EA Definitions Series: Ambition
Disclaimer: For ease of writing, I say “effective altruism says this” or “effective altruists believe that.” In reality, effective altruism is a diverse movement, and many effective altruists believe different things. While I’m trying my best to describe the beliefs that are distinctive to the movement, no effective altruist (including me) believes everything I’m saying. While I do read widely within the effective altruism sphere, I have an inherently limited perspective on the movement, and may well be describing my own biases and the idiosyncratic traits of my own friends. I welcome corrections.
One of the most distinctive features of effective altruism is that it requires you to do shit. Effective altruists are constantly donating money, starting nonprofits, donating kidneys, creating conspiracies to infiltrate the highest levels of the U.S. government, etc.
Normally, I see new effective altruists and people who aren’t effective altruists talk about this fact using the language of “guilt” and “moral obligation.” Not donating to effective charities is basically murder, so if you buy a cookie you’re evil. You have to save the drowning child, or you’re a bad person. This shit—
I don’t like this because I don’t think people should be anonymous cog slaves all-consumed by abstract guilt. But, more to the point, the guilt/obligation framing doesn’t match to how any successful, high-achieving effective altruist I know seems to relate to their altruism.
I mulled over the title of this post for days trying to find a word in which to encapsulate the distinction, and finally settled on “ambition.”
We can all think of nonaltruistically ambitious people. Certainly Marc Andreessen does—he’s a venture capitalist. A founder who isn’t content until she has a unicorn startup, and then once it IPOs turns around and starts another one. A chess player trying to become a grandmaster—or a speedrunner trying to set a world record. A novelist who is constantly honing her craft. A lawyer who puts in hundred-hour weeks trying to make partner. A small business owner who plans to pass along her landscaping business to her children. A grad student who sacrifices her twenties to writing about the diets of tanners in 16th century Flanders.
But I think people feel strange about being altruistically ambitious. I think the objection is similar to people’s objection to doing the math about charity effectiveness. You’re supposed to help people in a soft-hearted, emotional way. Ambition is cold and ruthless. The altruism bucket is the Gryffindors, or maybe the Hufflepuffs. The ambitious bucket is Slytherins, and it’s full of evil racists!
The novelist or the startup founder, the grad student or the small business owner, never reach their goal. Your company can always be more successful; your novel, more beautiful; your research, less likely to provoke disdainful scoffing from time-traveling Flemish artisans. But that doesn’t mean that they’re always consumed with guilt or obligation, or that startup founders are sitting there going “if my company is only worth $50 million, I’m the equivalent of Hitler.”
Ambitious people, healthy ones, find high standards exhilarating. There is always another challenge to face, always somewhere higher to climb. If you go to a speedrunner and say “you know, lots of people take fifty hours to play this game and have a great time doing it, you don’t have to hold yourself to the standard of solving it in ten minutes,” the speedrunner would think you’re missing the point.
Ambitious people feel divine discontent:
To me, divine discontent is about cheerfully seeking out dissatisfaction. It’s choosing to ask, What could be better? What can I improve? It’s a feeling that practitioners across many fields—in literature, art, music, performance, film; but also the sciences, engineering, and mathematics—can relate to.
The author elaborates in an anecdote that made me groan with self-recognition:
I’m preparing dinner at home with my girlfriend. I make the salad, improvising with whatever herbs we have in the refrigerator, and make the vinaigrette without measuring anything. She tries to recreate a pasta dish she tried at a restaurant once. We sit at the table and critique our efforts. The vinaigrette is too sharp, I tell her. Next time I’ll use a rounder, milder vinegar, or balance the acid out with some maple syrup. Meanwhile, she’s evaluating her dish and deciding that it needs better tomatoes, more salt, more tarragon.
There’s a difference, of course, between caring deeply about quality and being excessively critical! But this instinct to critique my own work, to understand what fell short and fix it—that’s the divine discontent. Personally, I find that it’s genuinely fun to live like this. It makes life interesting! It means there is always something to care about and be passionate about.
I have been known, after cooking for Friday night family dinner, to announce “it’s time to criticize the meal!”1 Most effective altruists are more reasonable than me about the quality of their cooking. But I imagine a typical effective altruist going “I’m not really prioritizing improving my cooking right now, what with all the ongoing apocalypses.” And I imagine a normal person going “what the fuck? You’re a crazy person.”
