Why wouldn’t it be controversial? It suggests something other than people acting according to their personal pet projects, ideologies, and social affiliations, and proposes a way by which those can be compared and found wanting. The fact that it also comes with significantly more demandingness than anything else just makes it a stronger implicit attack.
Most people will read EA as a claim to the moral high ground, regardless of how nicely it’s presented to them. Largely because it basically is one. Implicit in all claims to the moral high ground—even if it’s never stated and even if it’s directly denied—is the corollary claim that their claims to the moral high ground are lesser or even invalid. Which is a claim of superiority.
That will produce defensiveness and hostility by default.
Many people’s livelihoods depend on ineffective charity, of course, and Sinclair’s Rule is also a factor. But it’s a minor one. The main factor is that the premise of EA is that charity should be purchasing utilons. And even starting to consider that premise makes a lot of people tacitly realize that their political and charitable work may have been purchasing warm fuzzies, which is an unpleasant feeling that they are motivated to push back against to protect their self-image as a do-gooder/good person/etc.
Of course, there is no need for contradiction. You can purchase both utilons and warm fuzzies, so long as you do it separately. But in my estimation, no more than 5% of the world, at the absolute most, is amenable to buying warm fuzzies and utilons separately. (More likely it’s less than 0.5%.) The other 95% will either halt, catch fire, and reorient their internal moral compass, or, much more commonly, get outraged that you dared to pressure them to do that. (Whether you actually applied any pressure is basically immaterial.)
I like this comment and think it answers the question at the right level of analysis.
To try and summarize it back: EA’s big assumption is that you should purchase utilons, rather than fuzzies, with charity. This is very different from how many people think about the world and their relationship to charity. To claim that somebody’s way of “doing good” is not as good as they think is often interpreted by them as an attack on their character and identity, thus met with emotional defensiveness and counterattack.
EA ideas aim to change how people act and think (and for some core parts of their identity); such pressure is by default met with resistance.
Why wouldn’t it be controversial? It suggests something other than people acting according to their personal pet projects, ideologies, and social affiliations, and proposes a way by which those can be compared and found wanting. The fact that it also comes with significantly more demandingness than anything else just makes it a stronger implicit attack.
Most people will read EA as a claim to the moral high ground, regardless of how nicely it’s presented to them. Largely because it basically is one. Implicit in all claims to the moral high ground—even if it’s never stated and even if it’s directly denied—is the corollary claim that their claims to the moral high ground are lesser or even invalid. Which is a claim of superiority.
That will produce defensiveness and hostility by default.
Many people’s livelihoods depend on ineffective charity, of course, and Sinclair’s Rule is also a factor. But it’s a minor one. The main factor is that the premise of EA is that charity should be purchasing utilons. And even starting to consider that premise makes a lot of people tacitly realize that their political and charitable work may have been purchasing warm fuzzies, which is an unpleasant feeling that they are motivated to push back against to protect their self-image as a do-gooder/good person/etc.
Of course, there is no need for contradiction. You can purchase both utilons and warm fuzzies, so long as you do it separately. But in my estimation, no more than 5% of the world, at the absolute most, is amenable to buying warm fuzzies and utilons separately. (More likely it’s less than 0.5%.) The other 95% will either halt, catch fire, and reorient their internal moral compass, or, much more commonly, get outraged that you dared to pressure them to do that. (Whether you actually applied any pressure is basically immaterial.)
I like this comment and think it answers the question at the right level of analysis.
To try and summarize it back: EA’s big assumption is that you should purchase utilons, rather than fuzzies, with charity. This is very different from how many people think about the world and their relationship to charity. To claim that somebody’s way of “doing good” is not as good as they think is often interpreted by them as an attack on their character and identity, thus met with emotional defensiveness and counterattack.
EA ideas aim to change how people act and think (and for some core parts of their identity); such pressure is by default met with resistance.