Notes on Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman.
Chapters 1 through 3 explore motivation. Why do this?
Chapter 4, "See Winning as Your Moral Duty", and on explore tactics. How to do this?
One may seek from life his own happiness. You can meditate yourself into continuous bliss. However, your ethics may require more. More impact on the universe.
Note to self: In my book, one will need to create that ethic. Though "balance" has an ick, some un-extremifying mechanisms may help.
One may lack the opportunity to impact. It may take all one's efforts to survive. Others may errantly believe it to be so.
One may reason thusly: If work pays, someone pays for it. They pay for it because they want it. If you do that work, you are fulfilling someone's want. Much can be justified this way. Google sells ads. Businesses and organizations big and small buy ads. Ads show those things to potential customers. Those customers click on and buy things they want. Therefore, Google fulfills wants. Bugs in this include: (1) The business may be gaming first-sale ignorance, leaving the customer unfulfilled, though addressing that requires you to arbitrate a business's value; (2) The customer may want things counter to their well-being, though addressing that requires you to arbitrate people's values. You may be interested in making those decisions, but that requires a robust ethic of someone's creation. Many are tempted and satisfied to delegate ethic creation to the market.
Many may pursue financial independence to leave the race altogether. Others pursue financial independence to continue working with reduced financial risk for doing something unconventional. Bregman dislikes the former and possibly the latter, but I am not yet convinced to abandon the latter as a practical tool. For everyone talented enough to garner enough donations to pay rent and rations for their life of public service, there are dozens or hundreds with too little talent or too little attention to support themselves that way. They'd be better off in their mission working traditionally for half their career and then working morally ambitiously the other half. The savings from the first prevent them from perpetually falling into the needy. A further middle ground would be simply to work traditionally but making minor compromises to shift from what one deems a neutral or negative industry to one more clearly good. Some equation with factors for each individual and their talents will impact whether the save and serve method impacts more or less overall than the subtle shift method. As for the whole hog method, we'll need to consider tactics later.
Note to self: Interesting how Bregman wrote this whole book without specifying any particular ethic. Insert your own moral theory here.
Many think of morality as shrinking. Do less. Consume less. Be less. Maybe disappear. My and Bregman's ethic is the abundant alternative: Solve climate not being shrinking, but by inventing so much more (though efficiency-oriented self-shrinking can be a personal practice). Solve poverty not be redistributing and flattening, but by growing the pie (though charity can be a personal practice). Cure disease not by distribution of yesteryear's treatments, but by inventing the new wonder pills (though distribution is critical). As before, "balance" has an ick, but some un-extremifying mechanisms may help.
Mere attention or awareness or signaling is insufficient.
locus of control. threshold to act. kick in the pants.
Simple hack to get yourself to do something, including hard moral things: Spend time around people doing it, or further along towards doing it. Sooner or later, you'll cross your threshold for herd mentality and begin to do it yourself. If you are a zero-herd self-starter, you won't need this advice.
A good idea alone is weird and ineffectual. A good idea with a dedicated following is weird and potentially effective.
Nader's tactics:
Nader's book royalties funded his activities.
Defeat is not a virtue: Don't fail for the sake of it like Nader did.
Don't be a Noble Loser.
Beware the illusion of awareness: The wide majority of people can believe a position yet take no action to make it so. Meanwhile, a dedicated action-taking minority can enforce their will, for good or for ill.
Beware the illusion of good intentions: Doing something may seem or be better than nothing. But that something may have no effect or even be counter-productive. This earns you no moral credit. Opportunity costs in time, money, and effort abound, and the counter-moral forces may gain ground in the meantime.
Beware the illusion of the right reasons. Perhaps the right reason to oppose slavery is the plight of the enslaved. But perhaps the most effective argument for winning over abolition's opponents is the sad plight of the slavers. Push the effective argument. Exercise moral reframing to situate within the Overton window. You may not find those arguments to be the most compelling, or compelling at all, and thus pushing them may be in some way disingenuous, but do not forget the importance of winning.
