I worry about the increasing emphasis on personal gains from altruism. Sure, it’s important to take care of yourself, and a large portion of us need to hear that more. Sure the way we “take care of ourselves” needn’t be that we should demand that charities pay us market-rate wages for our skills, and it needn’t be take expensive vacations with abandon, etc.
Mostly it’s not the money that worries me. I think the greater danger is deeper, and is about what we optimise for. The criteria by which our brains search for and select actions to make conscious and pull up into our working memory. The greater the number of unaligned criteria we mix into our search process, the (steeply) lower the probability that our brains will select-into-consciousness actions that score high on aligned criteria. There are important reasons to keep needle-sharp focus on doing what actually optimises for our values.
I worry about the increasing emphasis on personal gains from altruism. Sure, it’s important to take care of yourself, and a large portion of us need to hear that more. Sure the way we “take care of ourselves” needn’t be that we should demand that charities pay us market-rate wages for our skills, and it needn’t be take expensive vacations with abandon, etc.
Mostly it’s not the money that worries me. I think the greater danger is deeper, and is about what we optimise for. The criteria by which our brains search for and select actions to make conscious and pull up into our working memory. The greater the number of unaligned criteria we mix into our search process, the (steeply) lower the probability that our brains will select-into-consciousness actions that score high on aligned criteria. There are important reasons to keep needle-sharp focus on doing what actually optimises for our values.
It’s not new to have multiple goals! See for example Julia Wise’s post “You have more than one goal and that’s fine” or her earlier post “Cheerfully”.
http://www.givinggladly.com/2019/02/you-have-more-than-one-goal-and-thats.html?m=1
http://www.givinggladly.com/2013/06/cheerfully.html?m=1