Naively I’d have guessed that the “biases clouded by personal experience” angle would cause upper-middle class young Westerners to overrate the global importance of problems that they or people close to them personally experience (e.g. mental health issues, racism) and are shared by other moral patients, rather than overrate the problems that they do not suffer from, but others do (e.g., malaria, being trapped in a battery cage).
I agree, but the situation here is a bit more complex. Michael’s telling a story about someone who was emotionally invested in the problem of improving mental health among EAs, but then “suddenly switched to sceptical mode” as soon as the conversation turned to helping people who were more distant. While in skeptical mode, this person (in Michael’s telling) appeared to be relying on the intellectual judgments of more proximate people in the EA community rather than connecting emotionally to the subjective experience of the more distant people, whether we are talking about malaria or depression. The point is about people selectively choosing to apply “sceptical mode” based on the context.
Maybe, but FWIW, lots of people have the view that mental health is only—or, least, is primarily—a problem for wealthy people. The idea seems to be that only the rich have the luxury to obsess about their emotions, whereas the poor are pretty happy and/or too busy dealing with their other problems to stop and ‘fuss’ about it. I don’t know why they think this, but I’m surprised at how often I encounter this view
I note it’s in some tension with another attitude common, namely that the rich are almost uniformly happy whereas the poor are miserable.
I don’t share this view, and I agree that it is weird. But maybe the feeling behind it is something like: if I, personally, were in extreme poverty I would want people to prioritize getting me material help over mental health help. I imagine I would be kind of baffled and annoyed if some charity was giving me CBT books instead of food or malaria nets.
That’s just a feeling though, and it doesn’t rigorously answer any real cause prioritization question.
Naively I’d have guessed that the “biases clouded by personal experience” angle would cause upper-middle class young Westerners to overrate the global importance of problems that they or people close to them personally experience (e.g. mental health issues, racism) and are shared by other moral patients, rather than overrate the problems that they do not suffer from, but others do (e.g., malaria, being trapped in a battery cage).
I agree, but the situation here is a bit more complex. Michael’s telling a story about someone who was emotionally invested in the problem of improving mental health among EAs, but then “suddenly switched to sceptical mode” as soon as the conversation turned to helping people who were more distant. While in skeptical mode, this person (in Michael’s telling) appeared to be relying on the intellectual judgments of more proximate people in the EA community rather than connecting emotionally to the subjective experience of the more distant people, whether we are talking about malaria or depression. The point is about people selectively choosing to apply “sceptical mode” based on the context.
Maybe, but FWIW, lots of people have the view that mental health is only—or, least, is primarily—a problem for wealthy people. The idea seems to be that only the rich have the luxury to obsess about their emotions, whereas the poor are pretty happy and/or too busy dealing with their other problems to stop and ‘fuss’ about it. I don’t know why they think this, but I’m surprised at how often I encounter this view
I note it’s in some tension with another attitude common, namely that the rich are almost uniformly happy whereas the poor are miserable.
I agree that many people believe that mental health problems only affect the rich, and that this belief is incorrect.
I don’t share this view, and I agree that it is weird. But maybe the feeling behind it is something like: if I, personally, were in extreme poverty I would want people to prioritize getting me material help over mental health help. I imagine I would be kind of baffled and annoyed if some charity was giving me CBT books instead of food or malaria nets.
That’s just a feeling though, and it doesn’t rigorously answer any real cause prioritization question.