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The Good Life Quantified

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Cross-posted, as always, from Putanumonit. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rob Wiblin writes at 80,000 Hours, a site for systematically thinking about how to have a positive impact for the world through your career. The site tends to an analytical approach, with explicit models for comparing global priorities on three axes of impact or planning your career with an explore/exploit structure. It’s a lot like Putanumonit for people who care about improving the world instead of just about, uhh, getting laid and buying soap. This summer Rob recorded a podcast with Russ Roberts of EconTalk, and even though Russ is sympathetic to the Effective Altruism project, he is less sympathetic to 80,000 Hours’ approach of putting numbers on improving the world. He starts by discussing some failures of applying the systematic/quantitative approach to philanthropy, such as deworming charity recommendations that were based on an RCT that has since been called into question. He then expresses a broader skepticism of the applicability of the quantitative approach to life in general: Russ: In principle, that all sounds great. But, I don’t really actually think it’s the right way to think about how to live your life, or how to live your career. So, let me try to suggest some things I find troubling about it. So, you mentioned a whole bunch of factors. They’re all reasonable. Any one of them is extremely reasonable. You should tackle an important problem. You should tackle a problem that people have not successfully solved, that you might have a chance of improving, that you might have an impact. It’s a variation really of expected value theory to me. […] So, when I think about that enormous range of trade-offs within economics, and then I think about, ‘Oh, but I didn’t have to be an economist. I could have been, say, an English professor,’ would you conclude that I did the right thing? I happen to like economics now, but at the time I

x The Good Life Quantified — LessWrong Rationality World Optimization Frontpage 38 The Good Life Quantified by Jacob Falkovich 11th Dec 2020 6 min read 3 38 Cross-posted, as always, from Putanumonit . Rob Wiblin writes at 80,000 Hours , a site for systematically thinking about how to have a positive impact for the world through your career. The site tends to an analytical approach, with explicit models for comparing global priorities on three axes of impact or planning your career with an explore/exploit structure . It’s a lot like Putanumonit for people who care about improving the world inst

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