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If this doesn't work: In my own experience and that of a few others these feelings disappear all by themselves over time.
Dissociation for Altruists
If this doesn't work: In my own experience and that of a few others these feelings disappear all by themselves over time.
It may be useful to find out how many people have this problem or find this solution useful. Does anyone share or not share it?
Maybe something for the EA survey.
I don't. There are people out there who do feel cripplingly emotionally burdened by the problems in the world, but they seem far outnumbered by those who don't.
I don't.
Nice piece! I have used techniques similar to this but personally haven't used them for a while.
Also, the use of these techniques may contribute to a view that EA's are "cold and clinical." This FB thread on that accusation is relevant.
What ended up happening to me is similar to what's described in this article. When a homeless person asks me for money, I immediately feel dismissive because I know others have it far worse than they do, and we have longer-term global problems that dwarf their suffering.
Some people do not lack in altruism and are well aware of effectiveness considerations too, but the sheer magnitude of suffering that effective interventions would force them to face is too unbearable for them to acknowledge. I give tips on how they can use dissociation to put altruism on a more scalable basis. (Cross-posted from my blog.)
Books like Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save mostly aim to break through people’s compartmentalization to allow them a glimpse of the real importance of problems like poverty. This is one of the most common outreach strategies and it may also be the most widely applicable one. Some of you, however, may be well aware of the importance of the enterprise but are too sensitive to face the suffering that the most effective interventions necessarily bring to mind.
Repeatedly I’ve heard that people think effective altruism is great, but that they would become emotional wrecks if they allowed themselves to care about more than the well-being of their closest friends, Wikipedia, and SETI@home.
I’ve been there. The suffering in the world is enormous, and all the while even the suffering of a single chicken in industrial agriculture is unfathomable to me. I watched a video of seals being flayed alive once. For weeks I slipped through the world in a haze.
However, when we want to donate time and money to alleviate this suffering effectively, then we have to acknowledge it. My solution to overcome this “squeamishness” has been to not “feel about” the things I think about, a form of dissociation. It was more a decision for me than something I had to train, but if it doesn’t come easy to you, then I’ve collected some tips for you as well. (Peter Singer touches on this in chapter 7, “Is Love all We Need?,” of The Most Good You Can Do.)
When I still thought that it was virtuous to empathize emotionally, I did a version of Nate Soares’s experiment where, time and time again, I invented an individual family to represent the statistical victims of poverty and disease that I knew about. Thus I tried to prove to myself that my brain was not a cold dead place. I was overwhelmed and paralyzed with their suffering. I hadn’t even started to imagine the ten-fold suffering of ten families or the ten million–fold suffering of ten million families, yet my “care-o-meter,” as Nate calls it, was maxed out already. As these emotions preoccupied me and weighed me down, my productivity suffered and it threatened to impact, among other things, my fundraising.
Consequentialism saved me. Empathy doesn’t have to take the form that lets you break down sobbing and clawing the floor, or whatever it looks like for you. In fact our recent advances in transport and communication mean that we need a more advanced form of empathy too. As Nate puts it:
Prominent altruists aren’t the people who have a larger care-o-meter, they’re the people who have learned not to trust their care-o-meters. Our care-o-meters are broken. They don’t work on large numbers. Nobody has one capable of faithfully representing the scope of the world’s problems. But the fact that you can’t feel the caring doesn’t mean that you can’t do the caring. … You can still act like the world’s problems are as big as they are. You can stop trusting the internal feelings to guide your actions and switch over to manual control.
The realization that there’s nothing virtuous about having these emotions, that all I was doing was trying to electrocute myself with a broken voltmeter, freed me and allowed me to get stuff done again.
Medical students have to learn that too. One of them told themselves “if I don’t dissociate myself from this patient’s pain, then I will not be able to take care of them the way I need to.” Intellectualizing this decision repeatedly in a small pep talk before each surgery helped them shut it off, and only that way they were able to perform as highly as possible. As Nate puts it again:
It’s a common trope that courage isn’t about being fearless, it’s about being afraid but doing the right thing anyway. In the same sense, caring about the world isn’t about having a gut feeling that corresponds to the amount of suffering in the world, it’s about doing the right thing anyway. Even without the feeling. [Especially without the feeling.]
There may be other hurdles for you, as there were for me:
And in case you’re worried, I don’t think that practicing dissociation has impacted my social abilities in any way. On the contrary, I’ve become able to talk about things that used to be so emotional I hardly dared to think about them before.
For me, not feeling was mostly a choice, but there are some precautions I make anyway and some more tips I’ve gleaned from MDs.
Sara Cohen concludes somewhat self-contradictorily that “like my own advisors, I can now assert that it’s true that everyone eventually gets over it. And if not, there’s always radiology.” There may be some selection bias involved here (due to medical students who can’t dissociate sufficiently changing degrees), and many surgeons also indicate that there are still certain procedures that they can’t perform. But even these surgeons have surely made great progress since their first semesters of medical school, and the combination of dissociation and avoidance that they practice works well for them and can surely also work well for you.
If you have any more of such tips to share, please do so in the comments. I can’t give comprehensive answers that’ll work for everyone, but I hope I can start a discussion that will generate more of them for more of you.
Once you’ve taken this hurdle, articles like Ben Kuhn’s “To Stressed-Out Altruists” and Lukas Gloor’s “Room for Other Things” may become helpful to make your impact even more sustainable.
These points seem very dangerous to me:
As someone who's been on academia for 10 years, and intends to be for 10 more. It seems clear to me that academia fosters working on the wrong problems, and that academic prose, besides awfully written - see Pinker's Sense of Style on that - is unlikely to lead someone into fruitful EA behavior.
Not visiting countries sounds equally dangerous to me. People with first world problems, and in my experience, especially Americans who didn't have luck in their parent's school choice, have an incredibly distorted sense of what day to day life is in the world. I'm not particularly talking about the suffering from which you are trying to get people to dissociate, but particularly about the scarcity of money. In NY, SF, Sweden etc... I've seen people considering the prices of some things "reasonable" that are unfathomable in a small city in the Brazilian jungle, the Syrian desert or the Bolivian mountains. The important thing for EAs in this case of course is not to feel bad for buying a book or a Chai, but to understand how tremendously valuable their money and money acquiring capacity is.
Finally, not getting to know - at least a bit - who you are helping is a great way of being scammed, or, much worse, feeling paranoid of being scammed, or paralyzed into inaction by abstraction.
I think the strategy for motivating new people to join the EA movement should be different from the strategy for getting existing EAs to be more productive.
This can be motivating. But I think it can also prompt a "penny wise, pound foolish" attitude where you spend your finite attention optimizing small purchases rather than large career decisions.
Your last paragraph presents a better case. I'm not especially worried about Givewell scamming people, but I do remember seeing research suggesting that volunteers tend to donate more after they finish volunteering, and reading about the progress my favorite charities are making does seem to motivate me in my earning to give.
Thanks for your input. Please note that I’ve written this article for a specific kind of very emotionally empathetic person of which I’ve met maybe five or so (when I count myself). It’s terrible advice for all the people The Life You Can Save is written for. A bit in the spirit of All Debates are Bravery Debates, there are very different sorts of people out there, and some have to correct in the opposite direction as others.
These people don’t have a terribly distorted view of their locational privilege, but still of course they will typically know little about the countries where they’re helping people. In order not to be scammed, they can rely on GiveWell, ACE, or invest into movement building.