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.

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.

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, feeling alienated from their families/old friends, navigating other classic challenges of young adulthood). 

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.

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.

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, including Zvi's original post on Slack, and his post Out to Get You. 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 (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 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 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'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.