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 attitude towards death, published by Richard Ngo on February 25, 2022 on LessWrong.

The philosophy and psychology of death seem weirdly under-discussed - particularly by the wider silicon valley community, given how strongly anti-death many people in it are. This post is an attempt to think through some relevant considerations, primarily focused on my own intuitions and emotions. See also this old blog post - I mostly still agree with the points I made in it, but when thinking about it now I frame things pretty differently.

Fearing death, loving life

Let’s first distinguish two broad types of reasons for wanting to avoid death: fearing death, and loving life. Perhaps these seem like two sides of the same coin - but, psychologically speaking, they feel very distinct to me. The latter was particularly dominant when I was in primary school, when a part of me emerged that was very afraid of death (in a way that wasn’t closely linked to fear of missing out on any particular aspects of life). That part is still with me - but when it comes to the surface, its fear feels viscerally unpleasant, so I learned to suppress it pretty strongly.

Arguments for why death is bad usually focus on positive reasons - living longer allows people to experience more happiness, and more of the other good things in life. These have resonated with me more over time, as I started to think about death on a more intellectual level. However, one difficulty with these arguments is that many parts of me pursue goals in a fairly myopic way which doesn’t easily extrapolate to centuries, millennia, or longer. For example, it’s hard to imagine what career success or social success look like on the scale of millennia - and even when I try, those visions are pretty different from the versions of those concepts that I currently find motivating on a gut level. Extrapolating hedonistic goals is easier in some ways (it’s easy to imagine being happy for a very long time) but harder in other ways (the parts of me which care most about happiness are also the most myopic).

Dissolving fear

In practice, then, most of my motivation for avoiding death in the long term stems from fear of death. Although that fear comes out only rarely, I have a strong heuristic that fear-based motivation should be transmuted to other forms of motivation wherever possible. So what would happen if I talked more to the part that’s scared of death, to try and figure out where it’s coming from? By default, I expect it’d be uncooperative - it wants to continue being scared of death, to make sure that I act appropriately (e.g. that I stay ambitious). Can I assure it that I’ll still try hard to avoid death if it becomes less scared? One source of assurance is if I’m very excited about a very long life - which I am, because the future could be amazing. Another comes from the altruistic part of me, whose primary focus is increasing the probability that the future will in fact be amazing.

Since I believe that we face significant existential risk this century, working to make humanity’s future go well overlaps heavily with working to make my own future go well. I think this broad argument (along with being in communities which reward longtermist altruism) has helped make the part of me that’s scared of death more quiescent.

Indeed, probably my main concern with my current attitude towards death is actually that I’m not scared enough about existential risk - I think that, if my emotions better matched my credences, that’d help motivate me (especially to pursue particularly unusual or ambitious interventions). This doesn’t seem like a crucial priority, though, since my excitement- and interest-based motivations have been working fairly well so far (modulo some other productivity gaps which seem pretty orthogonal).

Generalising to others

So far I’...

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: What psychological traits predict interest in effective altruism?, published by Lucius Caviola on February 25, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

People react differently when encountering effective altruism for the first time. Some immediately find the ideas appealing and want to learn more, whereas others are much less enthusiastic about them. We suspect that people who immediately find the ideas appealing are more likely to become highly engaged EAs. Let’s call these people proto-EAs. What makes someone a proto-EA?

In a series of surveys, we studied the moral psychological factors that predict immediate interest in effective altruism. We found that the E (“effectiveness-focus”) and the A (“expansive altruism”) are psychologically distinct factors. Both are required to make someone a proto-EA. But only a few people score highly on both. We hope that a deeper understanding of the psychology of proto-EAs can prove practically useful for the community.

Previous research

In previous research, we and others have found that most people’s intuitions don’t align with effective altruism. For example, most people donate to emotionally appealing charities even if they know that other charities do more good. In part, this is explained by motivations that aren’t aligned with effective altruism. And while it may be almost impossible to change people’s moral motivations (at least not with brief and cheap interventions), it turns out that there are wide individual differences in people’s proto-EA inclinations. So instead of trying to change the preferences of people in general, it may be more promising to target the subset of the population that is especially positively disposed toward effective altruism.

