[This is the third post in my thirty-day writing challenge where I publish one blog post daily. Tune in for more if you enjoy the post!]
There is a funny word that is almost exclusive to the vernacular of the EA community, and this word bestows downright magical powers on its users.
The word I’m talking about is neglected.
I view this word as a sort of “Get Out of Jail Free” card for doing the most useless things you’ve ever heard of. Something that will happen to you if you go to parties in SF is that people will tell you what they do, and their statements will almost always be very interesting. And sometimes, you will hear something like this:
“I run a startup making fur-lined boots for honey bees. As it turns out, honey bees get really cold feet in the winter, and this diminishes their well-being by around 20%. Since there are so many honey bees, and because there are tons of butterfly effects from honey bees being happier, this would produce a sizable—but not enormous—positive good for the world. And it’s a really neglected problem, so I think it’s a pretty good use of my time.” [1]
You will then smile, nod, and then excuse yourself to eat some Oreos or one of the other vegan snacks they have at the party. That is, unless you’re really pushy, in which case you will ask them tons of questions about why they are doing what they’re doing. Because, like, come on. Really? That’s what you’re doing? Out of all of the things on the planet that you could spend your time on, you chose to make fur-lined boots for honey bees?
Normally I’d try to steelman this point of view. But I’ve pushed a lot of people who say things like this, and I’ve literally never heard a single good argument from any of them. It always just bottoms out in “it seems like a good idea”, or “it’s pretty neglected...”. Even if you take this person’s speculative numbers at face value, they are doing—at best—a pretty modest good. And this just pales in comparison to other things they could be doing, regardless of how neglected this current issue is. There simply isn’t an argument here. It’s just a reasoning error that the EA community frequently doesn’t punish because the person making the case used the fancy in-group word “neglected”.
To see why the case of our candidate Uggs for Bees™ CEO fails, I think it’d be useful to reflect on why neglectedness is a useful metric to judge candidate careers by. The reason neglectedness is a useful metric is simply that it raises the EV of the career in question. That’s it. Specifically, let’s say you agree that you should aim your career towards doing good. The question then arises: what to do to maximize the amount of good that you do? Really, the formula here is something like,
But it’s useful to fine-grain this a bit. First, we were implicitly referring to impact per person above. So we should calculate that instead. And actually, by inserting the identity a few times, you can arrive at this more informative formula,
You can make other considerations, but this is the formula that most EAs seem to roughly abide by. So now we can see what neglectedness actually does—it’s just a multiplier in an EV equation. Make it bigger and your expected impact increases, make it smaller and it decreases. In words, neglectedness matters because it raises the expected impact of you in particular working on a given field.
Practically, this occurs because the fruit in a field start out low-hanging, and then become progressively harder to pick as you climb up the tree of popularity. So, the expected return of an additional person working in the field is very high. For example, it’s probably more useful to be the first wild-insect-suffering reducer than the hundredth chicken-suffering reducer. Wild insect suffering is a super big deal, and there is basically no one working on it. It’s also really tractable—if you lobbied for the use of certain pesticides over others then you’d help literally billions (and possibly trillions) of insects live much better lives. Chicken suffering at the hands of factory farms is also a super big deal, but the marginal impact of another person working on it probably isn’t as high as working on wild insect suffering. So, ceteris paribus, it follows that you should work on wild insect suffering. Or, if you don’t like that example, then it’s probably more useful to start an AI safety compute cluster than to be the hundredth person on a frontier lab’s safety team. A field being neglected is connotatively synonymous with the field being easy to positively impact. One more person working in a neglected field might be worth ten people working in a non-neglected field.
But notice that all we’re doing here is an EV calculation. So neglectedness by itself says literally nothing about whether or not something is worth doing—you must consider the concomitant reasons of scale and tractability when considering what to do. For example, a super neglected question is whether or not energy drinks are actually superintelligent morally conscious agents. This would be a really big deal if true, as superintelligences probably feel suffering to a higher degree than humans do, and there are lots of energy drinks. And it’s also a completely neglected field! The horror! But obviously you should not work on this. The EV of this field is vanishingly small, and so its degree of neglect doesn’t matter. [2]
So now we can come full circle and see why our Uggs for Bees™ start-up was doomed from the beginning—its EV was simply much lower than tons of other alternatives.
In summary, when doing EV calculations about whether or not your career does good, it’s not enough to just consider how neglected a field is—you must consider its overall impact. You may find that it’s not as high as a number of other options, in which case you should strongly consider doing one of those other options. Your time on Earth is short—do something useful with it.
Looking at our formula above, this just means that the impact is zero on expectation, as you should give the idea that energy drinks are superintelligent conscious creatures a prior of essentially zero.
I don't think I've ever encountered someone who was knowingly working on something useless because it was neglected. If I thought it was useless, that was just because we disagreed about the merits of the thing itself.
