I wouldn’t call these biases. I was a typical lefty before I joined EA but when I learned about economic history and microeconomics I heavily updated towards what you call “capitalist mode of production”. In hindsight, I knew very little about economics and just repeated the same ideas that my leftist friends had. Knowing more has made me better at criticizing certain aspects of capitalism but also more appreciative of others.
The bias, in my opinion, should not be stated as the outcome (“believe in capitalism”) but what directs
one to arrive at such a position (e.g. risk aversion wrt to bad publicity, trust in authority etc).
I think this idea bears some merit in itself, but it would be a lot more complex in practice I think. Some other replies have covered that and I have nothing useful to add, so I won’t. One thing I would say is that we have to acknowledge that some of the criticism you list is pretty genuine. We aren’t a perfect community and this does impact our activities. Some examples from what Timnit et al discussed on Twitter:
‘EA and longtermism are claimed to be divorced from the lived experience of common people’
The majority of EA’s base is in the world’s ‘elite’ academic centres. This is for obvious reasons in that it is the best bang-for-buck place to find reliable quality of academic talent. However, it also means that EA generally picks from the most priviliged among society. For example a 2014 Cherwell report (bit dated, but relevant) found that the national average of students having to work while they study to support themselves is 57%, 90% of whom work 20+ hours per week. At Oxford University, only 20% of students work and ‘the majority’ according to the report work under 5 hours per week. This is because the students there are generally from much wealthier backgrounds, so fewer are forced to find part-time employment to fund themselves. This may also be due to other factors, such as a lack of work nearby (eg Oxford isn’t a huge city), but this is unlikely to be the main factor. Also, most EA orgs are based in the most expensive places in the UK (London, Oxford, Cambridge) which means that people with more financial runway can afford to take more opportunities. Is this a bad thing? Not in itself. But it does mean that EA’s membership demographic may not reflect the demographic makeup of society at large. It’s a genuine criticism. To be fair, the EA community does try hard to correct this, but it’s just looking at things as they are. When Timnu makes this point, she doesn’t make it baselessly.
EA and longtermism are claimed to follow colonialist lines of thought
An example of this is that influential EA members have in the past published pieces that to the general public are pretty horrifying, and I can’t for the life of me think why people are surprised at backlash. People are like “omg we’re being dragged publicly on Twitter” and you read the Tweet sources and you’re like “well...yeah”.
For example, posing the idea that some humans are more valuable than others. Hot takes like “Hey, maybe disabled people don’t have the same right to be alive as non-disabled people because they’re less useful” are going to generate some aggro. And in my opinion rightly so. Everyone is entitled to freedom of speech, but the community has to accept the blowback from that policy.
I’ve often thought that EA’s lack of centralised reaction to things like this has been a bit of an issue. Like when there were protests against EA regarding some views the public found objectionable, EA just kind of ignored it. But the media didn’t. Then again, creating some kind of EA PR dept could be seen as having something to hide, and EA has always liked a full transparency policy.
You’re right in that it would be useful to say up front “Hey, we’re not perfect, here’s the values we believe in but not all members agree and that’s okay”. But what are those values, and who decides? And would such an intro provide a cooling effect to philosophical thought? Or would it help, considering it matters just as much what people perceive your community to be as it does what your community actually is?
This was a good post, and raises good questions, I apologise if my answer/input isn’t helpful. It’s a good issue to raise because if it ever reaches the point where calling yourself a Longtermist or whatever is career suicide, the philosophy dies—for reasons entirely unrelated to the philosophy itself. It’s worth considering.
It would be nice to learn what movements exist besides EA. It may be beneficial for people to find those movements. Overviews could be done within EA forum articles first.
Absolutely, I can see what you mean. Personal lens counts for a lot and people can run away with ideas of badness. Things are rarely as bad as people criticise them for being, and EA is no different. Yeah it has a few issues here and there but the media and Twitter can often make these issues look far, far worse than they actually are. I can totally see where you’re coming from.
One (probably surmountable but non-trivial in my view) problem with this is that once you start trying to draft a statement about exactly what attitude we have to capitalism/economics you’ll start to see underlying diversity beneath “don’t want to abolish capitalism.” This, I predict, will make it trickier than it seems to come up with anything clear and punchy that everyone can sign onto.
In particular, leaving aside for a minute people with actually anti-capitalist views, you’ll start to see a split between people with actual neo-liberal or libertarian economic views they are confident of who would give ringing endorsements of capitalism, people who are just skeptical that we know whether or not “capitalism is good” is true or regard it as too vague to be worth assessing, and people who simply don’t think political activism is as good a use of the marginal dollar as other stuff, because they think it’s usually not very neglected or tractable. For example, I’d hesitate to sign onto “we are pro-capitalist”, but not because I’m anti, so much as because I have a mixture of the second 2 positions.
