Consider my previous two blog posts:

  • In the first one, I argue that knowing stuff in our present reality requires constantly seeking and updating on new scientific information.
  • In the second one, I argue that doing stuff in our present reality requires constantly seeking and implementing new, more efficient tools and skills.

This puts me in a bit of a bind. I am perfectly capable of constantly seeking out this updated information and these updated skills (gadgets, in the parlance of that second post). I do this all the time. But it’s not easy for me: I get information overload. As Dr Mithu Storoni would phrase it, being exposed to this high volume of information—while very useful for my job—raises my gear. I think this is just a quirk of my own psychology; I prefer a quiet, steady environment (I have extremely shifty gears!). (This is evident in other areas of my life, e.g. I’m not a social media user, and even receiving emails at a rate that other people would consider low is too much for me! This also helps explain why I am attracted to lo-fi environments, plain text tools, and retro technology.)

However, it’s very clear to me that my mission, while I’m inhabiting this mortal coil, is to reduce as much suffering as I can. Currently, my theory of change involves conducting research and engaging with policy in animal advocacy. The nature of this work is that I have to ingest as much information as I can—I rarely encounter diminishing returns in information. This is why I frequently conduct systematic reviews and so forth: the value of making a correct decision is very high, and making a suboptimal decision means that sentient beings suffer when they do not need to. Likewise, the animal advocacy movement is still rather nascent and resource-poor; in this context, it really pays to learn new skills, especially when they involve automation or ways to systematically ingest more information, as even modest improvements in efficiency or effectiveness can bring great value in terms of the overall goal of reducing suffering.

Thus, I arrive at the question: given the goal of reducing as much suffering as I can, are there theories of change/positions/whatever that do not require such a hectic rate of seeking and updating on new information and skills?

Firstly, in a more general context, it is clear that there are many perfectly worthy jobs that do not have such a hectic rate of seeking and updating on new information and skills. Examples:

  • Jobs where the skill is a craft that is perfected over a lifetime, rather than a set of skills that is constantly updated. e.g. tattoo artist, horticulturalist, carpenter, plumber.
  • Jobs where the information is limited to what is in front of you at any one time, which is frequently the case with in-person caring professions (e.g. nursing, dog grooming, counselling), when you are working with one person or a small group of people on a long-term basis (e.g. personal assistant for a person living with a disability, a tutor for a small number of ongoing clients), or when you are working for a particular physical site (e.g. caring for a cemetery, groundskeeper for a school).
  • Jobs where the task is limited to a very specific set of instructions by legislation or regulations. e.g. data analyst in the government department responsible for the census or tax or elections. In this category, I would also include some religious occupations—I suspect that theological research follows the same rapidly increasing trend as other forms of research (I haven’t checked), but if a job (e.g. a priest) is associated with some permanently limited set of scriptures and where those scriptures tend to be elevated over contemporary forms of information (e.g. the Bible in most Christian denominations), that certainly puts a strong limit on how quickly things can develop.
  • Jobs where the information is limited by virtue of working with genuinely scarce artifacts. e.g. historical house restoration, the care of physical manuscripts, data processing and validation for very early space missions where the space probe or satellite is still active and producing data
  • Jobs where the abundance of information and skills is required by the team as a whole, but where this task has been delegated to a colleague. e.g. management.
  • Jobs that involve a gate-keeping role and thus the information is usually pre-digested and presented to you and you carefully deliberate before making some decision or recommendation. e.g. grant-making, some less researchy forms of policy advice.

Many of these appeal to me personally. I think I would find it very gratifying to spend my life restoring old manuscripts/maintaining and processing very old datasets/caring for cemeteries/being a priest or pastor.

However, the challenge is to ensure that any such lifestyle is executing my deepest goal—for me, this is reducing the suffering of other sentient beings as much as I can.