Thanks for writing this, it was really enjoyable to read and I don’t see very many short posts like this on the forum.
I agree with most of the points made in this article and I have come across people who have recently come across EA who have had similar reactions to the first paragraph.
I do think that there is a set of people for which the ‘vast differences in the goodness of different choices’ insight (which can lead to this problem of not feeling like you are doing the maximally good thing) is still very valuable. I don’t think this post argues against this but there is probably a trade-off between stressing this point and not making people bad that the thing they are doing may not be maximally good.
Thanks for writing this, it was really enjoyable to read and I don’t see very many short posts like this on the forum.
I agree with most of the points made in this article and I have come across people who have recently come across EA who have had similar reactions to the first paragraph.
I do think that there is a set of people for which the ‘vast differences in the goodness of different choices’ insight (which can lead to this problem of not feeling like you are doing the maximally good thing) is still very valuable. I don’t think this post argues against this but there is probably a trade-off between stressing this point and not making people bad that the thing they are doing may not be maximally good.