Beware the illusion of purity: If you want to advance position X, you must for that time form a coalition with people with whom you have diametrically opposed positions on Y and Z. Bregman notes the theoretical power of intersectionality alongside the practical obstacle it can pose to broad coalition forming.
Note to self: Can one maintain a coalition on X and a separate but overlapping coalition on Y without losing either the X-but-not-Y or the Y-but-not-X in the respective coalitions? Or must the different broad coalitions be headed by different individuals to prevent the ill-effects of cross-coalition purification?
Beware the illusion of synergy: Progressives tend to think all the things are connected together and atomically.
Note to self: I am unsure about this one. Conservatives clearly believe in the synergy of positions and ideas, in some wavering, idol-following way. Christianity mixes with the economics mixes with the homogeneity. They are often more effective for it. Beyond contrast, as I noted earlier in my notes, I find Bregman's lack of a specific ethic to be limiting. Promoting position X may be appropriate in one world view, but counter-productive if pursued alongside position Y, which is also important in another world view. Example: As Klein and Thompson write in Abundance, Nader-like environmental policy was necessary in the 1970s, but now that we have clean air, the practices he initiated act mostly to inhibit anything from being built at all, including nuclear energy and trains and even cleaner air and water. How do you resolve this "X, but not in the presence of Y, except if some Z is involved" situation? Answer: You must have a cohesive worldview that fits all the pieces together. You cannot chop up and fix the world one vertical at a time without any coordination between the verticals. You'll have a lot of big sticks but nothing approaching an architecture. Exactly how many verticals of how much relation to coordinate is a challenging matter. One approach would be to focus first on the verticals that are highly likely to be positive to pursue regardless of where the other related verticals fall for good or ill.
Beware the illusion of all or nothing: It may be more effective to publicly fight and advocate for a limited version of your internal goal. Making some progress is more impactful than failing to make any progress in the attempt to make total progress.
The big march of millions of people is better as the culmination of tons of work and organizing and progress than as an emotional flash followed by inaction.
The magnitude of impact matters. Efficiency affects magnitude. Effectiveness improves efficiency and, through feedback, the size of input.
You don't need money for things like marketing if you can get those offered to your effort pro bono.
Note to self: As a starting point, can I offer my services pro bono to others leading efforts? Does GiveWell have a method of matching software needs to pro bono software providers?
Note to self: Are the time horizons of "charitable" works longer than for traditional entrepreneurship such that incremental contribution is valued with less time discount?
Ooh, "tariff tobacco"... that's brilliant!
I'm seeing some trends. Some efforts involve "lobbying" to get some policy or law implemented. Not my speed? Others raise donations to fund direct material assistance like mosquito nets or to fund research. Quite monetary. Can I contribute directly via the creation of needed software?
Good problems per Bregman:
Orient yourself to maximize your Value Over Replace Player (V.O.R.P.).
Note to self: Look for software that charitable or impactful organizations use that could be improved. Improve it or make an improved alternative. Promote adoption. If I invest lots of my time capital to make a cost improvement to marginal use, then that is a gift that keeps on giving. And it uses a resource I can quality control (my time and skill) rather than something I can't (an amount of money equivalent to a replacement software engineer's contract work).
Characteristics of moral ambition:
Note to self: Can I get a job in software for basic science or biology research?
Note to self: Riffing on improving existing software: Find some software library used by some important medical research and make it perform 50% faster. It might already be fast, say take 10 seconds to run. But, as I know from my day job, the difference between 10 seconds and 5 seconds is night and day in productivity.
Note to self: Same, but for nuclear energy.
Note to self: The glaring absence of an ethic in this book reared its head in this chapter. It strikes me as entirely self-contradictory. I think he felt compelled to fully swear off SBF, which is good. But he then makes a series of weird statements about needing rich people to donate but also not liking rich people or donating or people making money. It seems counter-abundance and counter-analytical. Will revisit another day and pick up from here.