The idea that immediately comes to my mind is that the problem isn't a lack of people that are both altruistic and ambitious. The issue is having high-achieving people who are both of these things stay altruistic in the long-term, instead of succumbing to other goals like money, power, or fame.
The clearest example of this is Stanford students, to me: there's been a lot of grumbling on campus about how students come in trying to 'change the world' and by the end of their first year end up working in consulting, finance, or defense tech. This almost seems like a feature, not a bug–there are powerful companies that offer strong incentives to ambitious-minded young people.
I am curious about whether you think it's a better strategy to 1) recruit ambitious people from already-talented centers and try not to lose them to prestige, or 2) try to convert non-ambitious but outwardly altruistic people into more ambitious versions of themselves.
I guess my take is that maybe there are real reasons we see fewer ambitious ppl that want to do good (because the ambitious ones often pivot elsewhere before they can be directly impactful).
Thanks Rhea! Yeah I think this is an important question and definitely a real dynamic. For those students I'm sure there are a bunch of reasons they move to traditional metrics of success, but one might be the lack of inspiring memetic stories to emulate (most people don't know who Norman Borlaug is but do know who Jensen Huang is). There are also just going to be real sacrifices they'd have to make if they wanted to work outside traditional paths like finance or defense tech - I want people to be willing to make those sacrifices in service of real problems in the world.
I could see either being useful in different contexts though - many organizations in philanthropy want to hire mid-career talent who have established valuable skills elsewhere, so getting people inspired about the possibility of channeling their ambitions towards better ends is important too.
And as a career advisor I've spoken to many people 2-3 years into a traditional consulting/etc career who started on that path and felt miserable when their work wasn't meaningful. So I guess it overlaps as well
> the problem isn't a lack of people that are both altruistic and ambitious. The issue is having high-achieving people who are both of these things stay altruistic in the long-term, instead of succumbing to other goals like money, power, or fame.
In the EA world it seems more like - there are plenty of ambitious and altruistic people but who all find it impossible to get roles in EA orgs. This has been true since forever it seems. I suppose part of this is just naivete; young people are often not ready to just be slotted into some high-power role and need to build their skills as an employee more generally. Or perhaps those people should all be founding their own orgs? I don't know.
I'm afraid that advice like this will not only lead to EAs burnt out or living in pain, driven by an abusive manager in their head; it will lead to EAs failing to live up to their potential.
The pathology that makes Jensen so ambitious is the same thing that makes him unable to sit with a question about AI safety without exploding. He's lashing out with anger because he's terrified of the feelings that come with believing your life's work is harmful.
In AI safety, it's extremely important to think clearly. Too many highly intelligent EAs have made a negative impact by working on the wrong things. Open Phil invested early in OpenAI. Anthropic said they wouldn't accelerate the frontier and now they're clearly accelerating the race.
Clear thinking requires being able to sit with uncomfortable ideas. That means being able to feel the feelings that scare you -- anger, grief, sorrow. Pushing through the pain to work an extra hour destroys that ability. It requires silencing your wants, overriding your feelings. You become productive and blind.
There's a different way to work hard that doesn't lead to burnout. Joe Hudson (Art of Accomplishment) gets a huge amount of work done, and he loves doing it. He gets a huge amount of work done because he loves doing it. Procrastination and dread are wasted energy. Clear that, and you naturally work more, not less, and with far better judgment. The bottleneck isn't your willingness to suffer; it's the emotional weight you're carrying that clouds your thinking and keeps your parts fighting each other instead of working together.
EAs shouldn't use Jensen's pathology. They should be whole people, thinking clearly about what matters, and work hard from that place.
Loved reading this and found it incredibly inspiring. I've spent time in 2 very different milieus, with different articulations of what's a valuable and worthy life—the first is the Silicon Valley tech-startup world (where ambition is typically focused on profit), and the second is the art-school/literary writing 'do it for love, not money' world.
