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 Model Of EA Burnout, published by LoganStrohl on January 25, 2023 on LessWrong.

(Probably somebody else has said most of this. But I personally haven't read it, and felt like writing it down myself, so here we go.)

I think that EA burnout usually results from prolonged dedication to satisfying the values you think you should have, while neglecting the values you actually have.

Setting aside for the moment what “values” are and what it means to “actually” have one, suppose that I actually value these things (among others):

True Values

Abundance

Power

Novelty

Social Harmony

Beauty

Growth

Comfort

The Wellbeing Of Others

Excitement

Personal Longevity

Accuracy

One day I learn about “global catastrophic risk”: Perhaps we’ll all die in a nuclear war, or an AI apocalypse, or a bioengineered global pandemic, and perhaps one of these things will happen quite soon.

I recognize that GCR is a direct threat to The Wellbeing Of Others and to Personal Longevity, and as I do, I get scared. I get scared in a way I have never been scared before, because I’ve never before taken seriously the possibility that everyone might die, leaving nobody to continue the species or even to remember that we ever existed—and because this new perspective on the future of humanity has caused my own personal mortality to hit me harder than the lingering perspective of my Christian upbringing ever allowed. For the first time in my life, I’m really aware that I, and everyone I will ever care about, may die.

My fear has me very focused on just two of my values: The Wellbeing Of Others and Personal Longevity. But as I read, think, and process, I realize that pretty much regardless of what my other values might be, they cannot possibly be satisfied if the entire species—or the planet, or the lightcone—is destroyed.

[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.]

So I reason that a new life strategy is called for.

Over time, under the influence of my “Accuracy” value as well as my “Social Harmony” value (since I’m now surrounded by people who are thinking about this stuff), I come to believe that I should value the following:

Should Values

Impact

Calibration

Openness

Collaboration

Empiricism

The Wellbeing Of Others

Personal Longevity

(The values on this new list with an asterisk beside them have a correlate on the original list (impactpower, collaborationsocial harmony, empiricismaccuracy), but these new values are routed through The New Strategy, and are not necessarily plugged into their correlates from the first list.)

Over a couple of years, I change my career, my friend group, and my hobbies to reflect my new values. I spend as little time as possible on Things That Don’t Matter, because now I care about Impact, and designing computer games has very little Impact since it takes a lot of time and definitely doesn’t save the world (even though it’s pretty good on novelty, beauty, growth, and excitement).

Ok, so let’s talk now about what “values” are.

I think that in humans at least, values are drives to action. They are things that motivate a person to choose one possible action over another. If I value loyalty over honesty, I’ll readily lie to help my friend save face; if I value both about equally, I may be a little paralyzed in some situations while I consult the overall balance of my whole value system and try to figure out what to do. When I go for a hike with my field kit of watercolor paints, I tend to feel really good about that decision as I make it, as I hike and paint, and also as I look back on the experienc...