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gwillen comments on Responses to questions on donating to 80k, GWWC, EAA and LYCS - Less Wrong Discussion

27 Post author: wdmacaskill 20 November 2012 10:41PM

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Comment author: gwillen 22 November 2012 07:54:30PM 6 points [-]

I don't know that that's the whole story.

For example, during the time I worked at Google, I observed that my coworkers' values, including those of people I otherwise respected, were drifting towards the values of the organization (or the value of loyalty toward the organization). This was part of the reason I left. I suspect this kind of value drift happens to most people in any organization or job. It's hard not to absorb the values you spend most of your time around, let alone the values that pay your salary.

So this is a case where I anticipated that my values were likely to drift, in a way incompatible with my current values, and removed myself from a situation I thought likely to cause that drift. (Mind you there were plenty of other reasons.)

Comment author: RichardKennaway 23 November 2012 12:02:49PM 7 points [-]

So this is a case where I anticipated that my values were likely to drift, in a way incompatible with my current values, and removed myself from a situation I thought likely to cause that drift. (Mind you there were plenty of other reasons.)

Not to say that you weren't right to do that, but I notice that the religious will sometimes avoid consorting with the non-religious for the same reason.

Faced with an experience that one foresees being changed by, how should one decide whether to go ahead with it? Given several sets of values, such that from the standpoint of any of them all the others look worse, how to decide which to adopt?