This seems like an incredibly interesting and important discussion! I don’t have much time now, but I’ll throw in some quick thoughts and hopefully come back later.
I think that there is room for Romy and Paolo’s viewpoint in the EA movement. Lemme see if I can translate some of their points into EA-speak and fill in some of their implicit arguments. I’ll inevitably use a somewhat persuasive tone, but disagreement is of course welcome.
(For context, I’ve been involved in EA for about six years now, but I’ve never come across any EAs in the wild. Instead, I’m immersed in three communities: Buddhist, Christian, and social-justice-oriented academic. I’m deeply committed to consequentialism, but I believe that virtues are great tools for bringing about good consequences.)
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I think the main difference between Guerrilla’s perspective and the dominant EA perspective is that Guerrilla believes that small actions, virtues, intuitions, etc. really matter. I’m inclined to agree.
Social justice intuition says that the fundamental problem behind all this suffering is that powerful/privileged people are jerks in various ways. For example, colonialism screwed up Africa’s thriving (by the standards of that time) economy. (I’m no expert, but as far as I know, it seems highly likely that African communities would have modernized into flourishing places if they weren’t exploited.) As another example, privileged people act like jerks when they spend money on luxuries instead of donating.
Spiritual intuition, from Buddhism, Christianity, and probably many other traditions, says that the reason powerful/privileged people are jerks is that they’re held captive by greed, anger, delusion, and other afflictive emotions. For example, it’s delusional and greedy to think that you need a sports car more than other people need basic necessities.
If afflictive emotions are the root cause of all the world’s ills, then I think it’s plausible to look to virtues as a solution. (I interpret “generating the political will” to mean “generating the desire for specific actions and the dedication to follow through”, which sound like virtues to me.) In particular, religions and social justice philosophers seem to agree that it’s important to cultivate a genuine yearning for the flourishing of all sentient beings. Other virtues—equanimity, generosity, diligence—obviously help with altruistic endeavors. Virtues can support the goal of happiness for all in at least three ways. First, a virtuous person can help others more effectively. Compassion and generosity help them to gladly share their resources, patience helps them to avoid blowing up with anger and damaging relationships, and perseverance helps them to keep working through challenges. Second, people who have trained their minds are themselves happier with their circumstances (citation needed). Great, now there’s less work for others to do! Third, according to the Buddhist tradition, a virtuous person knows better what to do at any given moment. By developing compassion, one develops wisdom, and vice versa. The “Effective” and the “Altruism” are tied together. This makes sense because spiritual training should make one more open, less reactive, and less susceptible to subconscious habits; once these obscurations are removed, one has a clearer view of what needs to be done in any given moment. You don’t want to act on repressed fear, anger, or bigotry by accident! To riff off Romy and Paolo’s example of “wealthy EA donors” failing to work on themselves, their ignorance of their own minds may have real-world consequences when they don’t even notice that they could support systemic change at their own organizations. The argument here is that our mental states have significant effects on our actions, so we’d better help others by cleaning up our harmful mental tendencies.
Maybe this internal work won’t bear super-effective fruit immediately, but I think it’s clear that mind-training and wellbeing create a positive feedback loop. Investing now will pay off later: building compassionate and wise communities would be incredibly beneficial long-term.
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Miscellaneous points in no particular order:
“EA seems to unquestioningly replicate the values of the old system: efficiency and cost-effectiveness, growth/scale, linearity, science and objectivity, individualism, and decision-making by experts/elites”.
Here’s how I interpret the argument: historically, people who value these things have gone on to gain a bunch of power and use it to oppress others. This is evidence that valuing these things leads to bad consequences. Therefore, we should try to find values that have better track records. I’d be fascinated to see a full argument for or against this chain of reasoning.
More factors that may or may not matter: Greed might be the root cause of someone’s aspiration toward efficiency+growth. A lack of trust+empathy might lead someone to embrace individualism. Giving power to experts/elites suggests a lack of respect for non-elites.
“In short, we believe that EA could do more to encourage wealth owners to dig deep to transform themselves to build meaningful relationships and political allyship that are needed for change at the systems level.”
If you assume that spreading virtues is crucial, as I’ve argued above, and if virtues can spread throughout networks of allies, then you should build those networks.
We would suspect that donors and grant managers with a deep emotional connection to their work and an actual interest to have their personal lives, values and relationships be touched by it will stick with it and go the extra mile to make a positive contribution, generating even more positive outcomes and impact.
