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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: My bargain with the EA machine, published by Eric Neyman on April 27, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Last summer I was thinking about what I wanted to do after finishing grad school. While I had several career options in the back of my mind, I only had a good sense of two of them (quantitative finance and academia). It struck me that the amount of exploration I had done so far had been woefully inadequate for making a decision about how I’d spend 80,000 hours of my life. Shortly thereafter, I decided that I would take a year off to try various potential careers. I’ll be kicking off this adventure in a month; some things I might try are AI alignment theory, empirical alignment work, philosophy, forecasting, and politics. Sometime in 2023, I plan to make a career decision. When doing so, what will I be optimizing for? The EA answer is that I should pick the career that would allow me to have the most positive impact on the world. This will be part of my calculation, but it won’t be everything. I intrinsically value enjoying my life and career – not just as a means to the end of generating impact, but for its own sake. Many people in EA depart from me here: they see choices that do not maximize impacts as personal mistakes. Imagine a button that, if you press it, would cause you to always take the impact-maximizing action for the rest of your life, even if it entails great personal sacrifice. Many (most?) longtermist EAs I talk to say they would press this button – and I believe them. That’s not true of me; I’m partially aligned with EA values (since impact is an important consideration for me), but not fully aligned. I like to think about this in terms of an elliptical cloud. Each point in the ellipse represents a plausible outcome of my career. The x-coordinate represents the impact I have on the world; the y-coordinate represents how good the career is according to my utility function (what I believe to be my extrapolated volition, to be more precise), which you can think of as combining an altruistic component (to the extent I care about impact) with a selfish component (to the extent that I want to prioritize my own happiness as part of my career choice). (Why an ellipse? Data drawn from a bivariate normal distribution will form an elliptical cloud. This is a simplified model in that vein; most of what I’ll be saying will also be true for other natural shape choices.) Note that this is my personal ellipse; you have your own, and it might be shaped pretty differently from mine. If you would want to press the button in my thought experiment, then your ellipse is probably pretty close to a line. People whose ellipse looks like this are a perfect fit for the EA community. EA is geared toward giving people the resources to maximize their impact, which is exactly what some people are looking for. On the other hand, many EAs deliberately make choices that significantly reduce their impact, and endorse these choices. For wealthy earners-to-give, giving away only 10% (or even only 50%?) of their wealth often constitutes such a choice. For some (but not all) EAs, having kids is such a choice. Such people often have ellipses that are shaped similarly to mine. I love the EA community, but the shape of my ellipse complicates my relationship with it. My “default” career trajectory (i.e., what I probably would have done if not for exposure to the EA community) is being a professor in a non-impactful area; it might be represented by this red point. Pretty good in terms of my values – not so much in terms of impact. EA would rather I do something very different; indeed, according to EA values, the optimal place for me to be is as far to the right as possible. (What is this point that’s all the way to the right? It might be working on AI alignment theory, exhausting myself ev...