I mean, I agree. I've also never heard anyone say that what they're doing is useless but neglected. The point I'm trying to make here is that I've frequently seen people vaguepost this word when they can't defend what they're doing on its merits, but really there is no special status that an issue being "neglected" confers. I think that barring the word from your vocabulary, or at least demoting its relative importance in your mind, helps to avoid this weird failure mode that I've seen where people overweight the importance of neglect in calculating the impact of what they're doing.
[This is the third post in my thirty-day writing challenge where I publish one blog post daily. Tune in for more if you enjoy the post!]
There is a funny word that is almost exclusive to the vernacular of the EA community, and this word bestows downright magical powers on its users.
The word I’m talking about is neglected.
I view this word as a sort of “Get Out of Jail Free” card for doing the most useless things you’ve ever heard of. Something that will happen to you if you go to parties in SF is that people will tell you what they do, and their statements will almost always be very interesting. And sometimes, you will hear something like this:
You will then smile, nod, and then excuse yourself to eat some Oreos or one of the other vegan snacks they have at the party. That is, unless you’re really pushy, in which case you will ask them tons of questions about why they are doing what they’re doing. Because, like, come on. Really? That’s what you’re doing? Out of all of the things on the planet that you could spend your time on, you chose to make fur-lined boots for honey bees?
Normally I’d try to steelman this point of view. But I’ve pushed a lot of people who say things like this, and I’ve literally never heard a single good argument from any of them. It always just bottoms out in “it seems like a good idea”, or “it’s pretty neglected...”. Even if you take this person’s speculative numbers at face value, they are doing—at best—a pretty modest good. And this just pales in comparison to other things they could be doing, regardless of how neglected this current issue is. There simply isn’t an argument here. It’s just a reasoning error that the EA community frequently doesn’t punish because the person making the case used the fancy in-group word “neglected”.
To see why the case of our candidate Uggs for Bees™ CEO fails, I think it’d be useful to reflect on why neglectedness is a useful metric to judge candidate careers by. The reason neglectedness is a useful metric is simply that it raises the EV of the career in question. That’s it. Specifically, let’s say you agree that you should aim your career towards doing good. The question then arises: what to do to maximize the amount of good that you do? Really, the formula here is something like,
But it’s useful to fine-grain this a bit. First, we were implicitly referring to impact per person above. So we should calculate that instead. And actually, by inserting the identity a few times, you can arrive at this more informative formula,
(cf. 80k Hours)
You can make other considerations, but this is the formula that most EAs seem to roughly abide by. So now we can see what neglectedness actually does—it’s just a multiplier in an EV equation. Make it bigger and your expected impact increases, make it smaller and it decreases. In words, neglectedness matters because it raises the expected impact of you in particular working on a given field.
Practically, this occurs because the fruit in a field start out low-hanging, and then become progressively harder to pick as you climb up the tree of popularity. So, the expected return of an additional person working in the field is very high. For example, it’s probably more useful to be the first wild-insect-suffering reducer than the hundredth chicken-suffering reducer. Wild insect suffering is a super big deal, and there is basically no one working on it. It’s also really tractable—if you lobbied for the use of certain pesticides over others then you’d help literally billions (and possibly trillions) of insects live much better lives. Chicken suffering at the hands of factory farms is also a super big deal, but the marginal impact of another person working on it probably isn’t as high as working on wild insect suffering. So, ceteris paribus, it follows that you should work on wild insect suffering. Or, if you don’t like that example, then it’s probably more useful to start an AI safety compute cluster than to be the hundredth person on a frontier lab’s safety team. A field being neglected is connotatively synonymous with the field being easy to positively impact. One more person working in a neglected field might be worth ten people working in a non-neglected field.
But notice that all we’re doing here is an EV calculation. So neglectedness by itself says literally nothing about whether or not something is worth doing—you must consider the concomitant reasons of scale and tractability when considering what to do. For example, a super neglected question is whether or not energy drinks are actually superintelligent morally conscious agents. This would be a really big deal if true, as superintelligences probably feel suffering to a higher degree than humans do, and there are lots of energy drinks. And it’s also a completely neglected field! The horror! But obviously you should not work on this. The EV of this field is vanishingly small, and so its degree of neglect doesn’t matter. [2]
So now we can come full circle and see why our Uggs for Bees™ start-up was doomed from the beginning—its EV was simply much lower than tons of other alternatives.
In summary, when doing EV calculations about whether or not your career does good, it’s not enough to just consider how neglected a field is—you must consider its overall impact. You may find that it’s not as high as a number of other options, in which case you should strongly consider doing one of those other options. Your time on Earth is short—do something useful with it.
Everyone who has been to EA-adjacent SF parties knows that this imaginary example is not far-fetched at all.
Looking at our formula above, this just means that the impact is zero on expectation, as you should give the idea that energy drinks are superintelligent conscious creatures a prior of essentially zero.