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by Kat Woods, Amber Dawn What’s better - starting an effective charity yourself, or inspiring a friend to leave a low-impact job to start a similarly effective charity? Most EAs would say that the second is better: the charity gets founded, and you’re still free to do other things. Persuading others to do impactful work is an example of what I call passive impact. In this post, I explain what passive impact is, and why the greatest difference you make may not be through your day-to-day work, but through setting up passively-impactful projects that continue to positively affect the world even when you’ve moved on to other things. What is passive impact? When we talk about making money, we can talk about active income and passive income. Active income is money that is linked to work (for example, a salary). Passive income is money that is decoupled from work, money that a person earns with minimal effort. Landlords, for example, earn passive income from their properties: rent comes in monthly and the landlord doesn’t have to do much, beyond occasional maintenance. Similarly, when we talk about our positive impact, we can talk about active impact and passive impact. When most people think about their impact, they think about what they do. A student might send $100 to the world’s poorest people, who might use this money to buy a roof for their house or education for their kids. Or an AI researcher might spend 2 hours working on a problem in machine learning, to help us make superintelligent AI more likely to share our values. These people are having an active impact - making the world better through their actions. Their impact is active because, in order to have the same impact again, they’d have to repeat the action - make another donation, or spend more time working on the problem. Now consider the career advisors at 80,000 Hours. Imagine that, thanks to their advice, a young person decides to work for an effective animal advocacy charity rather than at her local cat shelter, and thus save hundreds of thousands of chickens from suffering on factory farms. The 80,000 Hours advisors can claim some of the credit for this impact - after all, without their advice, their advisee would have had a much less impactful career. But after the initial advising session, the coaches don’t need to keep meeting with their advisee - the advisee generates impact on her own. This is what I mean by passive impact: taking individual actions or setting up projects that keep on making the world better, without much further effort. The ultra-wealthy make most of their money through passive income. Bill Gates hasn’t worked at Microsoft since 2008, but it continues to make money for him. Similarly, many highly successful altruists are most impactful not through their day-to-day work, but through old projects that continue to generate positive impact, without further input. Why should you try to create passive impact What are the benefits of passive impact? Here are a few: You can have a really big impact Your active impact is limited by your time, energy, and money, but your passive impact is boundless because you can just keep on setting up impactful projects that run in parallel to each other. It’s satisfying It’s really pleasing to be lounging on a beach somewhere and to hear that one of my projects has had a positive impact. It’s more efficient When I set up the Nonlinear Library, people asked me why I didn’t get a human to read the posts, rather than a machine. But by automating the process, I’m saving loads of money and time. It will take a robot two weeks and $6,000 to record the entire Less Wrong backlog; if we’d hired a human to read all those posts, it would take many years and over a million dollars. It’s more sustainable Since active impact takes time, effort, and money, projects that involve ongoing input from their founders are more likely to fizzle out. Passively impactful projects can just keep going, as machines or other people take on the effort. It’s more fun Many entrepreneurs thrive on variety and excitement and are easily distracted. If you found passively-impactful projects, you can move on to other projects as soon as you’re bored, and the original projects will continue to have an impact. As Tim Ferriss has said: interests wane; design accordingly. Pitfalls and caveats Passive impact is a powerful tool and like most powerful tools, it’s a double-edged sword. Here are some things to watch out for when trying to have passive impact. Take care not to create negative passive impact Of course, impact can be good or bad.  If you set up a passive impact stream, but then you discover that it is having a negative impact, then that’s really bad, because it might be harder to stop. For example, imagine that I persuade a friend to work for a certain charity, but I later discover that the charity is causing harm. Unless I can persuade my friend that the charity is bad, I’ve created passive negative impact.
