The idea that EAs use a single metric measuring all global welfare in cause prioritization is incorrect, and raises questions about this guy’s familiarity with reports from sources like Givewell, ACE, and amateur stuff that gets posted around here.
Some claim to, others don’t.
I worked at GiveWell / Open Philanthropy Project for a year. I wrote up some of those reports. It’s explicitly not scoring all recommendations on a unified metric—I linked to the “Sequence vs Cluster Thinking” post which makes this quite clear—but at the time, there were four paintings on the wall of the GiveWell office illustrating the four core GiveWell values, and one was titled “Utilitarianism,” which is distinguished from other moral philosophies (and in particular from the broader class “consequentialism”) by the claim that you should use a single totalizing metric to assess right action.
OK, the issue here is you are assuming that metrics have to be the same in moral philosophy and in cause prioritization. But there’s just no need for that. Cause prioritization metrics need to have validity with respect to moral philosophy, but that doesn’t mean they need to be identical.
Some claim to, others don’t.
I worked at GiveWell / Open Philanthropy Project for a year. I wrote up some of those reports. It’s explicitly not scoring all recommendations on a unified metric—I linked to the “Sequence vs Cluster Thinking” post which makes this quite clear—but at the time, there were four paintings on the wall of the GiveWell office illustrating the four core GiveWell values, and one was titled “Utilitarianism,” which is distinguished from other moral philosophies (and in particular from the broader class “consequentialism”) by the claim that you should use a single totalizing metric to assess right action.
OK, the issue here is you are assuming that metrics have to be the same in moral philosophy and in cause prioritization. But there’s just no need for that. Cause prioritization metrics need to have validity with respect to moral philosophy, but that doesn’t mean they need to be identical.