A potentially relevant pre-existing psychological measure is the Oxford Utilitarianism Scale (OUS, Kahane et al., 2018). This scale has two factors: impartial beneficence (complete impartiality and extreme self-sacrifice for the greater good) and instrumental harm (permissive attitude towards active harm for the greater good). However, we believe that these measures aren’t ideal to measure proto-EA inclinations. First, effective altruism doesn’t require an extreme level of self-sacrifice (e.g., giving away almost everything including your kidney) or complete impartiality (e.g., valuing distant people equally as your loved ones). A moderate form of altruism (e.g., giving away 10% of your income or choosing an impactful career you enjoy) combined with an expanded moral circle (e.g., prioritizing your loved ones but also taking distant others into consideration) are sufficient and likely more psychologically sustainable.

Second, effective altruism doesn’t necessarily require instrumental harm (e.g., actively killing one person to save five people). Instead it simply requires a focus on effectiveness and the willingness to make the trade-offs required to prioritize the more effective helpful option over the less effective helpful option.

Based on these considerations, our goal was to develop a new scale that captures the moral psychological tendencies that predict relevant EA outcome measures (see below). Note that we did not attempt to capture all psychological factors that predict proto-EA inclinations but only the most relevant moral attitudes. Further, please note that our scales are not meant to define effective altruism conceptually or philosophically, but rather to capture the psychological tendencies that explain the variance in finding effective altruism appealing and interesting.

We ran a series of ten studies. Here we report the most relevant findings. More details about our studies including the study materials can be found in our Supplementary Materials.

Scale development

We started by devising a long list of “items” (i.e., statements that survey takers could indicate...

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: Are there effective ways to help Ukrainians right now?, published by Manuel Allgaier on February 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

It happened, Russia has now launched a full-scale attack on Ukraine. This might be the beginning of a major war in Europe, possibly also beyond Ukraine. I feel like a lot of people want to help, but how? This cause is certainly not neglected, but I wonder if there might still be any effective interventions to help Ukrainians. Curious to hear your thoughts, please add ideas and upvote those you find worth investigating more. (Let me know if this is already being discussed elsewhere, I'd be happy to join the discussion there)

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

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: The Big Picture Of Alignment (Talk Part 2), published by johnswentworth on February 25, 2022 on The AI Alignment Forum.

I recently gave a two-part talk on the big picture of alignment, as I see it. The talk is not-at-all polished, but contains a lot of stuff for which I don't currently know of any good writeup. Linkpost for the first part is here; this linkpost is for the second part.

Compared to the first part, the second part has less material which has not been written up already, although it does do a better job tying it all into the bigger picture than any already-written source. I will link to relevant posts in the outline below.

Major pieces in part two:

Programs as a compressed representation for large (potentially infinite) probabilistic causal models with symmetry

Potentially allows models of worlds larger than the data structure representing the model, including models of worlds in which the model itself is embedded.

Can't brute-force evaluate the whole model; must be a lazy data structure with efficient methods for inference

The Pointers Problem: the inputs to human values are latent variables in humans' world models

This is IMO the single most important barrier to alignment

Other aspects of the "type signature of human values" problem (just a quick list of things which I'm not really the right person to talk about)

Abstraction (a.k.a. ontology identification)

Three roughly-equivalent models of natural abstraction

Summary (around 1:30:00 in video)

I ended up rushing a bit on the earlier parts, in order to go into detail on abstraction. That was optimal for the group I was presenting to at the time I presented, but probably not for most people reading this. Sorry.

Here's the video:

Again, big thanks to Rob Miles for editing! (Note that the video had some issues - don't worry, the part where the camera goes bonkers and adjusts the brightness up and down repeatedly does not go on for very long.) The video includes some good questions and discussion from Adam Shimi, Alex Flint, and Rob Miles.

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

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: How be productive before your baby turns one, published by ruthgrace on February 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Summary: It's really hard and I'm not sure. This is a work in progress.

It's important to me to feel centered in my identity and self-worth outside of being a parent, by making regular progress on my personal growth and career goals. Progress is slow, and some projects I might work on only a couple times a month, but that's enough for me to feel okay. Obviously it's totally fine for parents to NOT want to work at all so that they can focus on young kids, and it's also okay to outsource a lot of your parenting and focus on your impact full time. During my maternity leaves, I have been experimenting with something in between, and this post summarizes my learnings.