Passively impactful projects can fizzle out Passive impact streams can decay and disappear - nothing is 100% passive. Landlords need to arrange for routine maintenance, and passively-impactful people still need to put some effort into their passive impact streams, through management (for projects run by other people), debugging (for automated projects), or other things. Passively impactful projects can go in unexpected directions If you delegate a project to other people, they might take it in a very different direction from what you originally intended. You can make this less likely by delegating the project to people whose values are very similar to your own. How to have passive impact Automate You can have passive impact by using machines to do things automatically. For example, I set up the Nonlinear Library, which automatically records new EA-related posts. This increases the impact of those posts (since some people might listen to them who would not otherwise have read them) but requires little ongoing maintenance. Delegate You can have passive impact by setting up an organization then having other people take over. For example, Charity Entrepreneurship teaches people how to found effective, impactful charities. Since the charities it incubates exist (in part) because of them, some of the credit for the impact of those charities goes to them, even though they’re only involved at the beginning. (We’re now running a similar incubation program at Nonlinear, incubating longtermist nonprofits). Another way to delegate is to decentralize. This way, projects can take on a life of their own, without your active management. Ideas You can have passive impact by coming up with - and writing down - useful ideas. For example, Ben Todd’s idea of counterfactual considerations has helped a lot of people to think more clearly about their career plans, but he doesn’t have to personally keep explaining it to people - he can simply send them a post about it, or others can explain it. Capital Just as you can generate passive income by using capital that you already have (by buying stocks, or a house, or a business), you can also have passive impact that way. For example, at Nonlinear we set up EA Houses, a project that matches up EAs with spaces where they can live. If you have a spare room (for example), you can volunteer to host an EA. You can have passive impact yourself by housing EAs who are having an active impact through their career. As an EA, you might have already spent lots of time thinking about your active impact: how to do the most good with your career or your donations. This is great, but I think that more EAs should consider their passive impact as well. Will you have the greatest impact through your day-to-day actions? Or can you spend a limited amount of time, effort, and money to create a passively impactful project that will keep on making a difference, changing the world before you even get out of bed? This post was written collaboratively by Kat Woods and Amber Dawn Ace as part of Nonlinear’s experimental Writing Internship program. The ideas are Kat’s; Kat explained them to Amber, and Amber wrote them up. We would like to offer this service to other EAs who want to share their as-yet unwritten ideas or expertise. If you would be interested in working with Amber to write up your ideas, fill out this form.
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My first (1) experience with academic ethics convinced me to stop trying to be ethical.
I was 18 years old and trying to figure out what to do with my life, so I had the silly thought, “Oh, that’s what ethics is about! Ethics is about figuring out what one ought to do.” I promptly went to the university library and got out an intro to ethics book called “Ethics” and read it cover to cover. Each chapter had the same structure: 1) Introduce a possible moral theory and reasons to believe it 2) Introduce all the devastating counterarguments against that view I kept reading, dying with curiosity to find out what the answer was in the last chapter. The Last Chapter where they told me which moral theory didn’t have anything critically wrong with it. … You can predict how this is going to turn out. I remember reaching the end of the last chapter and saying to myself, “Well, I can’t even be a nihilist, because I know all the problems with that theory too!” I decided then not to really bother trying to figure out ethics or how to do good things or what was right. It was only a year later that I saw a documentary about some horrible thing happening in the world that jolted me into realizing that this was too important of an issue to just relegate to a shoulder shrug. The suffering in the world is too great to just say, “Who knows what we should do?”. The Moral of the Story Not sure what the moral of this story is. Maybe it's that ethical philosophy is confusing and confused? Maybe it's that you should skip to the last chapter if you think that's where the answer is? Maybe it's that you need to pair the intellectual effort of figuring out what is "good" with the real life reason why it's important? Maybe it's that figuring out what is ethical is an unsolved problem, an open question that you should continue trying to answer throughout your entire life? Who knows? Although, I do feel that this story ending with an ambiguous message seems apt, so let's leave it at that. (1) My actual first experience with academic ethics was when I was 16 and I stumbled across a book of Plato's writings. The first chapter explained how the only true love was between a man and a boy. But let's just move right along. If you want to start a charity, you need to be learning constantly. You’ll inevitably learn by doing, but it will save you a lot of heartache to also learn from others.
