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Kaj_Sotala comments on On Caring - Less Wrong
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I accept all the argument for why one should be an effective altruist, and yet I am not, personally, an EA. This post gives a pretty good avenue for explaining how and why. I'm in Daniel's position up through chunk 4, and reach the state of mind where
and find it literally unbearable. All of a sudden, it's clear that to be a good person is to accept the weight of the world on your shoulders. This is where my path diverges; EA says "OK, then, that's what I'll do, as best I can"; from my perspective, it's swallowing the bullet. At this point, your modus ponens is my modus tollens; I can't deal with what the argument would require of me, so I reject the premise. I concluded that I am not a good person and won't be for the foreseeable future, and limited myself to the weight of my chosen community and narrowly-defined ingroup.
I don't think you're wrong to try to convert people to EA. It does bear remembering, though, that not everyone is equipped to deal with this outlook, and some people will find that trying to shut up and multiply is lastingly unpleasant, such that an altruistic outlook becomes significantly aversive.
This is why I prefer to frame EA as something exciting, not burdensome.
Exciting vs. burdensome seems to be a matter of how you think about success and failure. If you think "we can actually make things better!", it's exciting. If you think "if you haven't succeeded immediately, it's all your fault", it's burdensome.
This just might have more general application.
If I'm working at my capacity, I don't see how it's my fault for not having the world fixed immediately. I can't do any more than I can do and I don't see how I'm responsible for more than what my efforts could change.
From my perspective, it's "I have to think about all the problems in the world and care about them." That's burdensome. So instead I look vaguely around for 100% solutions to these problems, things where I don't actually need to think about people currently suffering (as I would in order to determine how effective incremental solutions are), things sufficiently nebulous and far-in-the-future that I don't have to worry about connecting them to people starving in distant lands.
Do we have any data on which EA pitches tend to be most effective?
I've read that. It's definitely been the best argument for convincing me to try EA that I've encountered. Not convincing, currently, but more convincing than anything else.