Episode Details

I once took a seminar with Paul Bloom, author of Against Empathy. He often spoke about the limits of empathy as a motivation — how it misleads us where math wouldn't. It was all very EA-coded (and indeed, he ate dinner with Yale EA once).

His class got me thinking about all the different motivations behind EA, from boundless love for the world to a fear of what our friends will think.

This is my own list of motivations, no filter. Whether or not I endorse them, they all helped me get here. They appear in roughly temporal order, based on when they felt most salient, but they all resurface sometimes.

If I've left out one of your motivations, I'd be curious to hear about it!

Inheritance

Everything about my upbringing made it easy to believe that all people matter. My parents gave to charity, and rarely had an unkind word to say about anyone. We even had this Norman Rockwell print in our dining room:

Empathy

I used to be a picky eater. Once, my mother told me that I should appreciate food more — that lots of kids just went to bed hungry. This didn't make me [...]

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Outline:

(00:53) Inheritance

(01:22) Empathy

(01:49) Realism

(02:09) Annoyance

(02:34) Admiration

(03:12) Friendship

(03:26) Fairness

(03:53) Guilt

(04:04) Fear

(04:31) Rage

(04:49) Schadenfreude

(05:11) Revenge

(05:31) Community

(06:14) Pride

(06:58) Metacognition

(07:30) Status

(07:56) Math

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First published:
April 21st, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LyLE23rmwrZPMmLah/my-unfiltered-motivations

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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