When I was at Manifest, Austin Chen said something interesting to me: that one thing that he liked about my blog was that I was proud to be an effective altruist.
I don't identify as an EA, but EA has definitely motivated, increased, and improved my charitable giving, so I'm definitely pro-EA, and in no way ashamed to say so!
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, or why it's to me specifically. I donate mostly to effective (in the EA sense) charities of immediate benefit to humans, a bit to one effective animal charity, and some to local humanitarian charities (like food bank type stuff). I donate more money, and more effectively (in the EA sense, which seems good), because of reading EA things. I also donate more, and to more immediate (not long-termist) causes, and some locally, because I am Christian. By no means do I claim to have figured it all out.
Yes. I don't identify as EA, mostly because I'm way to poor to even ASPIRE to belong to that club, though when I had a bit more money I indeed gave a small regular donation to Give Well for "doing objectively most good purposes" and another one to a local community thing for community belonging reasons, but if this criticism this post is arguing against is a real, widespread thing and not some elite student in group out group signalling game thing then it's bizarre and I agree, repugnant.
Now, I think most people I interact with in reality that's not pixels have never heard of EA (some might have never heard of utilitarianism either) and if/when I introduce the idea to them I've NEVER encountered a person who said "ewww nope". So I suspect that unless someone has "saving souls in eternity" or "global communism at any cost" as their real priority value, these criticisms MUST be based on disliking the people/vibe/culture involved.
There's another possibility, which is that there are people who do give to charity already and to whom the EA argument is, paradoxically, very persuasive on a rational level, and who cannot bring themselves to admit, even to themselves, that they have money to give to charity, they already do give, but they choose to support a local football club or a dog shelter or Amnesty or DV refuge and the dissonance is too strong so instead of saying "it's a valid choice to give some of my money to less effective but otherwise important for me personally and socially causes". They can't deal with that dissonance and feel compelled to attack the whole project.
Do EAs tend to proselytise in a way that could be read as trying to pushily persuade people to CHANGE the allocation of their charitable money?
The bit where it feels too accepting of existing world order does seem to have some validity though. In some ways SBF debacle was an extreme example of that. But that would imply that most criticism of EA comes from genuinely anti capitalist hard/material left, not people who just produce words on screen while working happily within structures of that world order, and I'm not sure if this is the case.
On second thoughts "I feel like a moral failure for not earning enough to meaningful contribute" might be another reason some people reject the whole thing. Hmmm.
EAs are justified in being at least as proud and self-righteous as a seriously religious person who actively promotes their religion. After all, it is like a religion, except it has the advantage of being very likely true.
Maybe the problem is that Effective Altruism doesn’t have a very compelling emotional case. So instead of accepting reason, morality, and EA, it’s a lot more satisfying to just refuse reason.
That's certainly in line with core Christain teachings, and maybe that's what was so revolutionary about Christ. Stating the "obvious" truths that no one even thinks about and translating them into action?
"Every nice thing I’ve done interpersonally doesn’t have half a percent the value of saving lives, of funneling money into the hands of charities so that little kids don’t get horrible diseases that kill them."
I feel like people really don't want to hear that everything in their personal lives is trivial compared to the goodness of altruism. Now, of course, goodness is not zero-sum. But emotional bandwidth might be?
EAs are in a weird spot there the vast majority are far too agreeable and insufficiently proud and confident, yet the most high profile people associated with it like SBF or Eliezer Yudkowsky are the total opposite.
I think this is a really great piece. I hope to be able to take this sentiment on board more myself.
I agree about the incredible amount of unfathomably poor-quality criticisms of EA.
At the risk of stating the obvious, I think it's important to remember not to frame poor criticisms as 'the real criticisms of EA', at least in our own minds. There are far better criticisms, though these tend to be criticisms of ‘part of EA’ rather than ‘all of EA’
At the risk of stating the obvious again, I think we should be extremely skeptical of anyone writing like, one article in an attempt to push a narrative like 'EA specifically is bad', and can be fairly confident from the title that it's largely nonsense (or that it actually makes much weaker claims than its title suggests, or implies much broader things than its title suggests).
None of this is to say that responding to poor criticisms in public does not have value. I think it definitely does. But I'd be cautious of thinking that these are the real best attempts at criticism of EA, and perhaps cautious of giving people that impression, too.
I also generally think that, as a mark of respect to the endeavour, one should question oneself before throwing stones at things other people pour significant time and effort into at a significant personal cost. Not that we can’t ever criticise, obviously, but we should at least think *some amount* before criticising, and make sure we *actually know what it is we're criticising*. Sometimes people don’t realise what EA does and what it means to people, and throw around lazy stereotypes that they wouldn't throw around in other contexts. I personally think I’m well within my rights to (at least privately) find this at least a little bit disrespectful - and I think others should be able to feel the same.
It's the smug name. And people don't like nerds. And especially smug (their words) nerds telling them how they're doing charity wrong. Just my two cents.
Apart from abstract reservations about Utilitarianism, a non-silly crit of EA that pops to mind would be something like: it tends to favor working within the current global order to fix problems, and encourages its adherents to succeed within that order.
IF the current order is deeply bad, then in practice EA might be limited. In practice, EA probably functions, for *some* of its adherents, to legitimize what they would do anyway, which is succeeding Big among the technocratic elite, working on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley, et cet.
Of course, Master's tools for Master's house. . . .if you want to really change the world, you probably should aspire to get near the levers of power. . . without compromising your goals/principles along the way.
And of course, in principle EA is committed to doing whatever is best, including, if the U-calculator says so, subverting the global order. Actually, if we all simply followed Singer's conclusion in "Famine, Affluence and Morality", there'd be no need for a top-down system of income redistribution. The world would equalize by individual agency, probably the best way for it to happen!
And so many common EA agendas, like ending factory farming, entail a radical shift in the global order.
Assuming Utilitarianism, it's just an empirical question of what will do the most good, and then comparing the answer with what, in practice, the EA community tends to do. If the best thing is something radical like "dismantle the international finance system" [I don't know] or "halt the spread of industrial civilization", yet EA proposals all involve working within these systems, then. . . . it's still not a crit of EA in principle. It could be framed as a dispute about what EA entails, in practice.
Recognizing that you're only raising a potential argument subject to empirical questions- Personally I like the version of EA where we do not "get near the levers of power" with plans of "subverting the global order" given that we haven't seen much empirical case for doing so.
There's things we can do as a set of lawful and transparent organizations with clearly stated goals, and there's things we could instead do as a clandestine organization with revolutionary aims. Doing the latter would more or less permanently rule out returning to the former if it turned out we were wrong. Additionally, it would be much harder for the next consequentialist movement that tried lawful and transparent strategies, since the system would assume they too would pivot into revolutionary activities. So we should be *very* reluctant to switch strategies until the empirical evidence is very strong.
Further, I think both types would have issues with peoples' goals and principles being compromised by exposure to power, and with people who actually just wanted power the whole time. Power corrupts regardless of how you get it.
Possibly EA will diversify as it matures and admit of several factions or strategies, some not even associated, in the public consciousness, with the title "EA". I suppose this kind of diversification happens often with successful movements, and might be good at least in that multiple approaches are tested, and terrible failure of one of them may not tarnish the others, from a PR perspective.
