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| Autumn in Arizona |
To be an EA is to find out, again and again and again, that what you thought was the best thing to do was wrong. You think you know what [has the] highest impact, and you’re almost certainly seriously mistaken.
–Kat Woods, “The most important lesson I learned after ten years in EA” (quoted in Losing My Religions)
Preface
I’m not accusing anyone of bad faith.
Everyone is just following their programming. More importantly, the people I “vilify” in this piece are trying to be good people. However, they are suffering from myopic arrogance that is making the world worse than it needs to be. I spent decades with the same affliction.
Frame
Last month, I spent time out-of-town with friends. My pneumothorax buddy told me how she had two groups of friends / acquaintances. One was the group we were with at that moment – long-time animal advocates whose time together is filled with laughter, and who spend their professional lives trying to make things better at the margin. (Sometimes this involves simply trying to prevent regression.)
The other group are angry and judgmental “Vegans.” They spend their time saying how stupid, cruel, and hypocritical non-Vegans are. My buddy’s partner refuses to spend time with them.
Caveat
Like in nearly all online communities, I know that the loudest, most verbose voices in both the Effective Altruism (EA) and Vegan communities are not a representative sample. However, they wield enormous influence.
For example: Despite the delusions of the “We’re winning!” crowd, as I document in “The End of Veganism,” veganism hasn’t increased as a percentage of the population in basically forever. (It has actually gone down in recent years in the U.S.) This is because almost everyone who goes vegan goes back to eating meat:
Why? One survey of former vegans found that the top reason for quitting was that they couldn’t take the pressure to maintain the level of purity demanded by [the loud] Vegans. Vegans are “the greatest impediment” to the growth of veganism.
IOW, by constantly explaining why they are right, and everyone else is wrong wrong wrong, Vegans are not only failing to make things better – they are making things worse.
The Point Is This
The problem … of all human “thinking” [is] we start with the end we want, and then work backwards.
We are rationalizing animals, not rational.
Any “ethics” we endorse first must … support our personal [subjective] desires.
Both Vegans and EAs recognize some of the cognitive flaws and biases and prejudices in others. In and of itself, this insight is great! But it leads many Vegans and EAs to believe that they are free of flaws and biases and prejudices. They are objective and rational and in possession of The One Truth.
The problem, of course, is that it is impossible to be truly objective and rational. We are all driven by emotions, desires, wants. Biases are inherent; religion is inevitable.
Of course, the biggest problem with Effective Altruism is that utilitarianism itself is wrong. But the second biggest is that EAs think they are objective and can find The One Truth. (Meanwhile, Vegans are sure they have found The One Truth.)
The One Truth is, by definition, an illusion
In addition to the universal inability to be totally rational and objective, it is impossible to find The One Truth because anything that matters is inherently subjective.
The only thing that matters is subjective experience. “Subjective” is right there!
We don’t, and can’t, know what it is like to be a bat, a chicken, a shrimp, an 8-week-old fetus, a nematode, an amoeba, or an electron. And we can’t know how to compare a human suffering from crushing depression to a chimp in a deprivation cage (or to a pig in a gestation crate, or to a chicken starving to death because their leg broke beneath their unnatural weight).
And what do we do if we recognize our lack of knowledge and unconquerable uncertainty?
We just make shit up! And then prattle on and on about Bayesian statistics as if it is Objective Truth, when we are actually just pulling priors out of our asses!
How, exactly, do we choose which priors to pluck from our derriere?
However we want.
Be suspicious of what you want. -Rumi
It’s not that we want to be “la la la la la happy.” Rather, evolution has left all of us, without exception, with a bunch specific wants:
We want to think we’re smart (rational, unbiased) / have others think we’re smart, etc.
We want to think we’re special / have others think we’re special.
We want to think we’re important / impactful / will leave a legacy.
We want to think we’re superior / have others admire us.
We want to be validated.
We want to be popular with certain people.
Almost never do we want only to make someone else’s life better.
So we just make stuff up so we can get what we want.
And then our “certainty” makes others’ lives worse.
Again: there is only subjective experience
I say all this because I’ve done everything discussed here. As I lay out in Losing My Religions, my professional career has, on net, made the world a worse place. And that was in large part because I wanted to think I was smart enough to find The One Truth.
But that was a delusion. There isn’t The One Truth. It isn’t Jesus, or Buddha, or Veganism, or Expected Value.
There is only individual subjective experience.
And what my long and often painful experience has shown is that, to a first approximation, what matters is reducing suffering.
To live a meaningful life, we don’t have to know The One Truth so we can make The Difference. We just need to make a difference.
The first step to making a difference is truly wanting to. And then recognizing and giving up our other inherent wants. Then we can actually help real, suffering individuals.
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