Drake Thomas's Shortform

I think my original comment was ambiguous - I also consider myself to have mostly figured it out, in that I thought through these considerations pretty extensively before joining and am in a "monitoring for new considerations or evidence or events that might affect my assessment" state rather than a "just now orienting to the question" state. I'd expect to be most useful to people in shoes similar to my past self (deciding whether to apply or accept an offer) but am pretty happy to talk to anyone, including eg people who are confident I'm wrong and want to convince me otherwise.

The way I'd think about this: You should have at least 3 good plans for what you would do that you really believe in, and at least one of them should be significantly different from what you are currently doing. I find this really valuable for avoiding accidental inertia, motivated reasoning, or just regular ol' tunnel vision.

I remain fairly confused about Anthropic despite having thought about it a lot, but in my experience "have two alternate plans you really believe in" is a sort of necessary step for thinking clearly about one's mainline plan.

Yeah, I agree that you should care about more than just the sign bit. I tend to think the magnitude of effects of such work is large enough that "positive sign" often is enough information to decide that it dominates many alternatives, though certainly not all of them. (I also have some kind of virtue-ethical sensitivity to the zero point of the impacts of my direct work, even if second-order effects like skill building or intra-lab influence might make things look robustly good from a consequentialist POV.)

The offer of the parent comment is more narrowly scoped, because I don't think I'm especially well suited to evaluate someone else's comparative advantages but do have helpful things to say on the tradeoffs of that particular career choice. Definitely don't mean to suggest that people (including myself) should take on capability-focused roles iff they're net good!

I did think a fair bit about comparative advantage and the space of alternatives when deciding to accept my offer; I've put much less work into exploration since then, arguably too much less (eg I suspect I don't quite meet Raemon's bar). Generally happy to get randomly pitched on things, I suppose! 

@Drake Thomas [LW · GW] are you interested in talking about other opportunities that might be better for the world than your current position (and meet other preferences of yours)? Or are you primarily interested in the "is my current position net positive or net negative for the world" question?