(This doesn't apply to arguments that EA's ought to pursue more radical aims, while still doing so lawfully and transparently and within the current system. But my read was that you were thinking at least partially of power-seizey strategies.)
The problem with a "seize the levers of power" as a strategy to achieve positive change is that everyone on the entire planet is constantly trying to seize the levers of power, so the cost-benefit ratio is likely to be extremely bad. The AMF can be as effective as it is because the group of people actively fighting to support malaria continuing to kill African children is so small as to be effectively 0, while the amount of effort spent fighting it is still quite low (otherwise it would be extinct by now). Factory farming has some support, but most people broadly agree with its goals, they simply don't care enough to actually do literally one single thing about it. These interventions are the proverbial $20 on the train station
On the other hand, there are already billions of dollars poured into Presidential campaigns. The marginal value of another forty-five hundred dollars in such an election is about nil, but with the AMF, that's ~how much it costs to save a child's life. Carrick Flynn lost 2:1 in the primaries despite EAs spending millions on his campaign.
EA is not about "fixing" the world. It is about doing the most good per dollar. Politics may be able to fix the world, but it is hard to imagine there are many twenty dollar bills left to pick up, and any that exist are surely more "try focusing on [issue that people care about but is ignored by both major parties]" than "spend more money."
The only criticism that holds water is that we shouldn’t live in a system where people die of preventable things, and one of the few ways we can change things is based off of the goodwill of individuals — putting a bandaid on a blown-off limb.
That’s what critics are getting at, which is valid; and EAs respond “well at least I’m doing something”, which is also valid.
Frankly, my problem with EA is that it is not fit for purpose, and intrinsically can't be. The tools its using are incapable of solving the problem EA tries to solve.
Effective Altruists receive a great deal of scrutiny, much of it unreasonable and unfair. But it is emphatically not unreasonable that they face more scrutiny than many others. Why?
When you say "I want to do good in the world," what you are really saying is "I want power and should be trusted with it." Many people aim to do good in specific, limited domains they perceive a duty towards, and are as a result scrutinized only in the context of those domains. Effective altruists, in taking a proximity-blind approach to doing good, aim to assert power over the whole world, and are as a result scrutinized in a global context. The movement as a whole is extraordinarily power-seeking. That doesn't make it bad! But it cannot be ignored and means that it will, and should, face much more scrutiny than less power-seeking movements.
I realize that it's hard to give credit to critics of your own movement, but it betrays a blind spot in your own thinking to act as if critics are all stupid, uninformed, or malicious. I've seen many good-faith, sensible critiques of the movement, and I share many of them. Erik Hoel is particularly notable here (https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/why-i-am-not-an-effective-altruist). I like effective altruists because I think almost all of them are sincere, good people willing to sacrifice to make good things happen, and they often succeed more than I do within my own morality, but I have deep-running moral disagreements with the movement that, while they don't negate the good it does, simply cannot be papered over with "but they also do good."
Writing my response to the movement as a whole is probably outside the scope of a quick article comment, but so you have an idea, here are my most serious critiques in abbreviated form:
1. People have greater duty towards those with greater proximity towards them in ways EA as a movement struggles to recognize. Parents have greater duty towards their children than to strangers. Friends have greater duty towards their friends. Members of the same communities have greater duties towards members of their communities. Because we travel in similar circles, I have a greater duty towards you than towards people who travel in distant circles, and am liable to spend more time engaging with you as a result. That is appropriate, not a glitch in morality: while all people can certainly be said to have equal moral value from a hypothetical gods-eye view, none of us are God, and our particular positions give us greater or lesser degrees of duty towards particular people and ideas.
2. EA is far too susceptible to negative utilitarianism, which is evil and which any serious moral movement should be able to unambiguously describe as evil. A viewpoint that holds that suffering overwhelmingly outweighs the entire project of life, one that treats omnicide as only regrettably impractical and not obviously evil, has values fundamentally inimical to life.
Because negative utilitarians tend to be suffering-focused, even though most EAs do not identify that way they are taken seriously and retain broad sway in the movement given EA's own at-times monomaniacal focus on suffering (or the suffering/pleasure dichotomy). From my own angle, this mistakes the signifier for the signified (reduction of suffering as end goal rather than continuation and expansion of the grand project of life). This leads them to seriously entertain and put forward wildly power-seeking and irresponsible ideas like "Is it our duty to destroy all wild animals to reduce animal suffering?", and has other negative effects at the margins on much shorter time-scales.
I'm glad EA inspires you to do good, I respect the charity work effective altruists do, and I'm not looking to tell you you ought to tear down your entire worldview. All I'm saying in this comment, really, is that you should treat critics fairly and avoid breezily dismissing them out of hand.
I don't have any in-principle problem with people criticizing EA. If there really were lots of bad things being done in the name of EA, those would be worth criticizing. But, well, when one just looks at what the critics say, they're all very unconvincing. I feel the same way about Hoel's critique, and I've written about it before https://benthams.substack.com/p/erik-hoels-mistaken-criticism-of?utm_source=publication-search.
I don't just breezily dismiss the critics. I have written detailed responses to ~a dozen popular criticisms of EA. My assessment after doing that: they all suck! The only ones that are reasonable are the ones of the form "you're doing X a bit and this is less good than Y," but the ones that argue against it as a whole are just deeply, deeply crazy.
As for your criticisms, beginning with the first about proximity--it's true that lots of EAs don't think proximity is morally salient. I happen to share their judgment, and have written about why there aren't special obligations here https://benthams.substack.com/p/believers-in-special-obligations?utm_source=publication-search and why there aren't especially strong duties one has to members of their country here https://benthams.substack.com/p/america-second. But even if you think that there are special obligations, they have to be extremely strong to justify, in ones charitable giving, giving domestically rather than to the potentially 100 times more effective against malaria foundation. If you were walking by a pool and could either save one American child or 100 foreign children, you should obviously save the 100 foreign children.
2. Well first of all, even if you're right about this, I don't think it undermines the case for any of the things EA actually does. This is one bad element of basically all of the serious critiques--they're all about disagreeing with random things believed by EAs even if they don't affect what EA actually does in the real world.
I'm not a negative utilitarian and think that negative utilitarianism is crazy. That said, suffering is clearly *one of the things that matters*. If there were a bunch of people being tortured and you could press a button that would stop their torture, that would be a good thing to do, even if the alternative still didn't enable them to pursue life projects. If suffering is a bad thing, then reducing wild animal suffering is important.
You suggest that our goal should be "continuation and expansion of the grand project of life." Surely that's not the only thing! Suppose that we could create a bunch of people whose subject experiences would be, for the first 50 years of their life, akin to the worst forms of torture, but they'd live lives after the 50 years of torture. Surely, even though this would expand life, doing so would be seriously wrong.
The thing that seems obvious to me is that if you want to live a moral life, an important part of that will be doing lots of things related to EA. Critics act like finding a few contested philosophical assumptions means they shouldn't be an EA--and then use that to justify not taking high-impact careers or giving to effective charities.
Btw, I'm trying to start a podcastish thing where I sometimes have on interesting people and chat with them--would you have any interest in recording an episode where we talk about these things?
Having had a chance to read your article on why there aren't special obligations, I'm baffled that you would link it in response to my claim about duty and proximity.
