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Comment by akkad33 | Hacker News Reader

Is there a guide for knowing what you want?

The Effective Altruism movement is very good at convincing people they want what Effective Altruists want. Figuring out what you want is really hard. I quit my job and blew my life up since other people do this to soul-search and it was my best idea.

Can you talk more about your experience? What led up to you quitting your job? How have you been feeling over the past few years? Post-quit, how are things?

Late reply but figured I would share what worked for me. Once a week, spend 15-20 minutes writing down what an ideal day would look like for you in as much detail as possible. Visualise it and feel it. Don’t worry about anything like realism, consistency, selfishness, what other people would think, how you could possibly achieve it, etc. “Ideal day” doesn’t have to mean a crazy one-off like “I wake up and skydive into a safari park and then eat three chocolate sundaes”, it can be as simple as “I wake up feeling refreshed, I look around my room and enjoy my plant collection, I eat eggs and bacon for breakfast…”. Include some feelings in there - does your ideal day involve feeling relaxed and calm, or energetic and exhilarated, or loved and surrounded by family…? Let your ideal day evolve as time goes on. Do that for a few months and you’ll start to notice the patterns of what you want.

Thank you. Very concrete and actionable plan. I will try this

I recommend you look at Effective Altruism. Can there be anything more-fulfilling or less regret-on-your-deathbed than helping others (while knowing you're doing it in the most effective way you can)?

There are hobbies for sure, but when you spend 80,000 Hours in a career which you feel helps no one but you with your income, you might find mid-life there are more-important things.

https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ & https://80000hours.org/

I used to believe in Effective Altruism but the older I get the more I realise that it’s just another “feel good” philanthropy for rich people movement with completely warped values around so called rationality, utilitarianism and technological saviour complexes. If one reads the website and the projects accomplished most of them are completely vapid. Malaria nets? AI assignment research? Some high brow research institute? Real help is helping people to improve their lives at a personal level, not saving them a couple of bucks while banking. To anyone reading this, don’t fall for this. It’s no wonder Sam Bankman Fried was so closely advocating for Effective Altruism, it’s just the same old virtue signaling, but with a bit of rationality injected in.

This seems like an overly cynical take. Malaria nets have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. You can be critical of some areas of EA, but it's hard to deny that organizations like Against Malaria Foundation and GiveWell are doing a lot of good in the world. What's wrong with donating with the goal of maximizing lives saved per dollar?

Saving lives is a good thing but I just have a gut feeling against this traditional image of “doing good” due to my experience with working with many charities and seeing first hand how useless the majority of them are. It’s not about quantifying their impact, it’s understanding the whole mentality is completely wrong, so movements like GiveWell don’t really change much. Philanthropy is about helping others, when the people helping don’t even have their own stuff sorted out. Classic archetype repeated through history and fiction is similar to the Man in Black from Westworld. Rich dude who feeds his ego and avoids his inner landscape and crumbling family by being a saviour. Why do people jump at volunteering in Africa when their own countries and neighbours are in shambles? Case in point, San Francisco. I don’t doubt that a lot of good has come from EA but my impression is it’s just an incremental evolution of traditional philanthropy, which is basically 90% rich people trying to make themselves feel better and ingratiate themselves with other rich people. Real change also comes from certain charities but they’re much more focused on empowering people and loving them, rather than some lofty ideological goals around AI alignment. When most of your country is struggling paycheck to paycheck, most people will see an excessive focus on these abstract concepts as very out of touch. The malaria nets weren’t the best examples but the rest of the projects demonstrate what I mean. Source: Working in the space.

I don't think you understand the EA movement at all or it history. The foundation of it is Giving What We Can - https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/ - regular people (not rich) giving at least 10% of their income to cost-effective charities. I've been giving for over 10 years now - and I started as a math teacher.

You say "why won't people help in San Francisco". This betrays a severe misunderstanding of effectiveness. How many thousands of dollars would a single individual need to give to a charity working in SF to help one person as much as they can with a $2 donation to AMF (Against Malaria Foundation - providing protection from malaria for 3 years). People are people, regardless of where they were born, and helping more people is better than helping fewer.

"Most people will see [this activity] as very out of touch". So what? Most people saw gay rights as out of touch, most people still see animal welfare / animal rights activities as "out of touch".

What you're saying is exactly what motivated Effective Altruism: most charities are ineffective, and philanthropy should be about saving/improving people's lives, not feel-good causes; we should try to do the most good with our time and money.

The following video by Peter Singer is a good intro to Effective Altruism and the philosophy behind it. His essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" was one of the primary influences on the founders of the movement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Diuv3XZQXyc

It's true that more recently many people in the movement have shifted their focus from global health and development to areas like AI risk and biosecurity. Whether or not you agree with working on these areas, I don't think the people working on them are doing it cynically. I think they are motivated to work on these areas because they believe it will do the most good for humanity.

What's your thought process on malaria nets being vapid? It's not structural change, but (statistically) saving a life for ~$6k (I think that's their estimate? Or was at some point) is amazing, and very "real".

I don't have any experience with the actual culture of EA, but the concept and the philanthropy itself seems at least as good as other charities or mission-focused organizations.

I replied to this in my other comment

Effective Altruism might be great, but I'm not convinced that it's a one-size-fits-all approach to solving the problem of what someone actually desires. In fact, doing what one feels one "should" do or what other people might appreciate is a great way to avoid discovering what one actually wants.

> the most effective way

Like spending £15M for real estate [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33903850

If you feel unfulfilled in yourself how can helping others help you overcome that? Say you feel bitter about the way you've been treated all your life (shunned, bullied, isolated), will that rancour disappear one day because you helped a few people?

Wasn't this Sam Bankman-Fried's schtick?

I've tried this before.

As selfish as it sounds, saving (an expected) 186.328 lives in Africa will not create the "feel-good chemicals" that teaching a kid to ride a bike will.

Rationally, it's a good thing. But emotionally, I don't think it's actually all that effective.

I found therapy really useful for having a professional to guide me through the self-discovery process to identify some things I really want in life-- and more important, some things that aren't a priority for me (which I previously thought I really wanted). Figuring out what you DON'T want is at least as important as figuring out what you want.

As a result, I changed my career path (slightly! not even a whole blow-up-your-life thing) a year ago and have been happier since.

I also really liked the book Four Thousand Weeks, which is all about figuring out how you want to spend your finite lifetime.

Super important, and vastly underrated question. The article does partly address this.

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