I wrote a post on the morality of different career choices, and got a lot of responses. I was trying to come up with a reasonable metric of measuring the extent to which someone increased the overall amount of hapiness in the world. The idea was to compute a delta function – how much less happy would everyone be if this person didn’t exist?
Many readers, both here and on facebook, astutely pointed out a lot of problems in my analysis. I gave it a lot more thought, and concluded that ‘how much is person X helping the world?’ is really a meaningless question. In order to answer the question, you’d have to be able to say ‘what would happen’ if person X wasn’t engaged in their career of choice. To do that, you’d have to have an accurate analytical model of the entire world. Nobody’s got one of those.
If you can’t answer the question “how much am I realy helping the world,” how can you decide upon a career that helps the world out the most? I’ve concluded that this is really a meaningless goal. The best metric you have of happiness is your own – if something makes you happy, go for it. If it doesn’t make you happy, then you should maybe try to find something else. If you’re strictly logical about it, you can’t really answer questions about what kind of ‘difference’ you are making in the world, so you might as well not bother. Questions like ‘what if everybody acted this way’ become really meaningless when you think intensively about what they mean.
Am I advocating selfishness? Perhaps. I think people are usually hardwired to enjoy helping others. I know I feel great any time I help a stranger, even if it’s something simple like holding the door open for someone with a lot of baggage, or helping someone carry a peice of furniture to their apartment. I generally do these things instinctively, not becuase I’m some kind of ‘good person,’ but because I know I’ll feel good afterwards. I think people who are selfish and never help others are they way becuase they’ve never really experienced the rush of helping someone who needed it. I don’t volunteer in soup kitches because I don’t think I’d enjoy it. Some people do – if so, well hey, more power to you. I’m happy making the world of my experience a little better in small ways.
In summary, if you want to make the world a ‘better place’, just go out and do whatever the hell you want to do. You’ll make it a better place for you, at least. If you live in a community of people who share similar desires, you’ll make it a better place for the rest of your community as well. Once you start to ask questions about making the world as a whole better, you run into some serious logical problems. As with amost anything interesting, our logical faculties just aren’t equppied to answer questions like “How can I best serve the world?”