I worry that people who are new to EA might read this post and get the impression that there’s an expectation from people in EA to have some form of utilitarianism as their only intrinsic goal. So I’d like to flag that EA is a community of humans :). Humans are the result of human evolution—a messy process that roughly optimizes for inclusive fitness. It’s unlikely that any human can be perfectly modeled as a utilitarian (with limited will power etcetera, but without any intrinsic goal that is selfish).
Of course, this does not imply we shouldn’t have important discussions about burnout in EA. (In the case of the OP I would just pose the question a bit differently, maybe: “Should a utilitarian give 90%?”).
Thanks for writing this!
I worry that people who are new to EA might read this post and get the impression that there’s an expectation from people in EA to have some form of utilitarianism as their only intrinsic goal. So I’d like to flag that EA is a community of humans :). Humans are the result of human evolution—a messy process that roughly optimizes for inclusive fitness. It’s unlikely that any human can be perfectly modeled as a utilitarian (with limited will power etcetera, but without any intrinsic goal that is selfish).
Of course, this does not imply we shouldn’t have important discussions about burnout in EA. (In the case of the OP I would just pose the question a bit differently, maybe: “Should a utilitarian give 90%?”).
Also, many EAs don’t identify as utilitarians, like me!