Optimise Someone Else’s Altruism One more way to limit the influence motivators have over your decision making is to pretend that you are deciding what someone else – who is in exactly your situation with exactly your talents – should do to maximise their impact. You are advising this other person, whose interests you don’t care for because they are not you, on how they might accomplish the most can towards their goals.

What if we actually have someone else optimize for us? As in, describe one's situation to friends (who understand the basic idea of what you're trying to do) and ask them to tell you which things they think would have the highest impact. Outsourcing the reasoning to someone less biased, or at least differently-biased. Maybe talking to a few different people and then picking an average yourself.