To them I ask to read about what happened to that poor man, George Price, the population geneticist, journalist and chemist, whose work on the origins of altruism drove him first to give away all his possessions, then to let the homeless sleep in his house.
After reading his Wikipedia article, it isn't clear to me that the origins-of-altruism research caused his unusual behavior (and subsequent suicide). He seems to have had a curious relationship with Christian religion; he also survived thyroid cancer — and thyroid problems can have profound emotional effects.
One might wonder whether brain changes affecting one's valuation of oneself vs. others would lead a scientific mind both to curiosity about the origins of altruism, and to do altruistic acts. In that case, you need not fear that studying altruism will cause you to become excessively altruistic.
It seems like he had some problems distinguishing short- & long-term. Yes, opening your house & letting homeless people sleep there will help them in the short-term, but if it destroys your life in the long-term & makes you completely unable to help them, well then it isn't the correct decision for maximizing the amount of altruism you can perform. It seems like he was trying to be a good altruist, but wasn't a very good rationalist. Apologies if that seems offensive to anyone. I'm not trying to insult the man, he did much more good than many people do, I'm just trying to think about it in a broad sense.
As some of us might be aware, there exist ideas that harm their carriers simply by lingering in awareness. One may wonder if these ideas are just manifestations of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or other neurosis, but the difference here is the metaphysical nature of such ideas.
A person with OCD may have their thought stream painfully interrupted by whatever's been fixated upon and literally be unable to stop. I conjecture that a person who has a form of metaphysical obsession will have their thought stream *infected*, such that anything they value or care about will be permanently devalued somehow, rather than being merely pushed away, or that the subject of obsession will be *compatible* or *miscible* with ones ordinary life and that one will make logical inferences about one's life based on those metaphysical ideas. The difference between this and regular personal development is that these inferences don't make one come up with useful ideas or insights for improvement; rather than supplementing one's life, they *deconstruct* and *disassemble*, by virtue of their global scope. I'll elaborate more on this in the last paragraph.
I further conjecture that anybody with these dangerous ideas would avoid telling anyone else out of remarkable conscience, under the belief that these ideas are unresolvable and would simply harm others. Alternatively, they may see these ideas as a revelation and try telling others, only to not be taken seriously. In defense of this article from those in the former category, I'll present no such ideas, because I'm not a complete dumbass. What I'm presenting is an opportunity.
Anyone who has these ideas shouldn't post them here; this article is just to gauge interest in/need for a group which shares their ideas knowing that:
A) Different perspectives help
B) Those with whom you're sharing aren't going to feel significantly worse for the burden
C) If a solution isn't found, *other* people are going to come up with them, so we might as well get it over with and post the solutions.
One may wonder how dangerous ideas could possibly exist, or think that these are just misunderstood epiphanies. To them I ask to read about George Price, the population geneticist, journalist and chemist, whose work on the origins of altruism drove him first to give away all his possessions, then to let the homeless sleep in his house. These are all *really* generous things, but I feel that the mindset of Price when doing these things was tainted by *desperation*, that he wanted to avoid a terrifying conclusion, namely that selflessness itself was rooted in selfishness, making its goodness non-intrinsic. The paradox seems easy to resolve on the outside, when one isn't panicking about it, and while working through a similar crisis I kind of wished I could go back and time and explain to him why interpretations like that are only *half* the story. He cut his own throat with a pair of scissors at the age of 52.
[Edited out some poorly received theatrics, which admittedly bordered on the unnecessary]