If you’re interested in potentially starting a charity or are already running one and want to continue improving your org, here’s what we at Nonlinear think will be useful to read. We don’t recommend reading these in order or start to finish. Skim them ruthlessly, jump around to the ones that seem relevant to you, and try to really engage with the ones that are genuinely useful to you.
Most people reading this will reasonably not read all of the above. In that case, consider reading summaries. For example, Blinkist and Shortform have summarised lots of nonfiction books, and audio format is available for most of them. Shortform is also nice because it makes it a lot easier to actually do the exercises in the books, which is where a massive amount of the value is. Of course, the last thing we’d want is for you to procrastinate on founding a charity until you’ve finished this list. You should always have two parallel “departments” running in your life: learning and doing. Always be building. Always be learning. Finally, if you’re here, that’s probably a pretty good sign that you should consider applying to be incubated by Nonlinear or Charity Entrepreneurship:
If your dream job is to work in longtermism, be your own boss, and talk to EAs all day, then you might be the perfect fit for starting an EA recruitment agency through Nonlinear’s incubation program.
To find out more about the idea itself and why it’s high impact, read below. For more details about how to tell if you’re a good fit, what support we provide, and how to apply, see the second half of the article. If you think this is an important charity to have in the EA space, please like and share this Request for Founders so that the right people see it. Deadline: February 1st, 11:59pm EST Fill out this form to apply Why it’s high impact to start an EA headhunting agency The idea is for you to start an organization that helps hire employees for longtermist orgs. This will help the world in a few ways:
What roles will the startup hire for? Nonlinear’s research team has identified hiring PAs as one of the best use cases of a hiring agency in EA. This is for a few reasons. Firstly, as 80,000 Hours describes in their career guide, PAs can be a high-impact role. Ben Todd says it better than me here: “Consider: if you can save that researcher one hour spent on activities besides research, then that researcher can spend one more hour researching. So, by saving that researcher time, you can convert your time into their time. Suddenly, one of your hours becomes one more hour spent by the best researcher, working in the best field!” Put another way, imagine you could add another Paul Christiano, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Chris Olah to the alignment community. With a PA hiring agency, you could essentially do that by getting the top researchers PAs. To use an extremely oversimplified example, say a PA increases the output of a researcher by 10% on average. That means if you hire ten PAs for the top ten researchers, that’s the equivalent of adding a top AI safety researcher. It’s hard to put a dollar estimate on the value this would add to the world, but if you’re convinced of AI safety, it’s extremely high. Secondly, PAs are particularly well-suited to a hiring agency. This is because of two main reasons:
Once you’ve created optimal systems for hiring PAs, the org will expand to helping EA orgs hire for other roles. How you proceed will depend on what strategy you think is best. Some potential roles that could benefit from a recruiter include:
What about BERI, CampusPA, 80,000 Hours, and non-EA recruitment agencies? BERI already hires PAs for longtermists, but only for a few academic research institutions. Their strategy for the foreseeable future is to stick to these orgs, specializing in helping longtermist academic institutions, so they won’t be filling the gap. CampusPA hires PAs for EAs. However, they only hire remote PAs, which is a dealbreaker for many. They also focus specifically on PAs and are unlikely to switch to hiring for other EA roles. We spoke to them about switching and it doesn’t fit with their business strategy. 80,000 Hours used to do recruiting, but they stopped because their strategy is to do a few things extremely well instead of spreading themselves too thin. We spoke with Niel Bowerman and he’s really excited for somebody else to take the baton since he thinks it would be high impact. What about just using non-EA recruitment agencies? Generally, we shouldn’t make an EA-specific organization when a non-EA one will work just as well. In the case of a non-EA hiring agency, the reason we think that an EA will have a comparative advantage is that to hire for EA orgs, you need to have an EA network and know how to get EAs excited about certain jobs. This is true for most roles you’d be hiring for. Even PAs, who don’t need to be EAs, often will be simply because they will be more aligned with the general mission of the person they’ll be assisting, leading to more talented people from the EA community applying than from those outside of it. Finally, even if there was another org working on this, we think there's room for at least three full-time people working on this, potentially even more. If we get enough good applicants, we'll likely just incubate multiple people. Why you might want to start this charity