Me: "People have greater duty towards those with greater proximity towards them in ways EA as a movement struggles to recognize. ... our particular positions give us greater or lesser degrees of duty towards particular people and ideas."
You: "Obligations are relative to a person, and your moral obligations to help your friends and family are much stronger than your obligations to help strangers."
That you feel inclined to argue against my claim after conceding more-or-less all of it in your first paragraph before arguing against a much more esoteric, abstract claim is itself, I believe, telling. It suggests to me that you are simply nodding along to your own first paragraph as a figleaf before aiming to dismiss far-reaching implications of its reality with a winding argument against nobody in particular.
My read that it is simply a figleaf is reiterated in your country article where you claim that "Where a person lives is totally irrelevant to our moral obligations to them." This is explicitly contradicted by the idea that obligations are relative to individuals! Your first paragraph on special obligations, though, was correct: obligations are relative to people in far-reaching ways you briefly nod to before seemingly forgetting you ever said anything of the sort.
You suggest my claim is that "Obligations are relative to a person, and your moral obligations to help your friends and family are much stronger than your obligations to help strangers." I'm a bit confused--that's the entirety of what my first article was arguing against. I didn't concede it in the first paragraph--I granted that there are all sorts of practical reasons why one should do more to help those nearer to them. My claim was that if all else is really equal, one's obligations don't favor helping them.
Maybe what you're saying--let me know if I'm getting this right--is that while if all else is equal we have no especially strong obligations to those nearer to us, we should structure society to be such that we care more about those nearer to us because that's better overall.
If it's true that the people we should care about whichever groups makes things go best overall, then that's not really believing in special obligations. More importantly for our dispute, that would imply that EA's emphasis on impartiality is very valuable! Because in the case of the things EA recommends doing, all else is not equal--we can help far-away people much more than nearby people. If this is so, and we should have our obligations be calibrated such that they produce maximally great benefits for people globally, then we should exhibit great concern about people dying.
Even if one thinks they have special obligations to those nearer to them, even if those make one's duties to their countrymen 10x stronger than to strangers, because of the outrageous effectiveness of EA charities, they should still give to the against malaria consortium over charities helping their own countrymen.
"There are lots of good reasons to care more about your friends and family than about random strangers. When people watch out for those close to them, society goes better. Families and friendships are perhaps the most efficient vehicles of making people better off in the history of the world—so it’s not hard to explain why we should value them."
--suggests something rather stronger than you acknowledge, but I misread that later sentence as being an affirmative claim connected to that.
Why do you think that? My claim which is that we don't have any special obligations to those nearer to us but there are lots of practical reasons to care about them more and do more things to help them. Compare this to Kant's view that we don't have any obligations to animals but we should still take care of them, because otherwise we become corrupt.
A world in which all people help all people equally is neither possible nor desirable. If you care about your child or your friend as much as you care about eight billion other people, you care about nobody in any meaningful way at all. Localism is easily explainable via universalist principles: it is better for everyone that they have some people who care about them more than they care about strangers. It is good for children to have parents who love them. It is good for people to have friends who bake cakes for them and watch their houses for them. It is good for Bentham's Bulldog to attend Manifest to build alongside and chat with other people like him.
People have limited focuses, limited understanding, and limited capacity. You cannot abstract away every consideration when trying to put your time and attention towards a universally Best Thing--one who had power over everyone would have such a duty and ought to be expected to take those considerations into account, but you as an individual are best equipped to speak about things you understand, help those in situations you are well acquainted with and have personal investment in, and devote your energies towards communities who share enough of your ideas for you to be compatible with them.
The only way to achieve this universally more desirable state is to note a stronger sense of duty towards those near you, for every definition of the word near, than about those far from you, for every definition of the word far.
Yeah, I’d be happy to come on and chat. We obviously have far-reaching disagreements here and it would be worth hashing some of them out. I respect that you’ve engaged in depth at times with criticism and that your sentiment that critics all suck is earnest, but it reflects an overconfidence that I expect you’d do well to reconsider. You take “be proud to be an EA” (which is understandable and admirable—one ought to stand behind one’s convictions) and expand it to “critics of my group all suck” (which is very convenient but should give you pause given that naive members of almost every movement feel like that from the inside).
Finding serious philosophical objections to a movement absolutely means one shouldn’t be part of that movement. If I think EAs are wrong about some incredibly important things that would need fundamental restructuring to correct, it would be absurd of me to work within their frame, even though I can and do certainly find narrow alignment and space to collaborate. People’s beliefs have far-reaching impacts on their actions and their priorities. Values disagreements matter a great deal and can’t be papered over with “but we also do some things you agree with.”
I agree that generally when people hold that view that all the criticisms of their views suck, they are wrong and overconfident. If I said this about all of my controversial views--theism, utilitarianism, veganism, that the Democrats are better, that we should have something near open borders, and so on--that would be a big red flag. But I don't say that about all those things and am, I think, much less confident in my views on most hot-button issues than is typical. But it wouldn't be surprising if there were some views which were only opposed by terrible objections.
EA is a particularly likely candidate for such a topic because being an EA is inconvenient. Taking seriously EA advice requires accepting that you really should be acting very differently if you don't give a bunch of money to charity. If there's something that is inconvenient to follow, it wouldn't be surprising if the objections to it are basically all desperate rationalizations.
I wouldn't say that there are no serious criticisms of particular parts of EA. One can raise real objections to longtermism. But the people who think that how one lives their life shouldn't be majorly shaped by EA principles have, I think, no good arguments. (I don't even know if Hoel thinks that--he seems to think EA is a force for good in the world but just disagrees with the philosophy. To me this seems like not voting for Democrats on the grounds that you like their policies but think too many of them are atheists).
//Finding serious philosophical objections to a movement absolutely means one shouldn’t be part of that movement. If I think EAs are wrong about some incredibly important things that would need fundamental restructuring to correct, it would be absurd of me to work within their frame, even though I can and do certainly find narrow alignment and space to collaborate.//
Well it depends on the details. Suppose that most EAs are wrong about, say, whether consciousness is physical (I actually think they are wrong about that). This wouldn't be an objection to EA because it doesn't threaten core EA priorities. I agree a philosophical objection would be successful if it shows that the things EAs do are not philosophically defensible, but I don't think there are arguments that show anything like that. Some arguments might favor tweaks at the margins, but there are no good arguments against, say, distributing antimalarial nets.
I agree that being an EA is inconvenient. Given that, it's worth establishing my credentials for willingness to do inconvenient things. First, think about my time in Mormonism. I gave two years of my adulthood, paying for the privilege, to work to convert people. I paid a 10% tithe, something EAs have adopted from religion but which you now imagine is an inconvenient sticking point for the vast majority of EA critics. I accepted enormous lifestyle restrictions, from no sex before marriage to no drinking alcohol, coffee, or tea to spending hours every week volunteering for and participating in my faith. And I grew up in a culture where all of that was perfectly mundane and normal, where people did facially inconvenient things as a matter of course.
When I decided my belief in Mormonism was unfounded, I stepped away from my entire culture in order to pursue something else. The "something else" I pursued was not the dominant culture in the broader society I stepped into, but a syncretic blend of a set of often-controversial ideas I believe in. I saved the great majority of my money while in the military, live a no-frills lifestyle, and am now spending tremendous amounts of time and money to have kids because I believe it's the right thing to do. There, too: I am in a gay marriage in a social context where surrogacy is often unpopular, and I stake both my actions and my reputation on living and defending my beliefs in that regard. I have made deliberate, conscious career tradeoffs in order both to do what seems like it will be the most worthwhile and to build a life alongside my husband. Like you, I speak in public, under my own name, about white-hot controversial issues—and not just in an abstract sense, but in diving deep into specific events with real, immediate stakes.
