quickly you discover that [the specifics of the EA program] are a series of tendentious perspectives on old questions, frequently expressed in needlessly-abstruse vocabulary and often derived from questionable philosophical reasoning that seems to delight in obscurity and novelty
He doesn’t talk or quote specifics, as if to shield his claim from analysis. “tendentious”? “abstruse”? He’s complaining that I, as an EA, am “abstruse” meaning obscure/difficult to understand, but I’m the one that has to look up his words in the dictionary. As for how EAs “seem”, if one doesn’t try to understand them, they may “seem” different than they are.
EA leads people to believe that hoarding money for interstellar colonization, is more important than feeding the poor.
Hmm, I’ve been around here awhile and I recall no suggestions to hoard money for interstellar colonization. Technically I haven’t been feeding the poor ― I just spent enough on AMF to statistically save one or two children from dying of malaria. But I’m also trying to figure out how AGI ruin might play out and whether there’s a way to stop it, so I assume deBoer doesn’t like this for some reason. The implication of the title seems to be that because I’m interested in the second thing, I’m engaged in a “Shell Game”?
researching EA leads you to debates about how sentient termites are
I haven’t seen any debates about that. Maybe deBoer doesn’t want the question raised at all? Like, when he squishes a bug, it bothers him that anyone would wonder whether pain occurred? I’ve seen people who engage in “moral obvious-ism”: “whatever my moral intuitions may be, they are obviously right and yours are obviously wrong”. deBoer’s anti-EA stance might be simply that.
I’ve pointed to the EA argument, which I assure you sincerely exists, that we should push all carnivorous species in the wild into extinction, in order to reduce the negative utility caused by the death of prey animals. (This would seem to require a belief that prey animals dying of disease and starvation is superior to dying from predation, but ah well.) I pick this, obviously, because it’s an idea that most people find self-evidently ludicrous
The second sentence there is surely inaccurate, but the third is the crux of the matter: he claims it’s “self-evidently ludicrous” to think extinction of predators is preferable to the suffering and death of prey. It’s an appeal-to-popularity fallacy: since the naturalistic fallacy is very popular, it is right. But also, deBoer implies, since one EA argues this, it’s evidence that the entire movement is mad. Like, is debate not something intellectuals should be doing?
“what’s distinctive about EA is that… its whole purpose is to shine light on important problems and solutions in the world that are being neglected.” But that isn’t distinctive at all! Every do-gooder I have ever known has thought of themselves as shining a light on problems that are neglected. So what?
So, maybe he’s never met anyone who did mainstream things like give to cancer research or local volunteering. But it’s a straw man anyway, since he simply ignores key elements of EA like tractability, comparing different causes with each other via cost-effectiveness estimates and prioritization specialists, etc.
“Let’s be effective in our altruism,” “let’s pursue charitable ends efficiently,” “let’s do good well”—however you want to phrase it, that’s not really an intellectual or political or moral project, because no one could object to it. There is no content there
Yet he is objecting to it, and there are huge websites filled with the EA content which… counts as “no content”?
He doesn’t talk or quote specifics, as if to shield his claim from analysis. “tendentious”? “abstruse”? He’s complaining that I, as an EA, am “abstruse” meaning obscure/difficult to understand, but I’m the one that has to look up his words in the dictionary. As for how EAs “seem”, if one doesn’t try to understand them, they may “seem” different than they are.
Hmm, I’ve been around here awhile and I recall no suggestions to hoard money for interstellar colonization. Technically I haven’t been feeding the poor ― I just spent enough on AMF to statistically save one or two children from dying of malaria. But I’m also trying to figure out how AGI ruin might play out and whether there’s a way to stop it, so I assume deBoer doesn’t like this for some reason. The implication of the title seems to be that because I’m interested in the second thing, I’m engaged in a “Shell Game”?
I haven’t seen any debates about that. Maybe deBoer doesn’t want the question raised at all? Like, when he squishes a bug, it bothers him that anyone would wonder whether pain occurred? I’ve seen people who engage in “moral obvious-ism”: “whatever my moral intuitions may be, they are obviously right and yours are obviously wrong”. deBoer’s anti-EA stance might be simply that.
The second sentence there is surely inaccurate, but the third is the crux of the matter: he claims it’s “self-evidently ludicrous” to think extinction of predators is preferable to the suffering and death of prey. It’s an appeal-to-popularity fallacy: since the naturalistic fallacy is very popular, it is right. But also, deBoer implies, since one EA argues this, it’s evidence that the entire movement is mad. Like, is debate not something intellectuals should be doing?
So, maybe he’s never met anyone who did mainstream things like give to cancer research or local volunteering. But it’s a straw man anyway, since he simply ignores key elements of EA like tractability, comparing different causes with each other via cost-effectiveness estimates and prioritization specialists, etc.
Yet he is objecting to it, and there are huge websites filled with the EA content which… counts as “no content”?
But oh well, haters gonna hate. Wait a minute, didn’t Scott Alexander respond to this already?