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Benjamin_Todd comments on Responses to questions on donating to 80k, GWWC, EAA and LYCS - Less Wrong
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Thanks for this.
Another question...
Did those involved with CEA study the literature on human value drift — if so, what did they find? What is CEA's own experience with it?
Examples I've witnessed several times each: Someone plans to do environmental law only but they end up in corporate law. Another person plans to become a professional philanthropist, but then fails to donate later, and instead spends money keeping up with the Joneses. Someone else plans to be a genuine, pleasant person but then they study "pickup artistry" and find that being a manipulative, cocky jerk actually does increase their success with women, and a bit later I discover they're a cocky, manipulative jerk to everyone. (Note to everyone: there are lots of ways to increase one's romantic success without becoming a cocky, manipulative jerk!)
I wish I knew how often this kind of value drift happens. Value drift with regard to professional philanthropy seems to happen a lot in the SI community; maybe it happens less often in communities focused on more "ground-level" causes like poverty reduction? What can be done to prevent it?
Of course, we probably don't want to prevent some kinds of value drift, e.g. value drift that occurs strictly due to encountering new and better information. I used to care a lot about God's will, until I gained information indicating God's non-existence.
Hi Luke,
This is certainly really important for 80k - it's on our list of strategic considerations to investigate.
We haven't looked into it in depth already, beyond knowledge of some relevant psychology literature (e.g. being primed by images of money has been found to make people more selfish in a couple of (probably dodgy) studies).
We've put a couple of measures in place which seem like they might help to mitigate the types of drift that don't involve updating on new information. First, making a public commitment to make the world a better place in an effective way encourages people not to drift towards being non-altruistic (while is also sufficiently broad not to commit people to moral beliefs they might well want to change e.g. that animal suffering doesn't matter), because people want to be consistent. Second, participating in the 80k community could help to counteract destructive social pressure from workplace communities. It remains to see how well these measures work - we'll be keeping a close eye.
Ben