Thinking about going back to earning to give

July 19th, 2017
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I'm wrapping up my AI risk project and at this point I'm thinking like I should probably go back to earning to give:
  • Most of my best altruistic options probably look a lot like what I did the past month, working remotely with varying amounts of self-management. While I suspected I wouldn't like this very much, now I know.

  • While I haven't finished the AI risk project yet, I think I'm pretty likely to conclude something like "I think work here is valuable, but not the very most pressing thing" and I don't think I'm a good fit for this kind of research.

  • I really like programming. When I think about different things I might work on, I keep coming back to opportunities that looked pretty exciting at big tech companies with openings here.

  • I still mostly agree with my 2016 EAG talk.

My main reservation about earning to give continues to be that I think the most important things are mostly constrained by people, not money. But I'm not well suited to be one of those people, I am well suited to earning money, and money is still useful.

(For more background and my constraints, see this earlier post.)

Update 2017-08-17: I'm going back to Google.

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