5/21/2023 0 Comments How do you choose what work to do?Whether you're young and just starting your working life, or later in life and deciding if you should start a new line of work, it's important to take the decision very seriously and think about it in depth. Just picking the first line of work you think of and leaping into it can cause all sorts of long-lasting problems that can be solved with better preparation.
Live for yourself Do work you enjoy. I don't mean enjoy the money you get at the end of it or the sum total of all the pros and cons - I mean do you enjoy the actual work? If you do work you don't actually enjoy doing you'll find yourself in the archetypal mind-numbing life where every day you just want the clock to run out, you find excuses to avoid the work or pass it off or goof off to end the boredom, and then when you're free you have to spend your free time in recovery from the misery of the day. It's not uncommon for someone to end up in an unending cycle of being miserable at work and pursuing empty gratification to recover with their free time. It's a death march that will take you all the way to being old, worn out and having achieved nothing with your work. Remember that your work will typically take up nearly half of your waking hours for the healthiest years of your life. Do you want to commit so much of your life to something that makes you unhappy? Do work that you can do well. It's important not to take jobs where you lack the skill to do it well. This ties in with enjoying the work, as trying to do a job that is much too difficult for your skill level will result in not enjoying it very much unless you are able to take your own pace in the job (very rare) or spend a lot of your free time studying to catch up (I wont say this is fundamentally bad, but you need to account for the extra time spent in deciding if the income is good enough.) Think about the skills you currently have and enjoy and look for jobs that match them well, or else you will set yourself up for problems even if you can convince someone you're more skilled than you are. Do work that's compatible with your life goals. If you genuinely enjoy a job that requires you to work 80 hours a week, then you go ahead and do it. If you think it's worth the investment you can make doing the job into the achievement of your life. If you have other goals in life, however, it's important to think seriously about whether they're compatible with a line of work before committing to it. What do you want to create in the world? Do you want to invent things or write books or raise children or create any of the other wonderful things that are possible with your life? Can you do these things while doing the job? If not, does the job at least help you learn relevant skills to your goals? Doing good in the world We all live far better lives thanks to the role of society and humanity in the world than if we were isolated and unable to trade and work with other people. So it makes sense to want to make the world even better, and your work is a massive part of your life so it’s ideal if your work can do this. There are at least two good ways of looking at this. Doing work that makes a difference. This isn’t just working for charities. One problem with choosing to work with charities is that a lot of charity work is not very highly skilled so if you have aspirations to being highly skilled you might be better looking at the alternatives. There are many other roles that help make the world a better such as like researchers, energy or environmental engineering, human rights or environmental law, doctors, police officers, full-time mothers or farmers. Doing work that pays very well, and using the earnings to make a difference. Lawyers, investment bankers, CEOs and other potentially extremely well paid jobs can make the world a better place. But even when they don’t really make the world better in any way they can still earn a lot of money which they can put towards good causes. As long as the work doesn’t actively make the world worse then this can even do more good than directly doing work that makes a difference. It also has the benefit that you can target the donations to the most effective causes, giving you flexibility and allowing you to choose each time you donate which cause will do the most good for the amount of money you put into it. Note that I don’t advocate self-sacrifice. You shouldn’t throw all of your disposable income into charities or do work that makes a big difference which you don’t like. Your life is important too; growing and being happy is important. Even if you consider the good you do for the world more important than your happiness (which you shouldn’t but I wont try to convince you of that here) then reinvesting in yourself over time allows you to make the world better faster in the future by being able to produce more and have more impact. Optimal income It’s easy to overlook that sometimes a very well paid job comes with significant costs. For example it may require commuting, living in an expensive city or country, maintaining an expensive lifestyle, committing an excessive amount of your time or tolerating an unreasonable level of stress. A job with a six digit income can be much less attractive when you take all this into account. What matters more than your income is your effective buying power: how much income you have left after paying all the essential living costs to get that income, then adjusted by how much other things will cost in the city and/or country you need to live in for the work. Entrenched careers It's important to be wary of the kind of over-invested career which can be awkward to leave. Jobs that rely very much on parochial skills, maintaining relationships, or requiring approval from an authority can leave you in a position where if you leave the job you have very little comparable prospects and might have to start from the bottom again. This is especially problematic if you find out during the career that there’s something bad about it or find that you don’t enjoy it any more, then you can be stuck either being unhappy with your work or leaving and losing a lot of income potential. If you have dependencies such as family or financial commitments like property you may not be able to support these any more if you then choose a much lower income. I think academics, career politicians, and influencers all run this risk when they choose their work. If you are determined to take this risk it’s important to be self-aware about it and plan ahead for the eventuality that you may want to leave the career behind some day. Work which depends predominantly on transferable skills like programming, mathematics, communication skills, engineering or many others is less subject to this risk. A closing question There’s another question that accompanies this subject: Which cause is a good one? What is a good impact to have? That’s not a question I want to go into here, but it’s important that you seriously think about it and work out your own answer before committing a large part of your life to it. Categories:
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4/23/2023 0 Comments How should you take advice online?It's impractically hard to be great at anything without being able to learn from others. Learning from people you meet in person can be great, but it's not a viable option for everyone and can still be very limited if you aren't born in the right place to meet the right people. The best living people to learn from are few and far between; without a lot of luck, they won’t normally be a part of your personal life.
