None of those seem like critiques of the broad idea “I will attempt to think critically about how to reduce the most suffering.” Rather, they take issue with tactics.
So, they aren’t criticisms of EA as a philosophy, they are criticisms of EA tactics.
Also, as Peter Singer recently pointed out, no one ever said EA work was “either / or.” If someone has a systemic solution to global poverty, by all means, pursue it. In the meantime, EAs will donate to AMF and Helen Keller, etc.
So, the question then is whether we should sit on our hands and leave our money in savings accounts while we wait for a solution to systemic poverty, or should we use that money to de-worm a child while we are waiting.
It’s not like effective altruists are the first or only people to think critically about how to reduce suffering. EA philosophy doesn’t have a monopoly on trying to do good or trying to the most good, it doesn’t even have a monopoly of approaching doing good from an empirical standpoint. These aren’t original or new ideas at all, and they aren’t the ideas that are being critiqued.
I don’t think it makes sense to separate what you’re calling EA tactics and EA philosophy. EA is its tactics, and those can change, but for the moment they are what they are. On a more concrete philosophical note, aspects of EA philosophy like cause prioritization, cause neutrality, utilitarian approaches, using metrics like cost-effectiveness, DALYs and QALY to measure outcomes, tendencies towards technocratic solutions, and top down approaches are among the things that are being critiqued. I don’t think these are all necessarily valid or representative of the whole of EA, but the first few are certainly very closely related to what I consider to be the constitutive and distinctive features of EA. That being said, I’m curious about how you define EA philosophy beyond the broad idea of thinking critically about how to reduce the most suffering, as that definition is broad enough that I’d say most people working in pretty much any field related to wellbeing, social policy or charity would be included.
I understand your frustration, but I don’t think anybody making the arguments above is arguing that “we should sit on our hands and leave our money in savings accounts while we wait for a solution to systemic poverty”. They’re arguing that current EA approaches, both philosophical and tactical, are not satisfactory and that they don’t do the most good, and that there should be more effort and resources put into solutions that they think are.
I’ve read the text you linked twice, to make sure I’m not missing something, and I don’t see where the authors argue that “it would be to leave money in a savings account than donate it to a de-worming charity or AMF”—which, incidentally, is very different than “we should sit on our hands and leave our money in savings accounts while we wait for a solution to systemic poverty”. I guess the closest thing is “how funding an “effective” organization’s expansion into another country encourages colonialist interventions that impose elite institutional structures and sideline community groups whose local histories and situated knowledges are invaluable guides to meaningful action.”, which is not arguing that we should keep money in our bank accounts waiting for systemic change, but that funding these charities have adverse effects and so they shouldn’t be funded.
Exactly, your last sentence. She think it would be better to leave the money in a savings account than to donate it to a generic EA global poverty cause because of the adverse effects. But these adverse effects are not cause-specific or empirical, but rather assumed based on the high level EA philosophy.
“We shouldn’t fund charity X because it’s harmful” is a very different argument than “we should sit on our hands and leave our money in savings accounts while we wait for a solution to systemic poverty”, which is the argument I said no one is making. The authors aren’t arguing that we should be doing nothing and passively waiting for a systemic solution. They’re saying that funding charity X is harmful.
But these adverse effects are not cause-specific or empirical, but rather assumed based on the high level EA philosophy.
I do agree that this isn’t backed up in this very short blog post introducing a book (charitably, I would assume that it is backed up in one of the pieces in the collection this post is attached to, as that is how these types of introductions tend to function, but I could be wrong and can’t know until the book is published in February). That being said, this is a frequent criticism levied at charities from the Global North acting in the Global South. I don’t know enough about every “effective” charity functions to say confidently that it is or isn’t true, but the general climate of charitable giving and international aid tends enough in this direction that I see no reason to immediately assume it’s “assumed based on the high level EA philosophy” without more information. I’ll remain unconvinced in either direction until the actual book comes out.
It looks like an interesting book, btw. At first I thought it had come about after the SBF scandal, but it seems to have been in the work for quite some time.
Regarding what they write in the blog post, their criticism does come from a valid place, kind of. They certainly don’t advocate doing nothing as an alternative to engaging in EA. That said, I think they are probably mistaken.
