Addicted to potential

Because I like to spend my leisure time making myself mad, I've been reading More Everything Forever by Adam Becker (affiliate link) and getting all het up about effective altruism and long termism.

The logic of effective altruism follows this path: you should do what is in your power to help others. Therefore you are morally obligated to find a high paying job so you have a lot of money with which to help others. However, it is incumbent upon you to ensure that maximum help is being achieved with your money; you want to help in the most effective way possible

This is obviously fucked up from the outset. Some people need expensive help. Some people need cheap help. It's not a waste to help the first group.

But effective altruism is worse than that. The effective altruists have done a whole lot of maths to figure out how best to spend their money and come to the conclusion that they should be concentrating on the hypothetical, space colonising people of the future.

There are more people living in this mythical future by several orders of magnitude, you see, so focussing your attention on helping them is much more effective than throwing your money away on helping the people who are alive and suffering right now.