People Trying to Be Good

Early on in our history we made a number of classic new-founder mistakes. We hired too quickly, prioritised marketing and outreach before achieving product-market fit, and spread our focus too widely without regard to longer-term strategy.

Why do good people suffer? You asked Google – here’s the answer

Fortunately, most of these errors just slowed us down rather than creating permanent problems for the field of effective altruism. This is the most obvious and visible category of negative impact: A common form of mistake among novices is to lack strategic judgement. This is an especially dangerous trap for people new to working on reducing extinction risk. Your first instinct might be to raise public awareness so policymakers are pressured to develop countermeasures or a nonproliferation strategy.

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While this may be useful in certain circumstances, increasing the profile of a threat can backfire by making it rise to the attention of bad actors. Another common oversight is failing to appreciate how damaging interpersonal conflict can be and how hard it is to avoid.

Interpersonal conflicts can harm a whole field by reducing trust and solidarity, which impedes coordination and makes recruitment much more difficult. Nobody wants to join a field where everybody is fighting with each other. An example from history: His colleagues were at first willing to indulge his whim, and infection rates plummeted on his unit.

But after a series of miscommunications and political conflicts within the hospital system, Semmelweis came to be regarded as a crank and was demoted.

The practice of handwashing was abandoned, and thousands of patients died from infection over the next decades until later researchers proved him right. The risk of making a misjudgment is a good reason not to rush into solving a complex problem without getting the necessary training, mentoring, supervision or advice, and to embed yourself in a community of colleagues who may notice before you make a major mistake. One particularly easy way to make a mistake that causes a substantial negative impact is to act unilaterally in contexts where even one person mistakenly taking a particular action could pose widespread costs to your field, or the world as a whole.

Nick Bostrom has explained that if people act based only on their personal judgement in this context, risky actions will be taken too often. If everybody acts based on their own judgment alone, then whether the initiative is started will be determined entirely by whether the most optimistic member of the whole group , i. This is a recipe for going ahead with a lot of bad projects. Fortunately, the curse can be lifted if you take the judgement of the rest of your field into account and refrain from taking unilateral action when most of them would disagree. This is a strong argument for developing a good network and general knowledge about the range of views in your field before taking major actions.

We write more about the importance of compromise as a norm in our article on coordinating within a community. Everyone understands that one risk of failure is that it tarnishes your reputation.

Ways people trying to do good accidentally make things worse, and how to avoid them - 80, Hours

But, unfortunately, people will sometimes decide that your mistakes reflect on your field as a whole. This means that messing up can also set back other people in your field. There are a lot of ways to do this. Those donors decide not to fund you, and are also less likely to take meetings with anyone else who wants to do something similar in the future. Watering down a field with mediocre work can also impede its long-run growth. Should researchers working on a neglected topic publish mediocre or unimpressive research contributions in addition to their best ones?

In response, they are more likely to commit unethical behavior that's in line with this perceived chaos. An example of this was when Mayor Rudy Giuliani lowered major crime rates in New York City in the 's by cracking down on petty crime. Living in a city that was less riddled with crime, New Yorkers came to believe in the organization running their city, which slowed the rate of major crimes.

There's nothing wrong with setting goals and driving hard to achieve them. This only becomes a problem when people are possessed by a singular focus on a particular goal, to the point that they leave other important considerations such as compassion and ethics out of their thinking. The Pygmalion effect refers to the tendency people have to act the way that other people treat them.

For example, if employees are treated like they're upright members of a team, they're more likely to act accordingly. Alternately, if they're treated with suspicion, they're more likely to act in a way that justifies that perception. The pressure to conform. The pressure to conform is powerful. When a group engages in unethical behavior, individuals are far more likely to participate in or condone that behavior rather than risk standing out. It's quite difficult for most people to ignore the wishes of those in authority positions.

People also feel like they're less responsible for wrongdoings if they act under the direction of someone else. Both of these reasons explain why employees are likely to act out the unethical wishes of their supervisors--and feel far less guilt than if they had decided to do it themselves. We live in a society where there is often only one winner: But does this competitive culture really produce the best outcomes? When it comes to ethical behavior, the answer is no. When there is only one winner in a given situation, people are more likely to cheat rather than face the consequences of losing.

The problem isn’t that life is unfair – it’s your broken idea of fairness

The Netflix drama Mindhunter , based on the true story of the man who pioneered the profiling of serial killers, provides an entertaining insight into the convergence of behavioural science and criminality. As the series shows, those inflicting grave suffering in their adult lives have often experienced childhood trauma. There is data to support the victim-to-victimiser cycle of sexual abuse. Do the perpetrators of such crimes deserve some kind of rehabilitation, then, or do they deserve to suffer? Do they, as human beings, deserve a decent existence as their days play out?

Death penalty states say no: Countries such as Norway, with its prisons focusing on humanity , say yes and also happen to have some of the lowest re-offending rates in Europe. Whether we can change people — and therefore limit further unnecessary human suffering in society — by power is an ongoing debate. For others, a sense of justice — and therefore a reduction in suffering — comes from an offender being in prison and losing their freedom.

In removing free will or conscious choice, can we really say that those who commit such grave acts of cruelty are victims of their own faulty wiring? A study suggested that amygdala dysfunction in children as young as three could cause impaired responses to fear that precede criminality in adulthood. However, implementing such testing in any kind of widespread way would be an ethical minefield.

Rule #2. You’re judged by what you do, not what you think

Put a psychopath under a scanner and they may be able to summon an empathetic response to order. When we feel pain we want to make sense of it. We hunt for a cause. The brain wants to find reasons because cognitive dissonance is so uncomfortable. There is no such thing as a human being who has never suffered.