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Awesome post!
Seventeen reasons I'm here
5 min read
Awesome post!
Hi Aaron. I liked this post.
Math
Some days, I don't have any particular motivation. That's when I turn to expected utility.
Very funny.
Hi Vasco. Thanks!
Thank you for this — it made me want to add a few of my own.
Luck. In the most literal sense. My diagnosis does not guarantee I keep my mind. A slightly harder fall, a slightly different trajectory, and I would not have the chance to get out of bed — let alone move to the US and write on this forum. I am here because something went right that easily could have gone wrong. That is not a small thing to carry.
Voice. Directly connected to the previous one. I happened to keep the ability to think, speak, and write. Others with my diagnosis did not — not because they worked less or wanted less, but because that is how it went. Epilepsy, for instance, often presents an impossible choice: think clearly and suffer seizures, or have the seizures managed and lose the cognitive capacity. I got lucky with my particular version of the equation. That luck feels like a debt.
Location. Chagall and Chaim Soutine would have spent their lives as rabbis' assistants if they had not made it to Paris. I am sometimes told I do not represent my community because I do not suffer to the same degree. But I represent it for a simpler reason: they are not here, and I am. That is not a small thing either.
Curiosity. The most literal kind. If you strip away the ideology, a researcher is someone who establishes possible connections between variables — nothing more. What drives me is solving the equation, not fixing the world. Or more precisely: my ability to see the equation inside a broken button is what lets me fix the button. The fixing is downstream of the seeing.
Executive summary: The author argues that their engagement with EA is overdetermined by a diverse mix of motivations—moral, emotional, social, and self-interested—which they do not fully endorse but all genuinely influence them.
Key points:
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
I once took a seminar with Paul Bloom, author of Against Empathy. He often spoke about the limits of empathy as a motivation — how it misleads us where math wouldn't. It was all very EA-coded (and indeed, he ate dinner with Yale EA once).
His class got me thinking about all the different motivations behind EA, from boundless love for the world to a fear of what our friends will think.
This is my own list of motivations. Whether or not I endorse them, they all helped me get here. They appear in roughly temporal order, based on when they felt most salient, but they all resurface sometimes.
I'd be curious to hear what motivates you! (Especially if it isn't listed.)
Everything about my upbringing made it easy to believe that all people matter. My parents gave to charity, and rarely had an unkind word to say about anyone. We even had this Norman Rockwell print in our dining room:
I used to be a picky eater. Once, my mother told me that I should appreciate food more — that lots of kids just went to bed hungry. This didn't make me less picky, but it did make me lie awake crying while I imagined being one of those kids.
I no longer meditate on suffering, but I do use art as a regular source of empathy: Peter Menzel, Dollar Street, Life in a Day.
I used to take notes on every problem I noticed in the news. I wanted to change things — all the things. But there were simply too many. The only realistic solution was to find the most important ones and focus. It's still the only approach that makes sense to me.
In high school, I raised money for a charity whose core message was "end cancer". I later learned that they mostly fund "patient support services": kind, but unlikely to end cancer.
I still felt sour about this when I found GiveWell; it probably made me like them 3% more, even if my eventual alignment was overdetermined.
I learned about earning to give when Peter Singer gave a talk at Yale's law school. He mentioned Aveek Bhattacharya, who I emailed right away — I'd wanted to donate my salary since high school but hadn't realized it was an actual thing people did.
Aveek responded on my birthday; I was starstruck. I've been starstruck many times since — by Ben Kuhn, Ben West, Julia Galef, Julia Wise, and several people with other names.
Some of the people who once left me starstricken are now friends. I'd donate regardless, but it helps that I've sung, danced, or gamed with the people I fight beside.
In crowds, I sometimes space out and sort of forget who I am. Why am I myself, and not any of these other people? What are they feeling right now? Maybe my life is a thought experiment.
I blame John Rawls for this feeling, but I also vibe with his approach. EA seems like the most obvious route to "creating a world you'd feel okay getting born in".
I'm not crippled by guilt, but I feel a small cloud of it when I make an ill-considered purchase or remember selling NVIDIA too early.
Taking the Pledge helped me feel a good, sustainable amount of guilt; it creeps over me in winter until I've made my yearly donations, then mostly goes away.
I don't ever want to die. But if I must, it should happen when I'm old. And the cause should be a cocktail of relaxing drugs — not an autonomous drone, nor some posthuman force I understand as well as chimps understand drones.
A small part of what makes me work each day is the chance to fight what scares me: a future without me, or you, or anyone.
When I think about jets filled with children crashing every day, I want to hit something.
When I think about people and most animals living in hell, I wish I were still religious so I could rage against God. Instead, I just rage.
I said "most animals" before; I smile when I picture mosquitos going to bed hungry.
I'm focused on political donations these days — not as satisfying as my usual giving. But it's easier to look past the spam texts and random phone calls when I think about the people I'm trying to make lose.
I met a guy named Max at EA Global and had a great conversation en route to the afterparty. Two months later, he died of malaria.
When I donate to GiveWell, it isn't just revenge for Max — it's revenge for Max and billions like him, all taken too soon.
A recipe:
This shouldn't work as well as it does, but I keep finding myself surrounded by the opposite of assholes. They aren't perfect, but they are surprisingly close to a naive stereotype of "people who donate a lot of money to the best charities they can find".
Also, I like walking into a giant hotel ballroom packed with people who (a) have saved multiple lives, (b) might save my life (see "Fear"), and (c) would help me move heavy boxes if they saw me setting up the conference. (It's happened before.)
I liked the thought of appearing in a book, even just a footnote. That's part of what drew me in — the chance to be an early joiner in a movement with big ideas, gathering steam.
That footnote looks less likely these days, but at least I've seen people I know in books. I feel proud just getting to walk among them and take part in their schemes.
I also feel proud (smug) seeing the caliber of our critics — I wouldn't be so addicted to Twitter if Andy Masley and Kelsey Piper weren't so good at dunking.
Some of the pride is self-endorsed: when I feel down about the thousands of hours I've wasted on worthless idling, I think about the lives I've helped to save.
I majored in cognitive science, or "fancy psychology". We read about cognitive biases; I took an extra dose via LessWrong.
The situation is outrageous: Nature tries to make us ignore scale in favor of salience, to care about close problems more than far ones. But I can outsmart it — tricking my brain into thinking I've impressed the tribe and saved my cousins by hanging out with fake "cousins" who are impressed when I write Forum posts.
Better still, those Forum posts assign me numbers that correspond to status! Some people claim that EA is ~100% status — that's obviously dumb, but the number isn't zero.
Running this place for a few years gave me a ludicrous artificial stockpile of karma totally out of proportion to my value; I love that karma like a beetle loves a beer bottle.
Some days, I don't have any particular motivation. That's when I turn to expected utility.
Great list. Some others that have come up:
Bargain-hunting
Excitement at having found and taken advantage of an amazing deal (better thrill than a 90% off refurbished as new sale) compared to another option to do something good with dollars.
Appreciation of ingenuity
Being able to get behind some people who have stumbled or engineered their way onto some really creative breakthroughs or possible / solutions.
Acceptance
Taking comfort that our choice of actions in the moment are the only true belongings, in world where nothing (even ourselves) ever stays the same.
Ancestors
Those who came before, who suffered to give us a better life, through kin or wide contributions, and feeling part of this human story.
Learning
Being able to learn new things, be challenged and enjoy the process of figuring stuff out over time is fulfilling, even more so when it's for something worthy.