3) Am I, as a person, actually capable of making a positive difference in general or is my presence generally going to prove useless or detrimental?
To be blunt, I don’t think you are making much of a positive difference in terms of changing the exploitative nature of the world, which you seem to be passionate about in your writing. I know it sounds terribly rude but couldn’t find another way to put it lest I treat it as a rhetorical question.
I’m not saying you should stop doing what you’re doing or that your work isn’t valuable in general, any more than I’m saying athletes and theoretical physicists are morons because it’s difficult to become a millionaire that way. It’s just that in a world overflowing with competing memes, playing politics (in the broader sense of recruiting more people for your tribe) is not a low-hanging fruit in general. I would say the rationalist community isn’t so much an army of generals with no soldiers to command, as it is an army of recruiters with no jobs to offer (that is if you conceive rationality as a project rather than just an interest).
Is this something I can improve and if so, how?
Again, not saying you should prioritize changing the world (over doing what you like and enjoy), but in case you want to, I’d say pick a EA cause (you probably know the details better than me) and make an actionable plan. For example, if your preferred cause is AI alignment, enroll in a MOOC on AI. Less meta-level pondering, more object-level work.
To be blunt, I don’t think you are making much of a positive difference in terms of changing the exploitative nature of the world, which you seem to be passionate about in your writing. I know it sounds terribly rude but couldn’t find another way to put it lest I treat it as a rhetorical question.
I’m not saying you should stop doing what you’re doing or that your work isn’t valuable in general, any more than I’m saying athletes and theoretical physicists are morons because it’s difficult to become a millionaire that way. It’s just that in a world overflowing with competing memes, playing politics (in the broader sense of recruiting more people for your tribe) is not a low-hanging fruit in general. I would say the rationalist community isn’t so much an army of generals with no soldiers to command, as it is an army of recruiters with no jobs to offer (that is if you conceive rationality as a project rather than just an interest).
Again, not saying you should prioritize changing the world (over doing what you like and enjoy), but in case you want to, I’d say pick a EA cause (you probably know the details better than me) and make an actionable plan. For example, if your preferred cause is AI alignment, enroll in a MOOC on AI. Less meta-level pondering, more object-level work.