[EDIT: name replaced with “the philosopher,” tracking Linch’s edits]
[The philosopher] recognizes in the comments that there are lots of people he could criticize on similar grounds:
It’s of course true that many other people never used cost-effectiveness analysis to guide their decisions, never gave to charity in the first place, gambled away all of their money, mounted a military coup, and so on. Many of these behaviors are wrong, and their wrongness could discussed elsewhere. Today, I want to focus on a different topic: the growing deprioritization of rigorous cost-effectiveness analysis within the effective altruism movement.
Blogging critical takes on EA is not his day job, nor likely to do much for him in his day job. I thought that particular post was unduly harsh at points, but it’s not unreasonable for him to choose to write a blog expressing his concerns about a specific, financially powerful charitable movement without expanding it to cover financial decisions he deems questionable (or worse) by every similarly monied entity/movement in the world. Division of labor is a good and necessary thing.
As for the comment about [the philosopher’s] career choice (“wtf”), there’s a difference between his position and EA’s position. To my knowledge, [the philosopher] isn’t claiming that teaching philosophy at an elite U.S. university is the maximally altruistic career decision he (or anyone else) could have made. He isn’t telling anyone that they should follow that career path. However, EAs are publicly making the claim that spending lots of money on AI Safety and other longtermist work is the maximally altruistic thing a charitably-inclined donor could do with their money, and the maximally altruistic career path they could choose. That justifies applying a more critical standard in my book than I would apply to an individual’s own personal career choices.
Moreover, as [the philosopher] has noted in his billionaire philantrophy series, megadonor charitable activity comes at the cost of hundreds of millions in tax revenues. In my book, that makes public criticism of those donors’ choices much more appropriate than wtf’ing a private person’s choice to pursue an academic career. And there are often deeply personal reasons for one’s career choice.
Finallt, [the philosopher’s] critiques of longtermist EA spending are either right or wrong on their merits. They wouldn’t become more correct if he went into earning-to-give or gene therapy research. Although I think your quick take has some really good points, I think the “wtf” bullet point drags it down.
Wait just to clarify critical takes on EA is his day job. He’s a philosophy professor who worked at GPI and his body of work is mostly around EA. That’s fine and the critique is admittedly harsh but he’s not some third party person doing this casually. He himself has been funded by EA Infrastructure Fund and GPI and admitted he used his adjacency to AI as a hot topic.
Thanks—that was specifically a reference to blogging. If I’m not mistaken, the blog isn’t even referenced on his professional website or listed on his CV, which to me is evidence that blogging “is not his day job, nor likely to do much for him in his day job.” I think that’s relevant to what I take as the implied claim here (i.e., that [edit: the philosopher] is somehow unreasonably picking on EA by not also blogging about other entities that spend money questionably [at best] in his view).
As far as his academic work, longtermists are making philosophical claims that they seek to be taken seriously. “[C]orportaions, governments, etc,” who “are wasting on ~morally neutral vanity projects” are, as a rule, not doing that. It’s understandable that a philosopher would focus on people who are making and acting on such claims.
I am referring to the blogging. It does do things for his day job. His ability to get outside grants is a sizeable chunk of getting a tenure track job. His blog has been funded on manifund and referenced in other grants as justification. I don’t think he’s beholdened to EA in anyway but to act like he doesn’t benefit in anyway from this bent on a professional level is a weird claim to make. His blog posts are often drafts of his academic critiques and distillations of critiques too.
Narrow point: my understanding is that, per his own claims, the Manifund grant would only fund technical upkeep of the blog, and that none of it is net income to him.
Sorry for the dead response, I think I took the secondary claim he made that extra money would go towards a podcast as the warrant for my latter claim. Again I don’t feel any which way about this other than we should fund critics and not let the external factors that are just mild disdains from forum posters as determinative about whether or not we fund him.
Moreover, as [...] noted in his billionaire philantrophy series, megadonor charitable activity comes at the cost of hundreds of millions in tax revenues. In my book, that makes public criticism of those donors’ choices much more appropriate than wtf’ing a private person’s choice to pursue an academic career
Wait, US academia is funded by taxpayer dollars (including my own, which incidentally I have to pay to the US government even though I’m not a US citizen and do not have US citizen rights).
If anything, a higher percentage of a typical academic’s work is funded directly by taxpayer dollars than the (implicit) subsidy of foregone tax dollars.
That justifies applying a more critical standard in my book than I would apply to an individual’s own personal career choices.
I agree about the direction, I disagree about the magnitude. I especially disagree if the tenor is more like righteous outrage and less like dispassionate normative analysis (akin to the “cheeseburger ethicist”). On a more personal level, I don’t personally appreciate being yelled at by people who I consider to be morally inferior.
