Concrete ways to reduce risks of value drift and lifestyle drift

Abstract

This post is motivated by Joey’s post on ‘Empirical data on value drift’ and some of the comments. “And Harry remembered what Professor Quirrell had said beneath the starlight: Sometimes, when this flawed world seems unusually hateful, I wonder whether there might be some other place, far away, where I should have been… And Harry couldn’t understand Professor Quirrell’s words, it might have been an alien that had spoken, (…) something built along such different lines from Harry that his brain couldn’t be forced to operate in that mode. You couldn’t leave your home planet while it still contained a place like Azkaban. You had to stay and fight.”- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality I use the terms value drift and lifestyle drift in a broad sense to mean internal or external changes leading you to lose most of the expected altruistic value of your life. Value drift is internal; it describes changes to your value system or motivation.Lifestyle drift is external; the term captures changes in your life circumstances leading to difficulties implementing your values. Internally, value drift could occur by ceasing to see helping others as one of your life’s priorities (losing the ‘A’ in EA), or loosing the motivation to work on the highest-priority cause areas or interventions (losing the ‘E’ in EA). Externally, lifestyle drift could occur (as described in Joey’s post) by giving up a substantial fraction of your effectively altruistic resources for non-effectively altruistic purposes, thus reducing your capacity to do good. Concretely, this could involve deciding to spend a lot of money on buying a (larger) house, having a (fancier) wedding, traveling around the world (more frequently or expensively), etc.