Here’s a frame I’ve found helpful for thinking about effective altruism:
- When I look inside myself, I notice that I care about a lot of things.
- You could also reasonably replace “care” with “wanting,” “preferring,” “valuing,” “desiring,” “having goals,” etc, rather than “caring.” I’m okay being loose.
- Some examples of things I care about:
- I want my sister to have an excellent career.
- I’m hungry, and want some food.
- I want to be valued by people I respect.
- I want my dogs to have enjoyable lives.
- (And many, many more).
- (It’s often useful to be introspective/clear-eyed about what you care about, what that ontology looks like, which values are instrumental to which other values, etc., but I won’t be doing that here, and indeed I think it might be anti-helpful in this particular frame at this particular time. Stay with me until the end.)
- Sort-of by definition, I want more of the things I care about. I see my life as a difficult, high-level optimization problem aimed at making decisions which, given my resources at various times, increase my values across time.
- Some of the things I care about — like wanting food because I’m hungry — are fundamentally oriented at myself. And I take actions to do better along these axes.
- Some examples of actions:
- Reading a book on tax strategies
- Learning how to cook
- Asking people for feedback on my sartorial choices
- etc
- And in general, I try to be effective at getting what I want, here — that is, I aim to achieve these kinds of goals/values/preferences to as great of a degree as possible.
- But other things I care about — like wanting my sister to have an excellent career, or my dogs to have enjoyable lives — are fundamentally oriented at others-by-their-lights. And I take actions to do better along these axes, too.
- These motivations often look starkly different in a lot of different situations.
- For some of these altruistic motivations, it just so happens that some lovely dynamics have coalesced such that there’s an existing group of people / infrastructure / etc who have worked & are working quite hard toward helping me get what I want w/r/t some of those things I care about that are oriented at others-by-their-lights. In particular, I haven’t found any community which is more effective at helping me achieve the things I care about that are oriented at others-by-their-lights than this one.
Why do I like this frame?
- Because it’s apparent that I care about quite a few things. It becomes evident quickly that totalizing stances toward EA are just not worth it; a bad trade; just getting less of what I want.
- In particular, I think this kind of frame can be validating toward folks who’ve gone quite far, and repressed the values that they in-fact have in other areas of their life. (I think I was in this camp ~two years ago.)
- There are interesting subproblems that come into clearer view, e.g.:
- When should, on the margin, my resources go toward different things that I care about?
- What actions would get me more access to the things that I want with greater robustness (i.e. getting me closer to many different things I want, all at once)?
- etc