AmagicalFishy comments on "Why Try Hard" Essay targeted at non rationalists - Less Wrong Discussion
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It's awful. Sorry. There are probably Jehovah's Witnesses that would have had my attention for longer. In fact it's so awful that it's inviting the reader to take delight into finding ways of feeling smugly superior to the author. It's just the kind of thing to make your non-rationalist friends want to un-friend you pretty quickly.
You don't even know which were the challenges you were supposed to rise up to in this article, otherwise you'd have at least paid lip service to them. You seem to come from a place of utterly failing to understand the cause of the usual blase attitude towards super-altruism - the part of typical human psychology which makes us generally not want to take the burden of the world upon our shoulders. You have to understand that in order to argue persuasively against it. Instead you just assume the contrary as a default. You also don't understand why hard things are hard, that is, hard as in, you don't just read an essay on the internet and decide that your aversion to doing a superhuman effort towards an unlikely goal is suddenly a thing of the past. And the writing itself flows as well as nails on a chalkboard. You can almost physically feel the pat on the head.
Your friends are not going to become optimizers or effective altruists. Especially not as a result of this essay. Get over it. It's a sign that their excessive-earnestness antibodies are working well, and that they have a well-calibrated sense of perspective with respect to their likely impact on the world. Sure, it wouldn't be good morals to try to talk you out of your itch to improve the world, as it might seem like I'm doing, but at the very least you could go about it in a less socially and psychologically oblivious way, because proselytizing for weird causes is textbook How To Lose Friends and Alienate People.
Huh. Actually, I enjoyed reading it.