I’ll give credit where credit is due- the Effective Altruist movement
convinced me to put my money where my mouth is and start donating a
chunk of my income every month to charity. There certainly is a decent
amount of good that can be done that way.
That being said, ughhhhh they’re such a weird fucking bunch. Routing
money for “x-risks” is fucking bizarre and wasteful, since x-risks are
just a Yudkowsky grift. (AI, a bigger risk than climate change? Fuck off
and stop watching the Matrix and Terminator sequels.) Their dreary
utilitarian rhetoric seems custom-deisgned to chase off the average
person. (It only works on weird nerds like me, and even at my most
enthusiastic, before I realized how cultish and grifty EA and
Rationalism are, I found their actual charity choices uninspiring and
weird.) And, hell, even some of their non-grift charity choices are odd
and somewhat hyperfocused- if it doesn’t fall into their specific
baliwick, they’re just entirely uninterested in issues. And ignoring
climate change because “technology/AI” will solve it is deeply fucking
stupid. (And ignores the damn laws of thermodynamics- all that heat
we’re shoving in the ocean is gonna take a LONG time to leave, there’s
no magic answer to that.)
Then there’s their obsession with low-hanging fruit. “Getting the
most bang for their buck”. It’s one way to prioritize, sure, but it’s
such an unfortunately hyperindividualistic way- the most pressing
problems are, unfortunately, often the most expensive, and where each
individual dollar has the least impact. By ignoring those in favor of
ones where they can feel like they’re personally making a difference,
they’re often being, to be frank, quite comparatively ineffective. Not
useless, but… Collective action is so damn important for a reason.
Hyperindividualism is a shit strategy.
And, most importantly, the eternal refrain of every EA critic- the
way they ignore politics is fucking stupid. Political change is far more
important than a few measly consumer dollars thrown at a problem. It’s
not to say people shouldn’t donate to charity, but rather that charity
is utterly insufficient to effect true change on its own- it needs to be
partnered with political action, policy changes, collective action, etc.
It’s why I donate so often to independent nonprofit journalism, like
ProPublica or the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Also, kinda nitpicky, but it kinda bugs me that EA tends to ignore
landmine removal- it’s a horrible problem that’s finite in scale, so
that consumer donations can actually make a difference.
> (AI, a bigger risk than climate change? Fuck off and stop watching the Matrix and Terminator sequels.)
If you want a ten-second "how to figure out serious thinkers" test, ask them whether they think climate change is a bigger issue than AI.
If they don't look at you like you're crazy it's a bad sign.
This is why I put the measly dollars I can donate towards a charity that does both help on the ground AND work for political change, depending on which avenue is necessary for a given focus project. This post just made me throw a few bucks their way.
I direct my also measly charitable donations to homelessness for similar reasons: first, homelessness is bad; second I’ve seen in person that getting people housing is the first step to getting them able to engage in political change.
Throw a few bucks whose way?
And yeah, I agree, political action plus feet on the ground is optimal- hence why I'll endlessly talk up orgs like the HALO trust.
If I may advocate for a particular charity, I threw a few bucks towards [these guys](https://www.solidar.ch/en). Ultimately a very social democratic charity. One incredibly successful and effective project was when a few years ago, they convinced hundreds if not thousands of municipalities in our country to no longer source stone from quarries using child labor. Yes this is a real problem, and turns out a thing where you can do a lot with little money.
They are part of a network of charities all over Europe (most or all of them being founded by the trade unions and/or social democratic parties), so if you're in Europe, maybe consider finding out what your local affiliate does:; https://www.solidar.org/en/about-us/members-and-partners
One of the best charities out there (and the one i donate to myself) is [Modest Needs](https://www.modestneeds.org/index.asp), which gives small (up to like $1500) direct grants to people facing unexpected expenses. Their goal is specifically to break the cycle of poverty for folks who are one bad expense away from homelessness.
