Mental health challenges in the AI safety ecosystem seem like a big problem

I think it’s useful to ground these results by looking at another setting in which cultural and institutional norms put ambitious, intellectually selected young people into a similar context, which I think can be reasonable characterized as high-stakes, status-competitive, weak-boundary work environments.

Here are some comparisons GPT found to people in early-career academia:

It seems worthwhile to me to question the premise that AI safety/x-risk work is unusually psychologically harmful. I’m not in the field, but I think there is a somewhat romantic story available here: that these problems arise because people are grappling with x-risk, carrying a moral burden, and working on something unusually consequential. That story is surely partly true, but it’s also flattering. Ingroup dynamics give us some reason to suspect that attributing distress to the exceptional significance of the work may be a motivated explanation, when a less glamorous one is that AI safety has reproduced a familiar high-pressure knowledge-work environment: long hours, poor boundaries, status competition, perfectionism, career uncertainty, people who are willing to sacrifice other parts of their lives to succeed.

The practical downside of viewing the problem as exceptional is that solutions become less available, need to be built bespoke. But if a large part of the variance is coming from more ordinary occupational dynamics, then a much larger institution (academia) has spent a long time running into the same failure modes and trying to intervene. There may be a helpful update here that upweights boring and well-established interventions.

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   Nature's 2019 global survey of 6,320 PhD students

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   A study of 302 Australian PhD students. Also in there, Imposter thoughts predicted symptoms of depression, anxiety and suicidality.

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   A study of 62 master's and doctoral psychology students at a Canadian university.

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   Nature's international survey of 7,600 postdocs.

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   A meta-analysis of nine studies, 15,626 PhD students.

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   A study of 222 doctoral researchers in the Berlin area. 

It estimated a loss of roughly 6–7% of total workforce output

I think one issue with this claim is that I think stress and anxiety is downstream of something that also causes a huge amount of upside and that is people are persuaded by this being an incredibly high-impact opportunity. This is high impact because the stakes are high. Things could go catastrophically wrong. Not enough people are working on it. This causes people to make big career pivots and work hard, and also create stress and anxiety with the resulting psychological downsides. 

Of course we should try to maintain motivation and interest in the cause area while reducing stress, anxiety, burnout, etc. But I think one of the reasons this is tough is that they are both downstream of a third factor.

Despite this, I do agree with most of your proposed solutions.

was just part of PDKU and now back in Philly for my "normal job". I think this is important! 

The problems in the bay (and maybe dc) and elsewhere seem very different. I think in the bay, there is enough critical mass that you could do e.g. sports league teams for the AI safety people. Exercise + social is good. Not sure if like constellation is already doing stuff like this, but maybe just pre pay for some different sports leagues and then distribute out flyers with easy signup to the various orgs and email some people. might punt a few k but would probably very little effort and decent upside. I played soccer with some AIS folks at a park and that was fun. I know I would always appreciate someone coming up to me and asking if I wanted to play on a sport team with like minded people for the next 10 weeks. 

Outside the bay, idk man. If you can help start an IRL group for people looking to inform the public/gov or help organize existing EA/Rat group to do the same, that seems like a good way to channel the energy. But otherwise it's a bit crazymaking to even think about AIS at all because you will find so little support or understanding from everyone around you. The best thing you can probably do without going nuts is to set a reminder to call your senator and congress person once a month or two and otherwise delete twitter and don't think about it too much (unless you are working an actual AIS remote job, then idk). 

In general I suppose I should have always felt the sadness associated with how bad the world is at triaging resources, that is sort of what EA is all about after all, but trying to help with AIS has made me feel this in such a visceral way that doesn't make me feel good compared to the animal welfare/poverty stuff. Maybe I had already more successfully compartmentalized those. 

