I’m not sure how common this mistake is, but sometimes I get to feeling like heroes are above humanity. Like they’ve transcended, stepped above, and are reaching back to help others. But when I try to live up to this kind of ideal I almost inevitably come to feel burdened, flat, demotivated, and alienated.

This remains true even after coming across some extremely useful techniques for handling my emotions. I’m able to dissipate negative emotions by realizing that emotions are intrinsically orthogonal both to the state of the world and to the values I have over those states. I’m also able to sit with negative emotions by accepting them, neither fighting nor fleeing them. Armed with these techniques I can embrace all my emotions, I can remove suffering from my physical and emotional pain, and I can greatly amplify the pleasure I gain from many experiences.

Even so, I still run into problems when I view myself as something above humanity and human concern. What I call this higher class is unimportant, whether it’s “player characters”, “spiritually developed humans”, or anything else.

When I view myself as approximately without any concerns or need for consideration, then when my own desires arise I think to myself “Ah! I have the ability to be free of suffering in any situation! I will therefore universally apply this power to any of my concerns that don’t assist me in being a bad-ass hero.” This separates me from connecting emotionally with the concerns and values of my own life. There are two or three problems with this approach.

1. My life becomes flat when I cease to care about its ups and downs. Happiness is much more vivid when you pay attention to it and are glad of it. And there are better ways to be unruffled by small concerns.
2. It becomes much easier to view altruism as a burden when I don’t assign importance to the quality of my own life. I think I experience this effect less than most, but it’s certainly very significant.
3. When I don’t care about the good or bad things in my own life it then becomes much harder to care about the existence of those things in the lives of others. I’ve written about this previously.

When I view myself as something above the majority of humanity I then come to feel alienated from that humanity. Humanity starts to gain the feeling of the “civilians” in video games, little people who stand around needing and hoping to be saved. You get points for saving them, sometimes they’re even the sole objective, but they aren’t characters.

Perhaps even worse, by thinking of heroes as being in a class outside humanity proper I remove from the class of humanity exactly those people whom I most look up to and admire. I deprive humanity of its heroes by considering non-human all those people who do the coolest things,

So what’s the alternative?

Heroes, then, are not in a different class. Heroes are people, just the same as other people. They may be a little less burdened by suffering, they may have internalized more heroic memes, they may be more gifted by ability, they may have trained harder, and they may be currently more altruistic in practice than most people, but they are still just as human.

And no (ideal) hero saves others without saving herself. Even if it arises that a hero can do the most good by sacrificing herself, she does not do so because she has no moral value, having transcended the “petty concerns” of humanity. She has just as much moral value as the people she is saving, and her sacrifice is a terrible loss. Not because she is better than most human beings, but simply because she is a human being. She would sacrifice herself merely because she can save many by sacrificing one. It would be just as good and sad a deed to sacrifice someone else in order to save others, even if that reveals less virtue. But virtue acts as a status signal and a useful indicator for humans to aim for in the pursuit of doing good; it is quite distinct from the actual good done.

And if the hero does not suffer from something as others do? Then it may reduce suffering for the hero to put herself in the place of others. But it’s still just as good and wonderful a thing for her to enjoy friendships, and to have a romance, and to spend a pleasant afternoon, as it is for anyone else.

Heroes are people that don’t stop with themselves when they set out to save people. They work to save as many as they can. Maybe it’s because they’ve generalized that it’s a terrible thing when they suffer or die and it’s a wonderful thing to flourish among friends, and so likewise with others. Maybe they just care a great deal about others without involving any explicit moral thinking at all.

I have a collection of inspiring pictures I’ve saved from the net, and as I went through them again I made sure to view the heroes not as something above humanity, something transcended and beyond moral valence, but as “merely” exceptionally altruistic and capable human beings. Their suffering is just as worthy of concern as anyone else’s, even if they are better at avoiding it, and equal too are their joys. And in an ideal world, they know and realize this: they are part of the humanity which they aim to save.

