There’s a phrase you’ll hear around this community sometimes. “Somebody has to and no one else will.” It’s from a novel, and in the novel it’s usually said when there’s something important to do shortly before the speaking character tries to do it. It’s a line that resonates with people in this community. Sometimes you look at all the ways that the world is falling short, at shortsightedness and broken windows, at famine and at plague, at death itself, and and think, hey, maybe I could fix that.
Or to quote a different writer, “It seems like there’s some kind of personality trait where instead of going ‘someone should do something about that’ you go ‘I’m going to do something about that.’ I don’t know how to teach it but I sincerely think the world is only still around because some people have it.” We have a bit of jargon around here for taking failure on your own shoulders, we call it “Heroic Responsibility.”
I admire this trait, and yet, tonight I want to argue with it.
Firstly, does somebody have to? Because I appreciate many of you dearly but sometimes I get the sense some of you are quoting “Somebody has to and no one else will” in your head because the way the world is falling short is that a book review is badly organized, or maybe the school board secretary isn’t very good, or someone is wrong on the internet. It’s okay if that fails. I’d prefer the frame where we choose to fix it, not the frame where we have to.
Sometimes the way the world is falling short is that people are dying. About 1.8 per second, or a little over a hundred every minute. About this rate- [snap fingers for a few seconds.] Most of those deaths, we don’t know how to stop them, but some deaths we absolutely do know how and you could get there in time with the right resources that person might live. They needed an antimalarial drug, or they went overboard into cold water and needed pulled out. People are, actually, dying, and this is important. I don’t want to say it’s okay. Death is bad. And yet, we still have the choice not to fix it.
And then we observe there’s a lot of burnout in this community for some reason.
Second and just as significantly, will somebody else? Because sometimes somebody will.
Yes, you are only one No, it is not enough— But if you lift your eyes, I am your brother
Sometimes when you don’t volunteer, you find that someone else stood up in your place. Except, it’s not in your place, because we are all in this boat together. Part of being in a community full of hard-working people who care a whole lot is that sometimes you can ask for help, and they’ll actually help. Not the kind of half-hearted, better off without it help like when you tried to do a group project in school and wound up the only person doing anything. The kind where they actually clerk the office that handles the funding /That raises the tower that watches the sky.
I would be sad if this speech made you turn away from Heroic Responsibility. Sometimes somebody has to and no one else will. But before you take the world on your shoulders like Atlas, I’m asking you to stop and ask yourself, how do you actually know that’s true?
Once upon a time, the best way to figure out how to kill Smallpox involved deliberately exposing ourselves to the infection. Children led the way, James Phipps among them. Hundreds of years later, sometimes the best way to kill a disease still involves deliberately exposing yourself, and then isolating yourself in a tiny hospital room. There were human challenge trials on dysentery as recently as October of this year, with at least one rationalist volunteering. Those volunteers are not alone, because doctors watch them carefully. They did not have to do this, and if those people had declined to get infected with dysentery then there would have been other volunteers, because the human race is kind of crazy sometimes.
Welcome to humanity! There’s eight billion of us right now, and in every corner of it there’s somebody who’s trying to help make things better.
Welcome to the rationalist community! This isn’t a tribe about getting to confidently know things together, but this is a tribe about figuring things out. This is also apparently sometimes a tribe about deliberately getting dysentery so other people don’t have to! Roger Bacon was trying to figure out how the world worked eight hundred years ago and we’re- somehow!- NOT DEAD YET!
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