I found them like a year after they were founded (in 2002!!! i'm old!) and i've boosted them ever since. A pretty astonishing percentage of folks they help go on to become donors later, which i think is a solid sign that they're doing things right.
Like global warming, the actual bulk of the solution must come from
elites who choose to back antipoverty policies, and can be persuaded to
do so through the right incentives - the belief that the elites are
entirely unpersuadable or uninfluenceable is nonsense
I read the post and pretty much agreed with it all and given that the
question of EA comes up here frequently enough, I thought y’all might be
interested :)
I have to admit that while I agree with the general conclusion that politics is indispensable to - well - politics, I find myself on a personal level less and less interested in approaches to this lengthy(-ish) style of analysing where the central ethical problems at the heart of the matter lie. I could as easily accuse this article of taking an atomitistc point of view as the article does of Singer. It misses the point by setting up the problems with EA as essentially a gotcha against Singet et al.
> The underlying problem is that effective altruism’s distinctive combination of political pessimism and consumer-hero hubris forecloses the consideration of promising possibilities for achieving far more good. First, effective altruists advance an **ungrounded pessimism about political action that cuts off that obvious avenue for solving large scale problems.** For example, in The Life You Can Save, Singer briefly discusses “whether it would be better to spend our time and money campaigning to eliminate trade barriers, rather than donating to agencies that give aid to the poor” before concluding sadly that “The powerful political interests allied against the elimination of trade barriers make political change unlikely.….Defeats like this suggest that our efforts are better spent elsewhere, where we can be confident of making a difference.” (p. 114)
Especially as an opening gambit for the case against Singer’s point about efficiency this just misses the point. Singer repeatedly makes the case for acting positively against pessimism within a political context, not just within an atomised utilitarian ethic. Effective Altruistics alike make a point of handling the big problems in big ways, they just don’t generally advocate for a holistic political ethic of mutual co-operation as in - say - anarchism or communism.
By taking Singer’s point of view as undermined by his advocacy of compromise, and therefore as a point against EA, the author falls into the same trap they’re describing of applying a very pedantic analytical approach to politics, and using that to make a politically ineffective argument for an alternative. This may be a relatively effective way of doing public philosophy, but it doesn’t reach very far beyond the world of people who wear sensible clothing in cold weather on their way to the department. I don’t have to tell you that academics often don’t live particularly strenuous or mind-expanding lives even if they’re happy to make broad statements about how to do so.
EAers, it is true - Singer included - *often* display a sometimes desperate attempt not to deal with the wider questions of political action, but it is hard to see how that would be a slam-dunk against EAers, especially since EAers if anything are actually quite concerned beyond the limits of the efficiency thesis of EA with effective *political* action. Even if they’re not very good at it.
Perhaps I’m jaded by a life too heavily lived (having a withdrawal induced seizure at the ripe old age of 27 might be an indicator for that), but I fail to see how this argument manages to support the (correct) conclusion that Singer and EA more broadly give a no less equally disappointing and atomistic argument for the importance of political action.
OK maybe I flew over the article too quickly to give such a positive recommendation.
Sure, it's an attack on some caricature of EA; but perhaps it's a caricature that a bunch of EA folks have taken to heart, no? I think the main criticism is this anyway:
> Singer and other effective altruist philosophers believe that their most likely customers find institutional reform too complicated and political action too impersonal and hit and miss to be attractive. So instead they flatter us by promising that we can literally be life-saving heroes from the comfort of our chairs and using only the super-power of our rich-world wallets. A big part of making this work is to make us feel in control of what happens to people around the world, and this in turn requires simplifying and personalising the logistical chain between action and outcome. Even if we end up achieving less good in total, we can be confident that the good that was achieved was due specifically to us – that we made a difference – and this may be a powerful psychological motivation for many people in our individualistic consumer societies and therefore result in more donations and more good achieved.