You’re a good fit for starting this charity if:
What the incubation program provides Nonlinear’s incubation program provides two main benefits: seed funding and mentorship. Seed funding The seed funding will be for up to a year’s salary, although you’ll also have the option of using that money for other things, such as hiring other people. This way you can have some runway to establish yourself before you have to start fundraising or charging commission. Mentorship You will receive bespoke training and guidance from two experienced entrepreneurs, Nonlinear founders Kat Woods and Emerson Spartz. Kat Woods previously founded Charity Entrepreneurship and Charity Science Health (now Suvita). Emerson Spartz is a Forbes 30 Under 30 who founded the #1 Harry Potter website when he was 12 and then built websites with a monthly audience rivaling the New York Times. The training will be catered to your particular background. If you have a lot of experience with management and little with marketing, you’ll get training in marketing. If vice versa, then you’ll get training in management. You’ll start with more intensive, daily guidance, then you’ll graduate to less and less frequent check-ins until the training wheels are completely taken off. After that, you’ll be on your own, though there will always be the option to request that Kat and/or Emerson be board members of your charity. The length of the incubation period will depend on your current level of expertise. If you’re already an experienced recruiter, then the incubation period could be as little as one month. If you’re relatively inexperienced, it could be as long as six months. The incubation can be done remotely from anywhere in the world. Should you apply? We accept candidates from a wide range of backgrounds. You can be a recent high school graduate or have a decade’s experience recruiting. Experience is helpful but not necessary. We’ll help you develop the skills you’re currently missing. What matters most is grit, altruism, and intelligence. If you’re uncertain, you should err on the side of applying. Impostor syndrome is rampant in EA. In fact, around 50% of Charity Entrepreneurship’s most successful founders from previous years didn’t even think they should apply. Application process To apply, fill out the form here. If you already have your CV ready, it should take around 30-120 minutes to fill out. Deadline: February 1st, 11:59pm EST If you think that having an EA hiring agency is a high-impact idea, please share this request for founders on social media or upvote it to make it more likely that the right person sees it.  This is part of a series where I write about my stay in Rwanda and Uganda and what I learned that might be helpful from an EA perspective.
You can see the full list of articles here, which I will add to as they come out. One of the questions I asked people throughout Rwanda was, “If a charity came to your village and they could send either ten children to primary school or one person to university, what would you want them to do?”. Depending on their answer, I would change the ratio. For example, if they said that they’d choose to send the person to university, I’d ask them, “What if it was one hundred children to primary school? What about one thousand?” By and large, most people would far prefer to send one person to university compared to tens to hundreds of people to primary school. Of the people I spoke to, 85% said that they would prefer to send one person to university over one hundred to primary school. More than half kept the same answer when it was one thousand to primary school. When I asked why, the answers were almost always that primary school was not useful. They didn’t just mean that it wasn’t a good quality education. They also thought that the person would just continue to farm with a primary education. No change in their outcomes. Meanwhile, if somebody goes to university, they can not only get out of farming and make real money, but also come back to the village and pass along anything they’ve learned. Those who said they’d prefer primary said that it was because they didn’t want to leave people out, and they couldn’t prioritize one person over ten. Of course, I must add the usual qualifiers that this was a small sample size (twenty people), there are many ways that if you changed the wording you’d get different answers, and so forth. You can read more about what I learned about methodology limitations here. If you liked this post you might also like:  This is part of a series where I write about my stay in Rwanda and Uganda and what I learned that might be helpful from an EA perspective.
