Subhead: “Why does “doing good well” always make you look like the cleverest boy in school?”
The start of the essay encapsulates the tone and general thrust well:
You can read ungodly reams of essays defining effective altruism—which makes me wonder if the people who wrote them think that they are creating the greatest possible utility by using their time that way—but the simplest definition I tend to see is that effective altruism asks how we can do the best job of doing good. How do we not just help people but help them most efficiently and effectively? I have two visceral responses to this effort.
This is a good project and worth doing.
It’s an utterly absurd way to define your purpose.
It’s a good project because, you know, doing good is important and we should want to do good better rather than worse. It’s utterly absurd because everyone who has ever wanted to do good has wanted to do good well, and acting as though you and your friends alone are the first to hit upon the idea of trying to do it is the kind of galactic hubris that only subcultures that have metastasized on the internet can really achieve.
Freddie is a Marxist blogger who regularly critiques a wide array of left-of-center political movements. I’m not sure if he’s ever written about EA before, but he has a wide following. Here’s his About page, if you’re curious to know more.
I’m very confused about both this article and the top comment by Scott Alexander tbh. FDB highlights an aesthetic critique that seems reasonable but bundles it with among the most “out there” interventions (that afaict no one is working on). To me, I think it’d be helpful to separate out issues of the aesthetics being insufficiently “normie”, from whether the cause areas/actions are insufficiently “normie.”
Like from the article I can’t tell if Freddie considers e.g. South Asian air pollution, or rodent birth control, or interpretability for AI safety, or far-UVC light inactivating viruses, or pandemic-proof shelters, as done by reasonable, professional people, in reasonable, professional organizations, to be part of the problem or part of the solution.
If he disagrees with the specific “weirder” projects EAs are actually doing, then it’s easier to have a debate. And honestly, fair! But right now the critique just looks like glossy-sounding nonsequitors, and I’m worried it’d push people towards (much) less impactful activities via misdirection rather than reasoned argument.
This seems wrong to me. Just this week, I went on a date with someone who told me the only reason she volunteers is that it makes her feel good about herself, and she doesn’t particularly care much about the impact. And you know what, props to her for admitting something that I expect a lot of other people do as well. I don’t think there’s something wrong with it, I’m just saying that “everyone who has ever wanted to do good has wanted to do good well” seems wrong to me.
When I was more active in Quaker circles, I’d hear versions of a quote attributed to Mother Teresa: “we are not called to be successful, but to be faithful.” There was a lot of attention to trying to do good, but the focus was on following where you were being spiritually led, and being in relationship with those you were helping, not effectiveness. Like if you felt a spiritual leading to help people in some ineffective way, people would have thought that was fine.
deBoer overstated it, but his point is that trying to be effective when being altruistic is in no way an original idea:
Where I think he goes wrong is that EA is often defined or interpreted in a maximalist way in terms of doing good well—it’s not about doing some good effectively, it’s about doing the most good from an impartial bent. And this idea is indeed rarer than just doing good well, albeit far from novel.
Much of this is amazing and deserves wider engagement within EA. Thanks for sharing. I LOLed at this bit:
“You can read ungodly reams of essays defining effective altruism—which makes me wonder if the people who wrote them think that they are creating the greatest possible utility by using their time that way ”
When I recently discussed effective altruism with fellow students, I heard similar objections. “Isn’t effective altruism empty?”, they asked. I definitely get them: just like deBoer argues, “everyone who has ever wanted to do good has wanted to do good well”.
The consensus-approved definition of effective altruism as “using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis” may have its merits in introducing effective altruism to those who are new to it. But it may, as it did to my fellow students, also sound meaningless. They wonder: what does effective altruism even do that others don’t do (or do less of)?
Perhaps we need a new definition of effective altruism, one that better emphasizes what distinguishes effective altruism from other social and intellectual movements. What is particularly distinctive about effective altruism for example, is perhaps not just its exceptional commitment to evidence-based interventions to increase wellbeing, but, even more so, its willingness to consider alternative goals and alternative courses of actions. So perhaps effective altruists need to bring out this aspect of effective altruism more whenever they are introducing effective altruism to those who are new to it.