I have noticed the following distasteful motivations for my interest in EA surface within me from time to time. I'm disclosing them as they may also be reasons why people are suspicious of EA.
- I feel guilty about my privilege in the world and I can use EA as a tool to relieve my guilt (and maintain my privilege)
- I like to feel powerful and in control, and EA makes me feel I am having an impact on the world. More lives affected = more impact = I feel more powerful. I'm not so small and insignificant if my effective actions can have outsized impacts
- Affiliation with EA aligns me with high-status people and elite institutions, which makes me feel part of something special, important and exclusive (even if it's not meant to be)
- If I believe that other people's suffering can be reduced I believe that there is hope for my own potential suffering to be reduced too
- I'm fragile and EA makes me feel that other people are more fragile by drawing attention to all of the suffering in the world. I must be stronger than I feel if I'm in a position to be an EA, so it makes me feel good about myself
- EA helps satisfy my need to feel like what I do matters and that an almighty judge would pat me on the back and let me in to heaven for my good deeds and intentions (despite being an atheist I was socialised with Christian values)
- EA is partly an intellectual puzzle, and gives me opportunities to show off and feel like I'm right and other people are wrong
- It is a way to feel morally superior to other people, to craft a moral dominance hierarchy where I am higher than other people
- EA lets me signal my values to like-minded people, and feel part of an in-group
- I don't have to get my hands dirty helping people, yet I can still feel as or more legitimate than someone who is actually on the front line
Really appreciate you writing this! Echoing others, I think many of these more self-serving motivations are pretty common in the community. With that said, I think some of these are much more potentially problematic than others, and the list is worth disaggregating on that dimension. For example, your comment about EA helping you not feel so fragile strikes me as prosocial, if anything, and I don't think anyone would have a problem with someone gaining hope that their own suffering could be reduced from engaging in EA.
The ones that I think are most worrying and worth pushing back on (not just for you, but for all of us in the community) are:
The first one is tricky, as affiliation with high-status people and organizations can be instrumentally quite useful for achieving impact--indeed, in some contexts it's essential--and for that reason we shouldn't reject it on principle. And just like I think it's okay to enjoy money, I think it's okay to enjoy the feeling of doing something special and important! The danger is in having the status become its own reward, replacing the drive for impact. I feel that this is something we need to be constantly vigilant about, as it's easy to mistake social signals of importance for actual importance (aka LARPing at impact.)
I grouped the "intellectual puzzle" and "get my hands dirty" items because I see them as two sides of the same coin. In recent years it feels to me that EA has lost touch a bit with its emotional core, which is arguably easier to bring forward in the contexts of animal welfare and global poverty than x-risk (and to the extent there is an emotional core to x-risk, it is mostly one of fear rather than compassion). I personally love solving intellectual puzzles and it's a big reason why I keep coming back to this community, but it mustn't come at the expense of the A in EA. I group this with "get my hands dirty" because I think for many of us, hard intellectual puzzles are our bread and butter and actually take less effort/provoke less discomfort than putting ourselves in a position to help people suffering right in front of us. I similarly see this one as a balance to strike.
The last one is the only one that I think is just unambiguously bad. Not only is it incorrect on its face, or at least at odds with what I see as EA's core values, but it is a surefire way to turn off people who might otherwise be motivated to help. And indeed there has been a history of people in EA publicly communicating in a way that came across to others as morally arrogant, especially in early years of the movement, which created rifts with mainstream nonprofit/social sector practice that are still there today (e.g.).