Finallt, [...] critiques of longtermist EA spending are either right or wrong on their merits. They wouldn’t become more correct if he went into earning-to-give or gene therapy research.
I agree. I think I was responding more to (and trying to mirror) the general tenor of his righteous outrage than trying to claim that the arguments are wrong on the object-level for their merits.
(I’ve since anonymized him in my parent comment, feel free to do the same)
He is now at an elite private university and was previously at GPI. I would expect that the proportion of funding for philosophy departments at such universities that flows from government coffers is pretty low. The funding situation of public universities, low-end private universities designed to exploit the federal student aid program (ugh), and so on isn’t relevant in my view.
Plus, in my view he is writing his blog in his personal capacity and not as an employee of his university (just as each of us can write on the Forum on your personal without our views being attributed to our employers). Even if you attribute a few percentage of his salary as an entry-level philosophy prof to the blog, and guess what percentage of that salary is paid through taxpayer dollars, it’s still going to be really small potatoes next to Open Phil’s impact on the public fisc.
To emphasize, I’m not defending everything that was in the philosopher’s blog post. It was not, in my opinion, anywhere close to his best work.
[replying to two of your comments in one because it is basically the same point]
Moreover, as [the philosopher] has noted in his billionaire philantrophy series, megadonor charitable activity comes at the cost of hundreds of millions in tax revenues. In my book, that makes public criticism of those donors’ choices much more appropriate than wtf’ing a private person’s choice to pursue an academic career. And there are often deeply personal reasons for one’s career choice.
This seems pretty uncompelling to me. A private individual’s philanthropy reduces tax revenues relative to their buying yachts, but a private individual’s decision to pursue a lower-paid academic career instead of becoming a software engineer or banker or consultant (or whatever else their talents might favour) also reduces tax revenues. Yes, the academic might have deeply personal reasons for their career choice, but the philanthropist might also have deeply personal reasons for their philanthropy—or their counterfactual yacht buying.
The fact that Vanderbilt is a private university also seems like a weak defense—what are the funding sources for Vanderbilt? As far as I am aware they are largely 1) an endowment started by billionaire philanthropy 2) taxpayer funded research 3) taxpayer subsidized student loans and 4) tax deductible donations. If benefiting from tax expenditures is sufficient to invite scrutiny then few US academics are exempt.
To use an even clearer example: a married couple’s decision to file their taxes jointly potentially significantly reduces their taxes. But I think their decision to do so causes absolutely zero increase in the extent to which it is appropriate to criticize them.
I think a much weaker version of this argument—that making tax-deductable charitable donations invites scrutiny as to whether their object really is charitable vs being a mere vanity project—is valid. But the scope of charitable objectives in the tax rules is very broad (to the extent that often activism on both sides of a political issue qualify!).
[EDIT: name replaced with “the philosopher,” tracking Linch’s edits]
[The philosopher] recognizes in the comments that there are lots of people he could criticize on similar grounds:
Blogging critical takes on EA is not his day job, nor likely to do much for him in his day job. I thought that particular post was unduly harsh at points, but it’s not unreasonable for him to choose to write a blog expressing his concerns about a specific, financially powerful charitable movement without expanding it to cover financial decisions he deems questionable (or worse) by every similarly monied entity/movement in the world. Division of labor is a good and necessary thing.
As for the comment about [the philosopher’s] career choice (“wtf”), there’s a difference between his position and EA’s position. To my knowledge, [the philosopher] isn’t claiming that teaching philosophy at an elite U.S. university is the maximally altruistic career decision he (or anyone else) could have made. He isn’t telling anyone that they should follow that career path. However, EAs are publicly making the claim that spending lots of money on AI Safety and other longtermist work is the maximally altruistic thing a charitably-inclined donor could do with their money, and the maximally altruistic career path they could choose. That justifies applying a more critical standard in my book than I would apply to an individual’s own personal career choices.
Moreover, as [the philosopher] has noted in his billionaire philantrophy series, megadonor charitable activity comes at the cost of hundreds of millions in tax revenues. In my book, that makes public criticism of those donors’ choices much more appropriate than wtf’ing a private person’s choice to pursue an academic career. And there are often deeply personal reasons for one’s career choice.
Finallt, [the philosopher’s] critiques of longtermist EA spending are either right or wrong on their merits. They wouldn’t become more correct if he went into earning-to-give or gene therapy research. Although I think your quick take has some really good points, I think the “wtf” bullet point drags it down.