I have proven time and again throughout my life that I am very, very willing to do inconvenient things should I be convinced of their importance. You can tell yourself all you want that someone like me is just making desperate rationalizations when I tell you that I fundamentally disagree with broad swathes of your worldview, but you will only be fooling yourself. You tell yourself that you have many controversial views and that you see reasonable objections to many of them, but my own impression is that EA is the core from which many of your other views emanate, and that in your sentiment that all the arguments against it are rubbish, you are mostly just demonstrating what you already know: that it is the deepest-held part of your moral framework. That's fine for what it is, but you make yourself look foolish when you treat all critics as desperately making rationalizations for their own convenience.
I wasn't suggesting that you were a motivated reasoner nor that one who disagrees with broad swathes of my worldview is irrational. My claim is that the arguments for EA having done more harm than good or the notion that doing many of the things EAs recommend aren't very important. The critiques you raise, and even Hoel does, are more what I referred to as tinkering on the margins--disagreeing with a bit of the philosophy or with some of the priorities.
However, I claim that there aren't good arguments against the idea that giving money to antimalarial charities is important. The reason people think there are is mostly that they want to rationalize not doing it.
The point about motivated reasoning was explaining why even though there are a lot of critics, I think there being a lot of critics would be expected even if EA was obviously good.
Both our models play a role in the presence of there being many critics, but mine cuts closer to the core: many people scrutinize EAs closely because EAs implicitly assert they should have power over the entire world, giving the whole world standing to object and reason to care.
My criticism is not tinkering at the margins. I am emphatically and unambiguously anti-Singerian in my philosophy (even aside from the affairs that remain peculiarly absent from his public narrative), and you cannot take his distance-blind utilitarianism out of EA without the movement ceasing to be itself on a fundamental level. You, and they, are fundamentally and badly wrong about essential moral issues. The more power you, and they, have, the likelier you are to do extraordinarily bad things as a result of it. If you think my objections are minor, you do not take your own beliefs seriously.
I speak in unusually firm terms here because I have no patience for people acting as if this sort of fundamental disagreement is merely haggling about the details. A global movement that reflected my own frame would look radically different to EA in far-reaching ways.
I'm not sure whether we're all that "special" in how much scorn we get. We're a community, we have a pretty big presence on the internet. That means we have a horde of extremely online haters.
I used to sometimes wonder what the early EA & rationality community should have done different, that would get us less low-quality criticism, so the only bad press and subsequent hesitance we'd get would be due to actual scandals.
This is dumb. Compare us to literally anyone else. What exactly could eg My Little Pony fans do differently to stop getting slandered by randos? Should we shake our heads and say furries made avoidable PR blunders? Pick any subreddit that has a sense of community- is it in fact true that people will stop disparaging them when problematic behavior improves?
Even events that seem specific to EA. Gaming fandoms- should you feel bad when an influencer claims to be an avid fan of your game, and then has a slow public meltdown? In the subsequent videos by content-starved youtubers, should you take it to heart when they tell their listeners what you're doing wrong?
If an artist had a years-long abusive campaign against their old art community before someone invites them to your community, and then they leave and begin a years-long abusive campaign against you guys as well... Okay, whoever invited them, that was a lapse in judgement. But once that happened, there was no such thing as winning.
Personally when I think about it this way, the sense of distress drops off. Again, forget the parts about ideology, do-gooders, having ideas about others' actions, or involving money in any way. As a community with internet. Of course we get snide haters, stupid haters, obsessive haters, politicized haters, fearmongering haters. Of course we get "survivor stories" with a range of seriousness and relevance. Of course we get people who didn't understand their girlfriend's hobby, but they broke up so it must be bad. Of course we get articles by people who outgrew us cause we're silly folk who don't realize [thing that's on pg 3 of "Please Read This Before Joining Our Community In Any Fashion"].
This happens to everyone. I had vague hopes that the norms of being extremely openminded and understanding meant we'd tank all the psychic damage until the haters realized their mistakes. This was not actually possible and that is not actually our fault. Deranged takes couldn't be avoided and can't be stopped, so there's no point wasting energy on it.
I agree that the particular critics you're referring to are mostly dumb, but that doesn't mean good criticisms don't exist. (And that matters because if you're trying to figure out the best thing to do, the fact that people who oppose your current efforts are even worse, doesn't mean your thing is good.)
I agree with you that EAs have done an enormous amount of good by encouraging people to donate to effective charities in the global health & development and animal welfare cause areas. I'm proud of my donations to GiveWell, GiveDirectly, Animal Charity Evaluators, and the Humane League. I believe I ought to donate more than I do.
That said, I can imagine an argument much like yours being applied in defense of an organization that I think deserves substantial criticism: the United States government. After all, the US government also allocates a lot of resources to save children from malaria via the President's Malaria Initiative. The US government also saved a lot of people from HIV and AIDS via PEPFAR. Yet if someone said to me "How dare you criticize the US government when they do far more to save these lives than you do?" I do not think I would find it convincing. Likewise, I would not be convinced if someone said "How dare you criticize George W. Bush? He established PEPFAR and PMI! He's done more to save lives than you do!"
The reason I would find this unconvincing, course, is that the US government generally and George W. Bush specifically have done many things I consider deeply immoral and unjust. The Iraq War, torture, unjustly imprisoning people, enforcing deeply unjust immigration restrictions that trap people in poverty, and passing laws meant to protect and perpetuate factory farming (such as the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act), come to mind.
I suppose another reason I would find this unconvincing is that PMI and PEPFAR, and foreign aid in general, are a very small proportion of the US government's budget. The bulk of it goes to aiding elderly, ill, and disabled people in a very wealthy country and to maintaining a massive military.
So the question this raises is as follows: Have EAs generally done things as gravely wrong as the things the US government and George W. Bush have done? I don't think so. But if someone presents a credible argument that we have, then that's worth taking seriously.
Right, well so my criticism isn't so much with criticizing EA as making bad criticisms of EA--but that happens to be all the criticisms. If the criticisms of the U.S. government were describing support for it as a violent cult, acting as if being for it is a byproduct of some combination of stupidity and ignorance, and then all the criticisms involved ignoring the good things it is doing and waxing philosophical about the political outlook of the founders--particularly if it was done in service of a person justifying not paying taxes (imagine that one could get away with this, and let's stipulate that doing so would be seriously wrong--I think such actions would be worthy of harsh condemnation.
I don't identify as an EA, but EA has definitely motivated, increased, and improved my charitable giving, so I'm definitely pro-EA, and in no way ashamed to say so!
But has your new charitable giving actually achieved anything positive?
It is beyond me to answer that definitively, but I have every reason to hope so.
Just like those who give to normal charities.
