What Are We Doing?

Six months ago I sat down to derive why I was an Effective Altruist from my own moral non-realist first principles. Here’s what I came up with.

I want to be happy and filled with meaning and a sense of purpose that gives me challenge and energy every day. I want to feel connection and belonging. I want to be loved and feel understood. I also want to give love and understanding back to others. To see people and things the way they are and to help people do what’s right for them and do what’s right for each other. I want to help push the whole world towards where it should be going. Towards the state I want for myself: towards feeling happy and meaningful, towards understanding and being understood. Towards energizing comfort, towards belonging, and towards a sense that things are deeply right and to-be-appreciated.

It probably starts with getting clear about the intention. What sorts of actions and inquiries look like the right ones? What are the blockers to that out there in the world? How do I overcome those blockers?

I’m first tempted to say it looks like firefighting. Just find something broken and fix it. Set one important thing right. Embody the virtues you want to win somewhere, at least in a small way.

But really understanding should come first. Is there even a fire? Are we already in the place we want to be and we just don’t know it? Are our abstract intentions even the right ones? How long can we afford to muse over these questions?

We quickly see that there are indeed fires. People roiling in pain and anger and confusion. People dying. People being stuck and lost and sad. Suffering in nature that’s gone on since forever. The urge to jump at something grows. But that’s what everyone does, and has done forever. No, you’re never going to fix it all, but you can do more than what’s always been done.

You keep on trying to understand. What are the worst things right now? What are the best things that have ever happened? What are the kinds of things that make big changes possible?

The worst things are suffering: deep unabated physical pain from disease, predation, and starvation. Also mental anguish—depression, fear, anxiety, insecurity.

The best things are new ways of doing things. Getting more value from less effort and material. Preventive medicines, creature comforts, alternatives to the painful ways things were done in the past. Technology.

Incentives and coordination. There are big (selfish) benefits to solving big problems. There are tools that make good ideas get picked up and command more resources than bad ideas. Those tools get improved by people who care and want better tools for a better world. The tools are laws, norms, common knowledge. They evolve slowly, but sometimes less slowly than other times. They’re often downstream of politics. Who was able to secure support from enough other people to have their ideas predominate? Power.

Power is risky business though. It corrupts. It lets some people just take what they want or impose what they think is best in ways that are not actually best. It isn’t arbitrary. It has its rules and its limits, but it’s subject to serious misuse, to say nothing of how often power can do the wrong thing just by accident.

Lots of people have pursued power, drawn to its ability to shape the world. Power is a game that selects only for winners though, and winning doesn’t have very much to do with what you plan to do after you win. And oftentimes there isn’t an “after” at all. Power requires constant maintenance. The people who lose sight of the “after” and focus only on maintenance keep more power longer. It often fails to push us towards a better world. When do you cash out your social/political capital for impact? When do you double down on accumulating more power? How much do you trust your judgment here? Have you noticed all the past failures? Will you remember them when the time comes?

Maybe stick to technology. Just help make something good. Something good in a way that you know current incentives will cause people to pick it up and run with it. Vaccines, bed nets, delicious non-slaughter meat, fertilizer, electronic payments.

Which path you choose to go down (and you can always re-choose) depends on you. And what are you, anyway?

First and foremost, you’re a primate descended from a long evolutionary history. You have strong instincts to seek social status, hoard resources, and conserve energy. You want many mates, or a very high quality one. You want to fit in and be respected. You also want the things I described at the top. It’s hard to balance. The status and resources and mates often pull harder. You can see why people are getting these power trade-offs wrong.

How do you stay true to your best intentions, what you really want, your best self? Habits and reminders, sure. Rituals, if tasteful. Costly signals and commitment devices that work. Close some social doors you think will pull you away. Bind your self-narrative to the good in public. Make it embarrassing to walk back. Stake your honor on it.

And have more honor to stake. Trust people and be trusted. Lose sometimes and be gracious in defeat. Give generously when you know you’ll get nothing in return. Be reliably kind. Listen like you’ll change your mind. Actually change it. Look at failure and pain and frustration with patience and poise. Restrain the urge to hit back or lament fate. Understand. Find what works. Start doing it.

I’m starting now, just by writing this down. Seeking some clarity and reverence for what’s really important. I intend to share it with others. I hope they write their own versions. I hope they have something to pull them away from the status and power-for-power’s-sake, or from attachments to old self-narratives or narratives that weren’t even theirs to begin with. Away from comfortable defaults or things that feel safe, defaults that don’t push towards a better world, or at least don’t push nearly as hard as they could…

I feel like I’m in a world that has taken a lot for granted and is about to be surprised. Specifically we’ve taken liberalism and our post-Malthusian state for granted. The former may have held the seeds of its own destruction. The collapse of the latter may have always been on the cards, but there’s reason to think it might be coming fast.

On liberalism, humans simply aren’t liberal creatures and the liberal order puts humans in charge. It’s hardly been a hundred years since liberalism has dominated the world. Merely winning the world wars and surviving TV and radio are not proof of invincibility.1 And traditions are fading. Social fabric is fraying. Without a liberal order, it seems unlikely that material and social progress will continue. Bad power wielders and bad incentives.

Malthusianism cuts to the heart of our situation as living things. For all of evolutionary history species have come and gone, saturating their environments until something else adapted to outcompete them and take all their resources for itself. Implicitly, most people believe we’ve fully broken out of that cycle and have achieved a permanently dominant position over our environment. One can somewhat tangibly imagine all out nuclear war favoring a species better adapted for post-nuclear-winter environments though. That might not be us.2 You can imagine similar environmental changes from a bioweapon or a Venusification-type climate disaster. Asteroids are a simple case too. But we can also go the classical way: something else comes along that is just better at the current environment than we are and that something else ends up using all the resources we need to survive. Superhuman AI is the prime candidate.

Unfortunately we may be arriving at a juncture where we need liberalism to safeguard our post-Malthusian dream time, but liberalism is under serious threat.

Those earnestly working towards the good for its own sake are a small minority. If there were problems that required great effort and willingness to make personal sacrifices to notice and work on them, only a few would notice them. Those few would need a system that was good at giving minorities a hearing and coordinating power to respond well to important arguments. This contrasts with systems of favor, patronage, and bribery that pervaded the vast majority of human history.

Even a low-growth authoritarian state (or world order) could leverage current technology to create a catastrophe from AI or biology. The end of liberalism and liberal growth doesn’t mean the end of these threats. Some thresholds may already be crossed and require a response. The chance to avoid them entirely has passed.

These are the stakes as I see them. You can value these things too and you can be motivated to work on them in whatever way you understand to be best.

You don’t have to though. There are no obligations. And even if there were, there is no one to hold you to any obligations like these. No one accomplishes anything by demanding heroism. You and me included.

I can’t even demand heroism from myself. All I can do is ask. Who are you? Who do you want to be? Who am I? What are we doing?