I do not consider myself a good person. I am lazy and frivolous and inconsiderate, I care too much about intelligence and status, I am a snob and a hypocrite, and I do not call my mother enough.
I don't mean this to read as self-hatred, nor a show of false modesty. Among all the people I know there is only a scant handful of people I would consider genuinely good, and so it is unremarkable to me that I wouldn't find myself amongst their number.
You do not need to be good to desire more goodness in the world. It is good for everyone when things are good, and when there is more of it — more thoughtfulness, more generosity, more coordination, more care, more beauty, more clarity, more positive sum trades, more sophistication and elegance in our solutions and resolutions.
Increasing the amount of goodness in the world is an urgent project. The world really sucks right now, and even in the wealthiest enclaves of the imperial core there is an immense amount of suffering.
To reach the healed world would be a massive complicated undertaking. It is such a massive complicated undertaking that it is not enough for only those who are intrinsically good to work on it. There simply aren’t enough of them.
If it is desirable (as I contend) for morally mediocre people like me to work on the project, it would not be enough to appeal to their innate goodness, for they have not that much of it to be appealed to. You will need to offer me things that are more base, like status and money and the affirmation that I am a good person (for everyone wants to be a virtuous person and to be recognized as such, whether or not they are).
Fortuitously, there was an instructive breakthrough around a decade ago: effective altruism. Here's approximately what that is: you take people who come from the morally bankrupt culture that is the western professional managerial class, and you give us the prestige and status and affirmation of virtue we neurotically crave for the trivial cost of ten percent of our income and a few weekends a year where we are subject to vegan food and like sixteen hours of one-on-one discussions with a bunch of earnest dorks. As a result, suddenly a contingent of this culture begins to compete in a new arena of QALYs and utilons and eyestalk ablation literature reviews rather than the traditional arena of summer home square footage and the number of Michelin star restaurants one has set foot in.
Put it that way, and it doesn't sound so different from the beautiful promise of capitalism: that if we can successfully align the system with human values, it will result in some sort of elegant virtuous cycle such that people can go about selfishly pursuing their self-interested goals, and end up pouring immense amounts of goodness into the world as a side product.
As a mediocre person, it does sure seem self-evident to me that the only way to get mediocre people to do good, en masse, is to generate more selfish incentives for doing so. Whether capitalism has successfully done that is discoursebait I will leave to more foolhardy poasters.[1] What I know for sure is that effective altruism did this for me. I dedicate much more of my energy and my money towards the reduction of suffering of sentient beings than I otherwise would, by a really really really wide margin.
It did this by not only appealing to some of my best instincts, but also some of my ugly ones, and ones that are simply mammalian. The community gave me peers that respected me and pushed me towards more virtuousness. I have recognition for my talents, and social status, and the occasional extra bag of money bit of funding when I do things that are unusually aligned with their goals. Insofar as engaging in effective altruism makes me do more improving things for the world than I would otherwise, it seems wise to continue to engage with it: to reap all of the rewards and allow myself to enjoy them to the fullest without guilt, such that I have as much motivation as I can get to continue to do good things for the world.
I am impure, so perhaps it is unsurprising that I've always disliked purity in my politics. Stringent, inhuman standards do not seem to me like the most effective way to increase the amount of goodness in the world. More specifically, stringent, inhuman standards will get you the small minority of humans who are inhumanly virtuous, and leave the rest of us out. To me that feels like leaving resources on the table.
I am not a good person, but I am a better one than I was before people started paying me in tangibles and intangibles to act like one. I would like as many people as possible to experience this privilege. For that to be the case, we will need to be thoughtful about how to bring more people into the fold — how to create a culture in which it is easier for people to be good.
...And my footnotes. I recognize that neither capitalism or the effective altruist ecosystem is as well aligned as its ideal versions would be, but this does not overly trouble me. Alignment problems of all kinds are wicked and difficult, and it makes sense to me that the very complicated ones (that won’t kill us imminently) might take up to centuries to straighten out. As long as there is continual improvement, I feel okay with the slowness of the bend towards justice.