Because ambition is usually associated with aggressive profit-seeking (even when it's antisocial/produces harm to others), the latter world tends to be really distrustful of ambition. But I've started to think that ambition is extremely, extremely necessary for questions like: how do you make the world a better place, how do you decrease inequality, how do you give more people (artists, creatives, others) more sustainable sources of income…and it's worth borrowing the tactics of ambitious capitalists and repurposing them!
(The usual Audre Lorde quote that people will cite, to critique such an approach: 'The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.' But I think it's possible to learn from someone else's approach and not wholesale incorporate their ideology…the quote I prefer, from the historian of technology Melvin Kranzberg, is: 'Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.' Replace technology with 'tools,' 'mindsets,' 'practices'…)
On your latter point, it worries/saddens me when artist sabotage themselves by rejecting the smallest of pragmatic tactics because it is tagged, in some way, to capitalism (possibly because everything is tagged to capitalism!). I also noticed this because I straddled two worlds between corporate/tech and grassroots activism -
many organising groups cannot mobilise effectively because they don’t benefit from the same tactics that make privately funded orgs incredibly efficient. There’s a lot you can do to behaviourally to be more efficient, effective, and relevant that isn’t necessarily profit seeking.
I think the animal rights movement has/has had a fair amount of people like this. The flip side is that a lot of people have burned out from the stress and pressure of heavy workloads and high ambition.
> For example, I think Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a sad story.
I think this is a reasonable position to hold. But I wonder whether Jiro would have been as much of a success if he had worked on anything else? There's a good Gwern post (https://gwern.net/speedrunning) arguing that pursuits like speed-running probably don't waste that much talent. Gwern's take is that talent is really spiky, so for power-law successes, there isn't a huge payoff for Jiro to do something he's less suited for.
(That being said, the bar is low enough for altruism that it probably doesn't matter?)
I have other thoughts, but the words aren't wording right now.
Thanks for the comment! And the Gwern article, I hadn't seen it. I definitely agree that if someone had taken a 15 year old Jiro and convinced him "don't be a chef, try to help the poor," it's really unlikely he'd be a world-class global health professional or whatever (too contingent and power-law dominated).
But I'd guess that "people with a willingness to work extremely hard" is a stickier personality trait. And even an 75th percentile person going into charity can do so much more good than a luxury sushi chef. I'd bet if he was donating large sums to charity it would outweigh this, but I can't find any evidence of this. Sad given his impoverished upbringing, if true
I agree with this, I don’t feel Jiro was the right example because it does seem pretty evident his obsession was stuck on a certain domain. I feel this is especially relevant when it comes to physical craft? There seems to be a dopamine reward loop that is exceptionally efficient given that specific series of tasks.
The metaethical question of why be moral is actually quite tricky for a lot of people. I’m fully convinced in utilitarianism and believe animal suffering is terrible, but you know the metaethical question why should I care is hard to override
Great post! It reminded me of a classic article in economics, by William Baumol: "Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive." Baumol makes the case that there are wildly ambitious entrepreneurs in every society, and the difference between societies is how they direct that ambition.
In ancient Rome, entrepreneurs got rich through conquest and rent-seeking. In medieval China, they passed civil service exams. In 20th century America, they (mostly) created value though innovation. It's up to policy and social pressure to keep ambition productive.
Enjoyed this, thanks. Good provocation Do you know the Richard Hamming story about he used to annoy his colleagues at Bell Labs with the question:’what’s the most important problem in your discipline right now?’, and the follow up:’why aren’t you working on it?’😄
EA/rat types need to read more fiction or something. Soulless reaction to watch a film about a sushi chef and think "maybe this person should be doing AI safety work instead."
Thanks. "children who missed time with their parents, moments that can never come back" hits me hard. And I must remember, raising our children with intention and compassion can potentially lead to more positive change for the world than I could ever force in other ways.
Perhaps I am thinking about this too simplistically, but from my experience, people are who truly altruistic do not have the ferocity to match this level of ambition. I'm happy to be proven wrong though.
> Leave a comment about your situation and I’ll try!
