One possible way of thinking about this, which might tie your work in smaller battles into a ‘big picture’, is if you believe that your work on the smaller battles is indirectly helping the wider project. e.g. by working to solve one altruistic cause you are sparing other altruistic individuals and altruistic resources from being spent on that cause, increasing the resources available for wider altruistic projects, and potentially by increasing altruistic resources available in the future.[1]
Note that I’m only saying this is a possible way of thinking about this, not necessarily that you should think this (for one thing, the extent to which this is true probably varies across areas, depending on the inter-connectedness of different cause areas in different ways and their varying flowthrough effects).
As in this passage from one of Yudkowsky’s short stories:
“But time passed,” the Confessor said, “time moved forward, and things changed.” The eyes were no longer focused on Akon, looking now at something far away. “There was an old saying, to the effect that while someone with a single bee sting will pay much for a remedy, to someone with five bee stings, removing just one sting seems less attractive. That was humanity in the ancient days. There was so much wrong with the world that the small resources of altruism were splintered among ten thousand urgent charities, and none of it ever seemed to go anywhere. And yet… and yet...”
“There was a threshold crossed somewhere,” said the Confessor, “without a single apocalypse to mark it. Fewer wars. Less starvation. Better technology. The economy kept growing. People had more resource to spare for charity, and the altruists had fewer and fewer causes to choose from. They came even to me, in my time, and rescued me. Earth cleaned itself up, and whenever something threatened to go drastically wrong again, the whole attention of the planet turned in that direction and took care of it. Humanity finally got its act together.”
One possible way of thinking about this, which might tie your work in smaller battles into a ‘big picture’, is if you believe that your work on the smaller battles is indirectly helping the wider project. e.g. by working to solve one altruistic cause you are sparing other altruistic individuals and altruistic resources from being spent on that cause, increasing the resources available for wider altruistic projects, and potentially by increasing altruistic resources available in the future.[1]
Note that I’m only saying this is a possible way of thinking about this, not necessarily that you should think this (for one thing, the extent to which this is true probably varies across areas, depending on the inter-connectedness of different cause areas in different ways and their varying flowthrough effects).
As in this passage from one of Yudkowsky’s short stories: