I cheated on an EA work task

I did a timed work task when applying for an EA job a few years ago. The task was supposed to take four or five hours and I spent a lot longer on it — less than double, but I think more than 50% longer. I did not inform the organisation I was applying to about this (I also didn’t get the job).

The experience

The main feeling of the experience was stress.

I did not originally plan to spend longer than the allocated time. As the time limit approached I felt increasingly stressed, with a sense that the quality of my work was not “good enough”. The time ran out and I hadn’t finished and I carried on working.

I was aware that I was spending longer than the time limit. But it seems like I was flinching away from this fact, and on another level it seems I was not truly taking in what I was doing.

I had various justifications popping into my head for why what I was doing was ok:

• I had a sense that the work I had completed didn’t reflect my true abilities, in part because I thought stress was impairing my performance.

• I had a subtle sense that I somehow deserved the role.

• I thought that other people might also be spending extra time on the task, and so sticking to the time limit would be unfair to me.

My sense is that something like the following cycle was happening:

I’d become peripherally aware that I was spending longer than the limit → This would feel painful - guilt, shame → One of these justifying thoughts would surface, something like “my work on this doesn’t reflect my true abilities” → The feelings of guilt and shame would be ‘pushed’ back, and I’d feel some relief from the pain → I’d continue working.

It’s difficult to say whether I actually believed these things, or even what counts as believing something in this situation. I imagine that if someone had asked me “do you actually think these things are true and/or justify spending longer on the task?” the question would have felt very painful to hear, and I ultimately would have answered ‘no’.

I also had a subtle sense that what I was doing was “wrong”, but that I would make up for it in the future. I didn’t have a concrete sense of what that would look like, but it was something broadly in the direction of “work hard” or “work harder” on EA things.

Additional comments

I was not happy in my role at that time and I did not feel “successful”. It seems to me that a lot of my sense of self-worth was tied up in my work - in particular, in “being successful” in EA or by EA lights. Roughly, doing things that people within EA judged to be impactful or held in high regard. I did not feel like I had good options for being “successful” in this way. The role I was applying for felt like one of the only such options. Relatedly, I felt a sense of financial insecurity around my job prospects, and an overall sense of scarcity.

It seems like I viewed this as “aberrant” at the time — not actually me or a true reflection of me. Whether or not I was an honest person was not something I had much of a reflective view of. Insofar as I had an unreflective view of my honesty, it was mostly based on a sense of me under “normal circumstances”, which didn’t take much into account these kinds of “aberrant” occurrences.

It now seems to me that this was one of the stronger instances of a broader pattern of dishonesty under circumstances where my abilities or work were being evaluated. Other things I notice in this genre: subtly inflating my work outputs, expressing opinions that didn’t feel fully true to me but that I expected relevant people to be pleased with.

(I wrote this in March but I didn’t post it, I think because I was too scared. I just read Richard Ngo’s What just happened? A retrospective of AI alignment which somehow has nudged me to post this now).