of conversations with different effective charities, including GiveDirectly and GiveWell. And I did a bit of research.
This boosted my confidence a bit, though I kept running into limitations — GiveDirectly’s CEO wanted to hire a research assistant for his lab at UCSD, but I’d totally forgotten my old R classes and wasn’t a good candidate, despite having a great connection from my operations work.