deBoer overstated it, but his point is that trying to be effective when being altruistic is in no way an original idea:
Every single moral philosophy and religion in the history of the world has had a goal of doing good well. You cannot find a text that attempts to define the good that does not also explain the difference between doing the good well and doing it poorly. Buddhism has whole lines of inquiry devoted to the idea of people who follow Buddha’s teachings to the letter and still arrive at the wrong conclusions entirely. If you’re a Christian, you could argue that the New Testament is mostly a matter of God sending his son to Earth to explain to human beings how they were failing to live up to the rules in the Old Testament. “Do good well” is not a new idea and certainly not an interesting one, and I’m perpetually put out by how many EA enthusiasts seem to think that they’re playing a powerful Pokemon when they whip that definition out.
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.
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.