Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I deeply empathize with the pull to help people now, while rationally agreeing with longtermist arguments. One insight that really stood out to me was:
“One thing I’m heartened by is that working on the long run feels hard in precisely the way I think we should expect effective altruism to feel hard”
This intuitively makes sense to me, particularly within the framing of neglectedness. Similarly however, I do wander whether the opposite could be true and whether the sense of something feeling hard may be our intuition providing a signal that the work doesn’t align with our personal ethic (for whatever reason)?
I have personally struggled with this. I am trying to give my intuition more weight relative to pure rational reasoning as I have found that I can often learn a lot about my moral intuitions by stepping back and trying to unpack the uncomfortableness that I may feel.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I deeply empathize with the pull to help people now, while rationally agreeing with longtermist arguments. One insight that really stood out to me was:
This intuitively makes sense to me, particularly within the framing of neglectedness. Similarly however, I do wander whether the opposite could be true and whether the sense of something feeling hard may be our intuition providing a signal that the work doesn’t align with our personal ethic (for whatever reason)?
I have personally struggled with this. I am trying to give my intuition more weight relative to pure rational reasoning as I have found that I can often learn a lot about my moral intuitions by stepping back and trying to unpack the uncomfortableness that I may feel.
Your comments makes me think of two posts which I imagine you might find interesting:
Effective Altruism and Free Riding
A summary of Nicholas Beckstead’s writing on Bayesian Ethics