Lest ye be Wronged
Raise other people's aspirations 🧙♂️
[Hello everyone! This email is part of a feed where I update my close friends ∼ weekly. You may read it, skip it, delete it, or tape it to the wall and pray to it every night.
If you want to support me: reply with a one-sentence email, even if you didn’t read the entire update. You can literally just answer with “ whee” and I’ll be happy. React in any way shape or form.
And if you do read the whole thing, please leave a short comment. It's extremely helpful. Thanks!]
I.
LessWrong is “an internet forum dedicated to the refining of the art of rationality”. Here’s the post “Welcome to LessWrong!” if you want to know more.
I believe LessWrong is the most important forum in the history of the internet. Mostly because LW is obsessed with AI, and AI is going to shape every facet of the world there is. (Artificial intelligence > human intelligence, and human intelligence was sufficient for climate change and Mars rovers).
I published four posts to LW last week:
“Politics are not serious by default”, about how most politics aren’t dedicated to serious society-building. Serious politics are possible; but they’re not what you get by default.
“What does it feel like to switch from earn-to-give to work-in-altruism?”, a question I asked to effective altruists. For context, effective altruism delineates two main ways of doing good in the world:
“Earn to give”, where you work at a regular job and aim to make a lot of money, then donate it to e.g. the Against Malaria Foundation to save as many lives as possible.
“Work in altruism”, where you pivot your entire career to do good in the world. LessWrong is filled with alignment researchers (engineers who specialize in reducing the chance AI kills everyone on Earth) who fit this criterion.
I’ve felt the switch from the first to the latter. Did others? The most first response I got was from Elizabeth, one of the LessWrong legends—and I’m grateful for her advice. You might want to look at it.
I’m working on a much longer post right now about what it means to “solve philosophy”. Because I lose interest in ideas fast, I must write quickly or else banish the post to a mess of dusty, forgotten ideas. Speed is extremely important.
II.
The post of the week is “The high-return activity of raising others’ aspirations”. Here’s half the post:
At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind. It costs you relatively little to do this, but the benefit to them, and to the broader world, may be enormous.
This is in fact one of the most valuable things you can do with your time and with your life.
On LessWrong, this is called “being a wise old wizard”, a nod to the excellent Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (which I would give a try if I were you). The community agrees there ought to be more wise old wizards in the world, dispensing advice and being mysterious at people. Elizabeth’s comment was an instance of this.
Being a wise old wizard is easy: showing people ambitious options they weren’t remotely considering is sufficient. Most people are conforming sheep in most areas of their lives (that’s fine, because we’d go insane otherwise). If you’re a non-sheep in a few particular axes, that’s an opportunity for you to point out paths you know to be promising that others can’t even think up.
For instance, most people I know want to do something good with their lives and help people. But also, they walk around without knowing how much money it takes to save a human life at minimum (5,000 USD) or how you do it (mosquito nets). To me, this is a mismatch. I need only point it out for them to go “huh, maybe I should pay attention to malaria more” and then off they go to save the world. It’s an intensely gratifying experience.
If you’re in this email feed, I’ll bet you are a non-sheep in a few key ways like this. Look out for those places where you have more awareness than most, and then share that awareness—and you’ll be a wise old wizard! :)
III.
Have you been a wise old wizard once or twice? Are you planning on it? How? I’m curious—send an email, even if it’s just one sentence!
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