Lauren Lee

Working to prevent burnout and boost productivity within the EA and X-risk communities

From the application:

(1) After 2 years as a CFAR instructor/researcher, I’m currently in a 6-12 month phase of reorienting around my goals and plans. I’m requesting a grant to spend the coming year thinking about rationality and testing new projects.

(2) I want to help individuals and orgs in the x-risk community orient towards and achieve their goals.

(A) I want to train the skill of dependability, in myself and others.

This is the skill of a) following through on commitments and b) making prosocial / difficult choices in the face of fear and aversion. The skill of doing the correct thing, despite going against incentive gradients, seems to be the key to virtue.

One strategy I’ve used is to surround myself with people with shared values (CFAR, Bay Area) and trust the resulting incentive gradients. I now believe it is also critical to be the kind of person who can take correct action despite prevailing incentive structures.

Dependability is also related to thinking clearly. Your ability to make the right decision depends on your ability to hold and be with all possible realities, especially painful and aversive ones. Most people have blindspots that actively prevent this.

I have some leads on how to train this skill, and I’d like both time and money to test them.

(B) Thinking clearly about AI risk

Most people’s decisions in the Bay Area AI risk community seem model-free. They themselves don’t have models of why they’re doing what they’re doing; they’re relying on other people “with models” to tell them what to do and why. I’ve personally carried around such premises. I want to help people explore where their ‘placeholder premises’ are and create safety for looking at their true motivations, and then help them become more internally and externally aligned.

(C) Burnout

Speaking of “not getting very far.” My personal opinion is that most ex-CFAR employees left because of burnout; I’ve written what I’ve learned here, see top 2 comments: [[https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NDszJWMsdLCB4MNoy/burnout-what-is-it-and-how-to-treat-it#87ue5WzwaFDbGpcA7](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NDszJWMsdLCB4MNoy/burnout-what-is-it-and-how-to-treat-it#87ue5WzwaFDbGpcA7)]. I’m interested in working with orgs and individuals to prevent burnout proactively.

(3) Some possible measurable outputs / artifacts:

• A program where I do 1-on-1 sessions with individuals or orgs; I’d create reports based on whether they self-report improvements
• X-risk orgs (e.g. FHI, MIRI, OpenPhil, BERI, etc.) deciding to spend time/money on my services may be a positive indicator, as they tend to be thoughtful with how they spend their resources
• Writings or talks
• Workshops with feedback forms
• A more effective version of myself (notable changes = gaining the ability to ride a bike / drive a car / exercise—a PTSD-related disability, ability to finish projects to completion, others noticing stark changes in me)

My thoughts and reasoning

Lauren worked as an instructor at CFAR for about 2 years, until Fall 2018. I review CFAR’s impact as an institution below; in general, I believe it has helped set a strong epistemic foundation for the community and been successful in recruitment and training. I have a great appreciation for everyone who helps them with their work.

Lauren is currently in a period of reflection and reorientation around her life and the problem of AGI, in part due to experiencing burnout in the months before she left CFAR. To my knowledge, CFAR has never been well-funded enough to offer high salaries to its employees, and I think it is valuable to ensure that people who work at EA orgs and burn out have the support to take the time for self-care after quitting due to long-term stress. Ideally, I think this should be improved by higher salaries that allow employees to build significant runway to deal with shocks like this, but I think that the current equilibrium of salary levels in EA does not make that easy. Overall, I think it’s likely that staff at highly valuable EA orgs will continue burning out, and I don’t currently see it as an achievable target to not have this happen (though I am in favor of people people working on solving the problem).

I do not know Lauren well enough to evaluate the quality of her work on the art of human rationality, but multiple people I trust have given positive reviews (e.g. see Alex Zhu above), so I am also interested to read her output on the subjects she is thinking about.

I think it’s very important that people who work on developing an understanding of human rationality take the time to add their knowledge into our collective understanding, so that others can benefit from and build on top of it. Lauren has begun to write up her thoughts on topics like burnout, intentions, dependability, circling, and curiosity, and her having the space to continue to write up her ideas seemed like a significant additional positive outcome of this grant.

I think that she should probably aim to make whatever she does valuable enough that individuals and organizations in the community wish to pay her directly for her work. It’s unlikely that I would recommend renewing this grant for another 6 month period in the absence of a relatively exciting new research project/direction, and if Lauren were to reapply, I would want to have a much stronger sense that the projects she was working on were producing lots of value before I decided to recommend funding her again.

In sum, this grant hopefully helps Lauren to recover from burning out, get the new rationality projects she is working on off the ground, potentially identify a good new niche for her to work in (alone or at an existing organization), and write up her ideas for the community.