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antinegationism

Question for any practicing Effective Altruists who might come across this:

Are you happier now than you were before you started practicing(?) Effective Altruism. If so, can you trace this back to your commitment to EA?

(I understand that the question arguably misses the point)

theunitofcaring

I’m a lot happier, and I think that this doesn’t totally miss the point - I think a movement that reliably makes its members better-off is also going to enable them to do more good (and be more attractive to others, obviously).

The big ways effective altruism has improved my life are:

- working with people who share your goals and values, and who really primarily care about results, is an incredibly powerful experience. I am sure there are other communities where someone can experience this, but in practice I’ve only ever encountered it in effective altruism. You can be more honest with yourself and with other people when you’re just trying to get the thing done. You pick up a bunch of new skills that are focused on results and not on process/appearances. It’s easier to think clearly about your goals when you don’t also have to be gearing up to defend them against other people.

- mutual encouragement to develop job skills, apply for promotions, negotiate for raises, and do other hard and scary stuff that I am not intrinsically motivated to do just for a bit more money but am intrinsically motivated to do in order to save a life. Networking can improve your life a lot!

- the skills you develop any time you try to dig into a really hard question you are very interested in solving - a sense of the scope and complexity of policy and advocacy and charity, a sense of the ways things fail, a sense of the level of robustness and rigor it takes for things to succeed, a sense of how often you are surprised by new information even in fields you thought you knew. This benefit I think you can get from working for a long time on any complex and intellectually interesting question.

- a sense of purpose and direction. I think that a particularly valuable social technology some people get from religion is an answer to ‘why am I here? what am I supposed to be doing? do I matter?’. And I think that a lot of people are pretty unhappy if they don’t have an answer to that question - the ability to fit their life into a broad perspective is a big part of their motivation systems and their life satisfaction. And ‘I’m here to figure out my values, and then do as much good as I can’, is at least for me a compelling answer to this question. It’s possible to make meaningful progress on day one, but it’s also complicated and I feel like I’m still learning new aspects of it years later. It’s demanding, but it’s forgiving - there is no day where the best thing to do is beat myself up over what I failed to do yesterday. And it matters. People are alive because of it. People are fed because of it. People in the future might get the chance to grow up in a richer, safer, stabler, freer world because of it.

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.