HELP! I want to do good

The problems of the world are perpetuated because the human race is perpetuated. There is a huge difference between those forms of action which consist of rearranging the pieces already on the chessboard of the human condition, and those forms of action which consist of changing the players, the rules, and the battlefield on which the game of life is played; and the way one should approach these two topics is completely different.

With respect to the first type of action, wanting to do good without concern for a personal payoff is only the relevant attitude for small-scale, interpersonal interactions. If you're hoping to save the world, either alone or in the company of your friends and colleagues, then you have a different problem: almost certainly, there is something missing or something unrealistic in your idea of how the world works. You say it yourself: why aren't other people already saving the world for you? So let's think about this.

But first, I want to emphasize: I am not talking about topics like life extension or friendly AI. If you are wondering why the human race hasn't made Ray Kurzweil president of the world and why health care debates don't include national cryonics programs, that belongs in Part Two of this comment.

So, let's consider some of the reasons why people aren't already saving the world (more than they are, that is). First, most adults are trapped in the wage-slave black-hole of working full-time in order to stay alive. Second, human survival requires a division of labor which ensures that most adult lives must revolve around performance of narrow economic functions in this way. Third, people actually enjoy domination and luxury, victory in conflict and selfish sensate pleasure, and these are zero-sum pursuits. Fourth, every human life is blighted by pain, disappointment, ageing, and death, and early hopes end up appearing just as hopes, not as facts about what is possible. Fifth, through a combination of limited capacity and natural inclination, people tend to care most about a small subset of all human beings: family, friends, subculture, nation.

Now let us consider some factors peculiar to the situation of the person or culture which does want to save the world. Here we should distinguish between world-saviors who have identified an enemy - an enemy class of people, not an impersonal enemy like "ignorance" or "poverty" - and those who have a spirit of general benevolence which doesn't blame anyone in particular. Human beings are well-adapted for hunting and so fighting a personalized enemy comes naturally. I have little to say about this much more common type of world-savior, except that they are probably part of the problem, especially from the perspective of the would-be purveyor of generalized benevolence. I have already given some reasons why the latter sort of world-savior is rare - why most people don't have the energy, time, attitude or inclination to be like that - so what can be said about the people who do?

First, they are probably better off than most other people, either through material standard of living or perhaps early quality of life. For them, that way of being seems natural, and so it's also natural to imagine that everyone could easily live like that.

Second, here we are often talking about people from the first world who want to make a difference in the third world. Well, there probably is considerable scope for improvement of life in that regard, and it's happening as the mundane innovations which make the difference between medieval daily life and modern daily life percolate throughout the world. (Though let us also remember that specifically modern annoyances and pathologies are thereby spreading as well.) What I see here most of all is massive political naivete of various forms. Altruists want to improve health or human rights in countries that they know almost nothing about, even though their history and their internal politics will be decisive on the big scales where the altruists want to make a difference. If you come from outside, you are likely to be either an ineffectual meddler or a useful tool for someone older, smarter, and more knowledgeable than you. Maybe sometimes that person or faction that uses you would actually be the faction that you would want to back, if you knew all the facts; but most outsiders just won't know those facts.

So I think that, if your aim is to do conventional (non-trans-human) world-improving (I won't call it world-saving), the attitude you should aim for is not one of being indifferent to personal gain; the attitude you should aim for is one of not expecting to make a big difference. Because most likely, you won't be making a big difference, or at least not a difference that is unambiguously an improvement. It's not hard to be part of something bigger - there are plenty of movements and causes in the world - but narrowness of personal experience and the sheer complexity of life tend to make it very difficult to tally up the gains and losses associated with any genuinely big change.

Feel free to criticize or dismiss what I've said, but perhaps you will feel compelled to agree with one point. If it's a mystery to you why the world is so bad, then something is lacking in your own understanding, and that places in doubt the effectiveness of any remedial action you may be planning. You may find that something or other is just so awful that you feel compelled to get involved, take a stand, make a difference, even though you're uncertain about the consequences - that there just isn't time to achieve a cold lucid understanding. That also is true; it's been said that life can only be understood in retrospect, but has to be lived forwards. Nonetheless, if you do rush into something, don't be surprised if you are surprised about what happens (or what doesn't happen), and end up being just another entry in the world's long log of follies and tragedies, rather than being the author of a genuine advance in the human condition.