I do not consider myself a good person. I am lazy and frivolous and inconsiderate, I care too much about intelligence and status, I am a snob and a hypocrite, and I do not call my mother enough.
I don't mean this to read as self-hatred, nor a show of false modesty. Among all the people I know there is only a scant handful of people I would consider genuinely good, and so it is unremarkable to me that I wouldn't find myself amongst their number.
You do not need to be good to desire more goodness in the world. It is good for everyone when things are good, and when there is more of it — more thoughtfulness, more generosity, more coordination, more care, more beauty, more clarity, more positive sum trades, more sophistication and elegance in our solutions and resolutions.
Increasing the amount of goodness in the world is an urgent project. The world really sucks right now, and even in the wealthiest enclaves of the imperial core there is an immense amount of suffering.
To reach the healed world would be a massive complicated undertaking. It is such a massive complicated undertaking that it is not enough for only those who are intrinsically good to work on it. There simply aren’t enough of them.
If it is desirable (as I contend) for morally mediocre people like me to work on the project, it would not be enough to appeal to their innate goodness, for they have not that much of it to be appealed to. You will need to offer me things that are more base, like status and money and the affirmation that I am a good person (for everyone wants to be a virtuous person and to be recognized as such, whether or not they are).
Fortuitously, there was an instructive breakthrough around a decade ago: effective altruism. Here's approximately what that is: you take people who come from the morally bankrupt culture that is the western professional managerial class, and you give us the prestige and status and affirmation of virtue we neurotically crave for the trivial cost of ten percent of our income and a few weekends a year where we are subject to vegan food and like sixteen hours of one-on-one discussions with a bunch of earnest dorks. As a result, suddenly a contingent of this culture begins to compete in a new arena of QALYs and utilons and eyestalk ablation literature reviews rather than the traditional arena of summer home square footage and the number of Michelin star restaurants one has set foot in.
Put it that way, and it doesn't sound so different from the beautiful promise of capitalism: that if we can successfully align the system with human values, it will result in some sort of elegant virtuous cycle such that people can go about selfishly pursuing their self-interested goals, and end up pouring immense amounts of goodness into the world as a side product.
As a mediocre person, it does sure seem self-evident to me that the only way to get mediocre people to do good, en masse, is to generate more selfish incentives for doing so. Whether capitalism has successfully done that is discoursebait I will leave to more foolhardy poasters.[1] What I know for sure is that effective altruism did this for me. I dedicate much more of my energy and my money towards the reduction of suffering of sentient beings than I otherwise would, by a really really really wide margin.
It did this by not only appealing to some of my best instincts, but also some of my ugly ones, and ones that are simply mammalian. The community gave me peers that respected me and pushed me towards more virtuousness. I have recognition for my talents, and social status, and the occasional extra
bag of moneybit of funding when I do things that are unusually aligned with their goals. Insofar as engaging in effective altruism makes me do more improving things for the world than I would otherwise, it seems wise to continue to engage with it: to reap all of the rewards and allow myself to enjoy them to the fullest without guilt, such that I have as much motivation as I can get to continue to do good things for the world.I am impure, so perhaps it is unsurprising that I've always disliked purity in my politics. Stringent, inhuman standards do not seem to me like the most effective way to increase the amount of goodness in the world. More specifically, stringent, inhuman standards will get you the small minority of humans who are inhumanly virtuous, and leave the rest of us out. To me that feels like leaving resources on the table.
I am not a good person, but I am a better one than I was before people started paying me in tangibles and intangibles to act like one. I would like as many people as possible to experience this privilege. For that to be the case, we will need to be thoughtful about how to bring more people into the fold — how to create a culture in which it is easier for people to be good.
...And my footnotes. I recognize that neither capitalism or the effective altruist ecosystem is as well aligned as its ideal versions would be, but this does not overly trouble me. Alignment problems of all kinds are wicked and difficult, and it makes sense to me that the very complicated ones (that won’t kill us imminently) might take up to centuries to straighten out. As long as there is continual improvement, I feel okay with the slowness of the bend towards justice.