One of their unspoken assumptions seems to be that if EA was not around, much of the energy that has gone into EA would have gone to leftist movements for social and environmental justice. If this assumption is correct, then I would probably be inclined to agree with them. I’m an EA adjacent eco-socialist who has followed core EA tenets in my own life for many years, but I still think that the actual EA movement as it exists probably does less good in the world than labor movements, environmental movements, etc.
I don’t think that their assumption is correct, however. If EA was not around I think it’s much more likely that the energy that has gone into EA would just have gone to into making privileged people even more privileged. EA kids would probably not have become EAs without EA, but rather have gone on to lucrative careers which was mostly about themselves.
I don’t have any strong data backing that prior, but it’s my hunch at least.
This is all pretty reasonable to me, although I do think some of the EA energy would still be go into other causes if EA werent around—but definitely not all. I’m looking forward to the book as well.
Side note: I don’t know if your username is after the band, but I’ll be listening to Stitches and Runs for the next couple hours thanks to you.
Alice Crary’s argument seems to suggest that if you pass a child drowning in a pond, you should let the child drown, because your resources and energy would be better directed at addressing the systemic issues that cause drowning. For example, why is there no fence around the pond? Why aren’t parents more diligent about keeping their toddlers away from ponds. It would be better to hurry past the pond and let the child drown so you can focus on these root cause issues.
I think that this is mischaracterization of the systemic change criticism. If you’re phrasing it in terms of the drowning child thought experiment and utilitarianism, it would be something like if there is a pond where one child drowns every however many minutes, it’s better to spend your time building a fence than it is to spend your time saving each individual child, because the fence will have a longer lasting impact and will keep the children from drowning even when there isn’t an altruistic bystander with the means and time to jump in and save a child, and will end up saving more lives overall.
The whole point is that to turn it into an either/or question is ridiculous.
The drowning example you give is good because it’s a real one. Drowning is actually the leading cause of death amongst 1-4 year olds (https://www.cdc.gov/drowning/facts/index.html) in the United States. Which is why people with backyard swimming pools have to put fences around them.
But if you saw a child drowning in a swimming pool and refused to save it because you could save more lives in the long run by addressing the systemic issues that make drowning the leading cause of death amongst 1-4 year olds in the United States, well…that’s what Crary’s argument is.
I’m having a hard time seeing the “whole point” because your point seems to keep changing.
I don’t think it’s an either/or situation either. I think both short term solutions and systemic change should be pursued. Both have their time and place, and both are needed. AMF and other effective charities do important work and their positive impact on the lives they effect is incontrovertible and massive.
That being said, it comes with a trade off and EA rhetoric itself does include some either/or in that it advocates that you should spend your charitable money on this and not that. EAs argue that we should do good better and donate to effective charities instead of other things because they are more effective. The systemic change critique argues that they are not more effective and donating to them isn’t doing good better because those resources would be doing more good if spent on other interventions, like advocating for systemic change or legal reforms or democratization or whatever intervention they think will do more good. This isn’t all that different than what EAs do: when you donate to AMF or deworming initiatives to save a life, you do that at the expense of donating to another intervention that would save a life elsewhere, like drug addiction treatment or children’s hospitals. In both cases, the decision is based on where the allocation of resources will do the most good, it’s only the reasoning behind it that is different.
One reason, in my opinion, that EA attracts more criticism on this is that it makes a claim that the interventions it backs are the best thing you can be spending your resources on with given information. This claim is central to EA. It’s perfectly fair and valid that people who disagree with this claim will criticize EA and argue that these interventions are not, in fact, the best.
Obviously I agree that there can be disagreement on what are the best interventions. That is not a criticism of EA. The world is messy.
But let’s take a thought experiment in which once you decide that you wanted to use your limited resources to improve the world as effectively as possible, you could know exactly how to do that. In that world, I don’t think it should be controversial to do that thing.
To me, that is what EA philosophy is: a goal of improving the world in the most effective way possible. And that is why I say EA should not be controversial.
In the real world we don’t know what the best interventions so we have to make judgements and do research, etc. But to me those are all tactical issues.
None of those seem like critiques of the broad idea “I will attempt to think critically about how to reduce the most suffering.” Rather, they take issue with tactics.
So, they aren’t criticisms of EA as a philosophy, they are criticisms of EA tactics.