Sure. I mean, I don't consider the charities I give to to be something other than normal charities
Well EA's whole raison d'être is that normal charities suck.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, or why it's to me specifically. I donate mostly to effective (in the EA sense) charities of immediate benefit to humans, a bit to one effective animal charity, and some to local humanitarian charities (like food bank type stuff). I donate more money, and more effectively (in the EA sense, which seems good), because of reading EA things. I also donate more, and to more immediate (not long-termist) causes, and some locally, because I am Christian. By no means do I claim to have figured it all out.
Amen
Yes. I don't identify as EA, mostly because I'm way to poor to even ASPIRE to belong to that club, though when I had a bit more money I indeed gave a small regular donation to Give Well for "doing objectively most good purposes" and another one to a local community thing for community belonging reasons, but if this criticism this post is arguing against is a real, widespread thing and not some elite student in group out group signalling game thing then it's bizarre and I agree, repugnant.
Now, I think most people I interact with in reality that's not pixels have never heard of EA (some might have never heard of utilitarianism either) and if/when I introduce the idea to them I've NEVER encountered a person who said "ewww nope". So I suspect that unless someone has "saving souls in eternity" or "global communism at any cost" as their real priority value, these criticisms MUST be based on disliking the people/vibe/culture involved.
There's another possibility, which is that there are people who do give to charity already and to whom the EA argument is, paradoxically, very persuasive on a rational level, and who cannot bring themselves to admit, even to themselves, that they have money to give to charity, they already do give, but they choose to support a local football club or a dog shelter or Amnesty or DV refuge and the dissonance is too strong so instead of saying "it's a valid choice to give some of my money to less effective but otherwise important for me personally and socially causes". They can't deal with that dissonance and feel compelled to attack the whole project.
Do EAs tend to proselytise in a way that could be read as trying to pushily persuade people to CHANGE the allocation of their charitable money?
The bit where it feels too accepting of existing world order does seem to have some validity though. In some ways SBF debacle was an extreme example of that. But that would imply that most criticism of EA comes from genuinely anti capitalist hard/material left, not people who just produce words on screen while working happily within structures of that world order, and I'm not sure if this is the case.
On second thoughts "I feel like a moral failure for not earning enough to meaningful contribute" might be another reason some people reject the whole thing. Hmmm.
EAs are justified in being at least as proud and self-righteous as a seriously religious person who actively promotes their religion. After all, it is like a religion, except it has the advantage of being very likely true.
Maybe the problem is that Effective Altruism doesn’t have a very compelling emotional case. So instead of accepting reason, morality, and EA, it’s a lot more satisfying to just refuse reason.
I think kids dying that we can do something about is emotionally salient--to me at least.
That's certainly in line with core Christain teachings, and maybe that's what was so revolutionary about Christ. Stating the "obvious" truths that no one even thinks about and translating them into action?
"Every nice thing I’ve done interpersonally doesn’t have half a percent the value of saving lives, of funneling money into the hands of charities so that little kids don’t get horrible diseases that kill them."
I feel like people really don't want to hear that everything in their personal lives is trivial compared to the goodness of altruism. Now, of course, goodness is not zero-sum. But emotional bandwidth might be?
The teachings of Christ were not revolutionary truths about charities for “saving kids”.
EAs are in a weird spot there the vast majority are far too agreeable and insufficiently proud and confident, yet the most high profile people associated with it like SBF or Eliezer Yudkowsky are the total opposite.
I think this is a really great piece. I hope to be able to take this sentiment on board more myself.
I agree about the incredible amount of unfathomably poor-quality criticisms of EA.
At the risk of stating the obvious, I think it's important to remember not to frame poor criticisms as 'the real criticisms of EA', at least in our own minds. There are far better criticisms, though these tend to be criticisms of ‘part of EA’ rather than ‘all of EA’
At the risk of stating the obvious again, I think we should be extremely skeptical of anyone writing like, one article in an attempt to push a narrative like 'EA specifically is bad', and can be fairly confident from the title that it's largely nonsense (or that it actually makes much weaker claims than its title suggests, or implies much broader things than its title suggests).
None of this is to say that responding to poor criticisms in public does not have value. I think it definitely does. But I'd be cautious of thinking that these are the real best attempts at criticism of EA, and perhaps cautious of giving people that impression, too.
I also generally think that, as a mark of respect to the endeavour, one should question oneself before throwing stones at things other people pour significant time and effort into at a significant personal cost. Not that we can’t ever criticise, obviously, but we should at least think *some amount* before criticising, and make sure we *actually know what it is we're criticising*. Sometimes people don’t realise what EA does and what it means to people, and throw around lazy stereotypes that they wouldn't throw around in other contexts. I personally think I’m well within my rights to (at least privately) find this at least a little bit disrespectful - and I think others should be able to feel the same.
It's the smug name. And people don't like nerds. And especially smug (their words) nerds telling them how they're doing charity wrong. Just my two cents.
Apart from abstract reservations about Utilitarianism, a non-silly crit of EA that pops to mind would be something like: it tends to favor working within the current global order to fix problems, and encourages its adherents to succeed within that order.
IF the current order is deeply bad, then in practice EA might be limited. In practice, EA probably functions, for *some* of its adherents, to legitimize what they would do anyway, which is succeeding Big among the technocratic elite, working on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley, et cet.
Of course, Master's tools for Master's house. . . .if you want to really change the world, you probably should aspire to get near the levers of power. . . without compromising your goals/principles along the way.
And of course, in principle EA is committed to doing whatever is best, including, if the U-calculator says so, subverting the global order. Actually, if we all simply followed Singer's conclusion in "Famine, Affluence and Morality", there'd be no need for a top-down system of income redistribution. The world would equalize by individual agency, probably the best way for it to happen!
And so many common EA agendas, like ending factory farming, entail a radical shift in the global order.
So what is the alternative thing they should do.
Assuming Utilitarianism, it's just an empirical question of what will do the most good, and then comparing the answer with what, in practice, the EA community tends to do. If the best thing is something radical like "dismantle the international finance system" [I don't know] or "halt the spread of industrial civilization", yet EA proposals all involve working within these systems, then. . . . it's still not a crit of EA in principle. It could be framed as a dispute about what EA entails, in practice.
Recognizing that you're only raising a potential argument subject to empirical questions- Personally I like the version of EA where we do not "get near the levers of power" with plans of "subverting the global order" given that we haven't seen much empirical case for doing so.
There's things we can do as a set of lawful and transparent organizations with clearly stated goals, and there's things we could instead do as a clandestine organization with revolutionary aims. Doing the latter would more or less permanently rule out returning to the former if it turned out we were wrong. Additionally, it would be much harder for the next consequentialist movement that tried lawful and transparent strategies, since the system would assume they too would pivot into revolutionary activities. So we should be *very* reluctant to switch strategies until the empirical evidence is very strong.
Further, I think both types would have issues with peoples' goals and principles being compromised by exposure to power, and with people who actually just wanted power the whole time. Power corrupts regardless of how you get it.
Possibly EA will diversify as it matures and admit of several factions or strategies, some not even associated, in the public consciousness, with the title "EA". I suppose this kind of diversification happens often with successful movements, and might be good at least in that multiple approaches are tested, and terrible failure of one of them may not tarnish the others, from a PR perspective.
(This doesn't apply to arguments that EA's ought to pursue more radical aims, while still doing so lawfully and transparently and within the current system. But my read was that you were thinking at least partially of power-seizey strategies.)