I hope that this post will:

start a discussion that will generate more stories and tips from people with different arrangements

help answer the question about how having kids affects your impact from people who don't have kids (e.g. example 1, example 2, example 3[1]). I know that Elon Musk has six kids and still gets a lot done, but I don't see a lot of perspectives from people who are breastfeeding their child or otherwise responsible for the night time wake-ups, which makes a HUGE difference in quality of life due to prolonged suboptimal sleep. It's not uncommon for people in this role (usually the mom) to feel that the first year of their child's life is the most challenging, while other parents find toddlerhood more challenging.

generate some advice for me! After my maternity leave is over, I go back to my day job, and feel totally underwater until my baby turns one and sleeps through the night consistently enough that I'M sleeping through the night. If you feel like you've figured out how to thrive – not just survive – at a "real job" (whatever that means to you) with a baby at home, please leave a comment. Maybe it's just not possible to do super well with the type or the amount of work I'm trying to do.

My kids are 8 months, and almost 3 years. I work in Silicon Valley as an software engineer, and have a 5 month maternity leave.[2] I look forward to leave as a time when I can do projects without having to worry about my day job. "Working on projects while on maternity leave" is completely different from any other job situation I've had, with rather extreme requirements on scope, schedule, and flexibility (discussed in depth below). As mentioned above, I haven't yet figured out how to do well at my regular job until after baby turns one.

For my first maternity leave, I worked ~10 hours a week as a manufacturing engineer, toward my goal of eventually being the CTO of an organization that does good (most top rated charities on GiveWell have to do with a physical good, e.g. bednets). This job was 80% project management and 20% technical stuff like CAD drawings, prototyping, and testing. For my second maternity leave, I interned with the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco, doing a research project where we asked homeless people about their experience applying for subsidized housing, so we could advocate for policy improvements. This job involved interviewing service providers, followed by facilitating group listening sessions (with baby in tow), and ended with data analysis and writing. I had parents staying with us to help for the first 1-2 months, while I was recovering from my c-sections.

My husband and I both took the first month off work, and then he waited until I finished my maternity leave before taking the rest of his leave. He had 14-16 weeks in total, depending on the job. While I'm on leave, my husband often takes the kids to the park after work, to give me a chance to nap, shower, or get stuff done.

I'd like to have more kids, once we find our new balance since hav...

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: Covid 2/24/22: The Next War, published by Zvi on February 24, 2022 on LessWrong.

Russia has invaded Ukraine with the stated goal of 'demilitarization and denazification.'

On its face, this has nothing to do with Covid. The invasion may reflect a perception, either on the part of Putin or otherwise, from our Covid-19 response or otherwise, that the West has shown itself incapable of dealing with real world physical problems, and therefore feeling he has a free hand. It also may have shown Putin and/or others that one can use justifications that are obvious and blatant nonsense lies with impunity. Those facts also may have little or nothing to do with it. We do not know.

I do not feel qualified at this time to comment further beyond an urgent call to build as many state of the art nuclear power plants as we can as quickly as possible, so I’ll be looking at other sources and watching the BBC News like everyone else to try and get a handle on the war. At least for now I’d only be adding noise.

Under such conditions, and with Omicron in decline and relatively mild, it may seem foolish to focus on Covid-19. Ignoring other events would be a mistake, but ignoring Covid-19 would also be a mistake. Covid-19 prevention efforts continue to disrupt our lives, and as events in Canada have shown us such events can pose long term existential threats to our freedom. Justin Trudeau has ended his emergency decree, but the groundwork remains laid for next time. There is danger that a variety of pandemic measures might not only continue for far too long but even become permanent.

As for the actual case and death counts? Sure, worth tracking those too.

Executive Summary

Russia invades Ukraine.

Canada freezes bank accounts of those they dislike without due process.

Covid cases continue to decline.

Let’s run the numbers.

The Numbers

Predictions

Prediction from last week: 555k cases (-35%) and 11,400 deaths (-25%).

Results: 485k cases (-40%) and 13,075 deaths (-14%).

Prediction for next week: 340k cases (-30%) and 10,460 deaths (-20%).

I forgot about Presidents Day, which explains cases dropping somewhat more than I expected, so I presume true case counts were closer to the path that I expected.

That only makes the small decline in deaths more puzzling. There are echoes of this in the past, where death counts declined less rapidly than expected at the tail end of a wave, presumably because of a long tail of how long it takes some patients to die and/or officials to register some of the deaths. It is not plausible that death rates are suddenly much higher, so such lags are the only remaining explanation. I do still expect the decline to accelerate from here, but I will temper such expectations.

