Sounds too good to be true, and by golly, it is! What makes me come alive is writing fiction. This is not what the world most needs from me.
Not everything that sounds like deep wisdom is wise.
Not everything that sounds like deep wisdom is wise.
Give me a break. You think the world is really better served by you giving up on your dreams? It's a good thing not everything felt as you did or the world would be pretty bleak indeed.
No, what they should have done is written their books, then donated a large fraction of the money they earned from writing them. If you're that good of an author (keeping in mind that 99.99% of people aren't), you can help the world a lot more that way than by volunteering at soup kitchens.
"It's a good thing not everything felt as you did or the world would be pretty bleak indeed."
If everyone felt as Eliezer did- that it was better to spend at least some effort doing what the world needed most, rather than what happened to feel good- then maybe we would not have hundreds of millions of people in constant danger of starvation.
I sincerely doubt it. What has charity really done for starvation and poverty? There's only one thing that has ultimately had a big, lasting effect on those things: capitalism. I'm sure many will disagree, but I'd like to see the evidence that giving $1m to developing economies has more effect than investing $1m in businesses in those economies that can then grow and hire more workers.
I don't presently see the case for charity, but I'd like to see more data on the subject.
What makes me come alive is writing fiction. This is not what the world most needs from me.
But now you're linking to this site as proof that you haven't given up your dreams? So which is your dream?
And regardless, my point is just that if writing fiction is what makes you come alive, what truly makes you happy, are you so certain that you're going to make more of a difference in the long run doing something else?
Eliezer presumably means that time is in short supply, and that every month's advance toward AI has the potential to save a great many people. Plenty enough time to write a novel after we crack that nut, but there's no time now.