I agree the revulsion against ulterior motives for altruism is somewhat detrimental but also somewhat rational. Using ulterior motives seems often like a good idea, but genuine caring can be good to cultivate too because it may be more robust against your pursuits changing when the next big thing comes along.
Two examples come to mind not doing things because of insufficient recognition:
Wikipedia contributions: People sometimes write blog posts or essays almost exclusively summarizing factual content. Such summaries could be added to Wikipedia and presumably would have had much bigger impact there, but one reason people don’t contribute to Wikipedia is lack of authorship. I’ve tried to get around this barrier by compiling a list of my Wikipedia contributions and sharing the more important ones on Facebook.
Google Grants: I think signing up charities for Google Grants can be a high-impact activity, but I can only do so much of it because it’s not the most interesting project, and it doesn’t currently have high status in the EA community.
In other areas of life, I’ve also seen lots of examples where people are reluctant to help others because they won’t get enough credit for helping. One way to help address this is to give acknowledgements to others (like you did at the end of your post!). Another thing that sometimes helps me is remembering that “we’re all in this together,” and picturing my sense of “ownership” as extending over the achievements of the whole group rather than just myself. (“There’s no ‘i’ in ‘team’”.)
Not wanting to do tedious manual chores can be somewhat sensible if it’s not your comparative advantage. It would be better to earn money and hire someone else to do them, unless you’d be doing them in your leisure time or you don’t otherwise have high earning/research/outreach potential.
This is a really excellent post!
I agree the revulsion against ulterior motives for altruism is somewhat detrimental but also somewhat rational. Using ulterior motives seems often like a good idea, but genuine caring can be good to cultivate too because it may be more robust against your pursuits changing when the next big thing comes along.
Two examples come to mind not doing things because of insufficient recognition:
Wikipedia contributions: People sometimes write blog posts or essays almost exclusively summarizing factual content. Such summaries could be added to Wikipedia and presumably would have had much bigger impact there, but one reason people don’t contribute to Wikipedia is lack of authorship. I’ve tried to get around this barrier by compiling a list of my Wikipedia contributions and sharing the more important ones on Facebook.
Google Grants: I think signing up charities for Google Grants can be a high-impact activity, but I can only do so much of it because it’s not the most interesting project, and it doesn’t currently have high status in the EA community.
In other areas of life, I’ve also seen lots of examples where people are reluctant to help others because they won’t get enough credit for helping. One way to help address this is to give acknowledgements to others (like you did at the end of your post!). Another thing that sometimes helps me is remembering that “we’re all in this together,” and picturing my sense of “ownership” as extending over the achievements of the whole group rather than just myself. (“There’s no ‘i’ in ‘team’”.)
Not wanting to do tedious manual chores can be somewhat sensible if it’s not your comparative advantage. It would be better to earn money and hire someone else to do them, unless you’d be doing them in your leisure time or you don’t otherwise have high earning/research/outreach potential.