I'm on break so I guess I might as well. I'm about to start my final semester of undergrad in Electrical Engineering, top percentile of my class from a top 10 eng. school worldwide (set to go to a top 5 school for my masters).
I'd consider myself quite ambitious. I'm no Jensen, but I've also been surprised when I realized others at my uni _don't_ usually work 10h+ on a day. As of now I have little interest in industry, and am mostly gearing up for a career in academia. I do feel quite hungry to climb that ladder.
But I'm at an odd position, and fear my ambition might me misguided or pointless. Given my results, there is at least some reason to think I _could_ succeed in academia. But the problems I feel I would be particularly well suited to solve don't seem that important: I do best at what's essentially engineering physics. Electromagnetics, quantum tech, photonics. That kind of thing.
But even though I love learning about those fields and would love working on them at a personal level, they feel mostly unrelated to the problems I think are most pressing (I'm particularly horrified by factory farming). The only EE path where I could work on important problems directly would, I guess, be clean energy research. But I must admit I didn't enjoy my energy classes that much, and to me it's unclear if I would be good in that field. But maybe the potential impact makes it worth it? I don't know...
When I last thought about this, and given the relevant advice on 80000 hours and the EA website, I decided on earn to give with the potential to transition into policy later. Earn to give as a scholar seems a bit odd though, given that academia pay doesn't scale like industry pay does. But maybe it's useful to have more engaged vegans in academic engineering circles.
As you can tell, I'm feeling conflicted. Obviously it's unlikely that I'll find a complete answer on Substack, but I'd appreciate any perspectives on my situation and how it fits into the larger picture, especially from those actively doing altruistic work. Thanks :-)
Have you thought about contributing to open source power system planning software. There is plenty of work to be done there, and there are now few organisations trying to bridge the gap between the hard underlying physics, typical hardware capabilities and perception of typical decision-maker - who usually lacks electrical background but makes important decisions about our climate future.
Have a look at PyPSA-World, and Osemosys by Transition Zero - I am sure they need ambitious people like you. Or if you are even more ambitious - fork it and drive a better version that will succeed sooner.
Interesting perspective, maybe potentially motivational for some of the readers.
At the same time the core underlying observation that the gap is a problem that would be nice to close, is not really substantiated.
To me it reads like extreme ambition is more a bug than a feature - fells like it stems from narrow focus on a thing or few things, but largely ignoring most of the things in the world (most importantly sustainability, society).
In some rare cases it has a sideeffect of nvidia and we envy that outcome a little bit even if philosophically we recognize it is just swallowing hotdogs faster than anyone else. Ultimately people who have broader horizons and dont jump into whatever is the most exciting in the moment, but think with longer-term perspective, usually are not able to focus so narrowly, they see the risks and ways it might go wrong and want to have social lives, happy families. Being ambitious is often putting all eggs into one basket and disregarding everything else (at least for some time).
Overall, I agree, do-gooders should do more, but I wouldn't call it increased ambition. I'd say join a political party, or an NGO, try to use skills you gained working on A in B, but do not be ambitious and do not try to be top 0.01% in the said skill.
1. An altruist with money and power has exponentially more impact than one without. Could it be that the optimal path is to first secure that leverage, and only then pivot to altruistic ends?
2. Maybe the desire to work relentlessly is simply a personality trait, one that correlates with high performance but is orthogonal to the desire to make the world better. Some people just like to build, to solve, to work. The direction of that work is a different variable entirely. If that’s the case, the question isn’t about an individual’s moral compass, but our system’s incentives. The ideal solution isn’t to hope that ambitious people are also born altruists. It’s to build a system where the gravitational pull of capitalism itself aligns that unstoppable drive with the common good.
Great post, as usual!
The idea that immediately comes to my mind is that the problem isn't a lack of people that are both altruistic and ambitious. The issue is having high-achieving people who are both of these things stay altruistic in the long-term, instead of succumbing to other goals like money, power, or fame.