Now for Part Two. We talk about these topics endlessly, so I will try to be brief. Here there is greater scope for changing the human condition, not just because ultratechnology might give us superlongevity or superintelligence, but because human nature itself here becomes changeable. But it's going to be a lot easier to make something subhuman or inhuman than it is to make something better than human.

The psychology of the individual response to the prospect of a singularity deserves to be more explored. A lot of it has nothing to do with altruism, and is just about an elemental desire for survival and freedom. It can also become a rationale for daydreams and fantasy. One really unexplored psychological aspect has to do with singularity-inspired altruism. Most committed detractors of transhuman futurism can barely acknowledge that there is such a thing - it's all power-tripping and infantile fantasy as far as they are concerned. However, it's clear that quite a few people have had a sublime personal vision of utopia achieved because (for example) no-one has to die any more, or because scarcity has been abolished. Unrealized utopian dreams are as old as history; it's a type of fantasy - an unselfish fantasy rather than a selfish one, but still a fantasy. Historically, most such visions have revolved around the existence of some wholly other reality in which all the negative features of this one are not present and are even made up for. More recently, we also have social utopianisms, which usually contain some element of psychological unrealism.

But now, in this era when natural and psychological causality are being decoded, and when the world and the brain might be reengineered from the atoms on up, it seems like you really could adjust the world to human beings, and human beings to the world, and create something utopian by its own standards. It's this sense of technological power and possibility which is the new factor in the otherwise familiar psychology of utopian hope. If it ever takes a form which is shared by thousands or millions of people, then we might have the interesting spectacle of typical pre-singularity social phenomena - politics, war, nationalism - that is informed by some of these new futurist notions. But the whole premise of Part One of this comment is that none of these pre-singularity activities can really "create utopia" in themselves. So it's best to view them a little coldly - perhaps sympathetically, if they aren't wrongheaded - but still, they have at best a tactical significance, in the way that they shape how things will play out when we really and truly start to have rejuvenation technology, nanotechnology, and autonomous artificial intelligence. Those (and some others) are the factors which really could change the human condition, easily for the worse, possibly for the radical betterment that altruist utopians have always desired.

I don't feel equal to the task of providing definitive advice to the person who aspires to make the right sort of difference to this change, the truly big change. But it's probably unhealthy to become too dreamy about it, and it's certainly unrealistic to start treating as a foregone conclusion, no matter how much happier that might make you. Also, it's important to get in touch with your own inner selfishness, and try to understand to what extent you are motivated just by the desire not to die, and not specifically by the desire to optimize the posthuman galactic future. And finally, don't ever expect the majority of pre-singularity humanity to unite behind you as one. Up until the end, however things play out, you and your cultural and political allies will only be one faction amongst many in a society which is still short-sighted by your standards, because it is preoccupied with the day-to-day crisis management arising from the collective political life of a society of millions of people.

It sounds to me like you're suffering from the perfect being the enemy of the good. I guess my advice would be that you're worrying too much about optimizing for the best possible course of action and not simply pursuing one reasonable course of action.

If it makes you feel any better, you're a better person than I am at the moment, as I don't really care about saving the world (right now), just trying to save myself, by which I mean getting into grad school/finding a career.

For me, the personal terror of mediocrity and slacking is far more effective in driving me away from saving-the-world-type-activities than akrasia. I don't know. Maybe in a few years if I'm in a more stable situation I'll worry about saving the world.

And from that the plan became clear: the best way to save the world would be to persuade other people to do it for me.

I don't see why evangelism is likely to be your comparative advantage. I'd suggest the better alternative is probably to earn a crap load of money then pay someone else to do the evangelism. Certainly what my plan is.

I know it's kind of taboo to say this here, but someone has to say it:

You best bet is probably to just give as much money as possible to the SIAI.

I'd like to help!

Basically my current plan is to learn how to build rationalist communities and optimize fun. Fun is instrumental in drawing people into rationalist communities.

