My Model Of EA Burnout

This all seems broadly correct, to me.

But I think it's worth noting that there's an additional piece of the puzzle that I believe this one is largely codependent on: namely, that burnout often comes from a mismatch between responsibility and power.

This can be seen in not just high-stress jobs like medicine or crisis work, but also regular "office jobs" and interpersonal relationships. The more someone feels responsible for an outcome, whether internally or due to external pressure/expectations, the more power to actually affect change they will need to not feel that their efforts are pointless.

EAs tend to be the sort of people who, in addition to taking large scale problems seriously, internalize the idea of Heroic Responsibility. This can work out well if they manage to find some form of work that helps them feel like they are making meaningful change, but if they do not, it can make the large, difficult, and often heartbreaking challenges the world faces all the more difficult to engage with. And for many, narratives of personal inadequacy start to creep in, unless they have proper CBT training, robust self-care norms, or a clear sense of boundaries and distinctions between what is in their power and what isn't.

Most people in society tend to do work that progresses causes and institutions with not-perfectly-aligned values to their own. The two main ways I've seen this not cause burnout is either 1) when they don't really pay attention to the issues at all, or 2) when they feel like they're still making a meaningful difference to progress their values in some way, shape or form. Lacking that, the mismatch of values will indeed tend to erode many aspects of their mental and emotional wellbeing until they grow numb to the value dissonance or burnout. 

I want to say something, but I'm not really sure how to phrase it very precisely, but I will just say the gist of it in some rambly way. Note: I am very much on the periphery of the phenomenon I am trying to describe, so I might not be right about it.

Most EAs come from a kind of western elite culture that right now assigns a lot of prestige to, like, being seen to be doing Important Work with lots of Power and Responsibility and Great Meaning, both professionally and socially.

"I am devoting my life to solving the most important problems in the world and alleviating as much suffering as possible" fits right into the script. That's exactly the kind of thing you are supposed to be thinking. If you frame your life like that, you will fit in and everyone will understand and respect what is your basic deal.

"I am going to have a pleasant balance of all my desires, not working all that hard, spending some time on EA stuff, and the rest of the time enjoy life, hang out, read some books, and go climbing" does not fit into the script. That's not something that anyone ever told you to do, and if you tell people you are going to do that, they will be surprised at what you said. You will stand out in a weird way.

Example anecdote: A few years ago my wife and I had a kid while I was employed full-time at a big software company that pays well. I had multiple discussions roughly like this with my coworkers:

• Me: My kid's going to be born this fall, so I'll be taking paternity leave, and it's quite likely I will quit after, so I want to figure out what to do with this thing that I am responsible for.
• Them: What do you mean, you will quit after?
• Me: I mean I am going to have a baby, and like you, they paid me lots of money, so my guess is that I will just hang out being a parent with my wife and we can live off savings for a while.
• Them: Well, you don't have to do that! You can just keep working.
• Me: But doesn't it sound like if you were ever going to not work, the precise best time would be right when you have your first kid? Like, that would be literally the most common sense time in your life to choose not to work, and pay attention to learning about being a parent instead? I can just work again later.
• Them: [puzzled] Well, you'll see what I mean. I don't think you will quit.

And then they were legitimately surprised when I quit after paternity leave, because it's unusual for someone to do that (at least not men) regardless of whether they have saved a bunch of money due to being a programmer. The normal thing to do is, let your work define your role in life and gives you all your social capital, so it's basically your number 1 priority, and everything else is a sideshow.

So it makes total sense to me that EAs who came from this culture decide that EA should define their role in life and give them all their social capital and be their number 1 priority, and it's not about a failure of introspection, or about a conscious assessment of their terminal values that turned out wrong. It's just the thing people do.

My prediction would be that among EAs who don't come from a culture with this kind of social pressure, burnout isn't really an issue.

Curated.

It does feel a bit weird for this to be curated on LessWrong rather than Effective Altruism Forum. Partly for "idk, feels like the wrong genre?" reasons (which I don't think are very strong), and partly because I think it's healthy for LessWrong to be an intellectual scene that doesn't really route through the "EA" abstraction.

