As with many statements people make about people in EA, I think you’ve identified something that is true about humans in general.
I think it applies less to the average person in EA than to the average human. I think people in EA are more morally scrupulous and prone to feeling guilty/insufficiently moral than the average person, and I suspect you would agree with me given other things you’ve written. (But let me know if that’s wrong!)
I find statements of the type “sometimes we are X” to be largely uninformative when “X” is a part of human nature.
Compare “sometimes people in EA are materialistic and want to buy too many nice things for themselves; EA has a materialism problem” — I’m sure there are people in EA like this, and perhaps this condition could be a “problem” for them. But I don’t think people would learn very much about EA from the aforementioned statements, because they are also true of almost every group of people.
As with many statements people make about people in EA, I think you’ve identified something that is true about humans in general.
I think it applies less to the average person in EA than to the average human. I think people in EA are more morally scrupulous and prone to feeling guilty/insufficiently moral than the average person, and I suspect you would agree with me given other things you’ve written. (But let me know if that’s wrong!)
I find statements of the type “sometimes we are X” to be largely uninformative when “X” is a part of human nature.
Compare “sometimes people in EA are materialistic and want to buy too many nice things for themselves; EA has a materialism problem” — I’m sure there are people in EA like this, and perhaps this condition could be a “problem” for them. But I don’t think people would learn very much about EA from the aforementioned statements, because they are also true of almost every group of people.