I want to write about effective altruism. But before I can do that I must process my feelings about effective altruism. And to do that I must process my childhood.
My second phase of life began on my 15th birthday, which is the day I started journaling (we’ve skipped the first phase because I can’t remember it well). I reread some of my journals a few years back - it was intense. I used to write some wild stuff. The first entry was something like ‘I am disappointed with what I have done with my life so far… I have not contributed anything to the world or done anything important’. I find this hilarious and heartbreaking.
What’s going on there?
Well, I don’t know. I think it’s poor form to speculate too much on someone’s childhood. But some other things it makes me think of:
I’ve long had fantasies of being a hero. These fantasies often involved
Some sort of combat situation where I am outnumbered by the forces of darkness
Me enduring physical pain or some sort of act of self-sacrifice for the greater good
An attractive woman
Quite James Bond vibes, except with more of a martyr aspect. And more superpowers. I don’t know if all boys had this fantasy or if it was just me. Also sometimes a skateboard. I was quite into these fantasies and used to spend a lot of time in them. I also used to believe in them, like I’d think ‘yes, this will one day be me’.
The nature of the fantasies evolved a bit over time, and gradually became less combat focused and tbh less awesome. I don’t know, being the prime minister or something, I can’t quite remember. But I still believed in them and that broadly I was special and destined for greatness.
(I think this made a lot of sense at the time, and continued to make a lot of sense to me afterwards. At secondary school I was the Head Boy and got A*s in all of my subjects. This was apparently sufficiently exciting to be featured in The West Briton - the local newspaper. I then received a scholarship to study at UWC Maastricht, an international school in the Netherlands. And then went to study at Oxford University, which is a very prestigious university.
The point of education, as I understood it, was to prepare you for the future. And my education went well. So it stood to reason that my future would be spectacular.)
At around the age of 15 I became more aware of these fantasies, and a growing sense of, shit, childhood is nearly over at which point I am supposed to have achieved greatness. But I don’t know, I don’t feel ready. In my fantasies the hero was fearless, charismatic and knew like a lot of kung fu.
I did Tae Kwon Do, but was only a blue belt. And I was also often socially anxious. Broadly, I had a sense that I was not quite on track to meet my destiny.
So around this time I got very into self-improvement, and huge swathes of my time were spent on some sort of self-improvement scheme. I read a lot of a blog by this guy called Steve Pavlina (who if I remember correctly was a solipsist) . I bought tons of nootropics (my parents were quite suspicious of the strange pills I kept buying with names like piracetam and Huperzine A). I learnt memory techniques, I developed productivity systems, I learnt about Neuro Linguistic Programming. I also loved a good How To book - How to Win Friends and Influence People, The How of Happiness, How to Read a Book and so on.
These self-improvement schemes largely did not in fact pan out. I spent a long time learning to speed read which was very frustrating as I didn’t seem to be getting much faster at reading. My understanding now is that speed reading is not a thing. I tried polyphasic sleep - wouldn’t it be wonderful if I had like four extra hours in a day? That would really give me an edge. This did not work. Also, at some point as a teenager I developed narcolepsy, and I’m like 25% on the polyphasic sleep experiment being the cause of this, which I find funny and sad.
I also spent a lot of time thinking. Scribbling away in notebooks with various ideas and schemes. Intentions and plans and goals and habits and thoughts. There was a lot of excitement in this. And also confusion and frustration. Why did I not follow the plans I had made for myself? Why did I not act in the ways that I wanted to act?
I also read a lot more broadly. Some of the books that were particularly formative: The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins, Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahnemann, Bad Science - Ben Goldacre. I loved Thinking Fast and Slow in particular, and made an Anki deck of all the points to make sure I learnt it all. Eliminating all my heuristics and biases, this seemed like a pretty plausible route to greatness.
There was a theme of the books that I was most drawn to - (other) people do stupid things and have stupid beliefs, because they are not rational.
This matched my experience! I was surrounded by idiots - my mother, brother, stepdad, teachers - impervious to reason all of them. And what’s worse, they had power over me.
I had an argument with my mother once - and she said something like ‘I can’t argue with you, you’re too clever for your own good and will always think of a reason why you’re right. But that doesn’t stop you from being wrong’.
I thought this was preposterous. She’s not even trying to be reasonable! (I think the argument might have actually been about smoking, as I’d start smoking around this age. So I guess in hindsight she did have a point).
My relationship to authority was mixed and I fit the niche of a well-behaved bad boy. Somewhat well-behaved. On the one hand, I was a model student in terms of academics, extra-curricular and so on. Also I hated being told off and liked receiving praise.
On the other hand, I didn’t trust authority, and resented the ways that authority restricted my freedom.
I nearly got expelled from college for smoking cannabis, which I thought was very unfair.
At college I was particularly irked at having to attend classes given that I could learn faster by reading the class textbook on my own, and didn’t understand why they needed to micromanage my learning. I formed a group of students and we proclaimed ourselves the Education Committee. I then sent an email to all the teachers inviting them to a meeting where we could give feedback on the quality of teaching. I can’t remember much of the meeting but I do remember a distinctly frosty vibe. Overall this did not endear me to the teachers.
I did have a good relationship with the teacher of our ‘Theory of Knowledge’ class, which was basically a philosophy course. I’d previously read Sophie’s World, a novel all about philosophy and stuff. It was great.
He lent me a copy of One World by Peter Singer. I suspect this fanned the flames of a growing sense of the world’s injustice, and inequality in particular. Like, people buy luxury cars when other people are starving. Wtf? Utilitarianism seemed very obvious to me.
I applied to university to study philosophy and psychology. My reasoning was roughly: There’s a lot of things to learn, and life is short. So it makes sense to focus on the deepest, biggest things, hence philosophy. Also, the mind is very important. I have a good mind, and if I can make it better, then greatness. Hence psychology.
I’d also hoped to meet people at university that shared a certain je ne sais quois with me. I made great friends at college, and also met people that were smarter than me and in many ways more brilliant. But I hadn’t met people who I jibed with in a certain way.
So to summarise:
I had hero based fantasies and a sense of being destined for greatness
I saw adulthood as the relevant timeline for converting my potential for greatness into actual greatness
Despite my self improvement efforts, I did not feel ready for greatness
I had a sense of being surrounded by unreasonable people
I had not met people whom I felt met by
I liked utilitarianism
I had a long neck
In the next episode - rationality and effective altruism!