I wonder whether another reason effective altruists might be particularly prone to these kinds of worries is the fact that it’s sufficiently broad that it isn’t even clear what you should be trying to optimise (donations? time working?), or optimise for (helping animals? helping those in the developing world?). That seems like it could be problem for feeling judged by others, and for giving yourself a hard time. An example of the former: I have a lot of effective altruists come and stay at my house, and I feel like very often I find myself worrying about what I should cook, and what they’ll think of the house – will they judge me for having meat in the house? Or if it seemed like I had expensive meat substitutes? Or if I had vegan foods that would take a long time to cook (when I could be working)? (Of course, this is mostly in my head – I haven’t had anyone actually complain about any of these.). Likewise, as to wonder what you should do, it feels s if it would be easier if there was a narrower range within which to optimise (for example, it feels much clearer to optimise for being a PhD student, because there are more specific aims, and also a clearly limited sphere).
I don’t know how we might be able to counteract this. One thing might be to just to try to be extra accepting of the fact that ‘doing good’ is going to look pretty different for different people, and try not to give ourselves or each other a hard time for that being the case.
I wonder whether another reason effective altruists might be particularly prone to these kinds of worries is the fact that it’s sufficiently broad that it isn’t even clear what you should be trying to optimise (donations? time working?), or optimise for (helping animals? helping those in the developing world?). That seems like it could be problem for feeling judged by others, and for giving yourself a hard time. An example of the former: I have a lot of effective altruists come and stay at my house, and I feel like very often I find myself worrying about what I should cook, and what they’ll think of the house – will they judge me for having meat in the house? Or if it seemed like I had expensive meat substitutes? Or if I had vegan foods that would take a long time to cook (when I could be working)? (Of course, this is mostly in my head – I haven’t had anyone actually complain about any of these.). Likewise, as to wonder what you should do, it feels s if it would be easier if there was a narrower range within which to optimise (for example, it feels much clearer to optimise for being a PhD student, because there are more specific aims, and also a clearly limited sphere).
I don’t know how we might be able to counteract this. One thing might be to just to try to be extra accepting of the fact that ‘doing good’ is going to look pretty different for different people, and try not to give ourselves or each other a hard time for that being the case.