Currently, my main objective in life is to help create a much brighter future for humanity (that is, I am most motivated by the prospect of creating a radically better world as opposed to securing our current one from catastrophe).

I want honour and glory, status, and prestige

I think that there is a question here of "yeah, but what are you optimizing for, in practice?". Are you optimizing for the honor, for the brighter future, or for a mix of both? If you were, for instance, a grantmaker, these might look very different.  

Reading @weeatquince's comment, I basically match their description for "bad people". It was both surprising and frustrating?

I don't think you do! It seems like you have a desire to be transparent about your motivations and concerned about what others expect of you. These are the sort of things that couldn't be further away from the picture I get when I read weeatquince's comment. The place in the comment where they mention "bad person/people" is here:

Zero tolerance to funding bad people. Sometimes an org might be tempted to fund or hire someone they know / have reason to expect it is a bad person or primarily seeking power or prestige not impact. Maybe this person has relevant skills and can do a lot of good. Maybe on a naïve utilitarian calculus it looks good to hire them as we can pay them for impact. I think there is a case to be heavily risk adverse here and avoid hiring or funding such people.

When I read this and upvoted the comment, I didn't mean to discourage (with my upvote) all the people who don't have effective altruism as their primary life goal. Instead, I interpreted weeatquince as follows:

Bad people := "people whose cognition is constantly optimizing* for 'how do I come across?' and 'how can I advance?,' so much so that their reasoning about how to have impact is careless, inauthentic, or even deceptive."

(I'm talking about levels of carelessness, inauthenticity, or deception that are way beyond anything that's in the middle of the range for people in EA or rationality, given that our brains generally weren't selected for self-understanding and honesty very much.)

(I'd add that it doesn't matter much whether cognition is conscious, semi-conscious or unconscious. It matters more if there's potential for it to change/improve, but I'd say that if this potential is there, I wouldn't consider the label "bad person" appropriate in the first place!)

The point being: You don't sound like that!

(I also think it's common for "bad people" to claim they're highly altruistic. (Though sometimes you get "bad people" who give you subtle warnings – e.g., the scene in Game of Thrones where Littlefinger tells Ned Stark "Distrusting me was the wisest thing you've done since you climbed off your horse."))

I think it's good that you wrote this post. I would strongly disagree if weeatquince meant it the other way – for the reasons you mention! Even if not, it would suck if more people feel less welcome based on a misunderstanding.

*I don't think it's necessarily bad if someone is highly self-conscious (in a socially strategic way) in their interactions with others. Instead, what matters is whether they have an equally serious commitment to truth and integrity so that when they reason about how to have impact (around people whose entire life is built around having the most impact!), they feel responsible to not want to distort others' epistemics or mess up their efforts. (This includes being careful to double-check their reasoning and maybe even flag conflicts of interest whenever they find themselves advocating for self-serving conclusions.)

I think the community should welcome you. I share many of your motivations. You seem “altruistic” in the way that “counts” for most people’s purposes.

I really like this question because it raises the uncomfortable topic of what motivations people actually have being different than what we imagine they are. It seems to me that the community should not lie to itself about… well, anything, but least of all this; and I do suspect there’s a lot of self deception going on.

I think a lot of people miss the idea that "being an EA" is a different thing from being "EA adjacent"/"in the EA community"/ "working for an EA organization" etc. I am saying this as someone who is close to the EA community, who has an enormous amount of intellectual affinity, but does not identify as an EA. If the difference between the EA label and the EA community is already clear to you, then I apologize for beating a dead horse.

It seems from your description of yourself like you're actually not an Effective Altruist in the sense of holding a significantly consequentialist worldview that one tries to square with one's choices (once again, neither am I). From your post, the main way that I see in which your worldview deviates from EA is that, while lots of EA's are status-motivated, your worldview seems to include the idea that typical levels of status -based and selfish motivations aren't a cognitive error that should be pushed against.

I think that's great!  You have a different philosophical outlook (from the very little I can see in this post, perhaps it's a little close to the more pro-market and pro-self interest view of people like Zvi, who everyone I know in the community respects immensely). I think that if people call this "evil" or "being a bad person", they are being narrow-minded and harmful to the EA cause. But I also don't think that people like you (and me) who love the EA community and goals but have a personal philosophy that deviates significantly from the EA core should call ourselves EA's, any more than a heterosexual person who has lots of gay friends and works for a gay rights organization should call themselves LGBT. There is a core meaning to being an "effective altruist", and you and I don't meet it. 

