Thanks for sharing your interesting experiences. Some the things you wrote really startled me, such as:
Therapists? They dealt with my pursuit of effective altruism as a pathology, so I stopped seeing them.
If the effects were that severe then that matches the dictionary definition of a pathology. Rejecting the opinion of an expert for something one could easily verify for themselves with minimal effort seems really extreme. It lends credibility to the theory that humans are adaptation executors and not fitness optimizers.
I now believe the root of my suffering was in a philosophical mistake: I’d supposed there existed some external source of moral authority – in particular, one which imposed a totalizing obligation to help.
The word “obligation” probably means different things to different people. The way I’d been (unconsciously) using it was like this: An obligation is that which – if I don’t fulfill it – I become Bad.
Sounds disturbingly similar to what those leaving cults say. Maybe it’s an unfortunate implication/association. Maybe the impression has some validity.
Thanks for sharing your interesting experiences. Some the things you wrote really startled me, such as:
If the effects were that severe then that matches the dictionary definition of a pathology. Rejecting the opinion of an expert for something one could easily verify for themselves with minimal effort seems really extreme. It lends credibility to the theory that humans are adaptation executors and not fitness optimizers.
Sounds disturbingly similar to what those leaving cults say. Maybe it’s an unfortunate implication/association. Maybe the impression has some validity.