Given the declines continue to be broad-based across all regions, I don’t expect them to slow much – the smaller decline here mostly represents me adjusting for the holiday.

Deaths

Cases

Physical World Modeling

The BA.2 variant of Omicron is going to take over from the BA.1 variant. Should we be worried?

As far as I can tell, no.

It does mean rate of spread will rise somewhat, but if it was enough to put us back into a nightmare it would not have taken this long.

BA.2 infections after BA.1 cases exist but are rare. Once again, it looks like BA.2 will not change the game.

Study puts the India death toll in the 3.2mm-3.7mm range.

Sanofi vaccine tests at 100% effective against severe disease. FDA approval will be tricky and it is not clear another vaccine matters at this stage, but still good news.

CDC data seems to contradict itself. The difference does not much matter for what we should do, but it is still rather a large mistake to be making and risks leading to a lot of confusion.

Zeynep thread on Long Flu cases from the 1919 pandemic. Such problems are nothing new and have been underplayed for a long ...

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: Do, Then Think, published by George on February 23, 2022 on LessWrong.

If there’s one lesson that I learned from almost every single smart person I know, it’s:

The unreasonable effectiveness of doing, then thinking; vs thinking too much before doing

This is not something I’ve been able to convince anyone of, at least not with a rational argument. I might tell people things like:

Stop ruminating about changing jobs, make accounts at x/y/z today, and fill them in minimally... yes, like, in 20 minutes, yes, it’s fine if they are not perfect. Then apply to 100 jobs, no, no, don’t spend 1 hour ruminating over each one, just write a 5-minute intention letter, you’ll have like a 5% reply rate anyway, just focus on the ones that send interview... I don’t mean like that, don’t ruminate for hours about every interview!

Or

Yeah, it’s a super complex piece of kit you need to build. But like, you’ve given me a use-case, you explained one of its components, just write a test and see where it goes. Yeah, I understand the test will fail, I understand it won’t even compile, whatever, just write it. Or if you don’t want to do that write the component you described to me, it can be broken, doesn’t matter. Or heck, find a similar~ish project and just copy-paste it and start cutting and remaking. Doesn’t matter that you’re starting from a Reddit clone and you want to build genetics testing CRM, it can still serve as a starting-off point.

Or

Yeap, getting into a new field is hard, but whatever, fake it til you make it. Buy the right books, follow the right people on Twitter, read the right blogs, build something that seems like it suits that field. Yes, the books will be wrong, you’ll be following dumb people that every insider actually derides, the blogs will be off-topic, you’ll build something shamefully bad. Doesn’t matter, just do it.

And I can’t for the life of me convince people about doing these things because they seem “rash”... and I keep thinking (therefore I know I exist): “what the fuck are they thinking” (therefore I know they exist as a separate entity), “why is this rash, you’re not trying to spear-hunt a fucking bear, you're writing some code in the privacy of your own home, the place you masturbate in, surely the shame of failing miserably can’t be that bad”.

Anyway, I’m not going to try to convince anyone to do then think. I can’t prove nor even properly conceptualize why you should start doing that. But I want to try and at least think about a few reasons why doing before thinking, or at least doing something that seems like doing before thinking, is so unreasonably ineffective.

Something Something Subconscious Immersion

You all know the drill here.

Brilliant scientist thinks a lot about a problem, gathers all the data that doesn’t make sense and all the data that already makes sense and needs to keep making sense, struggles for a few days and comes up with nothing... then, he wakes up from a dream drooling inspiration, runs to his notebook in a trance and figures out relativity/microscopy/the periodic table/DNA structure.

If we assume that, at any given time, a large part of brain networks are inactive or below the state of conscious control, then it’s only a short inference away that the patterns of thought that’d bring them online are best triggered by actually doing the tasks and letting said networks “figure out” that they need to to help and how.

Examples of this that everyone’s noticed are learning to ride a bike, row, climb, surf, etc. Complex motor skills are learned with minimal conscious input, the conscious mind just decided to get on the bike as best it can, it receives instructions like “push with your leg in a sort of rotation motion”... and 1 hour later the network that can actually handle bike riding has learned how to do it. It’s important to note tha...