Thank you so much for writing this Julian! I'm Cat, the operations lead at Rethink Wellbeing. Mental health does seem like a huge issue in the AI safety field right now, and we've been trying to tailor our CBT Lab program to fit with the most common things EAs/AIS report struggling with (burnout, work related stress, etc.). Our previous cohorts with a general EA/ambitious altruist audience have suggested that mental health support (via our program) can potentially increase productivity by 4-8 hours per week, which does seem to corroborate the claim that the AIS ecosystem could benefit from mental health support.

We're planning to make the broader AI Safety space one of our highest-priority targets for our next cohort (tentatively scheduled starting early/mid November) and we have been floating the possibility of officially partnering with organizations to provide mental health support as a employee benefit (and some plans for evidence-based team-building programs as well). Thankfully, since we're currently funded by the EAIF, we're able to offer this support for free. However, we're currently being bottlenecked by our reach. We primarily promote our programs on the forums, various Slack channels, and through organizations where we have warm connections. But it can be hard to reach organizations where we don't have warm connections, and from informal chats I've had with other EAs, it seems like there's a lot of dedicated EAs/AIS people who could benefit from the program but simply don't hear about it since they don't frequent the forums/slack channels! If anyone has ideas for how to reach AI Safety people/organizations better, we would love to hear them. Similarly, if you run an AIS/EA organization and would like free peer-support CBT programs as an employee benefit, please reach out to me or contact@rethinkwellbeing.org!

Of the survey data described by Spencer Greenberg (as well as the other surveys), do we know anything about the people who reported the fewest mental health challenges? What distinguishes them, and what are they doing differently?

This is something that I've thought about as I look to get into AI Safety in the context of: How might I set good boundaries with peers and myself when entering an org?  How do I strike the right balance of being engaged and committed to my team while protecting myself?

The backdrop is an environment where:

1. The stakes of getting it wrong feel incredibly high
2. There's not enough people
3. The backlog is already massive and growing as frontier labs race ahead

In basically every line of work, there's always going to be more to possibly do than you're going to have time for.  The to-do list never ends.

Rutger Bergman touched on this some in his School for Moral Ambition book.  He points out that many people work on efforts across their lifetime, and that you're least effective if you burn out and have to quit. (And probably more, paraphrasing from memory).

With that in mind, expanding on your ideas:

1. A good AI safety news newsletter - I'm subscribed to a couple of these, a general from Vox and one for climate change.  The goal is to remind us that real progress is being made on real issues, and that its not all doom and gloom.
2. Building it into the culture of the work:
   1. Create a documented plan - A template would be helpful.  Identify what you care about and why.  Identify the risks of burnout and other mental health challenges you face.  How you might mitigate them (your work/life boundaries, hobbies outside of work, forcing time off, sabbaticals, etc).  Ideally, this happens before you start a role as its a lot easier to do this when clear of the everyday grind.
   2. Put it into action - Be up front with your manager or team.  Ideally you could all share.  This creates an upfront expectation so that your team isn't left wondering why you're pulling back, or you feel guilty and keep pushing instead of taking the break you need.
       

As someone in the mental health space, this was an interesting read! I believe that more clinicians with niche specialties would be amazing, however current provider burnout rates and staff shortages would make that nearly impossible (right now). While we figure out that conundrum, utilizing trained lay people is an evidence-based, scalable solution. Community involvement also shows significant impact on mental health, isolation, and loneless, and I wonder if promoting and making space for some of these activities (during the workday) for employees would actually help bring anxiety levels down as well!

I rejoice in the goodness of those working on AI Safety. As it goes for big problems, they're basically out of control (for a particular agent) and some acceptance around that is needed. Making big tech slow down or put effective guardrails on AI is a difficult task, but those trying for it to be done must be happy about those intentions and efforts (if only they slow down to reflect on them), even if those intentions don't flourish completely. 

If I may add, on a deeper level, a lot of stress around x-risk comes from the understanding that such a thing as non-existence is even possible. I think that some relfection on that is also helpful.

Thank you for outlining the opportunities to get funding for mental health projects for those involved, I would love to help with my meditation and mediation facilitation experience.