Replacing Guilt

  • Many people are motivated by guilt, shame or some combination of the two
  • This is inefficient, but it’s the primary means of motivation for many effective altruists
  • The problem is that leads to bursts of high intensity effort interspersed with periods of “laziness”
  • This is inefficient and unsustainable
  • Replace guilt-based motivation with intrinsic motivation for a steadier, more efficient, more sustainable means of working
  • Goals
    • Address guilt that comes from listlessness
    • Listlessness often comes from a feeling that there must be more to life than one’s day to day activities

The Stamp Collector

  • Thought experiment of the stamp-collecting robot
  • Can the robot really be a stamp collector if it doesn’t have access to true knowledge of its own inventory?
  • This is a philosophical error
    • The robot doesn’t have “true” access to any part of its own internal state
    • The robot builds a model of the world that includes itself and its stamp inventory
    • The robot applies actions to that model and takes those actions that increase the number of stamps in the model
  • Actions don’t have inherent value; what has value is the world-states that result from applying those actions to the present world state
  • People, like the stamp collecting robot, can choose to value world states rather than internal state
    • Not everyone chooses world states that result in increases of their own short-term pleasure
    • Not every action can be explained in terms of individual pleasure maximization

You’re Allowed To Fight For Something

  • Listless guilt is guilt that stems from not doing anything
  • We can’t do anything about the guilt that results from not doing anything, but we can do something about the guilt that results from not doing a particular thing
  • Many people say that people only do whatever they “want” to do
    • This is broadening the term “want” to include both actions and goals
    • These are separate concepts, and therefore should be described with separate words
  • You don’t need a reason or excuse to care about things larger than yourself
  • Many people forget that they’re allowed to want a future that’s different from the present
  • If you have listless guilt, try to figure out what specific things you’re guilty about
    • This may not make the guilt go away
    • In fact, it might make the guilt worse
    • But once you know what you’re guilty about, you can take specific steps to address that guilt

Caring About Something Larger Than Yourself

  • People tend to confuse feelings with caring
    • It’s entirely possible to care deeply about something you don’t have a strong emotional connection to
    • Arguably, that is the definition of caring - taking an action for a cause or goal for reasons other than having a strong emotional connection to it
  • Why should we care about humanity as a whole, even though we don’t have strong feelings for it?
    • Choose to favor “default settings” that prioritize aesthetics and compassion over evolutionary defaults that prefer in-group bias and hating competitors
    • In short, favor people over evolutionary defaults
  • Let quiet aesthetics win over strong feelings
    • Strong feelings are the result of evolutionary happenstance whereas quiet asthetics reflect deeper values
  • Give people the same level of respect as animals
    • When animals are mistreated, we tend to side with the animal, regardless of circumstance
    • When people are mistreated we first evaluate whether the person did something to deserve the mistreatment
  • When we observe animals we don’t engage any of the social machinery we use when we observe other humans
  • Change perspective by trying to visualize humans as “animals responding to stimuli as they explore an environment they will never fully understand”

You Don’t Get To Know What You’re Fighting For

  • It’s a lot easier to know what you’re working against than to know what you’re working for
  • When we work towards a goal, we often find that the goals shifts or evaporates as we work towards it
  • Even if you say you know what you’re fighting for, it’s possible to be wrong
    • Humans have extremely imperfect introspection
    • We should be suspicious of anyone who claims to know their entire preference set
  • Fortunately, you don’t need to have a precise definition of what you’re fighting for in order to be an effective altruist
  • It’s possible to know that a direction is correct, even if you can’t clearly formulate a description of the destination
  • The world is awful enough that most of the time, it suffices to select the action that’s least incorrect and do that