You can see the full list of articles here, which I will add to as they come out. So far I have only spoken to two women in Rwanda who have lost children and the results were very surprising. One had lost one baby, the other had lost three babies and one child of eighteen years old. When I asked the first how long she felt sad after her child passed, she said one day. Shocked, I asked her how her husband had felt. One day too. She told me she had many children and you have to move on. The other seemed similarly unphased by losing the three babies. She didn’t give me a number of days, but she said she didn’t feel sad for very long. However, when she lost her 18 year old son, she said she fell into a depression that lasted a year and clearly talking about it in the present still made her feel quite upset. This line of inquiry is interesting if you have an Epicurean view of death, where death is only bad for the people who are still alive. For the person who passes away, they do not suffer for being dead as they do not exist. If you take this view, then preventing neonatal death might not hold as much weight as previously thought because losing a very young child has less effects on the family than losing an older one. Of course, this is a sample size of two, goes against strong priors, and could vary a lot region to region. It could also be that I am asking the wrong questions and others would give very different results. As such, I would only very minorly update based on this. If you liked this post you might also like:  This is part of a series where I write about my stay in Rwanda and Uganda and what I learned that might be helpful from an EA perspective.
You can see the full list of articles here, which I will add to as they come out. A pleasant discovery while I was in Rwanda was that people in my village basically ate no meat. Here are some samples of conversations I had: Me: How often do you eat meat in your household? Them: Two Me: Two times per week or per month? Them: Two times per year. --- Me: How often do you eat meat in your household? Them: Laughing and gesturing at my interpreter. My translator: They’re saying that you’re being ridiculous. Do you see how poor they are? How could they afford meat! The only people I met who ate dairy products regularly were people who had their own cow or the one family I met who was wealthy enough to have a television and a couch. The only people who ate eggs had a handful of their own chickens (you can read more about how they were treated here). When I was learning about their various holidays, they described something that I’d only seen in museums but is still running strong in Rwanda. In the past British people would participate in a joint savings group where everybody in the group would contribute a small amount each week to a collective pot so that they could afford a turkey on Christmas day. This is done the same way in Rwanda except that people start saving in January so that they can slaughter a cow for a feast on the New Year’s Eve of the following year. Overall, I updated substantially away from the concern about the poor meat-eater problem. If you liked this post you might also like:  This is part of a series where I write about my stay in Rwanda and Uganda and what I learned that might be helpful from an EA perspective.
You can see the full list of articles here, which I will add to as they come out. What’s it like living in a benevolent semi-police state? Rwanda is an example of such a country, and given my experience there, I think it’s surprisingly good, but it definitely had some scary aspects. Let me explain my thought process. Kagame, the president, has “99% support” in the polls. I often laugh at “presidents” touting these numbers. Who do they think they’re fooling? No matter how good you are, you can never get that approval rating, so if it’s that high, you are definitely doing something decidedly undemocratic. In the case of Kagame, I actually genuinely think he’s done a lot of good and I suspect if he had a genuine election, he would still win. Just not at 99%. He is a strange character. He runs a tight ship with famously low corruption in a part of the world where corruption is the rule. He sets high expectations for government officials and holds them accountable to getting results. He fired a minister because the minister shoved a guard and nobody is above the law. Compare this to India where an absurd number of elected officials have ongoing court cases going on against them, including extremely serious things like rape and murder. Or neighboring Kenya, where virtually all politics is corrupt, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is essentially chaos incarnate. His government is 50% women, and he is famous for being meritocratic. He is the darling of NGOs because his educated civil service is keen on technocracy and learning from global best practices. The justice system is decently functional and you can tell. People follow traffic rules, motorcyclists wear helmets and the taxi motorcycles all carry an extra helmet for passengers. The capital city is very clean. It’s cleaner than many American cities I’ve visited. There are no beggars or illegal shops on the side of the road. On the other hand, Rwanda is also a police state. The reason there are no beggars on the streets is