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: Important, actionable research questions for the most important century, published by Holden Karnofsky on February 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Intro

To a significant degree, I see progress on the cause I consider highest-priority (essentially, making the best of the most important century) as bottlenecked by high-quality research.

There are a number of questions such that well-argued, best-guess answers could help us get a lot more done (including productively spending a lot more money) to improve humanity’s prospects. Examples would be “How hard should we expect the AI alignment problem to be?” and “What will be the first transformative application of AI?” - more below.

Unfortunately, I consider most of these questions extremely hard to investigate productively. They’re vague, open-ended, and generally intimidating. I don’t think they are for everyone - but I think that people with the ability to make progress on them should seriously consider working on them.

In particular, I hope with this post to dispel what I see as a few misconceptions common in the EA community:

Misconception 1: there are plenty of EAs thinking about cerebral topics like these, what we need is more [money/power/connections at AI labs/connections in government/communications/something else].

I think there are very few people making focused attempts at progress on the below questions. Many institutions that are widely believed to be interested in these questions have constraints, cultures and/or styles that I think make it impractical to tackle the most important versions of them, and I’d overall estimate that there are fewer than 20 people employed by all multi-person organizations combined1 who are focused full-time on answering questions like these.

Until we see more progress, I expect that we will continue to have relatively few tangible, well-targeted ways to deploy money/power/politicking/communications/whatever towards improving the odds of transformative AI going well. (I do think it’s valuable to build up such things anyway, in the hopes that we’ll have more strategic clarity later on. But we really need that strategic clarity!)

Misconception 2: questions about AI alignment are only for people with serious backgrounds in AI and/or AI alignment. I think the field of AI alignment - especially on the theory side - is incredibly nascent right now. I think a highly talented, dedicated generalist could become one of the world’s 25 most broadly knowledgeable people on the subject (in the sense of understanding a number of different agendas and arguments that are out there, rather than focusing on one particular line of research), from a standing start (no background in AI, AI alignment or computer science), within a year.2

Misconception 3: the best thing for a creative, brilliant person to think about is “unknown unknowns,” “Cause X” and/or “crucial considerations” that address topics that aren’t remotely on anyone’s radar today. I think the questions I’ll be listing below are at least as interesting and challenging as hunting for such things, and more important in expectation.

Below, I will:

List a number of (IMO) important, actionable research questions, with notes on how they could be important. In the main body of the piece, I give a high-level summary. Appendix 1 gives more detail on each, including:

A bit more on how progress on the question could affect key decision-makers’ actions and lead to improved odds of transformative AI going well.

A concrete example or two of how I imagine starting to make progress on the question. This is not meant to imply that the strategy I outline is the best one - just to help people who have trouble thinking about “what it would even mean to work on this question” to visualize one example. In many cases, I think it could be better to follow...

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: Russia has Invaded Ukraine, published by lsusr on February 24, 2022 on LessWrong.

I wrote this quickly. It may contain errors. Please correct them in the comments after reading this post's special commenting guidelines.

You should ignore the news unless it's of historic import. Russia's invasion of Ukraine constitutes an event of historic import.

Interstate conflicts are inherently political. Politics is a delicate topic on Less Wrong because political topics tend to trigger tribal impulses. Arguments-as-soldiers are symbiotic with soldiers-as-arguments.

I'm writing about this topic because it's at the intersection of two topics dear to my heart: ① responding to rare events ② operating in a hostile informatic environment.

These are our players (in descending order of importance):

Russia (including its ally Belarus)

Ukraine

European Union + Britain

United States

China

China

China doesn't care what happens to Ukraine. China primarily cares about preserving its trade relationships with Russia and the West. China would prefer not to impose sanctions on Russia because sanctions are expensive.

The United States

The United States prefers that Ukraine remain out of Russian hands, but the United States cares more about the rise of China than Russia' fading empire. The United States just pulled out of Afghanistan. The United States does not want to get bogged down in another land war in Eurasia.

The United States has provided something around $2 billion in military aid to Ukraine since 2014. A couple billion dollars isn't nothing, but it's insignificant compared to Russian might.

The United States is not committed to defending Ukraine the way it is committed to defending Taiwan, Japan and NATO members. The United States does not plan to use its own troops to defend Ukraine.

The European Union + Britain

The European Union and Britain are allied with the United States. They would prefer Ukraine to stay out of Russian control but don't care enough to deploy their own troops in combat roles against Russia.

