Most of us want to make a difference in the world. But when we try to figure out how to do that — how to direct our time and money — we often fall prey to a predictable set of biases. We're swayed by emotional appeals rather than evidence. We give to causes that are visible rather than causes that are most in need. And we vastly underestimate how much good we can do.
You might also like
I scored the outputs without knowing which model made them, so you get to watch me make predictions, change my mind, and reveal my own very inconsistent taste.
Claire Vo
The trick is to make your mistakes non-fatal. You don't need to be right all the time. You just need to survive long enough to be right eventually.
Howard Marks — Mastering the Market Cycle
For example, the fundamental question of AI risk — what chance of extinction we should accept in exchange for a shot at utopia — depends crucially on how much we value survival. Things get even more confusing when we weigh the utility of real people who are alive today against the utility of potential people who might be alive later on.
Noah Smith