Part one of what will hopefully become the aspirant sequence.
Content note: Possibly a difficult read for some people. You are encouraged to just stop reading the post if you are the kind of person who isn’t going to find it useful. Somewhat intended to be read alongside various more-reassuring posts, some of which it links to, as a counterpoint in dialogue with them. Pushes in a direction along a spectrum, and whether this is good for you will depend on where you currently are on that spectrum. Many thanks to Keller and Ozy for insightful and helpful feedback; all remaining errors are my own.
Alice is a rationalist and Effective Altruist who is extremely motivated to work hard and devote her life to positive impact. She switched away from her dream game-dev career to do higher-impact work instead, she spends her weekends volunteering (editing papers), she only eats the most ethical foods, she never tells lies and she gives 50% of her income away. She even works on AI because she abstractly believes it’s the most important cause, even though it doesn’t really emotionally connect with her the way that global health does. (Or maybe she works on animal rights for principled reasons even though she emotionally dislikes animals, or she works on global health even though she finds AI more fascinating; you can pick whichever version feels more challenging to you.)
Bob is interested in Effective Altruism, but Alice honestly makes him a little nervous. He feels he has some sort of moral obligation to make the world better, but he likes to hope that he’s fulfilled that obligation by giving 10% of his income as a well-paid software dev, because he doesn’t really want to have to give up his Netflix-watching weekends. Thinking about AI makes him feel scared and overwhelmed, so he mostly donates to AMF even though he’s vaguely aware that AI might be more important to him. (Or maybe he donates to AI because he feels it’s fascinating, even though he thinks rationally global