>Suppose that you earn $4M over the course of your career, and want to spend $2M on yourself over the course of your life.
There’s also a difference between MMM and EAers over how long to work. A Mustachian might earn $1M, retire, and donate any funds they happen to have over what they need. The EA person might work for decades longer, make $4M and donate $3M. So there could be very big differences in total amount donated even if the Mustachian and EA person spend the same amount on themselves.
(Average lifetime income is in the range of $1M, is beside the point, but I couldn’t resist looking it up.)
remizidae
Karma: 361
Thanks for these thoughts, they resonated with me as an ambivalent Mustachian.
The tension between Mustachianism and effective altruism might be relevant to some on this site. You CAN both save aggressively and give to charity, especially at a high income. But you cannot make both your #1 priority: you have to choose. MMM himself seems to have chosen saving first, and giving to charity after financial independence (he advocates on the blog for effective charities, which I admire). This is my strategy as well on the principle of saving yourself before others. But the really committed EA people seem to choose charity first, with perhaps an emergency fund or retirement savings but nowhere near the level of savings that MMM would advise. Perhaps these people are more confident about their future earning power or prioritize themselves less. Or maybe it’s a difference in attitudes to work in that some MMM folk seem desperate to get out of the workplace.
I tried a hard lockdown in March-June with no friends, no restaurants, no travel, limited shopping, and it certainly was not a “trivial” loss. Our lifestyle and our sanity matters. I could feasibly lock down for a month or two, but I have no faith in my ability to accurately assess when that month would matter.
Where I’m coming out here is that it is not going to be feasible for most people to either lock down hard or intentionally get COVID. It’s not a comfortable conclusion, because we as humans like to pretend we are in control, but aside from the extreme I-will-never-leave-my-apartment outliers, who are never going to be more than a small minority of the population, we are not in control of whether or when we get Covid.
I’m having trouble thinking of a feasible and ethical way to get Covid intentionally. Don’t think the hospital would take kindly to a random person showing up and wanting to hang out in the Covid ward. I could increase my level of risk by going to unmasked protests or illegal parties or wherever crowds are, but if I got infected doing that, seems like in the time period between infection and test there would be a significant chance of infecting someone else, and I’m not sure that’s ethical. (Not sure it’s unethical either, given that others who engage in high risk activities have chosen the risk voluntarily, but it’s enough to give me qualms.)
Thanks for the recommendation for Library Genesis. I found 4⁄10 of the books I searched for on there, so not as good as my local library, but it eliminates having to wait.
I’d encourage people, though, to avoid reading books on a smart phone if possible. Reading on the one device that is most likely to distract you from reading seems like a failure-prone plan. I use a Kindle for ebooks, and it’s old and slow enough that I am not tempted to do anything but read on it.
Jeez, California is really trying to drive people away, huh? I’m sorry you have to live there.
Yes! I kind of suspected you might be in a strict-lockdown bubble and overgeneralizing from that. BTW, you can’t legally see a single friend?!
I think people who are immune are often either 1) risk-averse enough not to change their behavior or 2) responding by changing their own choices rather than pushing for changes to government restrictions. I think your surprise is coming from over-estimating the extent to which people’s behavior is driven by government rules.
The difference between my behavior currently and my probable behavior post-vaccine or post-infection would be almost entirely about changing self-imposed restrictions. I could already legally eat in restaurants outdoors, work in restaurants, go to outdoor bars, see my friends in groups of <25, shop, go to the gym, get my hair cut, or travel by plane. To the extent I don’t do those things, it’s my choice, not a restriction imposed by the government. (The only thing I cannot legally do that I would like to do is eat in restaurants indoors, and I expect that restriction to be lifted in a few weeks anyway. And if I really cared about eating indoors, I could just drive to the next county/state.)
I strongly disagree with this idea that only a few vaccine experts should be debating the topic. Aside from a few basic technical concepts, the basic question here is ethical. Everyone can judge ethical questions. And if the past year has taught us anything, it’s that medical ethics questions are too important to be left to the experts.
I found it, but the page would not allow me to select it.
I did this, but they are not allowing donations to any of the top-ranked charities I searched for (Give Directly, Malaria Consortium, Against Malaria).
Re #6: why don’t people have people they can talk to about depression?
I’d like to hear more about this. Is it because people want to talk to someone about mental health but don’t have a person to talk to? Or they do have a person but don’t want to talk?
Personally I find myself keeping quiet about a lot of the important things in my life, because either 1) it’s bad and I don’t want to look bad or have the information get around, or 2) it’s good and I don’t want to brag, especially if my friend is doing less well.
>You cannot discover new knowledge for humanity by reading a book written by a human.
But you can discover new knowledge for yourself. Unless you think you’ve already read enough that you know all human knowledge. This is why rationalists so often get accused of reinventing the wheel—because if you aren’t well-read, you can’t tell the difference between a genuinely new idea or insight and an old one. And you may come up with a good idea but be unaware of all the downsides that other people have pointed out in books.
Maybe some people need this advice. But most people read dramatically too few books, and in particular too few books from before the 21st century.
Have you considered the harm to physical and mental health associated with unemployment?
Of course, for every person who spends their volunteering or gardening, there will be ten people who spend their time getting high, binge-drinking, watching TV, or playing videogames.
>getting themselves fit and healthy (exercise time +cooking healthy food time)
What is with this idea that you can’t be fit and healthy and have a job? A hour for exercise per day is plenty, half an hour for cooking. It’s not at all difficult to do that and have a job too.
Outdoor dining in a tent has a lot more ventilation than being inside. But less ventilation than being fully outdoors. So I see your point, but it’s about harm reduction. If you make people choose between being outside and unsheltered on a December evening and being inside, most of us will choose inside, so the tent, while probably more risky than fully outdoors, reduces the risk.
It would be an unusual partner who would agree to no physical intimacy (possibly including kissing and hugging) for two weeks so that OP can “reflect on the relationship.” That sends a strong signal that you’re about to get dumped.
The big failure mode I see with physical intimacy is people rushing into major commitments (kids, marriage, moving in together) in the first two years of a relationship, when they’re still in the tempestuous, exciting, misleading phase of being “in love.” The solution is to be slower to commit.
I am not sure you can avoid the cognition-distorting effects of these hormones by avoiding physical intimacy. It’s very possible to be in love without any physical contact.
I appreciate this question—good to see someone willing to go against the hyperscrupulous LW consensus. I think many people want the vaccine because of a vague idea that it will accelerate the time at which things are back to normal. Most people have suffered more from the indirect effects of the pandemic (job losses, business closures, stress, isolation) than from COVID itself.
Re #2: you’re conflating the First Amendment and free speech. The First Amendment is one particular legal instantation of the idea of free speech, applicable in limited circumstances in one country. Establishing that there is no First Amendment problem does not establish that there is no free speech problem. And although I agree that there are important differences between government censorship and censorship by private actors, the classical liberal argument for free speech supplies reasons why even private censorship is harmful. You need to engage with these pro-free-speech arguments and explain why they don’t apply here.