No two people's philosophies are fully aligned, and even the most modal EA working in the most canonical EA organization will end up doing some things that feel "corporate" or suboptimal, or that matter to other people but not to them. If you work for an EA org, you might experience some of that because of your philosophical differences, but as long as you're intellectually honest with yourself and others, and able to still do the best you can (and not try to secretly take your project in a mission-unaligned direction) then I am sure everyone would have a great experience. 

My guess is that most EA organizations would love to hire/fund someone with your outlook (and what some of the posts you got upset with are worried about are people who are genuinely unaligned/deceptive and want to abuse the funding and status of the organization for personal gain). However if you do come in to an EA org and do your best, but people decline to work with you because of your choices or beliefs, I think that would be a serious organizational problem and evidence of harmful cultishness/"evaporative cooling of group beliefs".

I really enjoyed your frankness.

From reading what you wrote I have a suspicion that you may not be a bad person. I don’t want to impose anything on you and I don’t know you, but from the post you seem mainly to be ambitious and have a high level of metacognition. Although it’s possible that you are narcissistic and I’m being swayed by your honesty.

When it comes to being “bad” - have you read Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors? It discusses at length what it means to be a bad actor. You may want to see how much of these applies to you. Note that these traits are on dimension and have to be somewhat prevalent in population due to increasing genes fitness in certain contexts, so it’s about quantity.

Regarding status. I would be surprised if a significant portion of EAs or even the majority is not status-driven. My understanding is that status is a fundamental human motive. This is not a claim whether it’s good or bad, but rather pointing out that there may be a lot of selfish motivations here. In fact, I think what effective altruism nailed is hacking status in a way that is optimal for the world - you gain status the more intellectually honest you are and the more altruistic you are which seems to be a self correcting system to me.

Personally, I have seen a lot of examples of people who are highly altruistic / altruistic at first glance / passing a lot of purity tests that were optimizing for self-serving outcomes when having a choice, sometimes leading to catastrophic outcomes for their groups in the long term. I have also seen at least a dozen examples of people who broadcast strong signals of their character to be exposed as heavily immoral. This also is in accordance to what the post about malevolent actors points:

Such individuals might even deliberately display personality characteristics entirely at odds with their actual personality. In fact, many dictators did precisely that and portrayed themselves—often successfully—as selfless visionaries, tirelessly working for the greater good (e.g., Dikötter, 2019).

So, it seems to me that the real question is whether:

• your output is negative (including n-order effects),
• you are not able to override your self-serving incentives when there is a misalignment with the community.

So, I second what was mentioned by NunoSempere that what you [are able to] optimize for is an important question.

Personally, when hiring, the one of the things that scares me the most are people of low integrity that can sacrifice organizational values and norms for a personal gain (e.g. sabotaging psychological safety to be liked, sabotaging others to have more power, avoiding truth-seeking because of personal preferences, etc.). So basically people who do not stand up to their ideals (or reported ideals) - again with a caveat that it’s about some balance and not 100% purity - we all have our shortcomings.

In my view, a good question to ask yourself (if you are able to admit it to yourself) is whether you have a track record of integrity - respecting certain norms even if they do not serve you. For example, I think it’s easy to observe in modern days by watching yourself playing games - do you respect fair play, do you have a respect for rules, do you cheat or have a desire to cheat, do you celebrate wins of others (especially competitors), etc. I think it can be a good proxy for real world games. Or recalling how you behaved toward others and ideals when you were in a position of power. I think this can give you an idea of what you are optimizing for.

I also heavily recommend topics that explore virtues / values for utilitarians to see if following some proposals resonates with you, especially Virtues for Real-World Utilitarians by Stefan Schubert and Lucius Caviola.

Epistemic status: 2am ramble.

It's about trust, although it definitely varies in importance from situation to situation. There's a very strong trust between people who have strong shared knowledge that they are all utilitarian. Establishing that is where the "purity tests" get value.

Here's a little example.