There’s more than one reason to work to reduce extinction risk, but probably one of the most powerful is having something to protect. It seems to be a fact of human psychology that we’re willing to work harder and sacrifice more to protect something external to ourselves, such as loved ones, a “great noble truth”, or a nation/ethnic group/religious group, etc. Not only does working for something-we-want-to-protect bring us to do more, but it seems to also make us more satisfied while we do it.

6 billion people is a lot of people, but few if any of us feel an intuitive emotional kick about 6 billion people. It’s doesn’t mean we’re villains, our brains just aren’t built to multiply like that. Back in the EEA, we had no use for getting very emotional about people we didn’t know, because we knew everyone in our group.

One kind of work-around to this gap in our mental hardware is to take your concern for those close to you and multiply. Chances are that most people are cared for just as much as you care for your loved ones, and care for others in turn. Even if you think that only 1 in 4, or 1 in 100, is worth feeling that much for, that’s still 60,000,000 people. And 60,000,000 multiplied by however much you care for those close to you, is a fucking huge amount. Not that we’re capable of honestly multiplying like that, or physically capable of feeling that much concern if we could do the multiplication, but it can still bring you to feel massive amounts, and lead you to put a more coherent weight on certain outcomes when making conscious decisions.

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I actually wrote this post before the one on positive motivation, but I definitely didn’t want this to be taken the wrong way. I am NOT saying that we have a fantastically huge obligation, a duty to save all human lives. I am NOT saying we’ll be bad people if we don’t do all we can to protect the ones we care about. Personally I’m not really concerned about whether or not I’m a “bad person”, and I’m starting to think this is helpful. The fact of the matter is that I just really want my loved ones to survive, I want to save and help as many as I can. That’s not all I want, I have some technically selfish goals as well, and I endorse them. But I also have a very strong desire to preserve human lives and human value in the universe. And if you’re concerned about existential risk, I’m guessing you do as well.

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There’s a danger with this kind of multiplication, one that I didn’t see coming. With that much concern, a person can really get overzealous in protecting the things they care about. A little over a year ago, I explicitly decided to stop hanging out with my friends, unless I ran into them by chance. I did this in order to get more work done. I knew that I would mind that and so would they, but I’d rather them be unhappy for now and alive later. I’m recovering from the pit I fell into, so I’m starting to be able to emotionally understand why I did that, but for a while that level of concern was practically unimaginable. Anyway, I rapidly found that I couldn’t keep working without recreational social contact, but that didn’t completely end the problem.

I now took time for fun social gatherings, but I grew distant from people. I saw my friends now and then, but I was still on the other side of a divide. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, trying to figure out how to describe it. So far my best description was that they weren’t in my group anymore; I was in a group of me. I still cared about them, but I had a job to do. I didn’t want them to rely on me and me not to be there, if they made plans with me in them. I could get by with less hanging out than they’d want if I were close to them. Also, and this might be the larger part, I no longer took the time for many things I used to do, and enjoyed doing with them. I used to play video games, playing and discussing them with my friends. I used to put together role-playing campaigns with them in it. I used to be much more content to just lay around cuddling with my girlfriend. I used to spend several hours watching shows or movies with others.

I got along on my own, with occasional socializing. I still cared about my friends, but that care slowly became more and more abstract. They weren’t close to me anymore, nobody was. I wasn’t actually lonely or sad, but I was fairly alone. I can’t help but recall some lines from a favorite game:

“… I wish someone could have been there for you.”
“I’m used to being on my own.”
“One can be TOO self-sufficient, I’m coming to believe.”

And that’s how it came to be that I couldn’t even imagine or remember the type of dedication that lead me to separate myself in the first place. That’s how it came to be that I didn’t have much to multiply anymore. Y = 6,400,000,000 * X, and Y was so large that in my zeal I cut down X, and Y sunk with it.

I’m recovering from my mistake now, and I don’t know if anyone is even in danger of trying what I tried, but take my advice: keep close the ones you care about. Don’t put that aside. We’re social creatures, and we draw so much of our power from each other. Your friendships are important: for your happiness, for their happiness, and for all the good things your accomplishments will bring.

For those who don’t follow LessWrong: the human mind suffers terribly from scope insensitivity. I.e. experiments in which people pay much more to save one child, than they do to save 8. The brain just doesn’t multiply well, and the world is a huge place.