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This might provoke a reaction here: Effective altruism is the new woke
I do think it could be worthwhile to have a discussion about the parallels between EA and wokeism, but unfortunately the author's actual comparison of the two is rather sparse, focusing on just this one methodological point about how they both allegedly amplify our moral impulses beyond their natural scope. She also runs the risk of conflating longtermism with EA more broadly.
To me, an obvious similarity between EA and wokeism is that they both function as substitutes for religion, giving structure and meaning to individuals who might otherwise find themselves floating in the nihilistic void. Sacrifice yourself for LGBT, sacrifice yourself for Jesus, sacrifice yourself for malaria nets - it's all the same story at the end of the day. A nice concrete goal to strive for, and an actionable plan on how to achieve it, so that personal ethical deliberation is minimized - that's a very comforting sort of structure to devote yourself to.
I'd also be interested in exploring how both EA and wokeism relate to utilitarianism. In the case of EA the relation is pretty obvious, with wokeism it's less clear, but there does seem to be something utilitarian about the woke worldview, in the sense that personal comfort (or the personal comfort of the oppressed) will always win out over fidelity to abstract values like freedom and authenticity.
Love the thought-provoking take, even if it isn't something I fully agree on. I see some similarities between them.
Both Wokeism and the Neo-EA (AGI-fearmongers) movement run against one of the fundamental observed truths of the universe : "Predicting/Shaping the far-future is a futile exercise". I'd add a corollary to that : "Greedy optimization is the only form of optimization that works". Or in 1 word : "Humility".
Greedy optimization through small short term actions and observable outcomes is depressingly slow. But, it forces you to reconcile with the difference in expectations and actual outcomes. The difference is captured by a lack of understanding of the very underlying systems that these solutions aim to fix.
This is where both Wokeism and Neo-EA run into issues. Wokeism's "All of society needs to buy in into unresearched social change in lock step" demands change that requires generations to observe positive outcomes for, while negative side-effects are disregarded through "real wokeism wouldn't have these issues" or "a few negatives today will far outweigh the benefits that are to come in the promised future" kind of comments.
Neo-EA similarly demands that an entire industry should dedicate its efforts to AI-safety without any non-rhetorical research that proves the arrival of AGI, which they insist is definitely around the corner. They insist that a definite event is around the horizon by extrapolating from the present, a practice that has time-and-again failed at predicting the future. (Planes will keep getting smaller until flying cars are here, CPUs will grow at 2x/yr, Democracy is inevitable, and more things that never happened)
Both are impossible to criticize, in that same way that a startup that doesn't exist is impossible to criticize. Your analogies to religions and pseudo religions (Communism) are spot on. "Everything will make sense during the inevitable judgement day / when we have achieved true communism / when we have achieved equity / when AGI is finally here.". They are all the same thing.
For a movement so rooted in math, you'd think that they would have the humility to not look for a closed-form-solution to what is likely a non-convex problem. Small steps, gradient descent and slow progress is the only thing that sort-of-works.
There is certain irony to me suggesting that the only solution that has ever worked well for human systems is the exact algorithm being used to train massive AI models. So maybe the AGI-fearmongers have a point after all /s? .
What would you accept as non-rhetorical research proving the arrival of AGI that isn't just the arrival of AGI?
A meaningful shared definition of AGI would help.
The nature of seminal moments and paradigm shifts is that there are clear 'before' and 'after' periods that are indisputable. However, these are only indisputable in retrospect, as before hand people project their own biases/fancies on what a paradigm will be, which rarely relates to what it is. In retrospect, people will probably treat AGI-ers like we look back to the sort of cold war sci-fi that thought the future would be hover cars and atomic power everywhere. Yes, the atomic age was paradigm shift, but neither due to its apocalyptic prophets or its utopians.
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