The problem with a "seize the levers of power" as a strategy to achieve positive change is that everyone on the entire planet is constantly trying to seize the levers of power, so the cost-benefit ratio is likely to be extremely bad. The AMF can be as effective as it is because the group of people actively fighting to support malaria continuing to kill African children is so small as to be effectively 0, while the amount of effort spent fighting it is still quite low (otherwise it would be extinct by now). Factory farming has some support, but most people broadly agree with its goals, they simply don't care enough to actually do literally one single thing about it. These interventions are the proverbial $20 on the train station
On the other hand, there are already billions of dollars poured into Presidential campaigns. The marginal value of another forty-five hundred dollars in such an election is about nil, but with the AMF, that's ~how much it costs to save a child's life. Carrick Flynn lost 2:1 in the primaries despite EAs spending millions on his campaign.
EA is not about "fixing" the world. It is about doing the most good per dollar. Politics may be able to fix the world, but it is hard to imagine there are many twenty dollar bills left to pick up, and any that exist are surely more "try focusing on [issue that people care about but is ignored by both major parties]" than "spend more money."
Very true to my experience as well. Well said!
Do you think this is too spicy for the EA forum?
Nope, this is great. The only reason not to post is because it’s been said, but, if you think under-appreciated at the margin, I would say go for it
Well the language was kind of mean! I call people dumb
The only criticism that holds water is that we shouldn’t live in a system where people die of preventable things, and one of the few ways we can change things is based off of the goodwill of individuals — putting a bandaid on a blown-off limb.
That’s what critics are getting at, which is valid; and EAs respond “well at least I’m doing something”, which is also valid.
Frankly, my problem with EA is that it is not fit for purpose, and intrinsically can't be. The tools its using are incapable of solving the problem EA tries to solve.
Effective Altruists receive a great deal of scrutiny, much of it unreasonable and unfair. But it is emphatically not unreasonable that they face more scrutiny than many others. Why?
When you say "I want to do good in the world," what you are really saying is "I want power and should be trusted with it." Many people aim to do good in specific, limited domains they perceive a duty towards, and are as a result scrutinized only in the context of those domains. Effective altruists, in taking a proximity-blind approach to doing good, aim to assert power over the whole world, and are as a result scrutinized in a global context. The movement as a whole is extraordinarily power-seeking. That doesn't make it bad! But it cannot be ignored and means that it will, and should, face much more scrutiny than less power-seeking movements.
I realize that it's hard to give credit to critics of your own movement, but it betrays a blind spot in your own thinking to act as if critics are all stupid, uninformed, or malicious. I've seen many good-faith, sensible critiques of the movement, and I share many of them. Erik Hoel is particularly notable here (https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/why-i-am-not-an-effective-altruist). I like effective altruists because I think almost all of them are sincere, good people willing to sacrifice to make good things happen, and they often succeed more than I do within my own morality, but I have deep-running moral disagreements with the movement that, while they don't negate the good it does, simply cannot be papered over with "but they also do good."
Writing my response to the movement as a whole is probably outside the scope of a quick article comment, but so you have an idea, here are my most serious critiques in abbreviated form:
1. People have greater duty towards those with greater proximity towards them in ways EA as a movement struggles to recognize. Parents have greater duty towards their children than to strangers. Friends have greater duty towards their friends. Members of the same communities have greater duties towards members of their communities. Because we travel in similar circles, I have a greater duty towards you than towards people who travel in distant circles, and am liable to spend more time engaging with you as a result. That is appropriate, not a glitch in morality: while all people can certainly be said to have equal moral value from a hypothetical gods-eye view, none of us are God, and our particular positions give us greater or lesser degrees of duty towards particular people and ideas.
2. EA is far too susceptible to negative utilitarianism, which is evil and which any serious moral movement should be able to unambiguously describe as evil. A viewpoint that holds that suffering overwhelmingly outweighs the entire project of life, one that treats omnicide as only regrettably impractical and not obviously evil, has values fundamentally inimical to life.
Because negative utilitarians tend to be suffering-focused, even though most EAs do not identify that way they are taken seriously and retain broad sway in the movement given EA's own at-times monomaniacal focus on suffering (or the suffering/pleasure dichotomy). From my own angle, this mistakes the signifier for the signified (reduction of suffering as end goal rather than continuation and expansion of the grand project of life). This leads them to seriously entertain and put forward wildly power-seeking and irresponsible ideas like "Is it our duty to destroy all wild animals to reduce animal suffering?", and has other negative effects at the margins on much shorter time-scales.
I'm glad EA inspires you to do good, I respect the charity work effective altruists do, and I'm not looking to tell you you ought to tear down your entire worldview. All I'm saying in this comment, really, is that you should treat critics fairly and avoid breezily dismissing them out of hand.
I don't have any in-principle problem with people criticizing EA. If there really were lots of bad things being done in the name of EA, those would be worth criticizing. But, well, when one just looks at what the critics say, they're all very unconvincing. I feel the same way about Hoel's critique, and I've written about it before https://benthams.substack.com/p/erik-hoels-mistaken-criticism-of?utm_source=publication-search.
I don't just breezily dismiss the critics. I have written detailed responses to ~a dozen popular criticisms of EA. My assessment after doing that: they all suck! The only ones that are reasonable are the ones of the form "you're doing X a bit and this is less good than Y," but the ones that argue against it as a whole are just deeply, deeply crazy.
As for your criticisms, beginning with the first about proximity--it's true that lots of EAs don't think proximity is morally salient. I happen to share their judgment, and have written about why there aren't special obligations here https://benthams.substack.com/p/believers-in-special-obligations?utm_source=publication-search and why there aren't especially strong duties one has to members of their country here https://benthams.substack.com/p/america-second. But even if you think that there are special obligations, they have to be extremely strong to justify, in ones charitable giving, giving domestically rather than to the potentially 100 times more effective against malaria foundation. If you were walking by a pool and could either save one American child or 100 foreign children, you should obviously save the 100 foreign children.
2. Well first of all, even if you're right about this, I don't think it undermines the case for any of the things EA actually does. This is one bad element of basically all of the serious critiques--they're all about disagreeing with random things believed by EAs even if they don't affect what EA actually does in the real world.
I'm not a negative utilitarian and think that negative utilitarianism is crazy. That said, suffering is clearly *one of the things that matters*. If there were a bunch of people being tortured and you could press a button that would stop their torture, that would be a good thing to do, even if the alternative still didn't enable them to pursue life projects. If suffering is a bad thing, then reducing wild animal suffering is important.
You suggest that our goal should be "continuation and expansion of the grand project of life." Surely that's not the only thing! Suppose that we could create a bunch of people whose subject experiences would be, for the first 50 years of their life, akin to the worst forms of torture, but they'd live lives after the 50 years of torture. Surely, even though this would expand life, doing so would be seriously wrong.
The thing that seems obvious to me is that if you want to live a moral life, an important part of that will be doing lots of things related to EA. Critics act like finding a few contested philosophical assumptions means they shouldn't be an EA--and then use that to justify not taking high-impact careers or giving to effective charities.
Btw, I'm trying to start a podcastish thing where I sometimes have on interesting people and chat with them--would you have any interest in recording an episode where we talk about these things?
Having had a chance to read your article on why there aren't special obligations, I'm baffled that you would link it in response to my claim about duty and proximity.