Also, as Peter Singer recently pointed out, no one ever said EA work was “either / or.” If someone has a systemic solution to global poverty, by all means, pursue it. In the meantime, EAs will donate to AMF and Helen Keller, etc.
So, the question then is whether we should sit on our hands and leave our money in savings accounts while we wait for a solution to systemic poverty, or should we use that money to de-worm a child while we are waiting.
It’s not like effective altruists are the first or only people to think critically about how to reduce suffering. EA philosophy doesn’t have a monopoly on trying to do good or trying to the most good, it doesn’t even have a monopoly of approaching doing good from an empirical standpoint. These aren’t original or new ideas at all, and they aren’t the ideas that are being critiqued.
I don’t think it makes sense to separate what you’re calling EA tactics and EA philosophy. EA is its tactics, and those can change, but for the moment they are what they are. On a more concrete philosophical note, aspects of EA philosophy like cause prioritization, cause neutrality, utilitarian approaches, using metrics like cost-effectiveness, DALYs and QALY to measure outcomes, tendencies towards technocratic solutions, and top down approaches are among the things that are being critiqued. I don’t think these are all necessarily valid or representative of the whole of EA, but the first few are certainly very closely related to what I consider to be the constitutive and distinctive features of EA. That being said, I’m curious about how you define EA philosophy beyond the broad idea of thinking critically about how to reduce the most suffering, as that definition is broad enough that I’d say most people working in pretty much any field related to wellbeing, social policy or charity would be included.
I understand your frustration, but I don’t think anybody making the arguments above is arguing that “we should sit on our hands and leave our money in savings accounts while we wait for a solution to systemic poverty”. They’re arguing that current EA approaches, both philosophical and tactical, are not satisfactory and that they don’t do the most good, and that there should be more effort and resources put into solutions that they think are.
I agree EAs aren’t original and weren’t the first.
I do think it makes sense to separate tactics and philosophy.
There are people who say it would be to leave money in a savings account than donate it to a de-worming charity or AMF. One of the most prominent ones is Alice Crary. Here is a recent sample of her argument: https://blog.oup.com/2022/12/the-predictably-grievous-harms-of-effective-altruism/
I’ve read the text you linked twice, to make sure I’m not missing something, and I don’t see where the authors argue that “it would be to leave money in a savings account than donate it to a de-worming charity or AMF”—which, incidentally, is very different than “we should sit on our hands and leave our money in savings accounts while we wait for a solution to systemic poverty”. I guess the closest thing is “how funding an “effective” organization’s expansion into another country encourages colonialist interventions that impose elite institutional structures and sideline community groups whose local histories and situated knowledges are invaluable guides to meaningful action.”, which is not arguing that we should keep money in our bank accounts waiting for systemic change, but that funding these charities have adverse effects and so they shouldn’t be funded.
Exactly, your last sentence. She think it would be better to leave the money in a savings account than to donate it to a generic EA global poverty cause because of the adverse effects. But these adverse effects are not cause-specific or empirical, but rather assumed based on the high level EA philosophy.
“We shouldn’t fund charity X because it’s harmful” is a very different argument than “we should sit on our hands and leave our money in savings accounts while we wait for a solution to systemic poverty”, which is the argument I said no one is making. The authors aren’t arguing that we should be doing nothing and passively waiting for a systemic solution. They’re saying that funding charity X is harmful.
I do agree that this isn’t backed up in this very short blog post introducing a book (charitably, I would assume that it is backed up in one of the pieces in the collection this post is attached to, as that is how these types of introductions tend to function, but I could be wrong and can’t know until the book is published in February). That being said, this is a frequent criticism levied at charities from the Global North acting in the Global South. I don’t know enough about every “effective” charity functions to say confidently that it is or isn’t true, but the general climate of charitable giving and international aid tends enough in this direction that I see no reason to immediately assume it’s “assumed based on the high level EA philosophy” without more information. I’ll remain unconvinced in either direction until the actual book comes out.
I agree.
It looks like an interesting book, btw. At first I thought it had come about after the SBF scandal, but it seems to have been in the work for quite some time.
Regarding what they write in the blog post, their criticism does come from a valid place, kind of. They certainly don’t advocate doing nothing as an alternative to engaging in EA. That said, I think they are probably mistaken.
