If you spend a lot of time in deep thought trying to reconcile “I did X, and I want to do Y” with the implicit assumption “I am a virtuous and pure-hearted person”, then you’re going to end up getting way better at generating prosocial excuses via motivated reasoning.
If, instead, you’re willing to consider less-virtuous hypotheses, you might get a better model of your own actions. Such a hypothesis would be “I did X in order to impress my friends, and I chose career path Y in order to make my internal model of my parents proud”.
Realizing such uncomfortable truths bruises the ego, but can also bear fruit. For example: If a lot of EAs’ real reason for working on what they do is to impress others, then this fact can be leveraged to generate more utility. A leaderboard on the forum, ranking users by (some EA organization’s estimate of) their personal impact could give rise to a whole bunch of QALYs.
Reminder that split-brain experiments indicate that the part of the brain that makes decisions is not the part of the brain that explains decisions. The evolutionary purpose of the brain’s explaining-module is to generate plausible-sounding rationalizations for the brain’s decision-modules’ actions. These explanations also have to adhere to the social norms of the tribe, in order to avoid being shunned and starving.
Humans are literally built to generate prosocial-sounding rationalizations for their behavior. They rationalize things to themselves even when they are not being interrogated, possibly because it’s best to pre-compute and cache rationalizations that one is likely to need later. It has been postulated that this is the reason that people have internal monologues, or indeed, the reason that humans evolved big brains in the first place.
We were built to do motivated reasoning, so it’s not a bad habit that you can simply drop after reading the right blog post. Instead, it’s a fundamental flaw in our thought-processes, and must always be consciously corrected. Anytime you say “I did X because Y” without thinking about it, you are likely dead wrong.
The only way to figure out why you did anything is through empirical investigation of your past behavior (revealed preferences). This is not easy, it risks exposing your less-virtuous motivations, and almost nobody does it, so you will seem weird and untrustworthy if you always respond to “Why did you do X?” with “I don’t know, let me think”. People will instinctively want to trust and befriend the guy who always has a prosocial rationalization on the tip of his tongue. Honesty is hard.