But, I do still expect the post to be relevant to a lot of LessWrong contributors, who are engaging with various flavors of "the world seems full of big problems", and feel various flavor of pressure to adapt themselves to help with those big problems, in ways that are unhealthy. I think there are particular flavors of this that route through "conform to the Effective Altruism cultural center-of-mass", and versions that route through a somewhat more general pressure, and I think the models in this post will be relevant to a fair number of people.

Relevant Eliezer post [LW · GW]:

The Watcher spoke on, then, about how most people have selfish and unselfish parts - not selfish and unselfish components in their utility function, but parts of themselves in some less Law-aspiring way than that.  Something with a utility function, if it values an apple 1% more than an orange, if offered a million apple-or-orange choices, will choose a million apples and zero oranges.  The division within most people into selfish and unselfish components is not like that, you cannot feed it all with unselfish choices whatever the ratio.  Not unless you are a Keeper, maybe, who has made yourself sharper and more coherent; or maybe not even then, who knows?  For (it was said in another place) it is hazardous to non-Keepers to know too much about exactly how Keepers think.

It is dangerous to believe, said the Watcher, that you get extra virtue points the more that you let your altruistic part hammer down the selfish part.  If you were older, said the Watcher, if you were more able to dissect thoughts into their parts and catalogue their effects, you would have noticed at once how this whole parable of the drowning child, was set to crush down the selfish part of you, to make it look like you would be invalid and shameful and harmful-to-others if the selfish part of you won, because, you're meant to think, people don't need expensive clothing - although somebody who's spent a lot on expensive clothing clearly has some use for it or some part of themselves that desires it quite strongly.

It is a parable calculated to set at odds two pieces of yourself (said the Watcher), and your flaw is not that you made the wrong choice between the two pieces, it was that you hammered one of those pieces down.  Even though with a bit more thought, you could have at least seen the options for being that piece of yourself too, and not too expensively.

And much more importantly (said the Watcher), you failed to understand and notice a kind of outside assault on your internal integrity, you did not notice how this parable was setting up two pieces of yourself at odds, so that you could not be both at once, and arranging for one of them to hammer down the other in a way that would leave it feeling small and injured and unable to speak in its own defense.

I appreciate you writing this. I found myself agreeing much of it. The post also helped me notice some feeling of "huh, something seems missing... there's something I think this isn't capturing... but what is it?" I haven't exactly figured out where that feeling is coming from, so apologies if this comment ends up being incoherent or tangential. But you've inspired me to try to double-click on it, so here it goes :) 

Suppose I meet someone for the first time, and I begin to judge them for reasons that I don't endorse. For example, maybe something about their appearance or their choice of clothing automatically triggers some sort of (unjustified) assumptions about their character. I then notice these thoughts, and upon reflection, I realize I don't endorse them, so I let them go. I don't feel like I'm crushing a part of myself that wants to be heard. If anything, I feel the version of myself that noticed the thoughts & reframed them is a more accurate reflection of the person I am/want to be.

I think EAs sometimes struggle to tell the difference between "true values" and "biases that, if removed, would actually make you feel like you're living a life more consistent with your true values." 

There is of course the tragic case of Alice: upon learning about EA, she crushes her "true values" of creativity and beauty because she believes she's "supposed to" care about impact (and only impact or impact-adjacent things). After reframing her life around impact, she suppresses many forms of motivation and joy she once possessed, and she burns out.

But there is also the fantastic case of Bob: upon learning about EA, he finds a way of clarifying and expressing his "true values" of impact and the well-being of others. He notices many ways in which his behaviors were inconsistent with these values, the ones he values above all else. After reframing his life around impact, he feels much more in-tune with his core sense of purpose, and he feels more motivated than ever before.

My (rough draft) hypothesis is that many EAs struggle to tell the difference between their "core values" and their "biases". 

My guess is that the social and moral pressures to be like Bob are strong, meaning many EAs err in the direction of "thinking too many of their real values are biases" and trying too hard to self-modify. In some cases, this is so extreme that it produces burnout. 