Wait just to clarify critical takes on EA is his day job. He’s a philosophy professor who worked at GPI and his body of work is mostly around EA. That’s fine and the critique is admittedly harsh but he’s not some third party person doing this casually. He himself has been funded by EA Infrastructure Fund and GPI and admitted he used his adjacency to AI as a hot topic.
Thanks—that was specifically a reference to blogging. If I’m not mistaken, the blog isn’t even referenced on his professional website or listed on his CV, which to me is evidence that blogging “is not his day job, nor likely to do much for him in his day job.” I think that’s relevant to what I take as the implied claim here (i.e., that [edit: the philosopher] is somehow unreasonably picking on EA by not also blogging about other entities that spend money questionably [at best] in his view).
As far as his academic work, longtermists are making philosophical claims that they seek to be taken seriously. “[C]orportaions, governments, etc,” who “are wasting on ~morally neutral vanity projects” are, as a rule, not doing that. It’s understandable that a philosopher would focus on people who are making and acting on such claims.
I am referring to the blogging. It does do things for his day job. His ability to get outside grants is a sizeable chunk of getting a tenure track job. His blog has been funded on manifund and referenced in other grants as justification. I don’t think he’s beholdened to EA in anyway but to act like he doesn’t benefit in anyway from this bent on a professional level is a weird claim to make. His blog posts are often drafts of his academic critiques and distillations of critiques too.
Narrow point: my understanding is that, per his own claims, the Manifund grant would only fund technical upkeep of the blog, and that none of it is net income to him.
Sorry for the dead response, I think I took the secondary claim he made that extra money would go towards a podcast as the warrant for my latter claim. Again I don’t feel any which way about this other than we should fund critics and not let the external factors that are just mild disdains from forum posters as determinative about whether or not we fund him.
Wait, US academia is funded by taxpayer dollars (including my own, which incidentally I have to pay to the US government even though I’m not a US citizen and do not have US citizen rights).
If anything, a higher percentage of a typical academic’s work is funded directly by taxpayer dollars than the (implicit) subsidy of foregone tax dollars.
I agree about the direction, I disagree about the magnitude. I especially disagree if the tenor is more like righteous outrage and less like dispassionate normative analysis (akin to the “cheeseburger ethicist”). On a more personal level, I don’t personally appreciate being yelled at by people who I consider to be morally inferior.
I agree. I think I was responding more to (and trying to mirror) the general tenor of his righteous outrage than trying to claim that the arguments are wrong on the object-level for their merits.
(I’ve since anonymized him in my parent comment, feel free to do the same)
He is now at an elite private university and was previously at GPI. I would expect that the proportion of funding for philosophy departments at such universities that flows from government coffers is pretty low. The funding situation of public universities, low-end private universities designed to exploit the federal student aid program (ugh), and so on isn’t relevant in my view.
Plus, in my view he is writing his blog in his personal capacity and not as an employee of his university (just as each of us can write on the Forum on your personal without our views being attributed to our employers). Even if you attribute a few percentage of his salary as an entry-level philosophy prof to the blog, and guess what percentage of that salary is paid through taxpayer dollars, it’s still going to be really small potatoes next to Open Phil’s impact on the public fisc.
To emphasize, I’m not defending everything that was in the philosopher’s blog post. It was not, in my opinion, anywhere close to his best work.
.
[replying to two of your comments in one because it is basically the same point]
This seems pretty uncompelling to me. A private individual’s philanthropy reduces tax revenues relative to their buying yachts, but a private individual’s decision to pursue a lower-paid academic career instead of becoming a software engineer or banker or consultant (or whatever else their talents might favour) also reduces tax revenues. Yes, the academic might have deeply personal reasons for their career choice, but the philanthropist might also have deeply personal reasons for their philanthropy—or their counterfactual yacht buying.
The fact that Vanderbilt is a private university also seems like a weak defense—what are the funding sources for Vanderbilt? As far as I am aware they are largely 1) an endowment started by billionaire philanthropy 2) taxpayer funded research 3) taxpayer subsidized student loans and 4) tax deductible donations. If benefiting from tax expenditures is sufficient to invite scrutiny then few US academics are exempt.
To use an even clearer example: a married couple’s decision to file their taxes jointly potentially significantly reduces their taxes. But I think their decision to do so causes absolutely zero increase in the extent to which it is appropriate to criticize them.
I think a much weaker version of this argument—that making tax-deductable charitable donations invites scrutiny as to whether their object really is charitable vs being a mere vanity project—is valid. But the scope of charitable objectives in the tax rules is very broad (to the extent that often activism on both sides of a political issue qualify!).