2025-07-07
- Learning how to think, by thinking through this open question
1. Intro
- The open question:
Should I work full-time, or part-time?
Waking up from my 2025 story
- I currently have a sense that I grabbed onto the “I want to be a high impact leader!!!” story too quickly and got hypnotised by it for ~4 months without reconsidering/considering other options, in a very Anticipatio Mentis way. And in a very enneagram 3 way (believing your stories, thinking everything is great)
2. The story I’ve been operating from
Reconnected w/ love of working at Alvea
- I did a personal values sprint and reconnected with how much I loved working at Alvea
- I had “gisted”/compressed my time at Alvea down to “it was great but I probably shouldn’t have been hired”
- And then when I actually revisited what it was like to work there, I resurfaced all the great feedback I got throughout, and remembered how much I loved it
Reconnected me to all the data re: how much I love being useful
- I have ample data that I love working and love being useful
- Enneagram 3
- Always working on projects, life oriented around work
- Great feedback from time at Alvea, great references
Therefore, I should continue upskilling and being useful!
- “Ok, I want to continue upskilling, being useful!”
- “And I also want to learn how to think” (I was doing my rationality sprint at the time)
- Led to “ok, I’ll work for Cate Hall, best of both worlds!”
- Which led to chief of staff/executive assistant path feeling good
3. What is the update?
How do I feel about my 2025?
- I think this was pretty well reasoned in retrospect?
- Empirical data from my real life (re: e.g. loving working)
- Feeling motivated to “level up” (fusion Alex)
So what’s the problem?
- 🚨 It feels like it was the first and only path that I considered
“Full time Effective Altruist work is definitely my path”
- As soon as I landed on it - “oh good, I can work with this, let me fully merge with this!”
- Anticipatio Mentis, very enneagram 3
4. Considering other paths
1. Consensus-ism
- More exploration of consensus-ism, including coaching
- Led to ~stream entry in me, clearly deeply profound
- I still don’t grok how it works, but my lived experience provides incontrovertible proof that “there’s a there there” - it led to the most profound change of my life
2. Deeper understanding of people and their suffering
- My struggles with understanding my family and how they live is the most salient thing in my life. 10+ years of being front-of-mind
- This has been something I’ve felt shame around foregrounding - there’s the Effective Altruist shame of “you’re not supposed to weight the suffering of people close to you more heavily than other people. It’s like, my suffering + the suffering of <20 other people, I should just push through it and focus on helping the most amount of people”
- I think this is the key blocker for why I can’t wholeheartedly engage with Effective Altruism. I can’t care wholeheartedly about abstract suffering when my own house is on fire
- I think there’s a lot of depth here, and it connects to all my other projects. E.g., my deep frustration at my family is I think a lack of personal wisdom - I think I’m expecting impossible things of them, and not seeing how their actions are coherent
3. Deeper understanding of myself
- There’s the enneagram 3 thing of being a chameleon, wearing a mask, happily merging with any project that comes before you
- Vs deepening into what you want. This has been a perennial struggle for me.
- The Open Research Project is an exciting new addition to my life here → the point is to go deep on open questions that you deeply care about. So it’s really incentivising me to keep these things front-of-mind.
4. Learning how to think
- I did a short rationality sprint and then felt finished as soon as I landed on a clear path forwards, but it’s clear that learning to think is a longer-term project!
- My initial rationality sprint exposed me to some ideas like Bayesianism and predictions, and I’ve done 300+ Fatebook predictions since then so I’ve definitely learned some things
- And my strategy sprint exposed me to John Boyd and at the very least led to me baking in the habit of making tactics documents for all new projects, which has been useful
- But I didn’t stick with it for long enough to really change the way I think, to become a more systematic planner, etc
- I feel like my current Socratic vein is doing a really great job of like “rationality sprint v2”, where I’m learning to pick apart my own thinking with e.g. the elenchus. It still feels like early days
5. Perhaps this new path isn’t a refutation of the old one, but an evolution?
I don’t think I was on the wrong track
- I don’t think it’s surprising, in retrospect, that as soon as I landed on my first ever explicit mission statement (“I want to be a high-impact leader!”), I seized hold of it and dove right in
- And I think there’s absolutely a world where I was hired by e.g. Longview Philanthropy and really enjoyed it, and still worked on these other things in my spare time
I just think if I could do it again, I’d examine things more closely
1. Surface my semi-conscious worries
”I still don’t feel like a wholehearted EA”
- I had shame around not feeling like a proper EA. I wrote about this on Substack
”I just can’t get myself to deeply care about [EA cause area]”
- “I just can’t get myself to deeply care about AI risk, global health, etc"
"It’s going to take a lot of time away from other things”
- “Getting a full time job is going to take up a huge amount of my time and force me to sideline some things that I’m currently feeling very excited about, and like I’m at some kind of… profundity frontier (?)“
2. Why work full time?
- I had a sense of “maybe I don’t have to work full time”, which I’d quickly suppress
- “You have to work full time, to:”
- Maximally upskill
- Earn lots of money at a high pay EA job
- so I can live… somewhere (London, I guess?)
- Didn’t feel particularly excited about city life
- To get the best career capital
- Because of expectation/it’s the thing to do
- It’d be low status to get a more “mid” part-time job
- So my family members approve
- I have an aunty and uncle who are very judgemental re: my career breaks. Imagining telling them I’m doing a relatively chill part-time thing whilst working on these (illegible, to them) side-projects felt aversive (even though their opinion is very non-important in the grand scheme of things)
6. What’s the (POTENTIAL) vision now?
- Part time work, whilst also orbiting
- Consensus-ism
- Learning how to think
- Putting out my own fires
- Deeper understanding of myself
Where it could go
- I “de-confuse” myself and then can teach other people how to do the same thing
- I help my family
- I understand how consensus-ism works and how to have it click for other people
- I massively reduce my own suffering/how much cognitive capacity my family takes up, such that I can then pivot to big things