...But there is real value to self-modifying when it's appropriate. Sometimes, you don't actually want to be a photographer, and you would be acting in a way that's truly more consistent with your values (and feel the associated motivational benefits) if you quit photography and spent more time fighting for a cause you believe in.

To my knowledge, no one has been able to write the Ultimate Guide To Figuring Out What You Truly Value. If such a guide existed, I think it would help EAs navigate this tension.

A final thought is that this post seems to describe one component of burnout. I'm guessing there are a lot of other (relatively standard) explanations for why some EAs burnout (e.g., not having strong friendships, not spending enough time with loved ones, attaching their self-worth too much to the opinions of a tiny subset of people, not exercising enough or spending enough time outdoors, working really hard, not having enough interpersonal intimacy, getting trapped in concerns around status [LW · GW], feeling alienated from their families/old friends, navigating other classic challenges of young adulthood). 

This post crystallized some thoughts that have been floating in my head, inchoate, since I read Zvi's stuff on slack [LW · GW] and Valentine's "Here's the Exit." [LW · GW]

Part of the reason that it's so hard to update on these 'creative slack' ideas is that we make deals among our momentary mindsets to work hard when it's work-time. (And when it's literally the end of the world at stake, it's always work-time.) "Being lazy" is our label for someone who hasn't established that internal deal between their varying mindsets, and so is flighty and hasn't precommitted to getting stuff done even if they currently aren't excited about work.

Once you've installed that internal flinch away from not working/precommitment to work anyways, though, it's hard to accept that hard work is ever a mistake, because that seems like your current mindset trying to rationalize its way out of cooperating today!

I think I finally got past this flinch/got out of running that one particular internal status race, thanks to this and the aforementioned posts.

What is "EA burnout"? Personally I haven't noticed any differences between burnout in EAs and burnout in other white-collar office workers. If there are such differences, then I'd like to know about them. If there aren't, then I'm skeptical of any model of the phenomenon which is particular to EA.

Have you considered cross-posting this to the EA forum? (There's an option under Edit -> Options -> Crosspost.)

For me the core of it feels less like trying to "satisfying the values you think you should have, while neglecting the values you actually have" and more like having a hostile orientation to certain values I have.

I might be sitting at my desk working on my EA project and the parts of me that are asking to play video games, watch arthouse movies, take the day off and go hiking, find a girlfriend are like yapping dogs that won't shut up. I'll respond to their complaints once I've finished saving the world.

Through CFAR workshops, lots of goal factoring, journaling, and Focusing I'm getting some traction on changing that pattern. 

I've realised that values (or perhaps 'needs' fits better) are immutable facts about myself. Like my height or hair colour.  And getting annoyed at them for not being different makes about as much sense as shouting at the sky for raining.

The part of me that wants to maximize impact has accepted that moving to the Bay Area and working 80-hours a week at an EA org is a fabricated option [LW · GW].  A realistic plan takes into account my values that constrain me to want to live near my family, have lots of autonomy over my schedule and work independently on projects I control. Since realising that, my motivation, productivity, sense of agency (and ironically expected impact) have improved.  The future feels a lot brighter – probably because a whole load of internal conflict I wasn't acknowledging has been resolved.

It seems like a major issue here is that people often have limited introspective access to what their "true values" are. And it's not enough to know some of your true values; in the example you give the fact that you missed one or two causes problems even if most of what you're doing is pretty closely related to other things you truly value. (And "just introspect harder" increases the risk of getting answers that are the results of confabulation and confirmation bias rather than true values, which can cause other problems.)

I think the model of "Burnout as shadow values" is quite important and loadbearing in my own model of working with many EAs/Rationalists.  I don't think I first got it from this post but I'm glad to see it written up so clearly here.

Reading this post was a bit of a lightbulb moment for me, because I read it and went "ohhh, that's the thing other people are talking about happening to them when they talk about what an easy trap it is to fall into scrupulosity and stuff." This might also explain why I don't feel that much at home with the EA community even though I'm on board with basically all the main propositions and have donated a bunch.

