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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.
One thing that's always bugged my about progressivism and especially EA is that despite all their claims of being empathetic and humanistic they completely ignore the human. They are ironically the paperclip maximizers of philanthropy.
The argument is that despite some of the questionable things EA has been caught up in lately, they've saved 200 thousands lives! but did they save good lives? What have they saved really? More mouths to feed? Doctors and lawyers? Someone that cares about humanity would want to ask these questions. A paperclip maximizer that discounts a persons humanity entirely and just sees each life as some widget to maximize the number of would not.
The purpose of empathy is to be able to put yourself in someone else's shoes, to understand their feelings. Except, to do that you have to have some level of understanding of how they function, some mental model of their mind. Else you are simply projecting. It's easy to just imagine what you'd feel like if you were in Palestine or Israel etc. Except that isn't empathy. Even just listening to what a person says isn't truly empathy. If I were an alcoholic and I said I wanted a drink, to someone that has no knowledge of me it might seem a nice thing to do, but clearly it would not be. I'm not sure what it even means to have empathy for someone you don't know. I'm not sure it's possible. What is it really that you are feeling? Do you believe people are all the same, with the same wants? same needs? some values? It's such a dim view of people and of the world.
I suppose some people do, "We're all human," is something you'll hear espoused by this ideology, but that is literally the least you can have in common with another person. Trying to apply it to any other human interaction is instantly ridiculous. You wouldn't apply that logic anywhere in life, you don't hire someone just because they're human, you don't befriend someone, care about someone, hate someone. It's basically an open admission that you have nothing convincing to say. Even if someone was forced to compliment their worst enemy they'd manage to ad lib something more convincing than, "he's human."
Anyone that has had relationships with other humans, so basically everyone, knows how complicated it is to actually know someone. You can have spent years living with a partner and still be completely caught off guard when your mental model goes awry and your attempt at empathy then completely falls flat. The idea that some ideological group is more moral or more caring because of the sheer number of lives they've saved completely discredits and belittles one of the pillars of being human, getting to know each other, socializing, learning friend and foe. It discounts their humanity itself, that it's even necessary to get to know or to understand someone before you can help them. Your wants and needs don't matter, you are a widget, you need x calories, y oxygen, to continue existing and I will supply these needs, such altruism, wow.
Looking around at social media and world events I can't help but wonder if this is some major glitch with human psychology in the digital age. Too many strangers, too much opportunity for, "selflessness." So many people caught up in an empty and self serving empathy that has no imagination for others. Meanwhile people that have normal empathy are dismissed because they aren't as "selfless" as the newer movements. Spending time with and focusing on people that share your values isn't altruistic because if they share your values than you are less selfless than the progressive who cares about the stranger. (Not to mention the bay area tech bro that managed to save 0.0345 persons per dollar spent, blowing away the nearest tech bro competitor who only saved 0.0321)
This logic seems mad though, taken to it's extreme the most altruistic move would be to help someone that shares none of your values, and since altruism is a core value you should be exclusively helping the least altruistic of people as that is the most selfless thing you could do. Of course this is obviously ridiculous and self defeating (like the lgbt groups supporting hamas)
More cynically I think this sort of caring is just a way to whitewash your past wrongs, it's pr maximizing, spend x dollars and get the biggest number you can put next to your shady bay area tech movement that is increasingly under societies microscope given the immense power things like social networks and ai give your group. If you really want to help others you need to understand them, that means spending time with others, not with concepts. If you're lucky you might eventually find a few people that you understand well enough that more often than not your actions are positive and beneficial to them. Congratulations you have now invented the family and traditional community.
Your post puts my pause about supporting EA into better words than I possibly can write. I've always found it... cheating, kinda?... that the entire premise of EA seems to just be brute-forcing morality and ethics by shoving as many zeroes into a number as possible. And that's how we get what you have described here, where it's easy to say that you've saved 200,000 or however many lives, but then people don't interrogate that result beyond that. People just see the number and go "wow that's a lot of zeroes so it must be good".
I guess what I'm wondering is if there's much focus put in to long-term solutions (and I don't mean "longtermism" like figuring out how to get humans to colonize the stars or whatever to maximize the number of future lives) rather than just whatever saves the most lives in the short term. For example, I was always under the impression that you can't just brute-force solving world hunger by confiscating all the world's billionaires' wealth (ignoring the fact that much of it isn't liquid and actually kinda doesn't exist and if you confiscated it then most of the wealth would just go away) and funneling it into programs to distribute food to starving populaces (ignoring the fact that this would outcompete and devastate local markets, etc.). Sooner or later, their governments would stop you, because it turns out that the reason they're starving in the first place is because their government wants them to, and there's plenty of things the government can do to get their country in a place to feed them, but they don't for various reasons. So there's a good short-term solution by just distributing as much as you can, but an actual long-term solution requires some change to the government, and a lot of focus seems to be put on the short-term brute-force way of doing things.
Downthread, @FirmWeird posits a similar scenario where the population is way beyond carrying capacity. What do you do? Feeding them makes the line on a graph go up, if you ignore that this means you'll need even more in the future (induced demand). Not feeding them makes the line go down but it results in a more stable equilibrium. "Just shove as many zeroes in as you can" ignores plenty of side effects that may or may not be desirable, almost like a paperclip maximizer.
In theory you can fix this by counting QALYs instead of lives saved.
Of course, counting QALYs meaningfully isn't easy, but it is easy to come up with bad ways to count them and hard to prove them bad.
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I have the exact opposite intuition about "cheating." To me, regular charities seem like cheating, since all most people do is give money, get warm and fuzzy feelings, decide that that means they did good, and then profusely refuse to actually verify how much good they did. It's essentially stolen valor - getting all the personal benefits of appearing altruistic without doing any of the difficult work of helping anyone out which is normally implied by things like "charity" and "altruism." Which looks a lot like cheating. EA at least seems to make a gesture at having some referee system in place to detect cheaters.
The thing is, as we see in international sports all the time like in FIFA or Olympics, the best way to cheat is to set the entire system of judgment itself as corrupted in your favor, so one could probably make a good argument that EA is performing this "meta-cheating" by claiming to actually be setting up objective standards for effectiveness while actually setting up corrupted standards that lead to [charity I like] being [effective]. The tough thing for EA is, every single person, down to the individual, involved in the EA movement could be perfectly transparent and honest with perfectly good intentions, and overall EA could still be engaging in this "meta-cheating" due to the biases that all people are susceptible to, and so they have some responsibility to set up the structure in such a way as to counter and negate these biases. I think they may be failing to do this properly.
But in terms of their attempt at brute-forcing morality, this seems to me the correct way to counter the massive "cheating" that's happening in basically all realms of altruism in our lives, even down to individual relationships, where most people don't bother checking and just get the beneficial warm and fuzzy feelings through "cheating" without doing any of the work that is supposed to make someone actually deserving of those warm and fuzzy feelings.
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