ShardPhoenix comments on On Caring - Less Wrong
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I agree with others that the post is very nice and clear, as most of your posts are. Upvoted for that. I just want to provide a perspective not often voiced here. My mind does not work the way yours does and I do not think I am a worse person than you because of that. I am not sure how common my thought process is on this forum.
Going section by section:
I do not "care about every single individual on this planet". I care about myself, my family, friends and some other people I know. I cannot bring myself to care (and I don't really want to) about a random person half-way around the world, except in the non-scalable general sense that "it is sad that bad stuff happens, be it to 1 person or to 1 billion people". I care about the humanity surviving and thriving, in the abstract, but I do not feel the connection between the current suffering and future thriving. (Actually, it's worse than that. I am not sure whether humanity existing, in Yvain's words, in a 10m x 10m x 10m box of computronium with billions of sims is much different from actually colonizing the observable universe (or the multiverse, as the case might be). But that's a different story, unrelated to the main point.)
No disagreement there, the stakes are high, though I would not say that a thriving community of 1000 is necessarily worse than a thriving community of 1 googoleplex, as long as their probability of long-term survival and thriving is the same.
I occasionally donate modest amounts to this cause or that, if I feel like it. I don't think I do what Alice, Bob or Christine did, and donate out of pressure or guilt.
I spend (or used to spend) a lot of time helping out strangers online with their math and physics questions. I find it more satisfying than caring for oiled birds or stray dogs. Like Daniel, I see the mountain ridges of bad education all around, of which the students asking for help on IRC are just tiny pebbles. Unlike Daniel, I do not feel that I "can't possibly do enough". I help people when I feel like it and I don't pretend that I am a better person because of it, even if they thank me profusely after finally understanding how free-body diagram works. I do wish someone more capable worked on improving the education system to work better than at 1% efficiency, and I have seen isolated cases of it, but I do not feel that it is my problem to deal with. Wrong skillset.
I have read a fair amount of EA propaganda, and I still do not feel that I "should care about people suffering far away", sorry. (Not really sorry, no.) It would be nice if fewer people died and suffered, sure. But "nice" is all it is. Call me heartless. I am happy that other people care, in case I am in the situation where I need their help. I am also happy that some people give money to those who care, for the same reason. I might even chip in, if it hits close to home.
I do not feel that I would be a better person if I donated more money or dedicated my life to solving one of the "biggest problems", as opposed to doing what I am good at, though I am happy that some people feel that way; humanity's strength is in its diversity.
Again, one of the main strengths of humankind is its diversity, and the Bell-curve outliers like "Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela" tend to have more effect than those of us within 1 standard deviation. Some people address "global poverty", others write poems, prove theorems, shoot the targets they are told to, or convince other people to do what they feel is right. No one knows which of these is more likely to result in the long-term prosperity of the human race. So it is best to diversify and hope that one of these outliers does not end up killing all of us, intentionally or accidentally.
I don't feel the weight of the world. Because it does not weigh on me.
Note: having reread what I wrote, I suspect that some people might find it kind of Objectivist. I actually tried reading Atlas Shrugged and quit after 100 pages or so, getting extremely annoyed by the author belaboring an obvious and trivial point over and over. So I only have a vague idea what the movement is all about. And I have no interest in finding out more, given that people who find this kind of writing insightful are not ones I want to associate with.
Personally I see EA* as kind of a dangerous delusion, basically people being talked into doing something stupid (in the sense that they're probably moving away from maximizing their own true utility function to the extent that such a thing exists). When I hear about someone giving away 50% of their income when they're only middle class to begin with I feel more pity than admiration.
* Meaning the extreme, "all human lives are equally valuable to me" version, rather than just a desire to not waste charity money.
I don't understand this. Why should my utility function value me having a large income or having a large amount of money? What does that get me?
I don't have a good logical reason for why my life is a lot more valuable than anyone else's. I have a lot more information about how to effectively direct resources into improving my own life vs. improving the lives of others, but I can't come up with a good reason to have a dominantly large "Life of leplen" term in my utility function. Much of the data suggests that happiness/life quality isn't well correlated with income above a certain income range and that one of the primary purposes of large disposable incomes is status signalling. If I have cheaper ways of signalling high social status, why wouldn't I direct resources into preserving/improving the lives of people who get much better life quality/dollar returns than I do? It doesn't seem efficient to keep investing in myself for little to no return.
I wouldn't feel comfortable winning a 500 dollar door prize in a drawing where half the people in the room were subsistence farmers. I'd probably tear up my ticket and give someone else a shot to win. From my perspective, just because I won the lottery on birth location and/or abilities doesn't mean I'm entitled to hundreds of times as many resources as someone else who may be more deserving but less lucky.
With that being said, I certainly don't give anywhere near half of my income to charity and it's possible the values I actually live may be closer to what you describe than the situation I outline. I'm not sure, and not sure how it changes my argument.
Sounds like you answered your own question!
(It's one thing to have some simplistic far-mode argument about how this or that doesn't matter, or how we should sacrifice ourselves for others, but the near-mode nitty-gritty of the real-world is another thing).