Personal relationships with goodness

I think this whole discussion so far hides dangerous amounts of confusion around the concept of "good," and any serious progress will involve unpacking this confusion in much more detail. Here are some other stories I think it's important to have in the mix when thinking about this.

Goodness is about signaling: You know this one. In the ancestral environment people wanted to signal that they would make useful allies, which involves having properties like standing up for your friends, keeping your promises, etc. Perhaps they even wanted to signal that they would be good leaders of the tribe, which involves having properties like looking out for the well-being of the tribe. Also, humans are bad at lying. All this adds up to a strong incentive to signal both to yourself and to others that you care about doing things that are "good" = things that would make you a desirable ally or leader, or whatever.

Goodness is about coordinating decisions about who to back in social conflicts: This is the side-taking hypothesis of morality. Read the link for more details. This is maybe the most horrifying idea I've come across in the last year.

Goodness is an eldritch horror / egregore: Some crazy societal / cultural process indoctrinated you with this concept of "good" for reasons that have basically nothing to do with what you want. Cf. people who have been indoctrinated with communism or a religion, or fictional people living in a dystopia. There is just this distributed entity running on a bunch of humans propagating itself through virulent memes, and who knows what it's optimizing for, but probably not what I want.

My story is some kind of complicated mix of these; many parts of it are nonverbal and verbalizing them would require some effort on my part. But if I had to try verbalizing, it might go something like this:

"Many people, including me, seem to have some concept of what it means for a person or action to be 'good.' It seems like a complicated concept and I notice I'm confused. When I try to label a person as 'good' or 'bad,' including myself, it feels like I am basically always making some kind of mistake, maybe a type error. I have some kind of desire to be able to label myself 'good,' which seems to come from some sense that if I am 'good' then I 'deserve' (another complicated concept I notice confusion around) to be happy, or 'deserve' other people's love, or something like that.

This concept I have of 'goodness' came from somewhere, and I'm not sure I trust whatever process it came from. I have some sense that my desire to use it is protecting something, but whatever that is I'd rather work with it directly.

What seems a lot less complicated than 'goodness' or 'badness' is thinking about what I want. I want a lot of things, many of which involve other people. I have some sense of what it means for people to be able to trust each other and cooperate in a way that makes both of them better off, and a lot of what I want revolves around this; I want to be a trustworthy person who can cooperate with other people in ways that make both of us better off, so I can get other things I want. I also want to continue existing so I can get all the other things I want. I in fact don't want to do a lot of the actions that I might naively want to label as 'bad' because they would make me less trustworthy and I don't want that.

I have the sense that I'm made out of a bunch of parts that want different things, and those parts are still in the process of learning how to trust and cooperate with each other so they can all get more of what they want."

One thing I've been playing with in the last few months is learning to stop being subject to [LW · GW] the concept of goodness. It's been very freeing; I feel a lot more capable of thinking through the actual consequences of my actions (including decision-theoretic consequences) and deciding if I want those consequences or not, as opposed to feeling shackled by a bunch of deontological constraints that were put into place by processes I don't trust.

Here's my trajectory:

1.) Worry a lot about "I'm not good"

2.) Improve in some dimensions, also refactor my moral priorities so that I no longer believe some of my 'bad traits' are really bad

3.) Still worry a lot about "I'm not good" where "good" refers to some eldritch horror that I no longer literally endorse

4.) Learn the mental motion of going "fuck it", where I just rest my brain and self-soothe. Do that until I deeply do not give a fuck whether I'm good or not.

5.) Notice a mild but consistent desire to do things that are, not "good", but "constructive" -- i.e. contribute to the construction of a nice thing that takes time and effort to complete.

6.) Notice that the people around me mostly like it when I do "constructive" things, and call them "good."

I like the last option (goodness + compromise), but want to add two notes:

1. It really seems like someone's got to be doing some indulging (perhaps in moderation). Otherwise you're only saving children from malaria so that they can save other children from malaria, and it all adds up to a disneyland w/ no children. (Or, I guess there are children, but they're all working rather than enjoying the park.)

2. After watching Schindler's List, I resolved not to be like him in the last scene, where he laments that he could have done just a little bit more. I want to get within an order of magnitude of the most good I could do. By analogy with computer science algorithms, I want it to have the right complexity class. If there are quick wins, or cheap buys, I want to take them. Worrying about every last ounce of goodness doesn't seem like how I want to be.

I am not permitted to engage in morality for exactly the same reason an alcoholic is not permitted to have a drink-- I can never stop at just one.

By coincidence, when I try as solemnly as possible to figure out what I genuinely want to do, one of the things I want to do is to be St. Basil the Great. Of course, I want to do very many unrealistic and mutually contradictory things: in addition to being St. Basil the Great, I also want to go to Disneyland about once a month, cook three delicious meals for myself every day from scratch, read my son every board book in existence, and date every pretty person I come across. But for me my desire to go to Disneyland interfering with my desire to be St. Basil the Great is not actually any different from my desire to go to Disneyland interfering with my desire to cook all my meals from scratch. So I try to fulfill as many of my desires as best I can.

