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.
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.