Ambition and divine discontent is linked to a concept that effective altruists call “agency.” I like Neel Nanda’s post about agency, in which he defines the concept:
Our lives are full of constraints, and defaults that we blindly follow, going past this to find a better way of achieving our goals is hard.
And this is a massive tragedy, because agency is incredibly important. The world is full of wasted motion. Most things in both our lives and the world are inefficient and sub-optimal, and it often takes creativity, originality and effort to find better approaches. Just following default strategies can massively hold you back from achieving what you could achieve with better strategies.
Agency can mean:
Taking personal responsibility for your actions and goals.
Thinking strategically; having a plan to achieve your aims.
Noticing greyed out options.
Having an internal locus of control.
Being willing to do weird things if they work.
Experimenting with different approaches to a problem.
Messing around, taking risks, trying new things; figuring that you can always fix things if they break.
Failing, picking yourself back up, and doing something else.
Feeling confidence all the way up.
Thinking “will this action I’m taking accomplish anything I want, or will it make everything worse?” and then—very important—not doing it if it’s that second thing.
To put it another way, ambition is having the high goals; agency is being the sort of person who might achieve them.
Effective altruists are, I think, careful not to push ambition on everyone. I have been present in a number of conversations where people loudly agree with each other that not all programmers need to be technical AI safety researchers and if you just want to make Facebook Messenger 0.0001% faster that is valid. But the presence of the divinely discontented tends to shift the standards for everyone: they have tricked a number of normal people into thinking that donating nearly six times as much as the average American is the ordinary standard that normal people ought to be holding themselves to. Not in a way where you’re consumed by guilt if you don’t, of course, any more than people who aren’t effective altruists are consumed by guilt if they forget to return a shopping cart or claim to their child that the Leapfrog Phonics Bus’s batteries died and can’t be replaced because doing so was banned by the Geneva Convention.
I see effective altruists saying “oh, I’m not doing anything big, although of course I donate my ten percent” and I want to shake them and go THAT IS BIG! DONATING TEN PERCENT OF YOUR INCOME IS A BIG THING! YOU ARE AT NEGATIVE SIX KILLS AND COUNTING!
But that’s the secret. You don’t have to do anything particularly special to be agentic and ambitious. No matter how good or bad you are, whether you are Gandhi or Hitler, you can always be better tomorrow than you were today.
Ambition and agency aren’t a stick you can beat yourself with because you’re a failure. They aren’t an obligation at all, really. They’re an invitation.
The point is not to achieve some particular standard. The point is not to be better than average (or six times better, specifically). The point is—to quote a certain venture capitalist I know—to build something great.
You might say it when expressing your determination to become a professional Go player—or after you lose an important match, but you haven’t given up—or after you win an important match, but you’re not a ninth-dan player yet—or after you’ve become the greatest Go player of all time, but you still think you can do better. That is tsuyoku naritai, the will to transcendence.
If you’ve gone as far as you want to, you can sit and rest. If you want to keep going, the path awaits you.
This is, then, the final principle of effective altruism, as I see it: You can do hard things. Not that you have to do hard things; not that you are a bad person who ought to hate yourself if you don’t do hard things; just that you can do hard things, if you want to.
In the next three posts in the series, I’ll discuss the approach of effective altruists to three specific areas: cause evaluation, history, and politics.
The effective altruist culture of criticism is fascinating but I think belongs in its own post.
Great and enlightening article, as usual. I find EA ambition and self-pushing inspirational, and all the EAs I've interacted with -almost all online, as there aren't that many down here- give me this vibe of goodness + earnestness that is always admirable. I do get the feeling, though (perhaps distorted by a smaller sample and reads) that it is relatively frequent for EAs to end up in masochistic feedback loops where they just push themselves too hard and enter downward spirals of self-loathing and inhumane effort at the cost of life, happiness and personal flourishing. The latter (dwelling on the material and intellectual relations, activities and things that give you joy and that make life a pleasure to be lived) is something I personally value as much or more than the ambition you present here. Perhaps society overvalues and overpractices it. I certainly do (if you forgive an autobiographical excursion, my education in the Humanities and the working class background of my parents instilled a deep loathing in me for practical and externally focused action, and perceiving such work as toilsome, boring, painful and inimical to human cultivation). I am quite certain EAs push it too much aside, to their own detriment.
anecdotally I think a lot of grad students are consumed by guilt about their inadequacy. I'll be following up on several links here but if anyone has more practical suggestions of shifting from overly critical to divinely discontent, please share!