I think the challenge for EA is what it expects, and despite the fact that the reasoning behind it seems flawless, it’s still hard to truly accept and act on it.
It’s much easier to claim that the view is clearly false and vilify those who give away their money as virtue signallers.
When you think being a good person just requires sharing an Instagram story and putting a flag in your bio, seeing people actually get things done probably makes you feel uncomfortable
I think this is the source of a lot of criticism of EA from the left. If your biggest contribution to society is tweeting “capitalism sux” every day, then the kidney-donating vegans are a real threat to your image of yourself as a good person. So you have to come up with some explanation of why they’re not better than you. But *of course* the kidney-donating vegans are better than the “capitalism sux” tweeters, so the explanations are inevitably a load of BS.
So, it seems your criticism is just that EAs aren’t really EAs. Which is compatible with thinking EA as a concept is right.
I find it hard to argue against EA provided that it seems undeniable that performing easy rescues is obligatory, and that I can donate money to do something very much like that. There are intricacies of course, such as how much money to give away, whether one must revolve their whole life around money making, etc.
A minimalist conception of EA might just be that we should give at least 10% of our income to charities (provided we can) that can best use the funds to do the most good. To be clear, I DO NOT currently do this. But this just seems to count against my virtue-or so it seems to me.
The left hates EA because EA says most of the things the left rallies around are either wrong or relatively unimportant. EA principles are an existential threat to their worldview and self-image, and they treat it accordingly.
I think socialists just don't like the fact that there's a rival movement with at least as much moral clarity as theirs, which isn't explicitly left-wing. A lot of them believe that you can't be a good person unless you accept leftist articles of faith.
My impression after spending a lot of time on the left is that there are two kinds of (unconvincing) objections to EA:
1. Private charity, particularly billionaire philanthropy, is more problematic than public spending. I disagree with your point that private charity is better than taxing and spending on voluntariness grounds (I don't think taxation is involuntary or that the pre-tax distribution of income is voluntary). But beyond that, there's the worry that private charity is problematic because of issues like the influence of wealthy donors and how private charities are not subject to democratic accountability. I agree with this objection but I don't think it provides a compelling reason to be against the EA approach because, unlike domestic spending, foreign aid is similarly problematic + we have to make do with the institutions we have.
2. EA is in bed with right-wing Silicon Valley types who have very bad politics. I think that's true but overstated (more of an online thing than an IRL thing in my experience) and also not a compelling reason to be anti-EA per se.
I think it is just hated because it is associated with other things which are hated by the left. The EA movement is associated with the rationalist group, which in turn is associated with silicon valley tech bros and libertarianism. EA advocates also often like to make points like, "you shouldn't worry about X at home, because Y abroad is much worse." While this may be true, it is not surprising that the people making those points are not well liked.
Also, people don't like it when others are morally superior to them, unless those people are already dead, because it makes us feel bad about ourselves, so rather than admit that EA has a point and we should all do more for charity we look for flaws in the ideology.
EA just is utilitarianism. It’s bad, according to leftism, because it’s committed to the wrong kind of equality. But at heart EA and leftism are on the same team because they’re both obsessed with rationality, central planning, and the importance of leaving nothing to chance.
I think many on the left reject the parts of utilitarianism that really are central to EA. Effective altruists don’t have to think you should violate deontological constraints to further their goals, but they do endorse a kind of moral impartiality between people who are nearby and people who are distant in space or time. If you think, as some left-leaning critics of EA seem to, that reducing income inequality within the United States is more important than saving lives in poor countries, then your moral concerns are just a lot more parochial than those of the EA movement.
Many on the left also seem to reject the moral centrality of promoting welfare. They seem much more interested in eliminating illicit benefits—privilege. I think if you could push a magic button that would achieve equality by lowering the wellbeing of, e.g., billionaires and white people without improving anyone else’s lives, many on the left would push that button, but most in the EA movement wouldn’t.
