Little (& effective) altruism

This was a nice little post!

One of the biggest draws to the EA community for me — and something that's kept me involved — is how much small-scale altruism goes on here. Unsurprisingly, a movement founded on practical altruism draws a lot of people who enjoy helping and actually care about providing good help. 

This manifests in a bunch of ways. Two that come to mind: EA Global participants swarming me to help carry heavy conference items through a shopping mall when I was at CEA, and a bunch of cases where someone in the community encountered a personal issue and got massive support from their extended social network — here's one example.

*****

I've met people who seem to get by without caring much about small-scale altruism (they are good at fixing their eyes on the biggest problems and attacking them relentlessly). But for many people, I think that small-scale altruism reinforces the bigger stuff. A habit of small good deeds helps you maintain your altruistic character, self-identity, and motivation. 

(Picking up some trash in my apartment complex was among the most satisfying altruistic things I've ever done, even though my donations do much more actual good.)

That said, there's no reason you can't start working on the big stuff alongside the small stuff. Donations, self-education, career planning, and small good deeds can all be part of a balanced EA diet (no false pride required).

Thank you Parmest for writing this post. Shared reflections and experiences such as this one seem to occur somewhat infrequently on the EAF, and I appreciate your perspective. 

Some things came to my when reading this. 

A post that you may find enjoyable and insightful is Keeping Absolutes in Mind. Here, Michelle Hutchinson writes about altruistic baselines: 

In cases like those above, it might help to think more about the absolute benefit our actions produce. That might mean simply trying to make the value more salient by thinking about it. The 10% of my income that I donate is far less than that of some of my friends. But thinking through the fact that over my life I’ll be able to do the equivalent of save more than one person from dying of malaria is still absolutely incredible to me. Calculating the effects in more detail can be even more powerful – in this case thinking through specifically how many lives saved equivalent my career donations might amount to. Similarly, when you’re being asked to pay a fee, thinking about how many malaria nets that fee could buy really makes the value lost due to the fee clear. That might be useful if you need to motivate yourself to resist paying unnecessary overheads (though in other cases doing the calculation may be unhelpfully stressful!).

which I believe is in line with your idea that local altruism, or the baseline altruism most people unfamiliar with EA think of when they imagine "altruism", is still absolutely good even if it's less good relative to other actions, and might support or drive other, more "macro-scale" altruistic action.

After days of reflection, I understood what the problem was with me. The big talks on the forum had overshadowed my modesty. This was a profound and important realization for me. I recognized that a sudden jump to the big things was not making me an altruistic human being. Even if I would have managed to make contributions, I would never have become a part of EA. 

In most instances, I suspect lowering the bar for noticing, recognizing, or being cognizant of altruistic deeds probably will not detract significantly from the expected effectiveness of the most altruism deeds, so at minimum it wouldn't hurt to care more about and help those around you in whatever ways possible and would likely improve

Again, thank you for sharing these thoughts.