Incidentally, for what it’s worth, I strongly suspect that in developed countries with a traditional “party of business” and “party of labour”, a somewhat higher % of EAs in those countries vote for the “labour” one. I actually think that is consistent with what you’ve said about community attitudes to capitalism. But if I’m correct about it, I think saying were pro-capitalis
economic rightists will actually confuse at least some outsiders about where we stand on a measure of political affiliation they really care about. (I’m thinking of people on the centre-left here primarily, rather than more radical socialists.)
I suspect that unfortunately, both in the initial writing of such things and the finding of them, that we’d get more conflict rather than less. I think it will be hard to get EAs to reach consensus on what our biases are, and I’d guess that adversarial people will use that kind of thing as fodder, unfortunately. Maybe there will be people who appreciate learning it and being able to understand EA’s role in the intellectual ecosystem, but I don’t foresee that doing a lot to reduce friction.
Having more projects in common would serve this goal better, I’d guess, but that’s of course complicated in lots of ways
A better word for this might be “priors”—it indicates that there’s already existing inertia towards these positions in EA, but doesn’t carry the connotation of this being a bad thing.
That said, it’s not 100% accurate—a “prior” is an assumption of the world that comes from deep-seated beliefs or upbringing, whereas many of us in EA who have certain existing stances have done so via reasoning.
A couple thoughts so far, written at 3am so hopefully at least somewhat clear:
The post isn’t short :)
Another bias is in favour of technocracy over democracy. “Impact is calculated through careful analysis, and this analysis can be done by anyone, so the recipients do not need to govern it or give inputs to it.” I do not mean by this that anyone in EA would stand behind this quote as written (though some might), but rather that we’re biased in this direction.
These biases can be viewed through more than one lens: on the other hand, this is what a newcomer should expect to currently find in EA circles; on the other hand they aren’t sacred, and do not automatically follow from EA principles. Nor are they rigourously argued for. It is rather that no arguments have been put forward convincing enough to move people against them. In other words, they may change, and we can work to change them if we don’t like them, as long as we show changing them will help.
Another kind of “bias” that probably is a core part of EA is pragmatism: projects and ideas have to be assessed on how much they contribute to the end goal (whichever it may be: utility, equity, beauty, etc.) - adopting one part of a theory (or political ideology) does not mean all the rest have to be adopted too.
I wouldn’t call these biases. I was a typical lefty before I joined EA but when I learned about economic history and microeconomics I heavily updated towards what you call “capitalist mode of production”. In hindsight, I knew very little about economics and just repeated the same ideas that my leftist friends had. Knowing more has made me better at criticizing certain aspects of capitalism but also more appreciative of others.
The bias, in my opinion, should not be stated as the outcome (“believe in capitalism”) but what directs one to arrive at such a position (e.g. risk aversion wrt to bad publicity, trust in authority etc).
I think this idea bears some merit in itself, but it would be a lot more complex in practice I think. Some other replies have covered that and I have nothing useful to add, so I won’t. One thing I would say is that we have to acknowledge that some of the criticism you list is pretty genuine. We aren’t a perfect community and this does impact our activities. Some examples from what Timnit et al discussed on Twitter:
The majority of EA’s base is in the world’s ‘elite’ academic centres. This is for obvious reasons in that it is the best bang-for-buck place to find reliable quality of academic talent. However, it also means that EA generally picks from the most priviliged among society. For example a 2014 Cherwell report (bit dated, but relevant) found that the national average of students having to work while they study to support themselves is 57%, 90% of whom work 20+ hours per week. At Oxford University, only 20% of students work and ‘the majority’ according to the report work under 5 hours per week. This is because the students there are generally from much wealthier backgrounds, so fewer are forced to find part-time employment to fund themselves. This may also be due to other factors, such as a lack of work nearby (eg Oxford isn’t a huge city), but this is unlikely to be the main factor. Also, most EA orgs are based in the most expensive places in the UK (London, Oxford, Cambridge) which means that people with more financial runway can afford to take more opportunities. Is this a bad thing? Not in itself. But it does mean that EA’s membership demographic may not reflect the demographic makeup of society at large. It’s a genuine criticism. To be fair, the EA community does try hard to correct this, but it’s just looking at things as they are. When Timnu makes this point, she doesn’t make it baselessly.
An example of this is that influential EA members have in the past published pieces that to the general public are pretty horrifying, and I can’t for the life of me think why people are surprised at backlash. People are like “omg we’re being dragged publicly on Twitter” and you read the Tweet sources and you’re like “well...yeah”.
For example, posing the idea that some humans are more valuable than others. Hot takes like “Hey, maybe disabled people don’t have the same right to be alive as non-disabled people because they’re less useful” are going to generate some aggro. And in my opinion rightly so. Everyone is entitled to freedom of speech, but the community has to accept the blowback from that policy.
