Should you hope that you are doing good? Perhaps not. For a number of cause areas you should probably hope that you are achieving nothing, or actually doing harm. Eg, if you are working on x-risk reduction you should hope what you are doing is not neccessary, in which case you are probably doing harm by reducing growth.
Nor in Scandinavia. Driving, or riding trains, you often see cows grazing on pastures. Of course, that is not in the slaughterhouse, or when their young are taken away from them, but I still wonder whether their life on average is worse than mine. (I am also going to die one day, and adjusted for my greater understanding I am not sure mine will be a more pleasant death than a cow's.)
I know EA leads to some weird places, but at the same time I think the EA movement is good at not getting too involved in questions of the day where an EA perspective is not needed, and could repel some from the movement. Presumably peace in the Middle East would be very good from an EA perspective, but there is a lot of debate on the Middle East already, no reason to try to inject a formal EA perspective on it. This is not to say that EA-adjacent individuals can't engage in the debate, as a form of personal hobby maybe.