A communication from Harvard Effective Altruism:
Aversion Factoring & Career Choice
with Dr. Andrew Critch
Thursday, April 17th 7-8:30 PM
Emerson 305
We often limit ourselves by avoiding things we find bothersome or scary. But for almost anything you find bothersome, there’s someone out there who doesn’t! How does that work? Can you copy their enjoyment-powers? If so, you have many more options for growth, career choice, and general do-gooding. This presentation is based around a technique Dr. Critch teaches at the Center for Applied Rationality for using aversions as a source of creativity, and then getting over them.
Dr. Critch’s interest in rationality began as a teenager growing up in Newfoundland, Canada, where he says he “just had a lot of time to think about it”. When he was 14, he made his first attempt to extrapolate his instinctive preferences into a function whose expected integral he wanted to maximize. (In college he found out that some economists had been crazy enough to think humans worked this way automatically). He also won numerous national awards in mathematics and public-speaking competitions.