Thus, the European Union's (and Britain's) primary option is sanctions. But the European Union and its allies have already been imposing sanctions on Russia for its actions in Crimea since 2014. Putin has already demonstrated that this level of sanctions will not stop his actions in Ukraine.

Europe (especially Germany) is dependent on energy imports from Russia. Europe ramping up sanctions against Russia would damage the European economy and industry in the short term.

Too little, too late. The European Union does not have the will to stop Russia. Britain, alone, is too weak to act without the European Union. (Except—possibly—by threatening a nuclear attack on Moscow, which they are not going to do to protect a non-NATO state.)

I am making no claims to whether the European Union and Britain should or should not stop Russia from invading Ukraine. It is none of my business. I'm just saying that if you live in Ukraine then you should not count on much more support from the EU than from the US.

Ukraine

The Ukrainian government will fight a total war to defend its sovereignty. It has issued an emergency order allowing its people to buy firearms (they were not, previously, legal to own) but it has not trained its people in guerrilla warfare.

Russia

Putin is committed to invading Ukraine.

The War

There is probably going to be a war. Ukraine is probably going to lose. The question is how much, how quickly and on what terms.

Eastern Ukraine is a flat plain contiguous with Russia. If you just look at troop counts then Ukraine would seem to have a chance against Russia. But Russia has superiority of aircraft and heavy weapons. Russia will conquer Eastern Ukraine. The Russian Armed Forces is among the three most capable militaries in the world. The Ukrainian military isn't.

If you live in U...

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: Trading time in an EA relationship, published by rosehadshar on February 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Thanks to Stephanie Hall, Jeff Kaufman and Julia Wise for comments, and especially to my partner.

I think it’s common in relationships for one person’s work to be deemed more important than the other person’s. This might be because:

One person earns more than the other.

One person works longer hours than the other.

One person’s work is more stressful than the other’s.

One person cares more about their work than the other person does (or alternatively, the other person cares more about non-work things).

The people in question were socialised differently, and live in a society where there are different social expectations and pressures on people with different characteristics.

In the context of EA relationships, I think there’s often another factor at play:

One person’s work is more impactful than the other’s.

All of the above factors apply to my relationship, but it’s the part about impact that feels most loaded and tricky to navigate when it comes to trading time with my partner. Who should do the washing up? How late should we each work? When should we go on holiday? All of this gets more complicated if you think that one person’s work time is more impactful than the other’s.

In this post I want to offer a few ways of thinking about these time trading decisions that I’ve found helpful.

First, is it really more impactful?

Couples get into shared stories. It’s worth checking whether the story you collectively have that one person’s work is more impactful than the other’s work is actually true.

Some reminders:

Impact is extremely uncertain. We don’t know how actions now will influence the distant future.

Careers are long. One person might be doing more impactful work now, but in ten years it could be the other way around.

Beware self-fulfilling prophecies. If you both consistently prioritise one person’s career, then it’s likely that that career will end up going better than the other one.

In my case, while I do think there are worlds where my work ends up being more important than my partner’s work, I think that almost all funders would pay quite a lot more for the next decade of his career than the next decade of mine. For one thing, I hope to spend a significant part of the next decade looking after children rather than working formally, so even if I thought that hour per hour our work was similarly impactful (which I don’t), my partner’s work would still be worth a lot more as there will be a lot more of it.

Options if one person’s work is more impactful

If one person’s work is more impactful than the other’s, what does that mean when it comes to trading time with each other?

I want to offer two extremes here.

At one extreme, you might bet hard on the more impactful career, and consistently act as if one person’s time is much more valuable than the other’s. This might mean things like:

One person does all of the domestic labour and life admin.[1]

In relationship decisions which affect the more impactful person’s productivity, their votes get greater weight.

On the other extreme, you might decide that you don’t want considerations like this to operate in your relationship, and you want to treat each other’s time as equally valuable, irrespective of your actual opinions about the work you each do. This might mean equal shares of domestic labour, and equal votes in relationship decisions, without taking into consideration the likely impact of these things outside of the relationship.

Neither of these extremes feel great to me:

From experience, heavily prioritising my partner over me is bad for my self-esteem and my mood, makes my partner feel guilty, and leads to resentment and conflict.

It feels painful and inefficient to spend time that could be convert...