Iām not really sympathetic to the following common sentiment: āEAs should not try to do as much good as feasible at the expense of their own well-being /ā the good of their close associates.ā
Itās tautologically true that if trying to hyper-optimize comes at too much of a cost to the energy you can devote to your most important altruistic work, then trying to hyper-optimize is altruistically counterproductive. I acknowledge that this is the principle behind the sentiment above, and evidently some peopleās effectiveness has benefited from advice like this.
But in practice, I see EAs apply this principle in ways that seem suspiciously favorable to their own well-being, or to the status quo. When you find yourself trying to justify on the grounds of impact the amounts of self-care people afford themselves when they donāt care about being effectively altruistic, you should be extremely suspicious.
Some examples, which I cite not to pick on the authors in particularāsince I think many others are making a similar mistakeābut just because they actually wrote these claims down.
I felt a bit suspicious, looking at how I spent my time. Surely that long road trip wasnāt necessary to avoid misery? Did I really need to spend several weekends in a row building a ridiculous LED laser maze, when my other side project was talking to young synthetic biologists about ethics?
I think this is just correct. If your argument is that EAs shouldnāt be totally self-effacing because some frivolities are psychologically necessary to keep rescuing people from the bottomless pit of suffering, then sure, do the things that are psychologically necessary. Iām skeptical that āpsychologically necessaryā actually looks similar to the amount of frivolities indulged by the average person who is as well-off as EAs generally are.
Do I live up to this standard? Hardly. That doesnāt mean I should pretend Iām doing the right thing.
Minimization is greedy. You donāt get to celebrate that youāve gained an hour a day [from sleeping seven instead of eight hours], or done something impactful this week, because that minimizing urge is still looking at all your unclaimed time, and wondering why you arenāt using it better, too.
How important is my own celebration, though, when you really weigh it against what I could be doing with even more time? (This isnāt just abstract impact points; there are other beings whose struggles matter no less than mine do, and fewer frivolities for me could mean relief for them.)
I think where I fundamentally disagree with this post is that, for many people, I donāt think aiming for the minimum puts you close to less than the minimum. Getting to the minimum, much less below it, can be very hard, such that people who aim at it just arenāt in much danger of undershooting. If you find this is not true for yourself, then please do back off from the minimum. But remember that in the counterfactual where you hadnāt tested your limits, you probably would not have gotten close to optimal.
This post includes some saddening anecdotes about people ending up miserable because they tried to optimize all their time for altruism. I donāt want to trivialize their suffering. Yet I can conjure anecdotes in the opposite direction (and the kind of altruism I care about reduces more suffering in expectation). Several of my colleagues seem to work more than the typical job entails, and I donāt have any evidence of the quality of their work being the worse for this. Iāve found that the amount of time I can realistically devote to altruistic efforts is pretty malleable. No, Iām not a machine; of course I have my limits. But when I gave myself permission to do altruistic things for parts of weekends, or into later hours of weekdays, well, I could. āMy happiness is not the point,ā as Julia said in this post, and while she evidently doesnāt endorse that statement, I do. That just seems to be the inevitable consequence of taking the sentience of other beings besides yourself (or your loved ones) seriously.
Personally have been trying to think of my life only as a means to an end. Will my life technically might have value, I am fairly sure it is rather minuscule compared to the potential impact can make. I think itās possible, though probably difficult, to intuit this and still feel fine /ā not guilty, about things. ā¦ Iām a bit wary on this topic that people might be a bit biased to select beliefs based on what is satisfying or which ones feel good.
I do think Tessaās point about slack has some forceāthough in a sense, this merely shifts the āminimumā up by some robustness margin, which is unlikely to be large enough to justify the average personās indulgences.
If I donate to my friendās fundraiser for her sick uncle, Iām pursuing a goal. But itās the goal of āsupport my friend and our friendship,ā not my goal of āmake the world as good as possible.ā When I make a decision, itās better if Iām clear about which goal Iām pursuing. I donāt have to beat myself up about this money not being used for optimizing the world ā that was never the point of that donation. That money is coming from my āpersonal satisfactionā budget, along with money I use for things like getting coffee with friends.
It puzzles me that, as common as concerns about the utility monsterāsacrificing the well-being of the many for the super-happiness of oneāare, we seem to find it totally intuitive that one can (passively) sacrifice the well-being of the many for oneās own rather mild comforts. (This is confounded by the act vs. omission distinction, but do you really endorse that?)
The latter conclusion is basically the implication of accepting goals other than āmake the world as good as possible.ā What makes these other goals so special, that they can demand disproportionate attention (ādisproportionateā relative to how much actual well-being is at stake)?