Anyway, the main criticism I would make is that to optimistically suggest becoming a high-volume trader in order to give 5% of your income is just breathtakingly stupid, no-good, and actually harmful to the world. As Adorno said (and yes this is not really what he meant): There is no right life in the wrong life. You cannot enrich yourself and your company by trading stocks of morally problematic entities to then donate a small part of your earnings to alleviate poverty, while your day job effectively undermines any such charity.
And that's the main criticism here: That EA, as well-intentioned as it may be, still suggests to take high-paying but morally problematic jobs that keep up the system and by doing so boils down to justifying these jobs, this work, and offering the sale of indulgences to utilitarians in that line of work.
And what I think is equally bad - and you're right to point out the article also does this - is the whole idea that effective giving is sufficient for a moral life. This basically their selling point. Maybe I'm too cynic. But also, their politics is a neoliberal pro-trade one, I guess? Which makes very little sense from a long-term poverty alleviating standpoint.
> EAers if anything are actually quite concerned beyond the limits of the efficiency thesis of EA with effective political action. Even if they’re not very good at it.
Maybe that's my personal bias here, but I will never stop ridiculing the EA people where I live for spending serious amounts of money on referenda campaigns against meat in publicly run cafeterias, against lab animal research facilities, and forcing regional governments to... I guess offer more sustainable food? Literally the only political lobby group they founded [works on animal rights](https://sentience-politics.org/de/politik/nachhaltige-ernaehrung-basel/) and not in a fashion that is in any way productive. (They did win a ballot initiative in a major city doubling that city's global aid to I think 1% of the budget, that's a net good I guess)
Little fun edit: The dude who posted this to r/philosophy crossposted it to slatestarcodex, that might give some popcorn.
Well I agree but I take the point differently: my emphasis is that the moral problem of making money in dubious ways to fund allegedly less dubious goods is less important than the failure of both EA and competing programmes to engage productively with the political issues at hand. EA generally poses the question: can a person live a good life *without* devoting themselves to the betterment of the less unfortunate, the overall financial betterment of society, or even the aversion of fantastical existential risks to the human (or other) race(s)? The underlying question of the philosophy espoused in this article is very similar: can a person live a good life *without* being a politically engaged agent on some imagined intellectual level?
I think both questions are both posed in the wrong way, because I think the real question is: to what extent can a particular individual or a particular society be ethically or politically potent **at all**? And only if so should we start to answer the question: how? I don’t think Singer or our author above have come close to answering that question, and I think that they start from the proposition that it’s just obvious to assume that it is.
Perhaps I’m the one that’s too cynical in that respect. I’ve had a troubled and interesting life which makes me sympathetic to the idea that solving ethical and political problems (same thing) just isn’t the business of philosophically or systematically minded people, which isnn’t to say that like the credulous libertarians I think people should be left to the freedom of their own perfect devices willy-nilly. My thesis is negative rather than positive: I think the attempt to undermine a pluralistic (and in my view broadly communist) politics with an over-arching Enlightenment-style ideal of systematic argument vs counter-argument, atomic premise vs atomic premise, principle vs principle, is the real fool’s errand when it comes to the question I posed at the beginning of this paragraph.
Aah gotcha now. There's a bunch of truth to what you say. Good old Karl Marx wasn't interested in ethics for a bunch of the same reasons, I gather. Again to misuse Adorno : there's no real life in the wrong life.
I did like that the article calls out the consumerist attitude, but I can see that it stops short of a real alternative.
