I was reading a blog about EA by the Guerilla Foundation, which contained the quote:
[EA] provides wealth owners with a saviour narrative and a ‘veil of impartiality’ that might hinder deeper scrutiny into the origins of philanthropic money, and stifle personal transformation and solidarity.
And how do EAs respond to this?
I can’t respond for “EAs in total” but I can respond for myself.
For this specific point, I find it a very vague and early hypothesis. A much more concrete and precise claim might be, ”Donors that give to EA causes do so at the expense of greater altruism. We should generally expect that in empirical settings, donors that think they have some sort of ‘veil of impartiality’ fail to do much investigation, and thus wind up donating to worse causes.”
This sounds interesting to me, but it seems like an empirical question, and I’d really want some data or something before making big decisions with it. I could easily see the opposite being true, like, ”Donors who give to causes they think are highly effective will think of themselves as people who care about effectiveness, and then would be more likely to do research and prioritization in the future.”
Basically, this seems to me a lot like a just-so story at this stage.
This is a very interesting comment. I think a lot of the disagreement relates to a difference in what evidence is regarded as valuable within each field. I think this is a tension that both groups can learn from. I’ll write more about this, but I believe that EA ascribes too low value to non-numerical ways of knowing and radical feminists are reluctant to corroborate qualitative understanding using numbers.
I can’t respond for “EAs in total” but I can respond for myself.
For this specific point, I find it a very vague and early hypothesis. A much more concrete and precise claim might be,
”Donors that give to EA causes do so at the expense of greater altruism. We should generally expect that in empirical settings, donors that think they have some sort of ‘veil of impartiality’ fail to do much investigation, and thus wind up donating to worse causes.”
This sounds interesting to me, but it seems like an empirical question, and I’d really want some data or something before making big decisions with it. I could easily see the opposite being true, like,
”Donors who give to causes they think are highly effective will think of themselves as people who care about effectiveness, and then would be more likely to do research and prioritization in the future.”
Basically, this seems to me a lot like a just-so story at this stage.
This is a very interesting comment. I think a lot of the disagreement relates to a difference in what evidence is regarded as valuable within each field. I think this is a tension that both groups can learn from. I’ll write more about this, but I believe that EA ascribes too low value to non-numerical ways of knowing and radical feminists are reluctant to corroborate qualitative understanding using numbers.