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I didn't say it wasn't relative. What I am saying is that the emotions you feel are real and you are not going to fake it till you make it. Like is demonstrated with people making 6 figure salaries choosing to live lifestyles that make them unable to 'expand their circle of love' more effectively.
Are you saying that emotions are unchanging and immutable? I agree that emotions are real, and that 'faking it till you make it' isn't a great strategy, although we probably disagree about what that means.
What I'm arguing is that humans can change the way they think and feel, and I like to think we should change by trying to become better people over time. To me, effective altruism presents a compelling argument as to how to become a better person.
This is proving to be very difficult, to the point that we have billions-of-dollars-per-year industries and millennia-old social phemonena devoted to various different methods of doing this (religion, meditation, self-help, therapy, pharmacology, alcohol, narcotics) and we are, by some measures, less happy, more lonely, and less loving than we've ever been.
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The realities of 'being a good person' instead of being a selfish person aren't a mystery and your stated beliefs are not relevant to me next to the lived reality of people who have actually gone out of their way to be a good person, putting in all the hard work and effort, only to find themselves completely burned out in a year or two as the seriousness of the situation becomes clear to them. Examples of people 'being good', where I have first-hand accounts of people completely giving up on the situation are: Missionary work/general aid work in Africa, helping the homeless, helping stray animals.
In all of the examples there was a common line that, eventually, the people doing the aid hit a wall. If you have some way of helping people get over the wall, in whatever capacity it is that you imagine these folks becoming 'better persons' I am all ears. Because as far as I can tell, nothing about EA involves a replacement for actual people doing actual physical work on the ground.
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