I love this post! It’s beautifully written, and one of the best things I’ve read on the forum in a while. So take my subsequent criticism of it with that in mind! I apologize in advance if I’m totally missing the point.
I feel like EAs (and most ambitious people generally) are pretty confused about how to reconcile status/impact with self-worth (I’m including myself in this group). If confronted, many of us would say that status/impact should really be orthogonal to how we feel about ourselves, but we can’t quite bring that to be emotionally true. We helplessly invidiously compare ourselves with successful people like “Carl” (using the name as a label here, not saying we really do this when we look at Carl Schuman), even though we consciously would admit that the feeling doesn’t make much sense.
I’ve read a number of relevant discussions, and I still don’t think anyone has satisfactorily dealt with this problem. But I’ll say that, for now, I think we should separate questions about the moral integrity of our actions (how we should define the goodness/badness of our actions) and those about how we should think about ourselves as people (whether we’re good/bad people). They’re related, but there might not be an easy mapping from one to the other. For instance, I think it’s very conceivable that a “Dorothea” may be a better person than a “Carl”, but a “Carl” does more good than a “Dorothea.” And, perhaps, while we should strive to do as much good as possible, our self-worth should track the kind of people we are much more closely than how much good we do.
I love this post! It’s beautifully written, and one of the best things I’ve read on the forum in a while. So take my subsequent criticism of it with that in mind! I apologize in advance if I’m totally missing the point.
I feel like EAs (and most ambitious people generally) are pretty confused about how to reconcile status/impact with self-worth (I’m including myself in this group). If confronted, many of us would say that status/impact should really be orthogonal to how we feel about ourselves, but we can’t quite bring that to be emotionally true. We helplessly invidiously compare ourselves with successful people like “Carl” (using the name as a label here, not saying we really do this when we look at Carl Schuman), even though we consciously would admit that the feeling doesn’t make much sense.
I’ve read a number of relevant discussions, and I still don’t think anyone has satisfactorily dealt with this problem. But I’ll say that, for now, I think we should separate questions about the moral integrity of our actions (how we should define the goodness/badness of our actions) and those about how we should think about ourselves as people (whether we’re good/bad people). They’re related, but there might not be an easy mapping from one to the other. For instance, I think it’s very conceivable that a “Dorothea” may be a better person than a “Carl”, but a “Carl” does more good than a “Dorothea.” And, perhaps, while we should strive to do as much good as possible, our self-worth should track the kind of people we are much more closely than how much good we do.