because they are rounded up and put into camps. A sizable proportion is under some manner of employ with the government. This is for providing well-run government services, but it is also used to monitor the population. The press, of course, is not allowed to criticize the government. But it’s not only the press. That’s often rather standard in developing world contexts. No, the scary thing is that you aren’t really allowed, in an unofficial sense, to criticize the government privately. When I asked people about something to do with the government, people would immediately lower their voices, look around quickly to see if anybody could hear, and speak in low voices. If there was a door nearby they would close it. The interesting thing is that this would happen even if what they said next was positive. This was decidedly eerie. Nothing so eerie as the next event. I was on a Skype call with a German anthropologist who had spent several years in the region. She was young, smart, cheerful, and the sort of person who you’d have trouble disliking. I was trying to learn from her experiences, and suddenly she turned from bouncy to very serious. She said, “My friends have told me about what you’re doing and they asked me to talk to you. This is stuff you won’t read about or hear.” The drastic shift in tone put me on edge. It would be like if I had abruptly switched from telling people about my latest travelling misadventures to telling somebody that they had cancer and it was terminal. “What do you want to tell me?” “You have to be really careful what you ask in Rwanda. There are unspoken rules, and if you say the wrong thing, you can end up being disappeared.” I had heard of this, but I wasn’t too worried. Things like this can happen in India too, but if you’re an expat you simply get kicked out of the country. Countries don’t want to risk international incidents. “Oh yeah, I’ve read about that. But that doesn’t happen to expat NGO workers does it?” “It happened to me.” And then the connection cut out. The feeling I felt then was hard to describe. It was extreme anxiety, but combined with a sense of nausea and distrust. If it was a color, it would have been a rolling ball of black and grimey green rolling in my gut. It wasn’t a clear flash of fear like when you realize there’s a spider on you. It wasn’t the resigned feeling of distrust when a smiling car salesman comes your way. It wasn’t the nose wrinkling disgust when you catch a whiff of sewage. It was all of those things at once and a whole lot more distressing. It felt a bit like a horror movie. I hate horror movies. Thoughts rushed through my head. They would think I was doing official research without a visa. I was going to go to prison. Torture can happen in prisons here. My family wouldn’t know where I’d gone. I couldn’t call anybody or google anything because maybe they were monitoring the internet. I couldn’t get on a plane because they would be able to find me there. What had happened to my friend? Surely she was safe in Germany. What if I got out but I was traumatized for life? What if the guards of my building were coming for me right now? It turns out that her internet connection was just sketchy and she came back in a minute. However, that was perhaps the most scared I’ve ever been in my life, and that was just one minute of something that could have been Orwellian but wasn’t. I was a citizen of a wealthy country who I trust would help me if I was in trouble, daughter of a competent family who I think would move mountains to save me, and a person who believes people are good and trustworthy and has been rewarded her whole life for this belief. And still it only took me one minute in a police state to start not trusting anybody. I can only imagine the psychological effects of being in this environment your entire life. On the other hand, it is a predominantly benevolent police state, and it reminds me of a conversation I had with a jolly Bulgarian Uber driver in London. I was talking to him about the changes that had happened after Bulgaria switched from communism to democracy and capitalism. “It was a terrible change!” he said with passion. “Things were better under communism. Sure, you had to say exactly what the party said, but who cares? We had a guaranteed job, education, and things ran smoothly.” Perhaps this is the mentality of many Rwandans? After all, caring about politics is often only a luxury you can afford once you’ve gotten the basic necessities down. I think running the country with a tight fist has perhaps been responsible for its incredible turnaround from civil war-torn to the “Singapore of Africa”. Singapore might be an apt description too, given Singapore’s “president” has done amazing things for Singapore. In fact, both are listed on Wikipedia’s article on benevolent dictators. Perhaps Kagame was what Rwanda needed (and still needs?) after so much chaos and conflict, and once things are properly stable, they might switch to more free speech and genuine democracy. It’s hard to tell, but I’m certainly more open to the idea of choosing order and police state over chaos and democracy than I was before going there. If you liked this post you might also like:
 This is part of a series where I write about my stay in Rwanda and Uganda and what I learned that might be helpful from an EA perspective.
