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I like this post a lot.
Personally I am an even less altruistic Bob, who is still slightly altruistic. I would guess that 1% or less of my effort and resources go to altruistic causes.
But I accept most of the logical arguments and most of the facts / conclusions.
The very reason I don't step up to at least become Bob is because of the Alices of the world.
If I identify with the good (pure?) too much, the good people then have in-group status which they can use as a tool to extract more value from me.
I think it's one of those things you can't logic people into doing, because there's always "well at the end of the day I'm going to die in 50 years, I am ultimately a meaningless monkey on a dirt rock, why not just get high, have fun and ignore all this dumb shit"
The idea of using goodness (really ideological purity) as leverage feels inherently wrong to me.
Maybe that's just a convenient though-terminating cliche. But maybe I don't really care, and that's the whole point.
I agree with all of this and it underscores why I loathe networking
Trying to hit the balance of not being overly transactional and signaling the right way but also trying to make sure that my signaling itself isn't perceived as conscious (which it is) is agonizing for me
I strongly believe that at least half of the population would never believe it is an unbiased source of information no matter what you do, and would find the centralization very suspicious
This feels closely related to Alexithymia or emotion blindness
Extremely common in: people with ADHD / Autism (potentially over half)
Fairly common in: people who have PTSD, people with substance abuse issues (possibly causal, alexithymia -> drugs to feel something), and men (male-normative alexithymia)
People with alexithymia often identify their emotions primarily through physical sensations
For me (a male with autism, ADHD and PTSD) I can tell I'm feeling scared or anxious if my legs get cold (I believe this is a common form)