Crossposted on my blog.  

When I was at Manifest, Austin Chen said something interesting to me: that one thing that he liked about my blog was that I was proud to be an effective altruist. I didn’t treat it as an embarrassing quirk, but as something that’s actively good, that’s worth encouraging. A lot of EAs don’t do this, which I think is sad. Scott Alexander amusingly quips:

I hate having to post criticism of EA.

Not because EA is bad at taking criticism. The opposite: they like it too much. It almost feels like a sex thing. “Please, tell me again how naughty I’m being!” I went to an EA organization’s offices once - I think it was OpenPhil, but don’t quote me on that - and the whole place was strewn with the most critical books you can imagine - Robert Reich, Anand Giradharadas, that kind of thing.

I remember when I was out tabling for the effective altruism club at my University, some woman came up and started trotting out braindead anti-effective altruism arguments—something about tech bros and SBF and white saviorism. The other very reasonable and responsible EAs at the club were saying things like “hmm, yeah, that’s a very interesting criticism, well, if you want to come to a meeting, we’d be happy to discuss it.”

I wanted to scream! These aren’t serious criticisms. This is complete bullshit.

Spend enough time listening to the criticisms of effective altruism and it becomes clear that, aside from those arguing for small tweaks at the marigns, they all stem from either a) people being very dogmatic and having a worldview that’s strangely incompatible with doing good things (if, for instance, they don’t help the communist revolution); b) people wanting an excuse to do nothing in the face of extreme suffering; or c) people disliking effective altruists and so coming up with some half-hearted excuse for why EA is really something-something colonialism.

I don’t want to be too mean about this, but the criticisms are unbelievably dumb. They are confused to a really extraordinary degree. The reasoning is so exquisitely poor that it’s very clearly motivated. I don’t say that about other subjects—this is the only subject on which the critics don’t have any half-decent objections. And yet despite this, lots of effective altruists treat the criticisms as serious.

1,000 children die a day of malaria. Think about how precious the life is of a young child—concretely picture a small child coughing up blood and lying in bed with a fever of 105. We—the effective altruists—are the ones doing something about that. And not just doing a bit about it—working as hard as possible to eradicate malaria, taking seriously how precious the lives of those children are. GiveWell does research into the charities that avert misery most effectively, and then tens of thousands of EAs all around the world give to those charities, because they recognize that though they’ll never see the children they help, those children matter.

This is not something to be embarrassed about. Giving money to effective charities and getting others to do the same is by far the best thing I have ever done in my life. Every nice thing I’ve done interpersonally doesn’t have half a percent the value of saving lives, of funneling money into the hands of charities so that little kids don’t get horrible diseases that kill them.

And yet these critics who do nothing, who sit on their asses as children die whose deaths they can easily avert have the gall to criticize those of us who are doing something, who are working to avert deaths as effectively as possible. They have the gall to criticize those of us who are working to free animals from the horrifying torture chambers known as factory farms.

It’s one thing to do nothing as children die. But it’s utterly repugnant to spend one’s time and energy criticizing the people doing something about it.

The effective altruism movement has saved about 50,000 lives a year since its inception. While the critics wax poetic, we’re actually doing things about the world’s problems. We’re doing things to avert about 17 9/11s worth of death every single year. One can certainly criticize the movement at the margins: maybe we should spend a bit less on the longtermism stuff. But the movement, as a whole, has clearly been an enormous good. The best kind of life one can live would certainly involve doing lots of things recommended by effective altruists.

And sorry, I’m not going to be embarrassed about trying to improve the world well—about being part of a movement that’s saved hundreds of thousands of people. No matter how many ridiculous hit pieces there are, no matter how many mean names people call effective altruists, no matter how many people try to pin SBF’s fraud on the principles of effective altruism, I’m not going to be embarrassed about it. While one can have marginal disagreements with some of the things done by the movement, those who criticize the movement as a whole are deeply intellectually unserious. I’m not going to pretend that they have real objections: they do not, all they have is some combination of rhetorical barbs, spite, and apathy.

Nearly everyone in the modern world effectively walks past drowning children, doing nothing about children whose lives they could save. The few people doing something about the drowning children, recognizing, in the face of the row of corpses, that something deeply horrible is going on and something must be done about it, are worthy of utmost respect and reverence, not snark or cheap rhetoric or disdain.

When children are drowning, you shouldn’t be ashamed to wade in to save them.

 

 


 

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Think about how precious the life is of a young child—concretely picture a small child coughing up blood and lying in bed with a fever of 105. We—the effective altruists—are the ones doing something about that.

The vast majority of people trying to keep kids from dying of malaria are not effective altruists.

I took this as being relative to those detracting, where this isn't to be taken in a pretentious tone dismissing the work of others in the space helping others, but more "those who insult us aren't often aren't really trying to improve the world with us".

Emile seems to donate quite a bit: 


"I’m passionate about alleviating global poverty, and have pledged to give away everything I earn over $40,000 a year. In December 2022, I started a fundraiser with Nathan Young, an Effective Altruist, that raised more than $321,000 for the charity Give Directly." -- https://www.xriskology.com/

I'm also quite critical of EA and have donated more than most EAs (both in absolute and percentage terms). 

Even annoying critics may be quite sincere.