The clearest example of this is Stanford students, to me: there's been a lot of grumbling on campus about how students come in trying to 'change the world' and by the end of their first year end up working in consulting, finance, or defense tech. This almost seems like a feature, not a bug–there are powerful companies that offer strong incentives to ambitious-minded young people.
I am curious about whether you think it's a better strategy to 1) recruit ambitious people from already-talented centers and try not to lose them to prestige, or 2) try to convert non-ambitious but outwardly altruistic people into more ambitious versions of themselves.
I guess my take is that maybe there are real reasons we see fewer ambitious ppl that want to do good (because the ambitious ones often pivot elsewhere before they can be directly impactful).
Thanks Rhea! Yeah I think this is an important question and definitely a real dynamic. For those students I'm sure there are a bunch of reasons they move to traditional metrics of success, but one might be the lack of inspiring memetic stories to emulate (most people don't know who Norman Borlaug is but do know who Jensen Huang is). There are also just going to be real sacrifices they'd have to make if they wanted to work outside traditional paths like finance or defense tech - I want people to be willing to make those sacrifices in service of real problems in the world.
I could see either being useful in different contexts though - many organizations in philanthropy want to hire mid-career talent who have established valuable skills elsewhere, so getting people inspired about the possibility of channeling their ambitions towards better ends is important too.
And as a career advisor I've spoken to many people 2-3 years into a traditional consulting/etc career who started on that path and felt miserable when their work wasn't meaningful. So I guess it overlaps as well
> the problem isn't a lack of people that are both altruistic and ambitious. The issue is having high-achieving people who are both of these things stay altruistic in the long-term, instead of succumbing to other goals like money, power, or fame.
In the EA world it seems more like - there are plenty of ambitious and altruistic people but who all find it impossible to get roles in EA orgs. This has been true since forever it seems. I suppose part of this is just naivete; young people are often not ready to just be slotted into some high-power role and need to build their skills as an employee more generally. Or perhaps those people should all be founding their own orgs? I don't know.
I'm afraid that advice like this will not only lead to EAs burnt out or living in pain, driven by an abusive manager in their head; it will lead to EAs failing to live up to their potential.
The pathology that makes Jensen so ambitious is the same thing that makes him unable to sit with a question about AI safety without exploding. He's lashing out with anger because he's terrified of the feelings that come with believing your life's work is harmful.
In AI safety, it's extremely important to think clearly. Too many highly intelligent EAs have made a negative impact by working on the wrong things. Open Phil invested early in OpenAI. Anthropic said they wouldn't accelerate the frontier and now they're clearly accelerating the race.
Clear thinking requires being able to sit with uncomfortable ideas. That means being able to feel the feelings that scare you -- anger, grief, sorrow. Pushing through the pain to work an extra hour destroys that ability. It requires silencing your wants, overriding your feelings. You become productive and blind.
There's a different way to work hard that doesn't lead to burnout. Joe Hudson (Art of Accomplishment) gets a huge amount of work done, and he loves doing it. He gets a huge amount of work done because he loves doing it. Procrastination and dread are wasted energy. Clear that, and you naturally work more, not less, and with far better judgment. The bottleneck isn't your willingness to suffer; it's the emotional weight you're carrying that clouds your thinking and keeps your parts fighting each other instead of working together.
EAs shouldn't use Jensen's pathology. They should be whole people, thinking clearly about what matters, and work hard from that place.
You keep serendipitously showing up on my feeds across platforms! Good to see you posting, Josh!
Loved reading this and found it incredibly inspiring. I've spent time in 2 very different milieus, with different articulations of what's a valuable and worthy life—the first is the Silicon Valley tech-startup world (where ambition is typically focused on profit), and the second is the art-school/literary writing 'do it for love, not money' world.
Because ambition is usually associated with aggressive profit-seeking (even when it's antisocial/produces harm to others), the latter world tends to be really distrustful of ambition. But I've started to think that ambition is extremely, extremely necessary for questions like: how do you make the world a better place, how do you decrease inequality, how do you give more people (artists, creatives, others) more sustainable sources of income…and it's worth borrowing the tactics of ambitious capitalists and repurposing them!