Me: "People have greater duty towards those with greater proximity towards them in ways EA as a movement struggles to recognize. ... our particular positions give us greater or lesser degrees of duty towards particular people and ideas."
You: "Obligations are relative to a person, and your moral obligations to help your friends and family are much stronger than your obligations to help strangers."
That you feel inclined to argue against my claim after conceding more-or-less all of it in your first paragraph before arguing against a much more esoteric, abstract claim is itself, I believe, telling. It suggests to me that you are simply nodding along to your own first paragraph as a figleaf before aiming to dismiss far-reaching implications of its reality with a winding argument against nobody in particular.
My read that it is simply a figleaf is reiterated in your country article where you claim that "Where a person lives is totally irrelevant to our moral obligations to them." This is explicitly contradicted by the idea that obligations are relative to individuals! Your first paragraph on special obligations, though, was correct: obligations are relative to people in far-reaching ways you briefly nod to before seemingly forgetting you ever said anything of the sort.
You suggest my claim is that "Obligations are relative to a person, and your moral obligations to help your friends and family are much stronger than your obligations to help strangers." I'm a bit confused--that's the entirety of what my first article was arguing against. I didn't concede it in the first paragraph--I granted that there are all sorts of practical reasons why one should do more to help those nearer to them. My claim was that if all else is really equal, one's obligations don't favor helping them.
Maybe what you're saying--let me know if I'm getting this right--is that while if all else is equal we have no especially strong obligations to those nearer to us, we should structure society to be such that we care more about those nearer to us because that's better overall.
If it's true that the people we should care about whichever groups makes things go best overall, then that's not really believing in special obligations. More importantly for our dispute, that would imply that EA's emphasis on impartiality is very valuable! Because in the case of the things EA recommends doing, all else is not equal--we can help far-away people much more than nearby people. If this is so, and we should have our obligations be calibrated such that they produce maximally great benefits for people globally, then we should exhibit great concern about people dying.
Even if one thinks they have special obligations to those nearer to them, even if those make one's duties to their countrymen 10x stronger than to strangers, because of the outrageous effectiveness of EA charities, they should still give to the against malaria consortium over charities helping their own countrymen.
Oh, sorry, I misread. I do think this--
"There are lots of good reasons to care more about your friends and family than about random strangers. When people watch out for those close to them, society goes better. Families and friendships are perhaps the most efficient vehicles of making people better off in the history of the world—so it’s not hard to explain why we should value them."
--suggests something rather stronger than you acknowledge, but I misread that later sentence as being an affirmative claim connected to that.
Why do you think that? My claim which is that we don't have any special obligations to those nearer to us but there are lots of practical reasons to care about them more and do more things to help them. Compare this to Kant's view that we don't have any obligations to animals but we should still take care of them, because otherwise we become corrupt.
A world in which all people help all people equally is neither possible nor desirable. If you care about your child or your friend as much as you care about eight billion other people, you care about nobody in any meaningful way at all. Localism is easily explainable via universalist principles: it is better for everyone that they have some people who care about them more than they care about strangers. It is good for children to have parents who love them. It is good for people to have friends who bake cakes for them and watch their houses for them. It is good for Bentham's Bulldog to attend Manifest to build alongside and chat with other people like him.
People have limited focuses, limited understanding, and limited capacity. You cannot abstract away every consideration when trying to put your time and attention towards a universally Best Thing--one who had power over everyone would have such a duty and ought to be expected to take those considerations into account, but you as an individual are best equipped to speak about things you understand, help those in situations you are well acquainted with and have personal investment in, and devote your energies towards communities who share enough of your ideas for you to be compatible with them.
The only way to achieve this universally more desirable state is to note a stronger sense of duty towards those near you, for every definition of the word near, than about those far from you, for every definition of the word far.
Yeah, I’d be happy to come on and chat. We obviously have far-reaching disagreements here and it would be worth hashing some of them out. I respect that you’ve engaged in depth at times with criticism and that your sentiment that critics all suck is earnest, but it reflects an overconfidence that I expect you’d do well to reconsider. You take “be proud to be an EA” (which is understandable and admirable—one ought to stand behind one’s convictions) and expand it to “critics of my group all suck” (which is very convenient but should give you pause given that naive members of almost every movement feel like that from the inside).
Finding serious philosophical objections to a movement absolutely means one shouldn’t be part of that movement. If I think EAs are wrong about some incredibly important things that would need fundamental restructuring to correct, it would be absurd of me to work within their frame, even though I can and do certainly find narrow alignment and space to collaborate. People’s beliefs have far-reaching impacts on their actions and their priorities. Values disagreements matter a great deal and can’t be papered over with “but we also do some things you agree with.”
Cool, just sent you an email.
I agree that generally when people hold that view that all the criticisms of their views suck, they are wrong and overconfident. If I said this about all of my controversial views--theism, utilitarianism, veganism, that the Democrats are better, that we should have something near open borders, and so on--that would be a big red flag. But I don't say that about all those things and am, I think, much less confident in my views on most hot-button issues than is typical. But it wouldn't be surprising if there were some views which were only opposed by terrible objections.
EA is a particularly likely candidate for such a topic because being an EA is inconvenient. Taking seriously EA advice requires accepting that you really should be acting very differently if you don't give a bunch of money to charity. If there's something that is inconvenient to follow, it wouldn't be surprising if the objections to it are basically all desperate rationalizations.
I wouldn't say that there are no serious criticisms of particular parts of EA. One can raise real objections to longtermism. But the people who think that how one lives their life shouldn't be majorly shaped by EA principles have, I think, no good arguments. (I don't even know if Hoel thinks that--he seems to think EA is a force for good in the world but just disagrees with the philosophy. To me this seems like not voting for Democrats on the grounds that you like their policies but think too many of them are atheists).
//Finding serious philosophical objections to a movement absolutely means one shouldn’t be part of that movement. If I think EAs are wrong about some incredibly important things that would need fundamental restructuring to correct, it would be absurd of me to work within their frame, even though I can and do certainly find narrow alignment and space to collaborate.//
Well it depends on the details. Suppose that most EAs are wrong about, say, whether consciousness is physical (I actually think they are wrong about that). This wouldn't be an objection to EA because it doesn't threaten core EA priorities. I agree a philosophical objection would be successful if it shows that the things EAs do are not philosophically defensible, but I don't think there are arguments that show anything like that. Some arguments might favor tweaks at the margins, but there are no good arguments against, say, distributing antimalarial nets.
I agree that being an EA is inconvenient. Given that, it's worth establishing my credentials for willingness to do inconvenient things. First, think about my time in Mormonism. I gave two years of my adulthood, paying for the privilege, to work to convert people. I paid a 10% tithe, something EAs have adopted from religion but which you now imagine is an inconvenient sticking point for the vast majority of EA critics. I accepted enormous lifestyle restrictions, from no sex before marriage to no drinking alcohol, coffee, or tea to spending hours every week volunteering for and participating in my faith. And I grew up in a culture where all of that was perfectly mundane and normal, where people did facially inconvenient things as a matter of course.
