I sort of agree that that's what the advice boiled down to, but I almost feel as though, given issues related to diffusion of responsibility that perhaps the world could use a few more batmen?

I mean, that's basically what Eliezer has done with his life, right? If I understand corrently, he spent the last ~8 years trying to make the singularity not be horrible because everyone around him appeared to be delusional in thinking a horrifying outcome wasn't racing towards us with no one taking it seriously and so he saddled up and started optimizing. When he talked about how having something to protect seems to cause people to become better rationalists, I think this sort of emotional crisis and subsequent sense of urgency was exactly the sort of thing he was talking about. (As far as I'm aware Lesswrong exists because he spent about two years of his life building it, and he built it because it seemed at the time like a good intermediate step along the way to saving the world.)

And yes, it may very well be be impossible for any of us to simply "stop child abuse" by any normal method, and Eliezer has an answer to that to: "Shut up and do the impossible".

Do you think getting the singularity to go right is easier than stopping child abuse? If that's so (and a positive singularity would solve child abuse and there aren't simpler routes to a solution) then you may have just found a new derivation for working on a positive singularity. Personally I think becoming a social worker is almost certainly not the solution to the general problem of child abuse if you look bottom line and shut up and multiply. A more obvious solution is to get the government to "fix it somehow" but many governments are trying to do that and failing. Maybe what's necessary is fixing government? Or something? Its a seriously hard problem.

Most obvious ideas probably won't even work and maybe you'll need to research and plan for several months to figure out what's been tried before and shown to fail, and based on that research you could come up with an angle of attack? Off the top of my head, you might try interviewing social workers and ask them what they thought a solution to child abuse would look like, then process the implied plans, and then spend the next 10 years of your life on that if you find something tractable. I have no idea what the results of that process would look like, but they might entrain something that will end child abuse after a while? It seems like that could happen, especially if you cooperate with other rationalists.

But, I mean, I thought the whole reason for having created this website was to help people understand that the world is deep shit and we seriously have to up our game if any of our real and pressing problems are going to be effectively solved. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something fundamental here? Maybe the connection between rabidchicken's attitude toward child abuse and Eliezer's attitude towards a "bad singularity" is illusory? But they seem pretty similar to me.

Also, I think this is why we have things in this community like the Litany of Tarski and posts like I'm scared to talk about processing the emotional repercussions of not mentally flinching when a situation really appears to be horrible. Trying to "be batman" is hard. No one said it would be easy, but even if it is hard, it might be better than all the alternatives.

If you look at bad things and (after clicking) it seems that the rational response might actually be to "become batman and then fix it", then its kind of weird to be told that your suggestions are silly because you've just suggested becoming batman to solve a horrible problem. The right answer to that is simply, "Yes of course that's what I've proposed. But why is that silly?"

Edited to add: I see that you're new to commenting. Please accept my apologies for sort of biting your head off there. I don't want LW to be unfriendly or intimidating... but at the same time I don't want the culture to drift away from a community ethic of clear-eyed-pursuit-of-goodness and you were massively upvoted there. Boiling things down to "become batman" was insightful, I just didn't like that you boiled things down to the right conclusion and then, as far as I could tell, threw out the result simply because it reminded you of something from a comic book.