I'd wager (based on absolutely no evidence) that the fundamental reasons behind those on the left not endorsing EA are roughly similar to those on the right, but with different flavours of motivated reasoning.
The fundamental reasons would be those seen with really any collective action problem - that it sucks to make an individual sacrifice for something that is larger than any individual (e.g., poverty), and that the benefits of an individual donation aren't easily identifiable (thereby not giving people nice warm fuzzy feelings). As these reasons aren't really compelling argumentatively, those on the left/right need a rationalisation that stills serves their underlying ideology.
Therefore, left-wing people will make the arguments you presented above, as they all resolve the cognitive dissonance of "Oh damn it's actually not that hard/expensive to help a lot of people....someone should do something about that, not me tho lol" whilst maintaining all of the things they already believed (e.g., rich people/capitalism bad). On the other hand, those on the right might make some argument along the lines of ownership/nature/familial obligations that serve the same purpose of resolving any need to actually contribute.
It's basically the same as the veganism case - even though leftists are much more likely than rightists to be vegan (probably, idk), you'd still have a vast majority who'd argue something along the lines of "no ethical consumption under capitalism therefore I don't have to change personally". You'd think everyone could get around the light EA position (you should donate *something*, and you should probably try to maximise your donation), but apparently not!
1: Most committed leftist activists think they are effective altruists, as in, they are practicing altruism effectively, because only toppling capitalism will overturn the suffering in the third world that necessitates all this charity in the first place. I doubt they're right, but as far as they're concerned, Effective Altruists are just a bunch of ineffective or disingenuous altruists calling themselves Effective Altruists (TM).
2: Imagine that most EAs were pedophiles. That would be pretty bad from an optics / effectiveness perspective, but still not a reason to donate to your local art museum over malaria nets. Pretty much every philosophical argument in favor of EA would still apply perfectly even if we discovered that every single prominent EA were a closet pedophile. Sure, you should still donate to effective global health initiatives, but you can do that without being a capital EA, and you probably shouldn't support the capital Effective Altruist movement even if you can quietly practice effective altruism on your own time.
3: Both sides sort of implicitly agree that there's a limited pool of charity that both teams are fighting over. EAs will very often make arguments like "don't donate to your local college endowment, donate to starving children instead" which granted is a pretty good argument but they'll much less often explicitly exhort people "don't order dessert, donate to starving children instead" because it makes people unhappy. For committed leftists who want to achieve the critical mass of activism that will somehow overturn capitalism, EAs are just raiding the pool.
4. The test isn't very good. Imagine that a poor child is going to receive a heart transplant, but then you jump in and say, "actually, it would better to auction this heart off to the highest bidder so we can use the money to promote chicken welfare instead." Maybe you'd be very comfortable with that, but that's probably because you're a utilitarian already, so it's mostly just a test of what you already believe.
Agree with 1 and 2, 3 is a bit of a stretch. Usually EA's just prescribe the 10% rule and a few go beyond that. I've never met anyone unwilling to order desert
4 is just a different situation to the one I stipulated? You basically just said "That scenario doesn't work because imagine if this totally different scenario happened. We'd have different intuitions!" I'm not sure how that is a critique of my test. The test is a "Is this a good enough reason not to give to the global poor" test, and not "is this a good enough reason to deny a kid a transplant" test
I'm not really sure where you're getting any of this from. Either current EA interventions don't work (which I'd like to see the evidence for), in which case it just means current interventions aren't effective and we should pivot. It wouldn't count against the philosophy of trying to good effectively itself.
Or, you think it's impossible to maximise the good we do in principle? Which seems obviously false. Giving money to the Against Malaria Foundation obviously does more good than giving it to a random person on the street. Are no actions better than any others?
You didn't really make any points except "I hate EA".
I think the challenge for EA is what it expects, and despite the fact that the reasoning behind it seems flawless, it’s still hard to truly accept and act on it.