One of their unspoken assumptions seems to be that if EA was not around, much of the energy that has gone into EA would have gone to leftist movements for social and environmental justice. If this assumption is correct, then I would probably be inclined to agree with them. I’m an EA adjacent eco-socialist who has followed core EA tenets in my own life for many years, but I still think that the actual EA movement as it exists probably does less good in the world than labor movements, environmental movements, etc.
I don’t think that their assumption is correct, however. If EA was not around I think it’s much more likely that the energy that has gone into EA would just have gone to into making privileged people even more privileged. EA kids would probably not have become EAs without EA, but rather have gone on to lucrative careers which was mostly about themselves.
I don’t have any strong data backing that prior, but it’s my hunch at least.
So I think EA is probably more good than bad.
That said I will read the book when it comes out.
This is all pretty reasonable to me, although I do think some of the EA energy would still be go into other causes if EA werent around—but definitely not all. I’m looking forward to the book as well.
Side note: I don’t know if your username is after the band, but I’ll be listening to Stitches and Runs for the next couple hours thanks to you.
The basis for a lot of utilitarian arguments is the drowning child example (https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/child-in-the-pond/).
Alice Crary’s argument seems to suggest that if you pass a child drowning in a pond, you should let the child drown, because your resources and energy would be better directed at addressing the systemic issues that cause drowning. For example, why is there no fence around the pond? Why aren’t parents more diligent about keeping their toddlers away from ponds. It would be better to hurry past the pond and let the child drown so you can focus on these root cause issues.
I think that this is mischaracterization of the systemic change criticism. If you’re phrasing it in terms of the drowning child thought experiment and utilitarianism, it would be something like if there is a pond where one child drowns every however many minutes, it’s better to spend your time building a fence than it is to spend your time saving each individual child, because the fence will have a longer lasting impact and will keep the children from drowning even when there isn’t an altruistic bystander with the means and time to jump in and save a child, and will end up saving more lives overall.
The whole point is that to turn it into an either/or question is ridiculous.
The drowning example you give is good because it’s a real one. Drowning is actually the leading cause of death amongst 1-4 year olds (https://www.cdc.gov/drowning/facts/index.html) in the United States. Which is why people with backyard swimming pools have to put fences around them.
But if you saw a child drowning in a swimming pool and refused to save it because you could save more lives in the long run by addressing the systemic issues that make drowning the leading cause of death amongst 1-4 year olds in the United States, well…that’s what Crary’s argument is.
I’m having a hard time seeing the “whole point” because your point seems to keep changing.
I don’t think it’s an either/or situation either. I think both short term solutions and systemic change should be pursued. Both have their time and place, and both are needed. AMF and other effective charities do important work and their positive impact on the lives they effect is incontrovertible and massive.
That being said, it comes with a trade off and EA rhetoric itself does include some either/or in that it advocates that you should spend your charitable money on this and not that. EAs argue that we should do good better and donate to effective charities instead of other things because they are more effective. The systemic change critique argues that they are not more effective and donating to them isn’t doing good better because those resources would be doing more good if spent on other interventions, like advocating for systemic change or legal reforms or democratization or whatever intervention they think will do more good. This isn’t all that different than what EAs do: when you donate to AMF or deworming initiatives to save a life, you do that at the expense of donating to another intervention that would save a life elsewhere, like drug addiction treatment or children’s hospitals. In both cases, the decision is based on where the allocation of resources will do the most good, it’s only the reasoning behind it that is different.
One reason, in my opinion, that EA attracts more criticism on this is that it makes a claim that the interventions it backs are the best thing you can be spending your resources on with given information. This claim is central to EA. It’s perfectly fair and valid that people who disagree with this claim will criticize EA and argue that these interventions are not, in fact, the best.
I don’t even think we are disagreeing anymore.
Obviously I agree that there can be disagreement on what are the best interventions. That is not a criticism of EA. The world is messy.
But let’s take a thought experiment in which once you decide that you wanted to use your limited resources to improve the world as effectively as possible, you could know exactly how to do that. In that world, I don’t think it should be controversial to do that thing.
To me, that is what EA philosophy is: a goal of improving the world in the most effective way possible. And that is why I say EA should not be controversial.
In the real world we don’t know what the best interventions so we have to make judgements and do research, etc. But to me those are all tactical issues.