For now, I would encourage effective altruist types to take pride in being self-skeptical when it comes to favorable assessments of their potential impact relative to other effective altruist types, or relative to people outside of the effective altruist community.
Yes, I find it remarkable how EAs tend to think their work is obviously vastly more important than that of “non-EAs” (as if such a thing were even well defined). There’s not a lot new under the sun, and like most movements, EA is largely a recycling and recombination of things other people have been doing since the dawn of civilization. It may be a good combination, but little in EA is really unique to EA.
All of that said, I think a big reason people think their own work dominates that of others is because they have different values from other people. It’s perfectly possible for lots of people to be doing lots of things that are each optimal relative to their own values. You might (perhaps correctly) point out that most EAs have values more similar to each other than my values are to theirs, so my point may apply less broadly than I suggested.
All of that said, I think a big reason people think their own work dominates that of others is because they have different values from other people.
The situation is blurred by the fact that people are motivated to believe that the work that they’re doing fulfills their values. For an extreme but vivid case, consider participants in a genocide. It’s very hard to imagine that massacring a population reflects their fundamental values, but my impression is that such people often believe that they’re doing the “right” thing in some moral sense.
I worry that this might have (much more mild!) incarnations within the EA community.
Yes, I find it remarkable how EAs tend to think their work is obviously vastly more important than that of “non-EAs” (as if such a thing were even well defined). There’s not a lot new under the sun, and like most movements, EA is largely a recycling and recombination of things other people have been doing since the dawn of civilization. It may be a good combination, but little in EA is really unique to EA.
All of that said, I think a big reason people think their own work dominates that of others is because they have different values from other people. It’s perfectly possible for lots of people to be doing lots of things that are each optimal relative to their own values. You might (perhaps correctly) point out that most EAs have values more similar to each other than my values are to theirs, so my point may apply less broadly than I suggested.
The situation is blurred by the fact that people are motivated to believe that the work that they’re doing fulfills their values. For an extreme but vivid case, consider participants in a genocide. It’s very hard to imagine that massacring a population reflects their fundamental values, but my impression is that such people often believe that they’re doing the “right” thing in some moral sense.
I worry that this might have (much more mild!) incarnations within the EA community.