When I decided my belief in Mormonism was unfounded, I stepped away from my entire culture in order to pursue something else. The "something else" I pursued was not the dominant culture in the broader society I stepped into, but a syncretic blend of a set of often-controversial ideas I believe in. I saved the great majority of my money while in the military, live a no-frills lifestyle, and am now spending tremendous amounts of time and money to have kids because I believe it's the right thing to do. There, too: I am in a gay marriage in a social context where surrogacy is often unpopular, and I stake both my actions and my reputation on living and defending my beliefs in that regard. I have made deliberate, conscious career tradeoffs in order both to do what seems like it will be the most worthwhile and to build a life alongside my husband. Like you, I speak in public, under my own name, about white-hot controversial issues—and not just in an abstract sense, but in diving deep into specific events with real, immediate stakes.
I have proven time and again throughout my life that I am very, very willing to do inconvenient things should I be convinced of their importance. You can tell yourself all you want that someone like me is just making desperate rationalizations when I tell you that I fundamentally disagree with broad swathes of your worldview, but you will only be fooling yourself. You tell yourself that you have many controversial views and that you see reasonable objections to many of them, but my own impression is that EA is the core from which many of your other views emanate, and that in your sentiment that all the arguments against it are rubbish, you are mostly just demonstrating what you already know: that it is the deepest-held part of your moral framework. That's fine for what it is, but you make yourself look foolish when you treat all critics as desperately making rationalizations for their own convenience.
I wasn't suggesting that you were a motivated reasoner nor that one who disagrees with broad swathes of my worldview is irrational. My claim is that the arguments for EA having done more harm than good or the notion that doing many of the things EAs recommend aren't very important. The critiques you raise, and even Hoel does, are more what I referred to as tinkering on the margins--disagreeing with a bit of the philosophy or with some of the priorities.
However, I claim that there aren't good arguments against the idea that giving money to antimalarial charities is important. The reason people think there are is mostly that they want to rationalize not doing it.
The point about motivated reasoning was explaining why even though there are a lot of critics, I think there being a lot of critics would be expected even if EA was obviously good.
Both our models play a role in the presence of there being many critics, but mine cuts closer to the core: many people scrutinize EAs closely because EAs implicitly assert they should have power over the entire world, giving the whole world standing to object and reason to care.
My criticism is not tinkering at the margins. I am emphatically and unambiguously anti-Singerian in my philosophy (even aside from the affairs that remain peculiarly absent from his public narrative), and you cannot take his distance-blind utilitarianism out of EA without the movement ceasing to be itself on a fundamental level. You, and they, are fundamentally and badly wrong about essential moral issues. The more power you, and they, have, the likelier you are to do extraordinarily bad things as a result of it. If you think my objections are minor, you do not take your own beliefs seriously.
I speak in unusually firm terms here because I have no patience for people acting as if this sort of fundamental disagreement is merely haggling about the details. A global movement that reflected my own frame would look radically different to EA in far-reaching ways.
I don't care at all about EA but it is incredible how many outright stupid people speak out against it.
Regarding dumb hyperbolic attacks against EA:
I'm not sure whether we're all that "special" in how much scorn we get. We're a community, we have a pretty big presence on the internet. That means we have a horde of extremely online haters.
I used to sometimes wonder what the early EA & rationality community should have done different, that would get us less low-quality criticism, so the only bad press and subsequent hesitance we'd get would be due to actual scandals.
This is dumb. Compare us to literally anyone else. What exactly could eg My Little Pony fans do differently to stop getting slandered by randos? Should we shake our heads and say furries made avoidable PR blunders? Pick any subreddit that has a sense of community- is it in fact true that people will stop disparaging them when problematic behavior improves?
Even events that seem specific to EA. Gaming fandoms- should you feel bad when an influencer claims to be an avid fan of your game, and then has a slow public meltdown? In the subsequent videos by content-starved youtubers, should you take it to heart when they tell their listeners what you're doing wrong?
If an artist had a years-long abusive campaign against their old art community before someone invites them to your community, and then they leave and begin a years-long abusive campaign against you guys as well... Okay, whoever invited them, that was a lapse in judgement. But once that happened, there was no such thing as winning.
Personally when I think about it this way, the sense of distress drops off. Again, forget the parts about ideology, do-gooders, having ideas about others' actions, or involving money in any way. As a community with internet. Of course we get snide haters, stupid haters, obsessive haters, politicized haters, fearmongering haters. Of course we get "survivor stories" with a range of seriousness and relevance. Of course we get people who didn't understand their girlfriend's hobby, but they broke up so it must be bad. Of course we get articles by people who outgrew us cause we're silly folk who don't realize [thing that's on pg 3 of "Please Read This Before Joining Our Community In Any Fashion"].
This happens to everyone. I had vague hopes that the norms of being extremely openminded and understanding meant we'd tank all the psychic damage until the haters realized their mistakes. This was not actually possible and that is not actually our fault. Deranged takes couldn't be avoided and can't be stopped, so there's no point wasting energy on it.
I agree that the particular critics you're referring to are mostly dumb, but that doesn't mean good criticisms don't exist. (And that matters because if you're trying to figure out the best thing to do, the fact that people who oppose your current efforts are even worse, doesn't mean your thing is good.)
Have you read anything about EA by Ben Hoffman? I think ["A Drowning Child is Hard to Find"](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/drowning-children-rare/), ["Effective Altruism is Self-Recommending"](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/), and ["Parkinson's Law and the Ideology of Statistics"](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/parkinsons-law-ideology-statistics/) are worth serious consideration.
I agree with you that EAs have done an enormous amount of good by encouraging people to donate to effective charities in the global health & development and animal welfare cause areas. I'm proud of my donations to GiveWell, GiveDirectly, Animal Charity Evaluators, and the Humane League. I believe I ought to donate more than I do.
That said, I can imagine an argument much like yours being applied in defense of an organization that I think deserves substantial criticism: the United States government. After all, the US government also allocates a lot of resources to save children from malaria via the President's Malaria Initiative. The US government also saved a lot of people from HIV and AIDS via PEPFAR. Yet if someone said to me "How dare you criticize the US government when they do far more to save these lives than you do?" I do not think I would find it convincing. Likewise, I would not be convinced if someone said "How dare you criticize George W. Bush? He established PEPFAR and PMI! He's done more to save lives than you do!"
The reason I would find this unconvincing, course, is that the US government generally and George W. Bush specifically have done many things I consider deeply immoral and unjust. The Iraq War, torture, unjustly imprisoning people, enforcing deeply unjust immigration restrictions that trap people in poverty, and passing laws meant to protect and perpetuate factory farming (such as the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act), come to mind.
I suppose another reason I would find this unconvincing is that PMI and PEPFAR, and foreign aid in general, are a very small proportion of the US government's budget. The bulk of it goes to aiding elderly, ill, and disabled people in a very wealthy country and to maintaining a massive military.
So the question this raises is as follows: Have EAs generally done things as gravely wrong as the things the US government and George W. Bush have done? I don't think so. But if someone presents a credible argument that we have, then that's worth taking seriously.
Right, well so my criticism isn't so much with criticizing EA as making bad criticisms of EA--but that happens to be all the criticisms. If the criticisms of the U.S. government were describing support for it as a violent cult, acting as if being for it is a byproduct of some combination of stupidity and ignorance, and then all the criticisms involved ignoring the good things it is doing and waxing philosophical about the political outlook of the founders--particularly if it was done in service of a person justifying not paying taxes (imagine that one could get away with this, and let's stipulate that doing so would be seriously wrong--I think such actions would be worthy of harsh condemnation.