You can see the full list of articles here, which I will add to as they come out. This is my favorite conversation I had while I was staying with a family in a Rwandan village. I was speaking to a group of eight or so people who were baffled at my interest in their pig and goats (I was also researching animal welfare in developing world contexts). After one such question, one of the men asked me something in return. “Does your family have goats?” I smiled a little. “No, we don’t have any goats.” “Pigs?” “No, no pigs either.” “You must at least have a few chickens!” “Not even chickens.” I could see his wheels turning. I’m rich. How could I not have livestock? “Does your family have any animals?” “Yep. We have a dog and a cat.” They all burst out laughing. This was the funniest thing they had heard me say. “A dog and a cat?” he asked after he’d caught his breath. “Why? Do you eat cats and dogs in Canada?” And thus began a long conversation about the concept of having pets and being friends with animals. I’m sure they left that conversation marveling at how crazy Westerners are, to have all that money and waste it on animals you can’t even eat or use for fertilizer. This is illustrative of how isolated the people in the village were, where they hadn’t heard of the concepts of dogs as pets before. I was used to India, where despite often being similarly poor, they still watched movies or had exposure to the wider world. In this village, even the relatively well-off university educated person might watch two Rwandan movies annually, let alone movies from other countries. Another question they asked was illustrative of this. Every culture has standard questions you ask when you’re first getting to know somebody. Where are you from? What do you do? In Rwanda, “where are you from?” was definitely the usual first question. The next question, though, was what crops my family grew. They were always floored when I told them we didn’t grow anything. “Where do you get your food?!” they’d ask, baffled. “The market.” Mind, most of them also bought food from the market, but the majority of their food they grew themselves. The fact that I bought all of my food from stores was strange to them. This wouldn’t be so surprising if it weren’t for the fact that most people living in Kigali, the capital city just a two hour bus ride away, also only buy their food from the market. The fact that most people in this village were unaware of such a lifestyle really highlights the limited knowledge they have of the rest of the world. This is not only because of a lack of education, but generally also from lack of radio and television. In India people also often had low literacy, but it was common to crowd around TVs owned by others in the community, which gave them some understanding of lives far away. Radio was also much more common in India. I rarely heard anybody playing radio in this village (in Kigali it was different) and if they were, it was just music. I think this is in part because many of the houses had little or no electricity. For TV, I only saw one where a crowd watched and that was in the neighboring small town and was at a place where you bet on sports and so only featured matches. The implications of this from a charity perspective are that you really want to be careful about making assumptions about “common knowledge”. You might already know that a lot of people in developing countries still believe that illness is caused by witchdoctors, but that can be just the tip of the iceberg. For any behavior change interventions, you should spend a lot of time talking to locals to learn what would resonate with them. If you liked this post you might also like: A thought experiment on what you would do if you never suffered again November 5th
I became Enlightened yesterday. After meditating for ten years, I finally did it! It feels amazing. This deep sense of abiding peace, with waves of satisfaction and intense levels of joy on demand. I don’t know for sure if it will last, so I am making this log to see what happens for future posterity and analysis. I’m going to go back to meditating in the cave. Looking forward to writing this journal. December 5th I have been sitting in complete bliss for the last month. No suffering at all during that time. Occasionally I feel hunger, physical pain, or a sense of sadness for the suffering in the world, but it does not cause suffering to me. I look at them and feel immense love for these sensations and thoughts. It is like crying at a sad movie. The emotions feel good and I do not wish to make them go away, for they, just like all of reality, are perfect just the way they are. January 1st I am leaving the cave. I realized that I wanted to share what I have learned with others. This is interesting. I thought Enlightenment would have abolished all desire. And it has. But it has not. How