Thanks for this great post. I’m closer to left-libertarian or classical liberal myself, but I have many friends and family (mostly in the US) who are more traditional progressives and much more sympathetic to typical social justice concerns than to EA. I agree with many of the issues identified here (including in the comments); my own experience has been that it is largely that they want to be able to “walk and chew gum at the same time”. As an economist, I’m imbued with notions like opportunity cost and only being able to optimize one goal at a time (potentially itself an aggregation of course), but this is very foreign and off-putting to them. Either they don’t understand the size of the actual disparities between issues, or… well actually I’m not sure, it’s hard for me to wrap my head around.
The main topic is distinct, but from “The radicalism of effective altruism” onward it is very relevant and informative. On the one hand Yglesias is criticizing the journalist’s progressive critique of EA, SSC, Silicon Valley, etc. On the other hand Yglesias (who is definitely on the left, and who likes evidence and reason a lot) doesn’t end up very sympathetic to EA himself. He thinks of it as purely consequentialist, extreme, etc. Even if it’s hard to attract some full-on progressives, someone like him should be exactly the type of person who supports EA. Something has gone wrong with the messaging if that isn’t the case, and we are missing out.
Thanks for this great post. I’m closer to left-libertarian or classical liberal myself, but I have many friends and family (mostly in the US) who are more traditional progressives and much more sympathetic to typical social justice concerns than to EA. I agree with many of the issues identified here (including in the comments); my own experience has been that it is largely that they want to be able to “walk and chew gum at the same time”. As an economist, I’m imbued with notions like opportunity cost and only being able to optimize one goal at a time (potentially itself an aggregation of course), but this is very foreign and off-putting to them. Either they don’t understand the size of the actual disparities between issues, or… well actually I’m not sure, it’s hard for me to wrap my head around.
However I particularly wanted to mention an illuminating recent post by Matt Yglesias (who came up elsewhere in the comments) on his substack: https://www.slowboring.com/p/slate-star-codex
The main topic is distinct, but from “The radicalism of effective altruism” onward it is very relevant and informative. On the one hand Yglesias is criticizing the journalist’s progressive critique of EA, SSC, Silicon Valley, etc. On the other hand Yglesias (who is definitely on the left, and who likes evidence and reason a lot) doesn’t end up very sympathetic to EA himself. He thinks of it as purely consequentialist, extreme, etc. Even if it’s hard to attract some full-on progressives, someone like him should be exactly the type of person who supports EA. Something has gone wrong with the messaging if that isn’t the case, and we are missing out.
I agree with the last point, and I think EA is doing fairly well on the being sympathetic to Matt Yglesias front:
he donated his stimulus check to GiveWell https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1371137697746681858?s=20
he appeared on Julia Galef‘s Rationally Speaking podcast and iirc voiced pretty strong support of rationalist ideals http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/episode-251-the-case-for-one-billion-americans-more-matt-ygl.html