Interestingly, a huge proportion of EA’s intellectual infrastructure can be traced back to the academic climate of the USA during the Cold War, where left-wing thinkers were eradicated from (analytic) philosophy by McCarthyist purges, Robert McNamara pushed for “rationalisation” and quantification throughout the US establishment, and the RAND Corporation developed concepts like Rational Choice Theory, Operations Research, and Game Theory. Indeed, the current President and CEO of RAND, Jason Matheny, is a CSET founder and former FHI researcher. Aside from the Silicon Valley influences (from which we get the blogposts, CalifornianIdeology, and most of the technofetishism), EA’s intellectual heritage is largely one of philosophy and economics intentionally stripped of their ability to challenge the status quo. [emphasis mine]
Yes!
The Effective Altruism movement is, in origin and at present, on a mission to benefit the powerless using the tools of the powerful; an injection of genuine compassion into the machinery of Capitalist Modernity.
It thus has precisely the advantages and limitations that you would expect. It is a truly impressive engine for the operationalisation of altruism, distributing malaria nets and deworming drugs with astonishing efficiency and effectiveness. Yet, it cannot conceive of solving problems rather than treating their symptoms, acts with the self-assured entitlement of a colonial administrator, and can never quite escape the stony gaze of the techno-modernist Leviathan.
Yes!
The Effective Altruism movement is, in origin and at present, on a mission to benefit the powerless using the tools of the powerful; an injection of genuine compassion into the machinery of Capitalist Modernity.
It thus has precisely the advantages and limitations that you would expect. It is a truly impressive engine for the operationalisation of altruism, distributing malaria nets and deworming drugs with astonishing efficiency and effectiveness. Yet, it cannot conceive of solving problems rather than treating their symptoms, acts with the self-assured entitlement of a colonial administrator, and can never quite escape the stony gaze of the techno-modernist Leviathan.
At least it matches our Basilisk.