Quote: ”When things feel particularly bleak, I sometimes tell myself that even if I had the time and energy to try to make the world better, I’d probably fail.
Effective altruists try anyway. They know it’s impossible to take the care you feel for one human and scale it up by a thousand, or a million, or a billion.”
Quote 2: ”We could really make things very good in the future,” he tells me. “Imagine your very best days. You could have a life that is as good as that, 100 times over, 1,000 times over.”
(highlights mine)
At the face value the question comes up: if it is impossible to scale the care you feel by a factor of a 1000 or more why would it be possible to have a life that is a 1000 times over as good as how you might imagine “your very best days”? Wouldn’t that max out at some point too?
There is some nuance to both of these quotes, which removes the conflict somewhat: 1. the first quote is about your “care-o-meter” (as given in the linked essay), while the second one is about “goodness” of life in general. The word “imagine” suggests the latter quote is about feeling in your life as good as you feel on your best days times 1000, however, the word “imagine” can also mean other things (you can think that your best day was when you donated to rescue a 1000 birds, which does not necessarily feel much different to saving one, but the “goodness” factor comes up from other reasons than subjective wellbeing here) 2. perhaps it’s about having 1000 times more “very best days”, or 500 times more “very best days”, which are subjectively two times as “best” as they are now—or some other combo 3. perhaps there are limits to “care-o-meter” but not on how we percieve subjective wellbeing, the scales don’t necessarily need to have same limits and same progression patterns. (is it even the question one should be asking? Do these scales actually work that way in the first place?)
Obviously hard to give all these caveats in a single quote in an introductory press article, so it’s nobody’s fault, but still—an interesting conundrum.
At the face value the question comes up: if it is impossible to scale the care you feel by a factor of a 1000 or more why would it be possible to have a life that is a 1000 times over as good as how you might imagine “your very best days”? Wouldn’t that max out at some point too?
2022 era biological humans may not be capable of either, but our descendants (assuming we survive) may have a lot of room to change on both, should they wish to do so.
Great piece :) Nitpick:
Quote:
”When things feel particularly bleak, I sometimes tell myself that even if I had the time and energy to try to make the world better, I’d probably fail.
Effective altruists try anyway. They know it’s impossible to take the care you feel for one human and scale it up by a thousand, or a million, or a billion.”
Quote 2:
”We could really make things very good in the future,” he tells me. “Imagine your very best days. You could have a life that is as good as that, 100 times over, 1,000 times over.”
(highlights mine)
At the face value the question comes up: if it is impossible to scale the care you feel by a factor of a 1000 or more why would it be possible to have a life that is a 1000 times over as good as how you might imagine “your very best days”? Wouldn’t that max out at some point too?
There is some nuance to both of these quotes, which removes the conflict somewhat:
1. the first quote is about your “care-o-meter” (as given in the linked essay), while the second one is about “goodness” of life in general. The word “imagine” suggests the latter quote is about feeling in your life as good as you feel on your best days times 1000, however, the word “imagine” can also mean other things (you can think that your best day was when you donated to rescue a 1000 birds, which does not necessarily feel much different to saving one, but the “goodness” factor comes up from other reasons than subjective wellbeing here)
2. perhaps it’s about having 1000 times more “very best days”, or 500 times more “very best days”, which are subjectively two times as “best” as they are now—or some other combo
3. perhaps there are limits to “care-o-meter” but not on how we percieve subjective wellbeing, the scales don’t necessarily need to have same limits and same progression patterns. (is it even the question one should be asking? Do these scales actually work that way in the first place?)
Obviously hard to give all these caveats in a single quote in an introductory press article, so it’s nobody’s fault, but still—an interesting conundrum.
2022 era biological humans may not be capable of either, but our descendants (assuming we survive) may have a lot of room to change on both, should they wish to do so.