[I can delete my comment if you’d rather not have it on your shortform, or transfer it to somewhere more appropriate and not reference you]
I can emphasize with some of your emotions. This is what I wrote after seeing yet another Tweet from an entitled woke software engineer who probably never sacrificed for anything remotely valuable in his life:
I’ve been giving 10-20% of my income since I was 22, and I felt really bad I couldn’t do it earlier when I left home at 19. And I took a >>50% paycut to do my current job. I’m not asking for thanks, nobody said morality had to be easy. But what the fuck did you do with your life?
But I deleted the Tweet quickly, because this type of emotional outburst isn’t productive. People have all sorts of self-justifications, and pretend that not caring about morality absolves them of doing good, or that if you don’t try to do good, you can be entitled to sneer at people actually trying. And I expect playing the virtue game here to be actively unhelpful.
Life can be hard sometimes, for all of us. Morality is hard, too, for those of us who want to do good things. It’s important to remember this. I think when all of us old-timers (it feels weird to think of myself that way given that I’m not yet 30) decided to dedicate our lives to doing good, none of us thought this would be easy. Except maybe in the psychological sense of “I can’t imagine getting up in the morning and not do something about all the suffering and suboptimality of the world.”
I think it’s important to remember our ethical commitments, what drew us to doing good. Morality is fucking hard. Sometimes I forget that when I try to do abstract research to make the lightcone go well, but such is reality. If I wanted easy praise from the masses I’d do some generic greentech thing or go back to FAANG and volunteer + donate like 5% of my income to generically unobjectionable leftist causes.
But that won’t feel true to me, and more importantly, the net expected good in the world accomplished in the future will be significantly lower. And this general understanding is what drew me to this community in the first place. To do good, rather than seem to. To do the most good, rather than to do a bit and then call it quits.
From your past comments that I’ve read, you probably felt the same way,[1] even if it’s not as “alive” now. I imagine if you take a break, cool down some, and circle back to reflecting on your past ideals, you’ll still endorse them, and think the fight is worth fighting.
Morality feels hard, now. The load has sometimes felt lighter in the past year, I won’t deny that. But it’ll probably feel hard again in the future, probably for different reasons. But we didn’t sign up to do the easy thing. As you alluded to in your recent post, if we lived in a morally adequate society, we won’t need this movement in the first place.
It’s better to keep our heads down and just work for a better future, and let the historians sort out the rest.
On the more object-level of your comments, I think a lot of EA, at least traditionally[2], is implicitly a rejection of reciprocity ethics. I think a lot of EA as fighting for the voiceless. Much of classic GiveWell-style EA is donating so very poor children don’t suffer and die, and of course poor children have approximately zero political representation in developed world politics. Factory farmed animals can’t speak about their suffering or go on strike or vote. And of course future generations have zero political power or sway.
From another angle, I expect if we were much more focused on reciprocity ethics (especially to people with power), we’d be more liked. If EA was more about donating to stuff like Wikipedia and open-source software and local children’s hospitals I’d expect a lot more generically positive vibes from people we trade with. But this is not what The Good is, and our movement ’s ideals are not about being liked.
Honestly, maybe I should be grateful that we were liked for so long, given how much hatred other moral communities in the past has received in comparison.
I don’t have a strong conclusion, just some thoughts. I hope you feel better in the future. The work still needs to be done, and now more than ever we need people who can do it.
I think this is much less true for fighting against near-time existential risks. I think this is another reason to disaggregate the “existential security” and “effective altruism” brands.
[I can delete my comment if you’d rather not have it on your shortform, or transfer it to somewhere more appropriate and not reference you]
I can emphasize with some of your emotions. This is what I wrote after seeing yet another Tweet from an entitled woke software engineer who probably never sacrificed for anything remotely valuable in his life:
But I deleted the Tweet quickly, because this type of emotional outburst isn’t productive. People have all sorts of self-justifications, and pretend that not caring about morality absolves them of doing good, or that if you don’t try to do good, you can be entitled to sneer at people actually trying. And I expect playing the virtue game here to be actively unhelpful.
Life can be hard sometimes, for all of us. Morality is hard, too, for those of us who want to do good things. It’s important to remember this. I think when all of us old-timers (it feels weird to think of myself that way given that I’m not yet 30) decided to dedicate our lives to doing good, none of us thought this would be easy. Except maybe in the psychological sense of “I can’t imagine getting up in the morning and not do something about all the suffering and suboptimality of the world.”
I think it’s important to remember our ethical commitments, what drew us to doing good. Morality is fucking hard. Sometimes I forget that when I try to do abstract research to make the lightcone go well, but such is reality. If I wanted easy praise from the masses I’d do some generic greentech thing or go back to FAANG and volunteer + donate like 5% of my income to generically unobjectionable leftist causes.
But that won’t feel true to me, and more importantly, the net expected good in the world accomplished in the future will be significantly lower. And this general understanding is what drew me to this community in the first place. To do good, rather than seem to. To do the most good, rather than to do a bit and then call it quits.
From your past comments that I’ve read, you probably felt the same way,[1] even if it’s not as “alive” now. I imagine if you take a break, cool down some, and circle back to reflecting on your past ideals, you’ll still endorse them, and think the fight is worth fighting.
Morality feels hard, now. The load has sometimes felt lighter in the past year, I won’t deny that. But it’ll probably feel hard again in the future, probably for different reasons. But we didn’t sign up to do the easy thing. As you alluded to in your recent post, if we lived in a morally adequate society, we won’t need this movement in the first place.
It’s better to keep our heads down and just work for a better future, and let the historians sort out the rest.
On the more object-level of your comments, I think a lot of EA, at least traditionally[2], is implicitly a rejection of reciprocity ethics. I think a lot of EA as fighting for the voiceless. Much of classic GiveWell-style EA is donating so very poor children don’t suffer and die, and of course poor children have approximately zero political representation in developed world politics. Factory farmed animals can’t speak about their suffering or go on strike or vote. And of course future generations have zero political power or sway.
From another angle, I expect if we were much more focused on reciprocity ethics (especially to people with power), we’d be more liked. If EA was more about donating to stuff like Wikipedia and open-source software and local children’s hospitals I’d expect a lot more generically positive vibes from people we trade with. But this is not what The Good is, and our movement ’s ideals are not about being liked.
Honestly, maybe I should be grateful that we were liked for so long, given how much hatred other moral communities in the past has received in comparison.
I don’t have a strong conclusion, just some thoughts. I hope you feel better in the future. The work still needs to be done, and now more than ever we need people who can do it.
My guess is that if you tried to seem good rather than do good, it’d not feel true to you, and your life won’t actually feel better.
I think this is much less true for fighting against near-time existential risks. I think this is another reason to disaggregate the “existential security” and “effective altruism” brands.