- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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”
- 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