(The usual Audre Lorde quote that people will cite, to critique such an approach: 'The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.' But I think it's possible to learn from someone else's approach and not wholesale incorporate their ideology…the quote I prefer, from the historian of technology Melvin Kranzberg, is: 'Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.' Replace technology with 'tools,' 'mindsets,' 'practices'…)
Well said! Glad to hear the post resonated.
On your latter point, it worries/saddens me when artist sabotage themselves by rejecting the smallest of pragmatic tactics because it is tagged, in some way, to capitalism (possibly because everything is tagged to capitalism!). I also noticed this because I straddled two worlds between corporate/tech and grassroots activism -
many organising groups cannot mobilise effectively because they don’t benefit from the same tactics that make privately funded orgs incredibly efficient. There’s a lot you can do to behaviourally to be more efficient, effective, and relevant that isn’t necessarily profit seeking.
I think the animal rights movement has/has had a fair amount of people like this. The flip side is that a lot of people have burned out from the stress and pressure of heavy workloads and high ambition.
A lot of this post resonated! One thought:
> For example, I think Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a sad story.
I think this is a reasonable position to hold. But I wonder whether Jiro would have been as much of a success if he had worked on anything else? There's a good Gwern post (https://gwern.net/speedrunning) arguing that pursuits like speed-running probably don't waste that much talent. Gwern's take is that talent is really spiky, so for power-law successes, there isn't a huge payoff for Jiro to do something he's less suited for.
(That being said, the bar is low enough for altruism that it probably doesn't matter?)
I have other thoughts, but the words aren't wording right now.
Thanks for the comment! And the Gwern article, I hadn't seen it. I definitely agree that if someone had taken a 15 year old Jiro and convinced him "don't be a chef, try to help the poor," it's really unlikely he'd be a world-class global health professional or whatever (too contingent and power-law dominated).
But I'd guess that "people with a willingness to work extremely hard" is a stickier personality trait. And even an 75th percentile person going into charity can do so much more good than a luxury sushi chef. I'd bet if he was donating large sums to charity it would outweigh this, but I can't find any evidence of this. Sad given his impoverished upbringing, if true
Like specifically I think Gwern is wrong about obsession "striking from nowhere"
I agree with this, I don’t feel Jiro was the right example because it does seem pretty evident his obsession was stuck on a certain domain. I feel this is especially relevant when it comes to physical craft? There seems to be a dopamine reward loop that is exceptionally efficient given that specific series of tasks.
The metaethical question of why be moral is actually quite tricky for a lot of people. I’m fully convinced in utilitarianism and believe animal suffering is terrible, but you know the metaethical question why should I care is hard to override
The veil of ignorance might be a helpful way to look at it
Great post! It reminded me of a classic article in economics, by William Baumol: "Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive." Baumol makes the case that there are wildly ambitious entrepreneurs in every society, and the difference between societies is how they direct that ambition.
In ancient Rome, entrepreneurs got rich through conquest and rent-seeking. In medieval China, they passed civil service exams. In 20th century America, they (mostly) created value though innovation. It's up to policy and social pressure to keep ambition productive.
Well said
Enjoyed this, thanks. Good provocation Do you know the Richard Hamming story about he used to annoy his colleagues at Bell Labs with the question:’what’s the most important problem in your discipline right now?’, and the follow up:’why aren’t you working on it?’😄
I'm a big fan! 80k advisors share this resource with people we speak to pretty often. Good flag
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
Cool post
EA/rat types need to read more fiction or something. Soulless reaction to watch a film about a sushi chef and think "maybe this person should be doing AI safety work instead."
Thanks. "children who missed time with their parents, moments that can never come back" hits me hard. And I must remember, raising our children with intention and compassion can potentially lead to more positive change for the world than I could ever force in other ways.
Perhaps I am thinking about this too simplistically, but from my experience, people are who truly altruistic do not have the ferocity to match this level of ambition. I'm happy to be proven wrong though.