I think outreach is helpful because it draws in other people, who can act autonomously, intelligently, and using their own skill sets. On my robotics team, I've found that most vaguely complex tasks are made easier (if not possible) when you work with other people.

My current strategy for doing that is making myself fun to be around, and finding people with goals that I want accomplished, and helping them with those. I'm less optimistic about the possibility of making people change goals, but it might actually be possible given enough time. Will investigate that further.

So then I start a community in DC and then college.

After college, I'll try to do some mixture of consulting and engineering.

Consulting: Basically, this might make it possible to spread rationality among business people in important fields. I'm not totally sure if there's much marginal impact there, since they might already be rational enough. If that's true, I probably won't spend as much time on this. It also has the useful side effect of teaching me a variety of skills, and having a wider variety of contacts.

Engineering: I think this is where my comparative advantage is, based on my experience in leading my robotics team, and becoming a Dean's List Finalist. I would focus on creating technologies which improve the quality of life, which hopefully will be profitable. This gives me money for other projects, and donating to SIAI, and maybe SENS. On top of that, lots and lots of good things seem to happen as people get richer, such as a lower birth rate (I consider this a good thing until we live in a post-scarcity environment), lower infant mortality rate, longer life expectancy, etc.

Basically, acquire skills, money, and influence in ways that generate lots of positive externalities.

Of course, this is all contingent on my continuing to think this would be effective. Should more effective instrumental goals come to my awareness, I would switch to them.

We should talk some time.

A quick bit of meta:

Firstly, I need a name for my group: how about "Altruist Support Network"?

Secondly, I've been trying to answer everyone individually, but only to show that I'm listening. I'm not trying to harass people.

You asked, so:

That's what you get when you finally grasp how much pointless pain, misery, risk, death there is in the world; just how much good could be done if everyone would get their act together; just how little anyone seems to care.

Speaks to me greatly. I am often shocked at how little people care about big things, and how much they care about trivial ones.

Not willing to fully commit without knowing more, but I'll listen.

There are people out there who want to do good in the world, but don't know how.

The how is what I'm interested in, not really the 'why.' This post may be useful to some people, but it's not really useful to me until you start focusing primarily on this.

Why is continuing to donate as you did previously mutually exclusive with your evangelism plan?

I'll help you save the world!

"persuade other people to do it for me"? Don't you mean "persuade other people to do it with me"?

other than that, this is an awesome post! I totally want to be your ally! :)

Congratulations on your altruism! If you really are as altruistic as you claim to be.

I'm the person who mentioned there should be a "saving the world wiki", by the way. The main thing that's stopping me from going ahead and starting it myself is that noone else expressed any interest in actually using this wiki if I created it.

Also, I've already made some previous attempts to do something like this, and they were pretty much complete failures. Costly failures. Costing lots of time and money.

(sorry for not noticing this post until now)

a community of aspiring rationalist do-gooders.

I recommend Felicifia.org, a forum on Utilitarianism.

I know this post was like 4 years ago but hey, it's never too late to change the world. Did you do the stuff you were hoping? I'm glad there are still good people in the world. Thanks for sharing, let me know if there's anything I can do to help :)

Declaring your intention to do good is an excellent way to start. However, I'd like to know what "good" means to you, and whether it reconciles with my conception of "good", before I formally declare my allegiance. I'm looking forward to hearing more in subsequent posts.

One possible path towards improving the world may be to identify people who have already accomplished that goal within their lifetimes, examine their approach, and possibly improve on it. What people would meet this criteria for you?

Have you considered open source projects?

What are you good at?

I'm trying to develop an open source meta-project which I believe is the path to maximal utility for all (that I can plan). Here: Plan A. I am just recently ready for collaborators. FAQ

I especially need programmers (Java or alternate), animators / producers of videos, illustrators, and everyone else now or later.

Brief Description. The project is centered around a serverless P2P application which provides a personal assistant offering peer-generated responses to user requests. The intent is to interface with personal manufacturing technologies in order to directly compare various means of meeting user requests, including commercial, home-manufacture, and barter, as well as considering alternative courses of action.

The application incorporates project-guided user generated content as entertainment in order to promote open source projects. This content is being developed for additional formats.

I am planning a "formal" announcement but a few pieces are not yet ready.