More philanthropic funding, about half of it we would argue, should go to initiatives that are still small, unproven and/or academically ‘unprovable’, that tackle the system rather than the symptoms, and adopt a grassroots, participatory bottom-up approach to finding alternative solutions, which might bear more plentiful fruit in the long run.”
Sounds like a good consequentialist thesis that fits right in in EA!
This seems like an incredibly interesting and important discussion! I don’t have much time now, but I’ll throw in some quick thoughts and hopefully come back later.
I think that there is room for Romy and Paolo’s viewpoint in the EA movement. Lemme see if I can translate some of their points into EA-speak and fill in some of their implicit arguments. I’ll inevitably use a somewhat persuasive tone, but disagreement is of course welcome.
(For context, I’ve been involved in EA for about six years now, but I’ve never come across any EAs in the wild. Instead, I’m immersed in three communities: Buddhist, Christian, and social-justice-oriented academic. I’m deeply committed to consequentialism, but I believe that virtues are great tools for bringing about good consequences.)
---
I think the main difference between Guerrilla’s perspective and the dominant EA perspective is that Guerrilla believes that small actions, virtues, intuitions, etc. really matter. I’m inclined to agree.
Social justice intuition says that the fundamental problem behind all this suffering is that powerful/privileged people are jerks in various ways. For example, colonialism screwed up Africa’s thriving (by the standards of that time) economy. (I’m no expert, but as far as I know, it seems highly likely that African communities would have modernized into flourishing places if they weren’t exploited.) As another example, privileged people act like jerks when they spend money on luxuries instead of donating.
Spiritual intuition, from Buddhism, Christianity, and probably many other traditions, says that the reason powerful/privileged people are jerks is that they’re held captive by greed, anger, delusion, and other afflictive emotions. For example, it’s delusional and greedy to think that you need a sports car more than other people need basic necessities.
If afflictive emotions are the root cause of all the world’s ills, then I think it’s plausible to look to virtues as a solution. (I interpret “generating the political will” to mean “generating the desire for specific actions and the dedication to follow through”, which sound like virtues to me.) In particular, religions and social justice philosophers seem to agree that it’s important to cultivate a genuine yearning for the flourishing of all sentient beings. Other virtues—equanimity, generosity, diligence—obviously help with altruistic endeavors. Virtues can support the goal of happiness for all in at least three ways. First, a virtuous person can help others more effectively. Compassion and generosity help them to gladly share their resources, patience helps them to avoid blowing up with anger and damaging relationships, and perseverance helps them to keep working through challenges. Second, people who have trained their minds are themselves happier with their circumstances (citation needed). Great, now there’s less work for others to do! Third, according to the Buddhist tradition, a virtuous person knows better what to do at any given moment. By developing compassion, one develops wisdom, and vice versa. The “Effective” and the “Altruism” are tied together. This makes sense because spiritual training should make one more open, less reactive, and less susceptible to subconscious habits; once these obscurations are removed, one has a clearer view of what needs to be done in any given moment. You don’t want to act on repressed fear, anger, or bigotry by accident! To riff off Romy and Paolo’s example of “wealthy EA donors” failing to work on themselves, their ignorance of their own minds may have real-world consequences when they don’t even notice that they could support systemic change at their own organizations. The argument here is that our mental states have significant effects on our actions, so we’d better help others by cleaning up our harmful mental tendencies.
Maybe this internal work won’t bear super-effective fruit immediately, but I think it’s clear that mind-training and wellbeing create a positive feedback loop. Investing now will pay off later: building compassionate and wise communities would be incredibly beneficial long-term.
---
Miscellaneous points in no particular order:
Here’s how I interpret the argument: historically, people who value these things have gone on to gain a bunch of power and use it to oppress others. This is evidence that valuing these things leads to bad consequences. Therefore, we should try to find values that have better track records. I’d be fascinated to see a full argument for or against this chain of reasoning.
More factors that may or may not matter: Greed might be the root cause of someone’s aspiration toward efficiency+growth. A lack of trust+empathy might lead someone to embrace individualism. Giving power to experts/elites suggests a lack of respect for non-elites.
If you assume that spreading virtues is crucial, as I’ve argued above, and if virtues can spread throughout networks of allies, then you should build those networks.
We need mind training so that we can help impartially. Impartiality is compatible with cultivating “warm” qualities like trust and relationships. Julia Wise explains why no one is a statistic: http://www.givinggladly.com/2018/10/no-one-is-statistic.html
Sounds like a good consequentialist thesis that fits right in in EA!