> Leave a comment about your situation and I’ll try!
I'm on break so I guess I might as well. I'm about to start my final semester of undergrad in Electrical Engineering, top percentile of my class from a top 10 eng. school worldwide (set to go to a top 5 school for my masters).
I'd consider myself quite ambitious. I'm no Jensen, but I've also been surprised when I realized others at my uni _don't_ usually work 10h+ on a day. As of now I have little interest in industry, and am mostly gearing up for a career in academia. I do feel quite hungry to climb that ladder.
But I'm at an odd position, and fear my ambition might me misguided or pointless. Given my results, there is at least some reason to think I _could_ succeed in academia. But the problems I feel I would be particularly well suited to solve don't seem that important: I do best at what's essentially engineering physics. Electromagnetics, quantum tech, photonics. That kind of thing.
But even though I love learning about those fields and would love working on them at a personal level, they feel mostly unrelated to the problems I think are most pressing (I'm particularly horrified by factory farming). The only EE path where I could work on important problems directly would, I guess, be clean energy research. But I must admit I didn't enjoy my energy classes that much, and to me it's unclear if I would be good in that field. But maybe the potential impact makes it worth it? I don't know...
When I last thought about this, and given the relevant advice on 80000 hours and the EA website, I decided on earn to give with the potential to transition into policy later. Earn to give as a scholar seems a bit odd though, given that academia pay doesn't scale like industry pay does. But maybe it's useful to have more engaged vegans in academic engineering circles.
As you can tell, I'm feeling conflicted. Obviously it's unlikely that I'll find a complete answer on Substack, but I'd appreciate any perspectives on my situation and how it fits into the larger picture, especially from those actively doing altruistic work. Thanks :-)
Ooh that's a cool skillset. I just sent you a message!
Have you thought about contributing to open source power system planning software. There is plenty of work to be done there, and there are now few organisations trying to bridge the gap between the hard underlying physics, typical hardware capabilities and perception of typical decision-maker - who usually lacks electrical background but makes important decisions about our climate future.
Have a look at PyPSA-World, and Osemosys by Transition Zero - I am sure they need ambitious people like you. Or if you are even more ambitious - fork it and drive a better version that will succeed sooner.
Interesting perspective, maybe potentially motivational for some of the readers.
At the same time the core underlying observation that the gap is a problem that would be nice to close, is not really substantiated.
To me it reads like extreme ambition is more a bug than a feature - fells like it stems from narrow focus on a thing or few things, but largely ignoring most of the things in the world (most importantly sustainability, society).
In some rare cases it has a sideeffect of nvidia and we envy that outcome a little bit even if philosophically we recognize it is just swallowing hotdogs faster than anyone else. Ultimately people who have broader horizons and dont jump into whatever is the most exciting in the moment, but think with longer-term perspective, usually are not able to focus so narrowly, they see the risks and ways it might go wrong and want to have social lives, happy families. Being ambitious is often putting all eggs into one basket and disregarding everything else (at least for some time).
Overall, I agree, do-gooders should do more, but I wouldn't call it increased ambition. I'd say join a political party, or an NGO, try to use skills you gained working on A in B, but do not be ambitious and do not try to be top 0.01% in the said skill.
1. An altruist with money and power has exponentially more impact than one without. Could it be that the optimal path is to first secure that leverage, and only then pivot to altruistic ends?
2. Maybe the desire to work relentlessly is simply a personality trait, one that correlates with high performance but is orthogonal to the desire to make the world better. Some people just like to build, to solve, to work. The direction of that work is a different variable entirely. If that’s the case, the question isn’t about an individual’s moral compass, but our system’s incentives. The ideal solution isn’t to hope that ambitious people are also born altruists. It’s to build a system where the gravitational pull of capitalism itself aligns that unstoppable drive with the common good.
"Lastly, like any good Substack, I’ll tie this all back to AI, asking what ambition means at the end of the human era."
How about no.