My brain just doesn't do the "get hijacked by other people's values" thing anymore. I think it got burned too much by me doing that in my late teens / early twenties and getting super depressed as a result, so now anytime I see a project that part of me wants to get excited about and subsumed by, my brain goes "Nope. Nah. Not messing with that." To the point where it's kind of hard for me to contemplate ambitious projects at all, because the part of me that refuses to be ruled will not submit to it.

Here are two directions that may be fruitful to explore when taking this essay as the starting point:

If you’re in this for the long haul, build a life in which the real you can thrive. And then, from the abundance of that thriving, put the excess toward Impact (or wherever else you would like for it to go).

This rhymes with posts about Slack [? · GW], including Zvi's original post [LW · GW] on Slack, and his post Out to Get You [LW · GW]. Furthermore, Zvi has written some criticisms of EA which IIRC also partly come from the perspective that effective altruism saps slack.

[This is, of course, a version of EA that’s especially focused on the far future; but I think it’s common for a very similar thing to happen when someone transitions from “soup kitchens” to “global poverty and animal welfare”. There’s an exponential increase in stakes, accompanied by a corresponding increase in the fear of lost value.]

On this point, this essay [EA · GW] (on the EA forum; recommended reading) about a paper by Tyler Cowen argues that this may be a fundamental limitation of utilitarianism plus scope sensitivity, i.e. that this moral framework necessarily collapses everything into a single value (utility) to optimize at the expense of everything else:

So, the problem is this. Effective Altruism wants to be able to say that things other than utility matter—not just in the sense that they have some moral weight, but in the sense that they can actually be relevant to deciding what to do, not just swamped by utility calculations. Cowen makes the condition more precise, identifying it as the denial of the following claim: given two options, no matter how other morally-relevant factors are distributed between the options, you can always find a distribution of utility such that the option with the larger amount of utility is better. The hope that you can have ‘utilitarianism minus the controversial bits’ relies on denying precisely this claim.

...

Now, at the same time, Effective Altruists also want to emphasise the relevance of scale to moral decision-making. The central insight of early Effective Altruists was to resist scope insensitivity [LW · GW] and to begin systematically examining the numbers involved in various issues. ‘Longtermist’ Effective Altruists are deeply motivated by the idea that ‘the future is vast’: the huge numbers of future people that could potentially exist gives us a lot of reason to try to make the future better. The fact that some interventions produce so much more utility—do so much more good—than others is one of the main grounds for prioritising them. So while it would technically be a solution to our problem to declare (e.g.) that considerations of utility become effectively irrelevant once the numbers get too big, that would be unacceptable to Effective Altruists. Scale matters in Effective Altruism (rightly so, I would say!), and it doesn’t just stop mattering after some point.

So, what other options are there? Well, this is where Cowen’s paper comes in: it turns out, there are none. For any moral theory with universal domain where utility matters at all, either the marginal value of utility diminishes rapidly (asymptotically) towards zero, or considerations of utility come to swamp all other values.

...

I hope the reasoning is clear enough from this sketch. If you are committed to the scope of utility mattering, such that you cannot just declare additional utility de facto irrelevant past a certain point, then there is no way for you to formulate a moral theory that can avoid being swamped by utility comparisons. Once the utility stakes get large enough—and, when considering the scale of human or animal suffering or the size of the future, the utility stakes really are quite large—all other factors become essentially irrelevant, supplying no relevant information for our evaluation of actions or outcomes.

...

Once you let utilitarian calculations into your moral theory at all, there is no principled way to prevent them from swallowing everything else. And, in turn, there’s no way to have these calculations swallow everything without them leading to pretty absurd results. While some of you might bite the bullet on the repugnant conclusion or the experience machine, it is very likely that you will eventually find a bullet that you don’t want to bite, and you will want to get off the train to crazy town; but you cannot consistently do this without giving up the idea that scale matters, and that it doesn’t just stop mattering after some point.

Started to enter a state that could be described as "meta analysis paralysis" ("meta-[analysis paralysis]" and not "[meta-analysis] paralysis") when I wanted to formulate my comment about your very interesting take on EA Burnout!

Your post screamed to me as a great example of analysis paralysis and bounded rationality.