Also, I keep doing things I don't want to do instead of things I want to do.

When I adopted this policy I was concerned that not wanting to be good would mean I would end up doing some things I would feel upset about doing, but it turns out that the whole reason I feel upset about those things is that I don't upon reflection want to do them (although I might have impulses to do them at the time). Otherwise, it would be like "if you stop caring about being good then you might have gay sex!" Yes, and in fact that is a selling point of not caring about being good.

I bite some bullets.

1) I am not a good person in any absolute sense. I perhaps do more overall good than many other humans, and I signal caring pretty well so many of my fellow humans put me in the "good guy" category, but I choose to waste resources on my own selfish experience pretty routinely. Suck it, future.

2) I don't value people equally. I do in fact care more about close friends and family than strangers, and still less about more distant strangers. My "optimization of goodness" weights my own experiences and my perception of people I interact with MUCH higher (like billions of times) than undifferentiated strangers across the world. (note that I do advocate for equality in terms of institutional design, I just don't think it applies at the personal level).

So, I think I can say things within the frame given here (I guess they'd mostly be similar to ESRogs – the main difference being that I'd object harder that the word "indulgence" is an appropriate word to describe what's going on. The whole point in my worldview is for people to be able to have good experiences. "Indulgence" conjures to my mind a "you're taking a break from the thing you're supposed to be doing." The experiencing-of-good-things is an important part of The Good)

But my inner Zvi is screaming at the entire framing of this [fake edit: so was my inner Qiaochu, although for different reasons, and he's already spoken for himself].

I will note that goodness is a fairly confusing concept, and is one of the places where I think it's good to catch up on some sequences if you haven't already.

Eliezer's Mere Goodness collection has a lot of theoretical background. (Much of this is oriented more towards "how do you make sure an AI is 'good'" as opposed to "what does 'good' mean as a human?" A lot of it is probably stuff you already know and I'm not sure which is which)

Nate Soare's Replacing Guilt series is more directly tailored as a response to the sort of question in the OP. I think a good post to start with to see if the series is a good fit for you is "Should" considered harmful.

(fyi, I kept running into Effective Altruist types who still seemed to have an unhealthy relationship with guilt, so I registered the domain doingguiltbetter.com to redirect to Nate's series)

I don't think I have too much to add, but I thought it was nice to see these different takes fleshed out.

My own views are a mix of your last two. It goes a little like:

"At best, humans are operating off leaky abstractions when it comes to 'doing good'. It's not realistic to expect yourself to do The Goodest Thing (TM) all the time, even when it seems like it's doable. Just like how you can't always swim to the other side of the shore, even if you can see it from across the waves. There's a lot of other factors involved, and doing things like taking breaks are instrumental in the long run to avoid burnout."

Relevant and still funny: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goode_Family

Every study I'm aware of investigating the topic shows that 'doing good' mentally buys people rationalizations for bad behavior. So I would say, the difficulty of doing good increases as more good is done, and the slope of that rate of increase is so steep that most people end up pretty close to 'even' between doing good and doing not-good. Here's a recent popular press article referencing academic research: http://m.nautil.us/blog/why-doing-good-makes-it-easier-to-be-bad

Charity, particularly self-directed charity performed as pennance, is a downright disgusting practice when viewed in this light.

I try to have good habits like recycling so I am 'good without thinking about it'

How about "I am good, and the obligation that places on me is finite, not infinite and oopen ended". IOW, deontology is true and utilitarianism is false.

I do the best I can. This sometimes means writing for hours at a time and sometimes means the equivalent of catching pictures.

It's not helpful for me to be self critical either way because I am aware that I already do the best I can do.

I found it helped to expand my definition of virtue. I learned that I am the best and perhaps only person willing to take care of myself in a way ensuring my long-term capability to do good. This is different than being the only person willing to take care of myself in the way I want, or I think is best. This allows me to defer to my own sense of what's best for me over other's advice, but because I'm only sovereign over myself, and not necessarily the best decision-maker in all instances, I find it easier to defer to advice from others than I used to when it makes more sense than anything I can think of to improve my own lot in life. This attitude expands beyond the self concentrically. For example, the people best-suited to ensuring the long-term well-being of a community are the people living in that community; in a country, the people of that country; and during a period of time, the people living during that period of time.

Realizing other people aren't best-suited to care for you even if they want to, perhaps more than you, makes it imperative to learn how to take care of oneself. In this case, selfish indulgence and virtue are inverted.

For instance, just now I went and listened to a choir singing. You might also admire kittens, or play video games, or curl up in a ball, or watch a movie, or try to figure out whether the actress in the movie was the same one that you saw in a different movie. I’ll call this ‘indulgence’, though it is not quite the right category.

Admiring kittens, playing video games, or watching movies in moderation switches from "I should be doing good, but I'm going to indulge myself" to "I'm running out of spoons to do good today, and while I could run on willpower, and my peers would be eager to see me keep burning the candle at both ends, they don't internally I need to recharge my batteries to avoid burnout". "Indulgence" in moderation becomes reframed as responsible self-care.