Effective Altruism: Why do people like to help others?

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1 Sometimes you need a helping hand

2 Good guide can save you a lot of mental strain

3 Mentor to the Mentee Relationship

4 Altruism Psychology

We are among the first generations who are living in a world where every question has an answer at our fingertips. Day by day we are building smarter and smarter searching tools. “Google it!” is synonymous to finding an answer. In the future, we might have highly intelligent systems. These systems could provide answers not only to the questions we ask but also to questions we haven’t even thought of yet.

Even though I enjoy discussing AI progress, I want to shift the focus to something else I’ve been pondering in recent months. I prefer humans over Searching tools. From my findings this is not just me, it is almost common as breathing among people. This is about “why do people help others?”

Sometimes you need a helping hand

I almost boast about being a self-taught engineer and then a self-taught ML practitioner because I never found my college education interesting and never had someone to teach me machine learning, let alone maths. I won’t say the college or the teachers were bad, but there was an alignment issue between my expectations and what they were offering. From talking to many people around me, I found out that it is almost a common condition among many engineers of my generation.

To learn on your own, you must have two things: discipline and a vision. Other things come after that. I have talked about self-learning extensively on my “How to be Successful with Self-learning?” blog, so I won’t delve into that here.

Although self-learning has “self” in it, it is slightly deceiving. Knowledge never trickles from the sky down into our heads to enlighten us; we have to get that from somewhere. So we get that from reading books, watching tutorials on YouTube, or from talking to someone. In a world where capitalism is consuming the entire population, surprisingly, most of this stuff is literally free. I have been learning ML for the last five years, and I never had to buy a book with my own money. You can literally learn anything for free!

Good guide can save you a lot of mental strain

But even having books is not enough. What’s the point of having an entire library at your fingertips if you don’t know what you are searching for? Looking for any answer in this information age is like finding a needle in this ginormous haystack. Asking the right questions itself is as challenging as finding answers, if not more. This is because we can’t see the summit of a mountain from its base. And from what human brain studies have found, our brain is stupid in predicting the challenge and potential time/resource requirement for completing any activity; gaining knowledge is the most chaotic activity there is.

To resolve this issue, I tend to find someone to mentor me—a person who can direct me in my path, boost my speed and efficiency, and potentially reduce my mental strain by a significant amount. During the last few years, I have talked with countless people, asking them for help and guidance. I don’t know if I got lucky, but I never had someone who never replied or who never addressed my issue.

Mentor to the Mentee Relationship

Not only the knowledge but almost a wisdom that flows from the mentor to the mentee. Some have super practical advice, some wander in the land of hypothesis. It is fun to listen to these people, to not just ask about the query that you have about the specific topic, but also to grab their worldview, see how they have designed their thinking process. It opens a lot of doors. Sometimes your beliefs and values may get challenged, the other time you may grab new values, better values.

Over the course of the last 5 years, I have talked with my peers, world-renowned scientists, billionaires, knowledge-rich and socially rich people. I don’t consider myself a good communicator, and financially and socially, I don’t belong to any of their categories. But I never had a feeling of not being understood. They always listened. I have hundreds of emails where I have double the word count of some of my blogs. That feeling of getting listened to is almost therapeutic. I always wonder what’s in it for them? Why would an extremely valuable person help someone who is just getting started?

Altruism Psychology

One of the coolest guys and my personal idol in the AI field is Andrej Karpathy. He is a world-renowned scientist who used to work at Tesla (self-driving), a young man in his 30s, extremely smart, but above all, he is an extremely good teacher. His YouTube tutorials are so diverse, well-thought-out, and highly acclaimed by the community. When he was asked about why he likes to teach, he said something like, “I don’t think I like teaching, I like happy people.“

Human nature is fascinating in its complexity. The drive to help one another seems to stem from a fundamental desire for collective happiness. It’s ingrained in us, almost as if it’s part of our DNA, shaped by millions of years of evolution.

Lex Fridman Podcast with Andrej Karpathy

What is Altruism?

Richard Dawkins, another hero of mine, in his non fiction “The Selfish Gene,” explains this paradox of altruism and selfishness. Altruism, at its core, is a sort of enlightened selfishness. It’s this intriguing notion that by promoting the well-being of others, we indirectly serve our own interests by fostering a harmonious, supportive environment.

This is almost poetic how this cycle works—by contributing to the happiness of others, we indirectly contribute to our own happiness. It’s as though our evolutionary history has fine-tuned this altruistic trait within us, recognizing that collective well-being ultimately benefits each individual. So, when we extend a helping hand or engage in acts of kindness, it’s not just altruism; it’s an acknowledgment of our interconnectedness and a testament to the beautiful interplay between self-interest and the greater good.