Let's say you had some private information about a problem/solution that the ea community hadn't yet worked on, and the following choice: A) reveal it to the community, with near certainty that the problem will be solved at least as well as if you yourself solved it (because you still might be the person to solve it), get only a little recognition for being the person to start the thread of investigation. B) work on/think about the solution yourself for some time first, which gives you a significantly higher likelihood of getting credit for the solution, with few/no personal repercussions.

(B) is strictly worse from a utilitarian perspective than (A)

Which would you do? In almost all industries/communities/whatever, people do B. Many EAs (me included) like to imagine we can be a community where people do A, even though it is personally bad to do A. There's a lot of kinda-decision-theory-y stuff that becomes possible between people who know each other will take (A)-like options.

For X-risk reduction (well, direct work at least), it's much less important than in other EA stuff, because there's not as many ways for these situations to come up, because anyone who groks (near-term) X-risk knows it's in their own greater interest to increase progress on the solution rather than recieve the recognition.

For other areas though, personal and altruistic interests aren't aligned and so these situations are gonna come up.

I personally wouldn't call anyone "bad", it's an unhealthy way to think. I prefer people be honest about their motivations, and big respect to you for doing so.

I respect you immensely for writing this, but some degree of altruism is required for being an effective altruist - not an infinite duty to self-sacrifice, but the understanding that you can be trusted to do so on big things, and costly signs you will do so are helpful. 10% giving is one such costly sign and it's not required that you do all of them (I also think you overestimate the fraction of EAs who are vegan). However I  think the disjunction between wanting the best for the world and wanting to have a high profile by improving the world occurs everywhere; in the fairly plausible world where  AI alignment is impossible, your most effective action is probably either not working on AI or being subtly so bad at it that the field suffers, neither of which will win you much status (assuming you can't prove that alignment is impossible). This is a general instance of the problem outlined here: "I am most motivated by the prospect of creating a radically better world as opposed to securing our current one from catastrophe". A biased motivation combined with the unilateralist's curse can easily give your actions negative expected utility but positive expected status-payoff: you don't lose face if everyone goes extinct. There are lots of plausible real examples of this, like geo-engineering or gain-of-function research. Which way you'd fall on these questions in practice is a much better test of whether you're "actually EA" than whether you buy cheap things. 

On a more institutionally level, it is unhelpful for EA to become associated with narcissism (which in some circles it already is). Since the cost is borne by the movement not the individual we expect misalignment until being EA is harmful to your reputation, so some degree of excluding narcissists with marginally positive expected personal impact is warranted.

It seems possible to me that you have a concept-shaped hole for the concept "bad people"

Thanks for your engaging post.   I'd like to reply to this section of it:

"Currently, my main objective in life is to help create a much brighter future for humanity (that is, I am most motivated by the prospect of creating a radically better world as opposed to securing our current one from catastrophe)"

A much brighter future is likely to involve ideas that are currently largely outside of the group consensus.  You know, if a game changing idea was embraced by the group consensus, it likely would have already been implemented.

A radically better world requires radical changes.  A radically better world will likely involve a threat to the currently established order.  Proposals of necessary scale will not be welcomed by the established cultural authorities.  Thus, to seek radical change will probably make you an outsider at the least, and perhaps scorned, or even hated.    If that sounds like a price you're willing to bear, here's a radical change idea you are welcome to call your own.  

The overwhelming vast majority of violence in the world at every level of society is committed by a very easily identified source.  

Men.  Male humans.

In a world without men a centuries old tidal wave of unspeakable suffering would be lifted from the backs of many millions of innocents.

In addition, the vast resources now required to manage and respond to male violence could be reinvested in constructive life affirming projects like education and health care etc.

The combination of these two factors would usher in a radically new era which might be reasonably labeled something very close to world peace, long dreamed of, but assumed to be impossible.

Should you adopt this cause you will be labeled a nut job, a fruitcake, a wacko, a Nazi, and various other unflattering terms.   And should you have the skill to reveal the weaknesses in these challenges, you may very well be hated for doing so.

What typically happens to revolutionaries is that they are hanged, and then MAYBE appreciated long after they are dead.

Welcome to radical change.  May you have the courage to embrace your coming unpopularity.  :-)