It’s much easier to claim that the view is clearly false and vilify those who give away their money as virtue signallers.
When you think being a good person just requires sharing an Instagram story and putting a flag in your bio, seeing people actually get things done probably makes you feel uncomfortable
I think this is the source of a lot of criticism of EA from the left. If your biggest contribution to society is tweeting “capitalism sux” every day, then the kidney-donating vegans are a real threat to your image of yourself as a good person. So you have to come up with some explanation of why they’re not better than you. But *of course* the kidney-donating vegans are better than the “capitalism sux” tweeters, so the explanations are inevitably a load of BS.
So, it seems your criticism is just that EAs aren’t really EAs. Which is compatible with thinking EA as a concept is right.
I find it hard to argue against EA provided that it seems undeniable that performing easy rescues is obligatory, and that I can donate money to do something very much like that. There are intricacies of course, such as how much money to give away, whether one must revolve their whole life around money making, etc.
A minimalist conception of EA might just be that we should give at least 10% of our income to charities (provided we can) that can best use the funds to do the most good. To be clear, I DO NOT currently do this. But this just seems to count against my virtue-or so it seems to me.
The left hates EA because EA says most of the things the left rallies around are either wrong or relatively unimportant. EA principles are an existential threat to their worldview and self-image, and they treat it accordingly.
I think socialists just don't like the fact that there's a rival movement with at least as much moral clarity as theirs, which isn't explicitly left-wing. A lot of them believe that you can't be a good person unless you accept leftist articles of faith.
My impression after spending a lot of time on the left is that there are two kinds of (unconvincing) objections to EA:
1. Private charity, particularly billionaire philanthropy, is more problematic than public spending. I disagree with your point that private charity is better than taxing and spending on voluntariness grounds (I don't think taxation is involuntary or that the pre-tax distribution of income is voluntary). But beyond that, there's the worry that private charity is problematic because of issues like the influence of wealthy donors and how private charities are not subject to democratic accountability. I agree with this objection but I don't think it provides a compelling reason to be against the EA approach because, unlike domestic spending, foreign aid is similarly problematic + we have to make do with the institutions we have.
2. EA is in bed with right-wing Silicon Valley types who have very bad politics. I think that's true but overstated (more of an online thing than an IRL thing in my experience) and also not a compelling reason to be anti-EA per se.
I think it is just hated because it is associated with other things which are hated by the left. The EA movement is associated with the rationalist group, which in turn is associated with silicon valley tech bros and libertarianism. EA advocates also often like to make points like, "you shouldn't worry about X at home, because Y abroad is much worse." While this may be true, it is not surprising that the people making those points are not well liked.
Also, people don't like it when others are morally superior to them, unless those people are already dead, because it makes us feel bad about ourselves, so rather than admit that EA has a point and we should all do more for charity we look for flaws in the ideology.
> Yet, somehow it’s possible to brush aside some of the worst genocides in history as evil people merely appropriating leftist ideas
Unfortunately the number of leftists who think they're good is not trivial! Or just see Noam Chomsky doing genocide denial on the Khmer Rouge.
EA just is utilitarianism. It’s bad, according to leftism, because it’s committed to the wrong kind of equality. But at heart EA and leftism are on the same team because they’re both obsessed with rationality, central planning, and the importance of leaving nothing to chance.
I think many on the left reject the parts of utilitarianism that really are central to EA. Effective altruists don’t have to think you should violate deontological constraints to further their goals, but they do endorse a kind of moral impartiality between people who are nearby and people who are distant in space or time. If you think, as some left-leaning critics of EA seem to, that reducing income inequality within the United States is more important than saving lives in poor countries, then your moral concerns are just a lot more parochial than those of the EA movement.
Many on the left also seem to reject the moral centrality of promoting welfare. They seem much more interested in eliminating illicit benefits—privilege. I think if you could push a magic button that would achieve equality by lowering the wellbeing of, e.g., billionaires and white people without improving anyone else’s lives, many on the left would push that button, but most in the EA movement wouldn’t.
