NOLS Alaska and Drowning Children

“I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted—and behold, service was joy.” - Rabindranath Tagore, maybe

I spent the last two weeks on the Nelchina Glacier in Alaska with NOLS.

The weather was some of the worst our instructors had seen on a course. On a seven mile trek⁠^[1] to a new campsite we got caught in a whiteout storm with 40mph wind blowing headlong into us. We navigated a featureless landscape using a compass, dead reckoning, and the instructors’ memory of the glacier’s topology.

The storm continued that night, so when we got to camp we cut bricks using our ice saw and built a 5 foot high, 40 foot long wall so that our tents wouldn’t tear in the storm.

Because of the way the wind flows and eddies around a wall, snow piles in a dune on both sides. Some nights we had to wake up every two hours and shovel snow away from our tents. After a cycle or two of this the tents were surrounded by shovel piles on all sides, worsening the eddies that deposit snow and making shoveling harder. So every one shovelful of snow had to be moved several times, bucket brigade style, further and further down the campsite. On some nights I spent more time unburying my tent than I did sleeping in it.

This on top of all the ways we planned on suffering, like eating powdered dehydrated food and being wet and cold all the time and wearing the same socks for two weeks and tediously melting snow for water and getting sunburnt.⁠^[2]

I loved this NOLS course. I remember crawling back into the tent in the middle of the night after shoveling, back sore, sleeping bag and clothes wet, hungry because we didn’t have the time to cook a hot meal. I closed my eyes and prepared to meditate as a means of self-soothing, only to realize that I was already grinning.

Singer’s drowning children thought experiment⁠^[3] makes me feel guilty every time I think about it. By any straightforward utilitarian calculation, the optimal way to spend all my time is by founding a startup so that I can donate the proceeds to humanitarian efforts in Sub-Saharan Africa or working on AI alignment or something similarly altruistic, with no time in between for mountaineering trips to Alaska. My brain goes into self-defense mode to squelch this thought, but none of my rationalizations are good:

• I don’t understand the Third World. Plenty of past would-be do-gooders accomplished little outside of spreading cholera and invasive species. This would imply that I should learn more, as plenty of people have succeeded in helping others far away from themselves too.
• I’ll figure out how to donate all my money when I have more of it, but at this point in my life I should provide for those closer to myself. But then I should a) be working very hard to make money and b) not be spending so much.

System II of my brain is aware that I’m being selfish, but it is incapable of overpowering System I and changing my behavior. I alternate between feeling guilty, trying and failing to rationalize my behavior, and thinking about other things.

No rationalization needed while you’re on the glacier. The thing I want to do in the middle of the night is unbury my tent so that I don’t die. That’s also the best thing I can do for everyone else in my tent, and for the whole world. I have no way to do alignment research or donate to GiveWell from a glacier. Cooking feeds myself and my tentmates. Keeping tension in the rope while traveling protects both me and my partner from crevasses. Everything I do to help myself has the side effect of helping others. And vice versa. We notice, we thank one another.

This state of affairs is contrived, but that doesn’t make it feel any less good.