One of the great things about the internet is being able to communicate with anyone in the world. Anyone who has access to very cheap and accessible technology (at least in the context of the last few decades) can do this. Even someone who is earning very little can achieve this and use it to improve their knowledge and start becoming much more successful. It's a great shame that many low-income people don't appreciate this, which is part of why they stay low-income. (Knowing English is a massive boon in this regard, but for people who start with other languages it's not very difficult to find places to start learning English online.) The difficulty comes in knowing who to talk to and how. The advice, suggestions, claims, explanations, and criticism of people who only know you through text on a screen require skill to manage productively. There are a few big questions that you need to ask when asking for advice online. Suppose hypothetically you have a problem you want to solve, a goal you want to achieve, or a skill you want to learn (I will broadly refer to this as "the problem"). You should then ask:
Who should I ask? Asking just anyone about the problem is going to cause problems. Lots of people won’t know anything about it but might think they do. In an arbitrary open discussion, you have a reasonable high chance of dealing with trolls, mean people, ignorant people, and dishonest people. It's worth asking yourself what kind of people you want to talk to about the problem. There are countless forums, mailing lists, and discussion groups out there that you could theoretically ask for advice from. It's important to be wary of bias when deciding where to discuss the problem. It's important to focus your query to people who might have relevant knowledge but if the people you ask live in an echo chamber, they might have big blind spots in their knowledge and could lead you to make the same mistakes. It's hard to detect this in the people that are discussing; the place to look for this problem is in the moderation policies of the group you choose to discuss in. If the group suppresses honest dissent or unpopular ideas, they are indicating that they operate as an echo chamber. Look out for moderators that arbitrarily ban or suspend people because of downvotes, dislikes, or other metrics of negative judgement that contain no explanation of what is wrong. Places like this should be treated with caution. It may be impossible to find a place to discuss the problem that is both open and honest, and also contains the critical knowledge that you are seeking. In this situation you might want to choose two (or maybe even more) places to discuss the problem. E.g. you could have one place that includes people with the knowledge you are pursuing (a specialist forum like a place with lots of skilled programmers), and another place that contains people willing to discuss openly and not suppress dissent (a more open and general discussion group) so you can check ideas across groups and look for blind spots and echo chamber indicators. There are also lots of potential cultural differences when you talk to people online. Even people who know English like me might be using a different dialect of English to you (for a common example I use British English rather than American English), or just not use clear grammar. There are cultural differences and expectations which might be different with people you meet online, such as what someone considers "polite". People you talk to might have particular social, political, or philosophical agendas which change how they interpret the problem and how they interpret your explanations. These don't necessarily make a discussion website a bad choice, but it's important to be aware of these possible problems. One general recommendation I have for serious discussion of any moral subject, and especially for anything related to epistemology, is the Critical Fallibilism forum run by the great philosopher Elliot Temple. https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/ What context is relevant? When you've decided which people to talk to, it's important to think about context. There are lots of things that you might be used to people you know in person being able to work out from inexplicit sources, so you might not automatically think to mention things like appearance, health, age, body language, historical behaviour, and other cues. For a simple practical example, consider shoes. When you buy shoes there are tons of parameters which you consider but might not think about consciously, like job/activity/foot size/sex/fashion preference/foot health/budget. It's important when discussing with people who don't know you personally that you identify these parameters so you can give the relevant context. Even people who know you personally (as in face to face) can easily overlook important parameters, so people who don't have that information can make much bigger false assumptions. If you're not sure what context is important, then explaining what the goal behind solving your problem might help people guess at relevant context to the problem. What do I do if I disagree? If you get advice from someone (whether online or not) that you disagree with: Don't do it! It's worth discussing the subject with them if you can. If they choose to stop talking about it (this happens a lot in online discussions) you might end up with a lot of questions and gaps in their explanations which you don't understand. You can progress on this by looking into those gaps more and trying to understand for yourself what they were saying, and perhaps by starting more discussions to fill in those gaps in your understanding if you can't work it out yourself. If you have a "feeling" of disagreement, like "something isn't right" or "I don't buy it", that's a hint that some unstated premise of yours is disagreeing with the advice. It may be worth thinking more about the context, as the advice may suggest something that doesn't make sense in your context but the person giving the advice doesn't know about that bit of context. There may be some sort of underlying moral conflict; maybe the person giving advice thinks that it's okay to pressure others to comply (a very common problem) and you don't, but it's an insidious kind of pressure (like gaslighting or other manipulations) and you haven't worked out the words to express it yet. Even if you don't know the words to explain it yet; it's worth working out why you disagree so you can put it into words. Following some advice before you've worked this out means that you're doing something that you disagree with. You can tell this person that you disagree but don't know how to put it into words. If they're a decent person they'll respect that and if they're generous they may even help you try to work out what the disagreement is. These some really good articles about working out your intuitions, how to understand them and put them into words, and why they're important. These can help you work out for yourself why you have an intuition that something is wrong. I use them myself. Categories:
3/15/2023 0 Comments Who should have children?Children are great. Human lives are great. A child has limitless potential and helping one grow and learn well creates a lot of good and creativity in the world. You could say that parenting is metacreative.
But there are other actions that create good in the world too. I think there will be lots of people having children whatever any individual decides. It’s not like good people having children and caring for them well will reduce the amount of children raised by bad people. I’m also not convinced by Idiocracy-style theories that society will get dumber because smart people generally have less kids; kids with dumb parents can still learn good ideas and be very smart. So I don't think it's urgent that all good people have children. There are lots of bad ideas people can have. I think most people have some pretty bad ideas in one way or another, but more often than not it's a result of ignorance rather than malice. There are some especially bad ideas though which would make someone a terrible parent which I want to make explicit. These aren't the only bad ideas, but these are somewhat common ones that I think are worth noting. So I think it's important that any prospective parent:
That still leaves a lot of other people who could have children. I don't think they should all be parents. I think people who can meet these criteria should have children:
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