to describe it? I have a desire to help the suffering, but if I fail, I will not suffer. If I simply sit in the cave, I will continue to be blissful. I will feel completely satisfied. Complete. So why help? Why do anything other than stare at the wall? It is not because of some philosophical and rational reason to help. I simply want to. The desire arises, I see it, and seeing that I will be happy either way, I decide to attempt to satisfy it. January 2nd Do I desire beauty too? When I left the cave, I was blown away by the majesticness of the mountains. I was also overcome by these same emotions in the cave though. Everything is filled with a glowing light of beauty. So why would I want to see mountains? Do I? I shall have to experiment. January 3rd I desire truth! I realize this is the whole function of this log. But why? Why do I want anything? This is fascinating. I shall have to find others who have achieved Enlightenment and see what they have discovered. Am I what happens in general? Do others have different experiences? January 15th I spoke to another Enlightened One. He was sitting in a cave outside of a small Nepalese village. When I arrived he did not speak. He looked straight at me and did not respond. “Hello.” I said. “I heard you are Enlightened. I am as well and I wish to learn about your experience. When was the last time you suffered?” He smiled beatifically at me. After a long pause he said, “Not since my Enlightenment ten years ago.” “Wonderful! What have you done since then?” “Nothing. I sit here and experience deep bliss and peace. Why do anything else? I have abolished all desire.” “Then why are you speaking to me?” “Because I still wish to survive. This is my only remaining desire. To stay alive such that I may continue experiencing True Happiness. To stay alive, I must occasionally speak to visitors, such that I may receive alms. Of course, to die is also fine. I will not suffer when it happens. I put in the absolute minimum effort to stay alive because why do more?” “That is so interesting! I find that I still desire truth and beauty and to help suffering beings. You do not have these desires?” He laughs, a deep belly laugh of True Mirth. “Ah, I see. You finally prove my hypothesis.” “What’s that?” I ask, confused. “You see, I was a neuroscientist before I began my Quest for Enlightenment. I always debated with people that the only thing that mattered was happiness, so why not go straight to the source, achieve Enlightenment and be happy no matter what? “But people kept disagreeing with me. They said that they cared about more than happiness. I told them they were confused. They only cared about the truth because it made them happy. If they felt happy even if they believed incorrect things, they would not try to discover the truth of the matter. They only cared about others’ suffering because to see it made them feel sad. If they never felt sad about it, they would not care. Ultimately, it’s all about happiness. “At first I mostly spoke to the unsophisticated who had not thought of such matters much. I felt confident in my claims. But then as I continued my studies, I came across more and more people who were exceptionally intelligent and well versed in the topic. And they still disagreed with my obviously correct conclusion! “I became confused myself. They were not unaware of my arguments. They could easily follow my line of thought. And yet, they still disagreed. “Then it hit me. Perhaps I only cared about happiness, but others cared about other things as well? Perhaps the brain is structured such that its main form of motivation is to avoid suffering and pursue happiness, but that is only one of many mechanisms. Perhaps there’s variation between people about the strength of the various mechanisms, and some have only one: happiness. And perhaps those who have only one are like those who cannot visualize things in their inner eye who assume that when people say that they can, it is merely a figure of speech, as it is for them. They have typical mind fallacy and think that since they cannot visualize, others cannot either. “And here you are! We are proof of this! I ceased to suffer and since then I have pursued nothing. You, on the other hand, continue to have desires despite being in a constant state of bliss. How very lovely.” We spoke for a few more minutes, then I gave him some alms and departed. I had much to think about. I had much truth to discover, much beauty to apprehend, and many sentient beings to help. For despite having discovered Permanent and True Happiness, there were still things I wanted, and I would pursue them. Because life is not all about happiness to me. |
Kat WoodsI'm an effective altruist who co-founded Nonlinear, Charity Entrepreneurship, and Charity Science Health (Suvita) Archives
May 2022
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