Marx’s view is complex in that generally in the tradition he was working through “ethics” and “political economy” weren’t as distinctly distinct even within academia, and he was outside of academia anyway
Marx opposed the “idealist” ethics of the likes of Mill, but clearly had what you and I would call “ethical” commitments: the 1st International and all of that pamphleteering and sending of letters and general advocacy makes it clear he had a goal in mind (I always think it’s funny when certain younger people first get into Marxism and start talking a lot of gubbins about “scientific socialism” as if it’s totally divorced from a stance on what is and isn’t “good”)
Actually that gives me a thought on why some people find both Adam Smith and Karl Marx, amongst others, so difficult to read. Both (and some of the others) are actually not particularly difficult read, but both blend a sense of literary style with analysis which can be intimidating if you’re taught to read them as inventors/discoverers of purely logical arguments shorn of rhetoric: with Adam Smith the trouble is getting to grips with the fact that he is making a partially rhetorical argument; with Marx the trouble is getting to grips with the fact he’s making a logical on top of the rhetorical argument. I remember when I first started doing analytic philosophy my background in lit crit was both a boon (because I could read supposedly difficult texts with a sympathy to the pathos and bathos of as a text in addition to its supposedly pure logos, which a lot of my peers couldn’t do from their own backgrounds), and an albatross (because I had to learn how to look at an argument from the perspective of logos, which was something I struggled with at first).
Anyway, I learned to love and hate logic in equal measure and I think being able to balance both of those side has stood me in good stead, and there’s an essay in there somewhere that the major reason you see rather dull inherited catchphrases about “Marx was dumb” so often from people who don’t have that training in both analysis and the critical study of rhetoric *and* its relationship to analysis.
Interestingly, this feels like it'd be a much better dunk against, say, the _usual subjects_ we hear about here. I'm pretty sure Siskind literally made the exact argument being torn down here; that we should ignore politics because it's unlikely to be successful or something like that.
I really don’t see the connection, beyond the rather boring fact that trying to shy away from politics whilst trying to do political things is a bit pathetic, as is Siskind.
OI!
You know as well as I do to mark this NSFW
I’ll give credit where credit is due- the Effective Altruist movement convinced me to put my money where my mouth is and start donating a chunk of my income every month to charity. There certainly is a decent amount of good that can be done that way.
That being said, ughhhhh they’re such a weird fucking bunch. Routing money for “x-risks” is fucking bizarre and wasteful, since x-risks are just a Yudkowsky grift. (AI, a bigger risk than climate change? Fuck off and stop watching the Matrix and Terminator sequels.) Their dreary utilitarian rhetoric seems custom-deisgned to chase off the average person. (It only works on weird nerds like me, and even at my most enthusiastic, before I realized how cultish and grifty EA and Rationalism are, I found their actual charity choices uninspiring and weird.) And, hell, even some of their non-grift charity choices are odd and somewhat hyperfocused- if it doesn’t fall into their specific baliwick, they’re just entirely uninterested in issues. And ignoring climate change because “technology/AI” will solve it is deeply fucking stupid. (And ignores the damn laws of thermodynamics- all that heat we’re shoving in the ocean is gonna take a LONG time to leave, there’s no magic answer to that.)
Then there’s their obsession with low-hanging fruit. “Getting the most bang for their buck”. It’s one way to prioritize, sure, but it’s such an unfortunately hyperindividualistic way- the most pressing problems are, unfortunately, often the most expensive, and where each individual dollar has the least impact. By ignoring those in favor of ones where they can feel like they’re personally making a difference, they’re often being, to be frank, quite comparatively ineffective. Not useless, but… Collective action is so damn important for a reason. Hyperindividualism is a shit strategy.
And, most importantly, the eternal refrain of every EA critic- the way they ignore politics is fucking stupid. Political change is far more important than a few measly consumer dollars thrown at a problem. It’s not to say people shouldn’t donate to charity, but rather that charity is utterly insufficient to effect true change on its own- it needs to be partnered with political action, policy changes, collective action, etc. It’s why I donate so often to independent nonprofit journalism, like ProPublica or the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Also, kinda nitpicky, but it kinda bugs me that EA tends to ignore landmine removal- it’s a horrible problem that’s finite in scale, so that consumer donations can actually make a difference.
Like global warming, the actual bulk of the solution must come from elites who choose to back antipoverty policies, and can be persuaded to do so through the right incentives - the belief that the elites are entirely unpersuadable or uninfluenceable is nonsense
I read the post and pretty much agreed with it all and given that the question of EA comes up here frequently enough, I thought y’all might be interested :)