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Scott Alexander has recently argued in favor of Effective Altruism after the new scandal of effective altruists trying to oust Sam Altman from Open A.I.
His argument starts by focusing about how different factions attack EA from different perspectives that are contradictory. That those on the right call them woke and those on the left call them fascists and white supremacist. The point seems to be implying that they are going to be attacked anyway by all sides no matter what, so we shouldn't take seriously such criticisms. Then he mostly focuses on an estimated 200,000 lives saved in the developing world.
My problem with this is that it obscures something that isn't a mystery. Which is that EA's politics align much more with the Democratic establishment than with the right and there isn't any substantial confrontation of what that means.
The biggest donor of Effective Altruism according to my short research and claims I found in the effective altruism forum from 2022 where he participated in such discussion is Asana CEO Dustin Moskovitz.
Asana, his company contributed 45 million in the 2020 election and he also had an important contribution in millions in the future forwards pac
https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/joe-biden/contributors?id=N00001669 https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2020/10/pro-biden-super-pac-darkmon/ https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/02/tech-billionaire-2020-election-donations-final-tally.html https://bluetent.us/articles/campaigns-elections/dustin-moskovitz-cari-tuna-democratic-donor-2020/
If one looks at open philanthropy or the EA forum and searches for controversial cultural issues there can be sometimes a small dissent but they follow the liberal party line for the most part.
Lets look at open philanthropy, an EA organization and Dustin Moskovitz organization. Scott certainly wants to give credit to EA and open philanthropy for promoting YIMBY.
However this organization has also funded decriminalization policies and pro migration policies.
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/criminal-justice-reform/ https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/immigration-policy/
I wonder if the well funded caravans of migrants we see in some areas of the world have to some extend to do with funding related to EA.
Recently there has been a mini EA scandal where one individual expressed HBD views in the past but this was made a thing and he was condemned by many in the movement, but not entirely unanimously. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8zLwD862MRGZTzs8k/a-personal-response-to-nick-bostrom-s-apology-for-an-old
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kuqgJDPF6nfscSZsZ/thread-for-discussing-bostrom-s-email-and-apology
Basically, this individual wrote an email 26 years ago that used naughty language to make the point that you should use less offensive language when arguing for race realism.
Then he apologized due to pressure and argued:
Then there is Open A.I. and Chat GPT and effective altruists have been influential in Open A.I. Chat GPT has liberal bias. https://www.foxnews.com/media/chatgpt-faces-mounting-accusations-woke-liberal-bias
Another thing to observe are the demographics of effective altruists.
They are only 0.9% right wing and 2.5% center right. With majority being of the left with 40% center left and 32% identifying as left. But that is identification. Just like Biden could be identified by some as center left while by others, including myself as far left. They are also 46% Vegans. 85.9% are Atheists.
https://rethinkpriorities.org/publications/eas2019-community-demographics-characteristics
I haven't encountered any group with such small representation of right wingers that actually is fair when promoting a political agenda towards either the right wing, or groups that are more seen related to the right. However, effective altruists are much more concerned about the lack of sufficient racial and ethnic diversity than ideological diversity when you search their forum.
Climate change and veganism are two issues that could well lead to hardcore authoritarian policies and restrictions. Considering the demographics of EA and the fact that Peter Singer is an important figure in it and helped coin the term, I do wonder if on that issue the EA influence would be for them to impose on us policies. When dealing with the moral framing of animal liberation movement activist like Singer we see a moral urgency. Like with all identity movements, to elevate one group such as animals you end up reducing the position of another group, such as humans. Or those who aren't vegans.
The issue is that these networks that are reinforced based on EA might already have as part of their agenda to promote their political agenda.. And these networks that developed in part due to EA and put like minded ideologues together to organize can also expand even more to promote their political agenda outside the EA banner.
It does seem that at least a few of the people involved with effective altruism think that it fell victim to its coastal college demographics. https://www.fromthenew.world/p/what-the-hell-happened-to-effective
My other conclusion related to the open A.I. incident as well is that the idea of these people that they are those who will put humanity first will lead to them ousting others and attempt to grab more power in the future too. When they do so, will they ever abandon it?
Scott Alexander himself argued that putting humanity first is the priority and he had some faith on them thinking rationally when they tried to oust Sam Altman, even though he invited them inside. He might not agree with their action necessarily but he sympathizes with the motive. https://twitter.com/slatestarcodex/status/1726132072031641853#m
That this action is dishonorable matters because like with Sam Bankman Fried it continues the pattern of important ethical issues being pushed aside under the idea that effective altruists know best.
This means that Sam Altman won't be the first. It also means that we got a movement very susceptible to the same problems of authoritarian far left movements in general of extreme self confidence to their own vision and will to power. This inevitably in addition to the whole issue of hell paved with good intentions encourages the power hungry to be part of it as well.
It does seem there is an important side to it which is about people donating in more unobjectionable terms but in general effective altruism it isn't separate from a political agenda that fits with a political tribe. That should be judged on its own merits without the 200,000 saved in developing world being accepted as an adequate answer for policies that affect the developed world. The short version of all this is that if you got a problem with leftist/far leftist NGOs, you should consider the effective altruism movement and some of its key players to be contributing in the same direction.
The term as a whole is stupid because almost every single person who operates a charity or is a large scale philanthropist sincerely believes they are engaged in “effective altruism”. Whether it’s Hobby Lobby types giving it all to whatever Evangelical church they belong to or Alex Soros funding justice reform think tanks and progressive DA candidates, they’re all believers in ‘effective altruism’. If they believed their altruism was ineffective they wouldn’t do it, and if they believed their motivations weren’t altruistic they’d presumably keep the money for themselves and those they cared about, or simply pursue naked political lobbying (which I’m not saying the above don’t do, to be clear, but I genuinely think they also think they’re helping ‘the world’ along whatever course they believe is best).
I'm on net pretty neutral with respect to EA, but I don't think this line of criticism makes sense. To some extent, it's true that everyone who engages in charity do so out of belief that they're effective and that they're altruistic. But believing that you are those things doesn't tell us anything about if you/your charity actually are those things. And where I think EA at the least makes gestures at doing (and they might do nothing more than those gestures, let's be clear) is checking if they really are effective (they do seem to have a big blind spot in checking if they really are altruistic - believing that you're altruistic is, at best, a neutral signal and most likely a negative signal of one's altruism, and I don't think I've seen EA engage with this).
I think there's a strong argument to be made that, in their attempts to check if their (self-perceived) altruism is effective, all they're doing is adding on more epicycles to come to the conclusion that [charity they like] also happens to be [the most effective]. I honestly don't know enough about the logistics of what EA does, but certainly that should be the default presumption, sans clear indication that they're doing the hard work needed to check all that, such as giving oppositional people full access to all the tools to make the strongest argument possible against whatever charities they like (or for charities they dislike). And the more popular/decentralized EA is/becomes, the more that EA people will follow this default pattern of convincing themselves that [charity I like] is [the most effective] because memes like this always get implemented in the laziest, most intellectually dishonest way when spread out among a wide/decentralized populace.
I would also say, given that we know this pattern about the populace, EA has, in some real sense, the responsibility to craft their memes such that if they get out to the wider populace and actually become popular, that the people who lazily implement these memes in dishonest ways don't fall into this extremely common trap of matching [thing I like] with [good] while building up a whole facade of pseudoscience/pseudomath in order to justify it. I'm not sure EA is very concerned with this at all, and I'll admit that the defensiveness I see from EA when they're criticized both about their core mission and about their more superficial PR aspects doesn't make me optimistic.
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