I'd wager (based on absolutely no evidence) that the fundamental reasons behind those on the left not endorsing EA are roughly similar to those on the right, but with different flavours of motivated reasoning.
The fundamental reasons would be those seen with really any collective action problem - that it sucks to make an individual sacrifice for something that is larger than any individual (e.g., poverty), and that the benefits of an individual donation aren't easily identifiable (thereby not giving people nice warm fuzzy feelings). As these reasons aren't really compelling argumentatively, those on the left/right need a rationalisation that stills serves their underlying ideology.
Therefore, left-wing people will make the arguments you presented above, as they all resolve the cognitive dissonance of "Oh damn it's actually not that hard/expensive to help a lot of people....someone should do something about that, not me tho lol" whilst maintaining all of the things they already believed (e.g., rich people/capitalism bad). On the other hand, those on the right might make some argument along the lines of ownership/nature/familial obligations that serve the same purpose of resolving any need to actually contribute.
It's basically the same as the veganism case - even though leftists are much more likely than rightists to be vegan (probably, idk), you'd still have a vast majority who'd argue something along the lines of "no ethical consumption under capitalism therefore I don't have to change personally". You'd think everyone could get around the light EA position (you should donate *something*, and you should probably try to maximise your donation), but apparently not!
1: Most committed leftist activists think they are effective altruists, as in, they are practicing altruism effectively, because only toppling capitalism will overturn the suffering in the third world that necessitates all this charity in the first place. I doubt they're right, but as far as they're concerned, Effective Altruists are just a bunch of ineffective or disingenuous altruists calling themselves Effective Altruists (TM).
2: Imagine that most EAs were pedophiles. That would be pretty bad from an optics / effectiveness perspective, but still not a reason to donate to your local art museum over malaria nets. Pretty much every philosophical argument in favor of EA would still apply perfectly even if we discovered that every single prominent EA were a closet pedophile. Sure, you should still donate to effective global health initiatives, but you can do that without being a capital EA, and you probably shouldn't support the capital Effective Altruist movement even if you can quietly practice effective altruism on your own time.
3: Both sides sort of implicitly agree that there's a limited pool of charity that both teams are fighting over. EAs will very often make arguments like "don't donate to your local college endowment, donate to starving children instead" which granted is a pretty good argument but they'll much less often explicitly exhort people "don't order dessert, donate to starving children instead" because it makes people unhappy. For committed leftists who want to achieve the critical mass of activism that will somehow overturn capitalism, EAs are just raiding the pool.
4. The test isn't very good. Imagine that a poor child is going to receive a heart transplant, but then you jump in and say, "actually, it would better to auction this heart off to the highest bidder so we can use the money to promote chicken welfare instead." Maybe you'd be very comfortable with that, but that's probably because you're a utilitarian already, so it's mostly just a test of what you already believe.
Agree with 1 and 2, 3 is a bit of a stretch. Usually EA's just prescribe the 10% rule and a few go beyond that. I've never met anyone unwilling to order desert
4 is just a different situation to the one I stipulated? You basically just said "That scenario doesn't work because imagine if this totally different scenario happened. We'd have different intuitions!" I'm not sure how that is a critique of my test. The test is a "Is this a good enough reason not to give to the global poor" test, and not "is this a good enough reason to deny a kid a transplant" test
I'm not really sure where you're getting any of this from. Either current EA interventions don't work (which I'd like to see the evidence for), in which case it just means current interventions aren't effective and we should pivot. It wouldn't count against the philosophy of trying to good effectively itself.
Or, you think it's impossible to maximise the good we do in principle? Which seems obviously false. Giving money to the Against Malaria Foundation obviously does more good than giving it to a random person on the street. Are no actions better than any others?
You didn't really make any points except "I hate EA".