I’ve often thought that EA’s lack of centralised reaction to things like this has been a bit of an issue. Like when there were protests against EA regarding some views the public found objectionable, EA just kind of ignored it. But the media didn’t. Then again, creating some kind of EA PR dept could be seen as having something to hide, and EA has always liked a full transparency policy.
You’re right in that it would be useful to say up front “Hey, we’re not perfect, here’s the values we believe in but not all members agree and that’s okay”. But what are those values, and who decides? And would such an intro provide a cooling effect to philosophical thought? Or would it help, considering it matters just as much what people perceive your community to be as it does what your community actually is?
This was a good post, and raises good questions, I apologise if my answer/input isn’t helpful. It’s a good issue to raise because if it ever reaches the point where calling yourself a Longtermist or whatever is career suicide, the philosophy dies—for reasons entirely unrelated to the philosophy itself. It’s worth considering.
It would be nice to learn what movements exist besides EA.
It may be beneficial for people to find those movements.
Overviews could be done within EA forum articles first.
No problem!
Absolutely, I can see what you mean. Personal lens counts for a lot and people can run away with ideas of badness. Things are rarely as bad as people criticise them for being, and EA is no different. Yeah it has a few issues here and there but the media and Twitter can often make these issues look far, far worse than they actually are. I can totally see where you’re coming from.
Surveys seem valuable, I’d certainly find the results interesting.
In case you haven’t seen this, it might address some of (though likely not all of) what you’re looking for: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LRmEezoeeqGhkWm2p/is-ea-just-longtermism-now-1
One (probably surmountable but non-trivial in my view) problem with this is that once you start trying to draft a statement about exactly what attitude we have to capitalism/economics you’ll start to see underlying diversity beneath “don’t want to abolish capitalism.” This, I predict, will make it trickier than it seems to come up with anything clear and punchy that everyone can sign onto. In particular, leaving aside for a minute people with actually anti-capitalist views, you’ll start to see a split between people with actual neo-liberal or libertarian economic views they are confident of who would give ringing endorsements of capitalism, people who are just skeptical that we know whether or not “capitalism is good” is true or regard it as too vague to be worth assessing, and people who simply don’t think political activism is as good a use of the marginal dollar as other stuff, because they think it’s usually not very neglected or tractable. For example, I’d hesitate to sign onto “we are pro-capitalist”, but not because I’m anti, so much as because I have a mixture of the second 2 positions.
Incidentally, for what it’s worth, I strongly suspect that in developed countries with a traditional “party of business” and “party of labour”, a somewhat higher % of EAs in those countries vote for the “labour” one. I actually think that is consistent with what you’ve said about community attitudes to capitalism. But if I’m correct about it, I think saying were pro-capitalis economic rightists will actually confuse at least some outsiders about where we stand on a measure of political affiliation they really care about. (I’m thinking of people on the centre-left here primarily, rather than more radical socialists.)
I think EAs are in favour of systemic change. This old article gives a list, which I guess will be much longer now. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5XeCA5gKbMakAskLy/effective-altruists-love-systemic-change
I suspect that unfortunately, both in the initial writing of such things and the finding of them, that we’d get more conflict rather than less. I think it will be hard to get EAs to reach consensus on what our biases are, and I’d guess that adversarial people will use that kind of thing as fodder, unfortunately. Maybe there will be people who appreciate learning it and being able to understand EA’s role in the intellectual ecosystem, but I don’t foresee that doing a lot to reduce friction.
Having more projects in common would serve this goal better, I’d guess, but that’s of course complicated in lots of ways
A better word for this might be “priors”—it indicates that there’s already existing inertia towards these positions in EA, but doesn’t carry the connotation of this being a bad thing.
That said, it’s not 100% accurate—a “prior” is an assumption of the world that comes from deep-seated beliefs or upbringing, whereas many of us in EA who have certain existing stances have done so via reasoning.
A couple thoughts so far, written at 3am so hopefully at least somewhat clear:
The post isn’t short :)
Another bias is in favour of technocracy over democracy. “Impact is calculated through careful analysis, and this analysis can be done by anyone, so the recipients do not need to govern it or give inputs to it.” I do not mean by this that anyone in EA would stand behind this quote as written (though some might), but rather that we’re biased in this direction.
These biases can be viewed through more than one lens: on the other hand, this is what a newcomer should expect to currently find in EA circles; on the other hand they aren’t sacred, and do not automatically follow from EA principles. Nor are they rigourously argued for. It is rather that no arguments have been put forward convincing enough to move people against them. In other words, they may change, and we can work to change them if we don’t like them, as long as we show changing them will help.
Another kind of “bias” that probably is a core part of EA is pragmatism: projects and ideas have to be assessed on how much they contribute to the end goal (whichever it may be: utility, equity, beauty, etc.) - adopting one part of a theory (or political ideology) does not mean all the rest have to be adopted too.