Then I started to get paralyzed trying to analyse analysis paralysis and bounded rationality in the context of EA burnout and I quickly burnt out solutionless writing this comment.

Oh the irony!

Even burnt out I was still stuck in analysis paralysis so in the end I told myself: 

"Tomorrow I will ask Google and ChatGPT: 'how to solve analysis paralysis?'".

And then submitted that above comment which does not really help you... or maybe it does?!

Damned still paralyzed!

Anyway pushing the submit button now, not sure if is the right thing to do but my bounded rationality tells me that at least it is one thing done, even if I could have spent much more time on a much more thorough and thoughtful answer that would have allowed me to formulate a better (less wrong / more helpful) comment but maybe also hitting diminishing returns!

The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

I would tend to agree with the thoughts you've shared. I think burnout is bound to happen in any situation where the expectations we have of self (the shoulds) are misaligned to a significant degree from the wants we have. Any time there is that level of tension it will eventually lead to some sort of system failure if not somehow corrected by bringing the two into closer alignment. 

I asked the AI what Abundance was as a value, and it should "refer to a mindset or belief that there is enough of everything - resources, opportunities, love, happiness, etc. - to go around, and that one can have as much as they desire without taking away from others. It's about feeling and being grateful for what one has, and having a positive outlook on life and the future."
While I subscribe to @DaystarEld [LW · GW]'s reminder of the misguided Heroic Responsibility, I wonder if additionally this Epicurean dilemma isn't at core of most "EA burnout" and the recurring idea in this and similar write-ups.

I must admit, acronyms are the worst enemy to my brain. Took a good 5 minutes of scanning comments for me to realize we‘re talking about effective altruism. Not a strike on your part entirely but I suspect providing a quick upfront glossary can help you affect positive change among a wider range of individuals.

I saw the development of EA as a[nother] naive series of misapprehensions about how to live in what the EA adherents see as a scary world.  Akin to,  "let's abstract this scary world, it'll  become less scary, and we can affect / control the outcomes".  That's weak adolescent thinking, and bad math besides. And this was after reading MacAskill’s book, which likewise struck me as naive academia-ism; as unpragmatic as any wooly professah unable to do basic household chores, basic tasks of living with others, of simply putting one’s shoulder to the job individually and then collectively. Very little ’survival’ in the world we live in skills [and so it was an amusing though unfortunate confirmation to read a profile of MacAskill in the New Yorker; and i dont care about lowbrow middlebrow [New Yorker/Atlantic] highbrow…. it’s all just brow; despite being ‘the most upcoming young philosopher’, his daily practical life sounds like a mild abstract chaos of ineptitude, though clearly he's a lovely human]

The ‘values’ inherent in EA seemed to me some sort of extremely core Christian penance:  induced suffering and avoidance of a meaningful engagement in one’s work, in one’s life, for an abstract “good” at some unspecified future time;  a ‘state of grace’, which again, grace = a piece of Christian dogma, grace being granted by god [Leroy?]  Storing up ‘riches’ for the future. Instead of hoarding gold, like preppers and other religious zealots saving for armageddon prior to salvation, let’s use Crypto! Easily subverted by a mountebank like Sam Bankman-fried (bankman! now that’s funny). 

The idea of working a job that pays well, but a job you dont care about, or even hate, eg - ‘i work at Goldman’ - in order to gift a lot of cash in the future to some intangible and unspecified  “general good”. In other words, sacrifice your own personal integrity, it’s ok to corrode your own personal core by doing hateful work, in order to help some guy in 50 years not get malaria. Nope; that’s an edifice built by naive lummoxes who’ve never really ‘worked’. How to find the beauty and meaning in one’s current life, one’s current work - and extend that beauty and meaning to others - THAT is what spurs altruism. The desire to share one’s own personal handiwork. 

I can use EAs “metrics” to show that my own personal ‘work’ - which is far smaller scaled than SBF & etc level  ‘earn big for the future’-  will continue to create positive generational change. The old words, the old concepts - they’re old because they work. EA…was and is novelty for youngsters who want to avoid engagement.