Due to the writing style, itās honestly not clear to me what exactly this post was claiming. But the author does emphatically say that devoting all of their time to the activity that helps more people per hour would be āpremature optimization.ā And they celebrate an example of a less effective thing they do because it consistently makes a few people happy.
I donāt see how the post actually defends doing the less effective thing. To the extent that you impartially care about other sentient beings, and donāt think their experiences matter any less because you have fewer warm fuzzy feelings about them, what is the justification for willingly helping fewer people?
In Defense of Aiming for the Minimum
Iām not really sympathetic to the following common sentiment: āEAs should not try to do as much good as feasible at the expense of their own well-being /ā the good of their close associates.ā
Itās tautologically true that if trying to hyper-optimize comes at too much of a cost to the energy you can devote to your most important altruistic work, then trying to hyper-optimize is altruistically counterproductive. I acknowledge that this is the principle behind the sentiment above, and evidently some peopleās effectiveness has benefited from advice like this.
But in practice, I see EAs apply this principle in ways that seem suspiciously favorable to their own well-being, or to the status quo. When you find yourself trying to justify on the grounds of impact the amounts of self-care people afford themselves when they donāt care about being effectively altruistic, you should be extremely suspicious.
Some examples, which I cite not to pick on the authors in particularāsince I think many others are making a similar mistakeābut just because they actually wrote these claims down.
1. āAiming for the minimum of self-care is dangerousā
I think this is just correct. If your argument is that EAs shouldnāt be totally self-effacing because some frivolities are psychologically necessary to keep rescuing people from the bottomless pit of suffering, then sure, do the things that are psychologically necessary. Iām skeptical that āpsychologically necessaryā actually looks similar to the amount of frivolities indulged by the average person who is as well-off as EAs generally are.
Do I live up to this standard? Hardly. That doesnāt mean I should pretend Iām doing the right thing.
How important is my own celebration, though, when you really weigh it against what I could be doing with even more time? (This isnāt just abstract impact points; there are other beings whose struggles matter no less than mine do, and fewer frivolities for me could mean relief for them.)
I think where I fundamentally disagree with this post is that, for many people, I donāt think aiming for the minimum puts you close to less than the minimum. Getting to the minimum, much less below it, can be very hard, such that people who aim at it just arenāt in much danger of undershooting. If you find this is not true for yourself, then please do back off from the minimum. But remember that in the counterfactual where you hadnāt tested your limits, you probably would not have gotten close to optimal.
This post includes some saddening anecdotes about people ending up miserable because they tried to optimize all their time for altruism. I donāt want to trivialize their suffering. Yet I can conjure anecdotes in the opposite direction (and the kind of altruism I care about reduces more suffering in expectation). Several of my colleagues seem to work more than the typical job entails, and I donāt have any evidence of the quality of their work being the worse for this. Iāve found that the amount of time I can realistically devote to altruistic efforts is pretty malleable. No, Iām not a machine; of course I have my limits. But when I gave myself permission to do altruistic things for parts of weekends, or into later hours of weekdays, well, I could. āMy happiness is not the point,ā as Julia said in this post, and while she evidently doesnāt endorse that statement, I do. That just seems to be the inevitable consequence of taking the sentience of other beings besides yourself (or your loved ones) seriously.
See also this comment:
I do think Tessaās point about slack has some forceāthough in a sense, this merely shifts the āminimumā up by some robustness margin, which is unlikely to be large enough to justify the average personās indulgences.
2. āYou have more than one goal, and thatās fineā
It puzzles me that, as common as concerns about the utility monsterāsacrificing the well-being of the many for the super-happiness of oneāare, we seem to find it totally intuitive that one can (passively) sacrifice the well-being of the many for oneās own rather mild comforts. (This is confounded by the act vs. omission distinction, but do you really endorse that?)
The latter conclusion is basically the implication of accepting goals other than āmake the world as good as possible.ā What makes these other goals so special, that they can demand disproportionate attention (ādisproportionateā relative to how much actual well-being is at stake)?
3. āIneffective Altruismā
Due to the writing style, itās honestly not clear to me what exactly this post was claiming. But the author does emphatically say that devoting all of their time to the activity that helps more people per hour would be āpremature optimization.ā And they celebrate an example of a less effective thing they do because it consistently makes a few people happy.
I donāt see how the post actually defends doing the less effective thing. To the extent that you impartially care about other sentient beings, and donāt think their experiences matter any less because you have fewer warm fuzzy feelings about them, what is the justification for willingly helping fewer people?