Appreciating this. It’s helping me see that part of how I didn’t fall deeper into EA than I did is that I already had a worldview that viewed obligations as confused in much the sort of way you describe… and so I saw EA as sort of “to the extent that you’re going to care about the world, do so effectively” and also “have you noticed these particular low-hanging fruit?” and also just “here’s a bunch of people who care about doing good things and are interesting”. These obligations are indeed a kind of confusion—I love how you put it here:
The thing underlying my moral “obligation” came from me, my own mind. This underlying thing was actually a type of desire. It turned out that I wanted to help suffering people. I wanted to be in service of a beautiful world. Hm.
I did get infected with a bit of panic about x-risk stuff though, and this caused me to flail around a bunch and try to force reality to move faster than it could. I think Val describes the structure of my panic quite aptly in Here’s the exit. It wasn’t a sense of obligation, but it was a sense of “there is a danger; feeling safe is a lie” and this was keeping me from feeling safe in each moment even in the ways in which I WAS safe in those moments (even if a nuke were to drop moments later, or I were to have an aneurysm or whatever). It was an IS not an OUGHT but nonetheless generated an urgent sense of “the world’s on fire and it’s up to me to fix that”. But no degree of shortness to AI timelines benefits from adrenaline—even if you needed to pull an all-nighter to stop something happening tomorrow, calm steady focus will beat neurotic energy.
It seems to me that the obligation structure and the panic structure form two pieces of this totalizing memeplex that causes people to have trouble creatively finding good win-wins between all the things that they want. Both of them have an avoidant quality, and awayness motivation is WAY worse at steering than towardsness motivation.
Are there other elements? That seems worth mapping out!
Ah I realized I actually wanted to quote this paragraph (though the one I quoted above is also spot on)
I felt similarly angry when I realized that my well-meaning friends had installed a shard of panic in my body that made “I’m safe” feel like it would always be false until we had a positive singularity. I had to reclaim that, in several phases. And on reflection I had to digest some sense of social obligation there, like fear of people judging me, whether EAs or other obligation-driven activists. And maybe they do or will! But I’m not compromising on catching my breath.