This is a solid data point so thanks for mentioning it. It is maybe worth mentioning that, as much as Emile and you may be "critical of EA", Emile was formerly quite friendly and you and I are having this conversation on the forum.

I think you're likely both "more EA" than the average person, and definitely more EA than the average detractor that I have in mind. What it means to "be EA" is amorphous and uncertain here, but many people who would consider themselves EAs are also critical of it sometimes.

I'd be interested to see how much Timnit donates, or any of those who wrote the typical SBF articles, but I highly doubt their numbers would look like those above.

I'm not sure if I agree with this.

I think your characterization of EAs is spot on, but I don't think it's a bad thing.

I've been loosely involved in a few different social movements (student activism, vegan activism, volunteering for a political party) and what makes EA unique is exactly the attitude that you're describing here. Whenever I went to an EA meetup or discussion group, people spent most of their time discussing things that EA could be getting fundamentally wrong. In my admittedly limited experience, that is really weird! And it's also brilliant! Criticisms of EA, and it's currently popular ideas, are taken extremely seriously, and in good faith.

I think a necessary consequence of this attitude is that the EA label becomes something people adopt only with a healthy degree of embarrassment and apologeticness. It is not a badge of pride. Because as soon as it becomes an identity to be proud of, it becomes much harder and emotionally draining to carefully consider the important criticisms of it.

I think you are right that there are probably downsides to this attitude as well. But I worry about what it would mean for the EA movement if it ever lost it.

I feel like I should also acknowledge the irony in the fact that in this particular context, it is you who are criticizing an aspect of the EA movement, and me who is jumping to defend it and sing its virtues! I'm not sure what this means but it's a bit too meta for my liking so I'll end my comment there!

I'm not against taking serious the criticisms at the margins--like that we should spend less on A and more on B.  But I think we spend too much time getting worked up about what e.g. Torres has to say about EA being rooted in eugenics and colonialism. 

I think you make a good point about the virtues of taking criticism seriously, but I see a difference between having a high degree of confidence and pride in Effective Altruism, the idea, and the ways the community brings those principles into the world.

Like most others, I welcome good faith criticism of the movement when needed, but being apologetic and embarrassed for wanting to help others and make the world a better place is something we should try to avoid, and part of that is having the courage in our base convictions to be proud of the work we have done and hope to do.

I donated a lot. Both in absolute and percentage terms. I gave a percentage many times higher than even most well off EAs. I think it would have been selfish to just keep the money. But I don't have any particularly great feelings about how I donated. 'Things are complicated' can be an applause light. Sometimes things aren't all that complicated. But this topic sure is. Saying 'those who criticize the movement as a whole are deeply intellectually unserious' just seems unserious to me. The movement has a lot of structural problems. Both 'extremely positive' and 'extremely negative' impacts seem very plausible to me. Probability is distributed over a very wide range. 

Im not sure what normal community members can really do. Decision making is incredibly centralized. But surely we have some responsibility to be serious about downsides. The existence of annoying critics does not absolve us. Though we also have a responsibility not to be overly negative. Or maybe the real answer is we dont have much of either responsibility since two people have almost all the power. But this suggests maybe we should take our talents elsewhere.

I quite like this comment, and am interested who the "two people" are who have almost all the power?

Is one of them me? ;).

I recognise that a lot of criticism is bad, and I have written a long post on why I think that is. But this is going  too far in the other direction. 

Spend enough time listening to the criticisms of effective altruism and it becomes clear that, aside from those arguing for small tweaks at the marigns, they all stem from either a) people being very dogmatic and having a worldview that’s strangely incompatible with doing good things (if, for instance, they don’t help the communist revolution); b) people wanting an excuse to do nothing in the face of extreme suffering; or c) people disliking effective altruists and so coming up with some half-hearted excuse for why EA is really something-something colonialism.

All of them? You think literally every person who is not on board with the effective altruism movement is doing so for these three reasons? 

EA, as a movement, is miniscule and highly homogenous. Like any group, it will be wrong about a lot of things. I think sentiments like this, dismissing every person who is not on board with the EA movement as some kind of crazy SJW, is epistemological suicide

Look, I'm a fan of malaria nets and animal welfare EA. I have donated plenty to malaria nets myself. But that is not the entire movement. You can't just isolate one part of it and ignore the whole "billion dollar fraud" thing, the abuses of power, the mini-cults, the sexism/racism controversies. Or it's part in building up OpenAI and starting the AI arms race, with all the harms they have brought. 

EA is seeking power and influence, and wants to have a large effect on the future of humanity. People are allowed to be concerned about that. 

In my mind since EA premises are vague and generic, any criticism above a quality bar gets borg'd in. So no, I didn't ever see an "external" criticism of EA be any good-- if it was good, then it'd be internal criticism, as far as im concerned.

I think that there are certainly legitimate critiques of some of EA.  But the ideas that either: 

A) EA does more harm than good.

B) Doing EA things like giving to givewell charities isn't very valuable 

C) One shouldn't strive to do good effectively

are all very crazy and supported by nothing. 

I agree that most criticism of EA as a movement/philosophy are often baseless, but recently I've begun to lose faith in the community as an EA myself. What are your thoughts on criticisms of EAs rather than EA?

I think they're very unconvincing--EA does a ton of good https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-effective

And sorry, I’m not going to be embarrassed about trying to improve the world

You, my friend, are not sorry :)

This is true. 

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