I suspect that the biggest altruistic counterfactual impact I’ve had in my life was merely because I was in the right place at the right time: a moderately heavy cabinet/shelf thing was tipping over and about to fall on a little kid (I don’t think it would have killed him. He probably would have had some broken bones, lots of bruising, and a concussion). I simply happened to be standing close enough to react.
It wasn’t as a result of any special skillset I had developed, nor of any well thought-out theory of change; it was just happenstance. Realistically, I can’t really take credit for it any more than I can take credit for being born in the time and place that I was. It makes me think about how we plan for things in expectation, but there is such a massive amount of random ‘noise’ in the world. This isn’t exactly epistemic humility or moral cluelessness, but it seems vaguely related to those.
I suspect that the biggest altruistic counterfactual impact I’ve had in my life was merely because I was in the right place at the right time: a moderately heavy cabinet/shelf thing was tipping over and about to fall on a little kid (I don’t think it would have killed him. He probably would have had some broken bones, lots of bruising, and a concussion). I simply happened to be standing close enough to react.
It wasn’t as a result of any special skillset I had developed, nor of any well thought-out theory of change; it was just happenstance. Realistically, I can’t really take credit for it any more than I can take credit for being born in the time and place that I was. It makes me think about how we plan for things in expectation, but there is such a massive amount of random ‘noise’ in the world. This isn’t exactly epistemic humility or moral cluelessness, but it seems vaguely related to those.