I don’t really like how this piece politically polarizes EA by making it seem like a “non-socialist space”, as if socialist and EA are mutually exclusive categories.
Global poverty, animal rights, and AI safety are causes that everyone from socialist to libertarian to conservative has a stake in, and people from all political stripes who are interested in doing the most good are Effective Altruists. You don’t need a particular political theory to want humanity to not go extinct, to wish to avoid causing pain to animals, or to prioritize all humans equally and to act accordingly.
PS. To the author, this criticism is not really aimed at you. I understand that this is a personal essay about your experience and much of this may not have been your intent. My criticism is more intended for the upvoters, if the piece hadn’t gotten strong positive reception then I would have just taken it for a personal essay and would not have made this comment.
To me this piece reads a bit like “I tried to convince my atheist friends to become vegan—it backfired completely, as I was previously laboring under the delusion that animals have souls”—this is definitely a reasonable personal experience to write about, but if a bunch of atheists started upvoting it and sharing it on twitter as a dunk on vegans I wouldn’t like that very much, and I think I would dislike this regardless of whether I was a nonvegan atheist, a vegan christian, a nonvegan christian, or a vegan atheist.
I don’t really like how this piece politically polarizes EA by making it seem like a “non-socialist space”, as if socialist and EA are mutually exclusive categories.
Global poverty, animal rights, and AI safety are causes that everyone from socialist to libertarian to conservative has a stake in, and people from all political stripes who are interested in doing the most good are Effective Altruists. You don’t need a particular political theory to want humanity to not go extinct, to wish to avoid causing pain to animals, or to prioritize all humans equally and to act accordingly.
PS. To the author, this criticism is not really aimed at you. I understand that this is a personal essay about your experience and much of this may not have been your intent. My criticism is more intended for the upvoters, if the piece hadn’t gotten strong positive reception then I would have just taken it for a personal essay and would not have made this comment.
To me this piece reads a bit like “I tried to convince my atheist friends to become vegan—it backfired completely, as I was previously laboring under the delusion that animals have souls”—this is definitely a reasonable personal experience to write about, but if a bunch of atheists started upvoting it and sharing it on twitter as a dunk on vegans I wouldn’t like that very much, and I think I would dislike this regardless of whether I was a nonvegan atheist, a vegan christian, a nonvegan christian, or a vegan atheist.