Something I personally would like to see from this contest is rigorous and thoughtful versions of leftist critiques of EA, ideally translated as much as possible into EA-speak. For example, I find “bednets are colonialism” infuriating and hard to engage with, but things like “the reference class for rich people in western countries trying to help poor people in Africa is quite bad, so we should start with a skeptical prior here” or “isolationism may not be the good-maximizing approach, but it could be the harm-minimizing approach that we should retreat to when facing cluelessness” make more sense to me and are easier to engage with.
That’s an imaginary example—I myself am not a rigorous and thoughtful leftist critic and I’ve exaggerated the EA-speak for fun. But I hope it points at what I’d like to see!
Strong upvote. I’m a former leftist and I’ve got a soft spot for a few unique ideas in their memeplex. I read our leftist critics whenever I can because I want them to hit the quality target I know the ideas are worth in my mind, but they never do.
If anyone reading this knows leftist critics that you think have hit a reasonable quality bar or you want to coauthor a piece for the contest where we roleplay as leftists, DM me on the forum or otherwise hit me up.
I consider myself a current leftist, and I honestly don’t have a big “leftist critique of ea”. Effective altruism seems uncomplicatedly good according to all the ideas I have that I consider “leftist”, and leftism similarly seems good according to all the ideas that I consider EA.
Effective altruists as individuals aren’t always radical leftist of course, though they are pretty much all left of center. If you press me to come up with criticisms of EA, I can think of harmful statements or actions made by high profile individuals to critique, I guess, though idk if that would be useful to anyone involved. I can also say that the community as a whole doesn’t particularly escape the structural problems and interpersonal prejudices found in larger society—but it’s certainly not any worse than larger society. Also EA organizations, are not totally immune to power and corruption and internal politics and things like that, these things could be pointed out too. What I am saying is, effective altruists and institutions aren’t immune from things like racism and sexism and stuff like that. But that’s true of most people and organizations, including leftist ones. But there’s nothing that un-leftist about effective altruism, the ideology.
If the whole idea is that you’re impartially treating everyone equally and doing the most you can to help them then that’s… almost tautologically and by definition, good, from almost all reasonable political perspectives, leftist or otherwise? I think you really gotta make some stronger and more specific claims which touch upon a leftist angle, if you want someone to refute them from a leftist angle.
I definitely agree with this. Here are a bunch of ideas that are vaguely in line with this that I imagine a good critique could be generated from (not endorsing any of the ideas, but I think they could be interesting to explore):
Welfare is multi-dimensional / using some kind of multi-dimensional analysis captures important information that a pure $/lives saved approach misses.
Relatedly, welfare is actually really culturally dependent, so using a single metric misses important features.
Globalism/neoliberalism are bad in the longterm for some variety of reasons (cultural loss that makes human experience less rich and that’s really bad? Capitalism causes more harms than benefits in the long run? Things along those lines).
Some change is really expensive and takes a really long time and a really indirect route to get to, but it would be good to invest in anyway even if the benefits aren’t obvious immediately. (I think this is similar to what people mean when they argue for “systemic” change as an argument against EA).
I think that one issue is that lots of the left just isn’t that utilitarian, so unless utilitarianism itself is up for debate, it seems hard to know how seriously people in the EA community will take lefty critiques (though I think that utilitarianism is worth debating!). E.g. “nobody’s free until everyone is free” is fundamentally not a utilitarian claim.
That doesn’t seem quite right—negative utilitarians would still prefer marginal improvements even if all suffering didn’t end (or in this case, a utilitarian might prefer many become free even if all didn’t become free). The sentiment is interesting because it doesn’t acknowledge marginal states that utilitarians are happy to compare against ideal states, or worse marginal states.
Got it, I think you’re quite right on one reading. I should have been clearer about what I meant, which is something like
there is a defensible reading of that claim which maps to some negative utilitarian claim (without necessarily being a central example)
furthermore I expect many issuers of such sentiments are motivated by basically pretheoretic negative utilitarian insight
E.g. imagine a minor steelification (which loses the aesthetic and rhetorical strength) like “nobody’s positive wellbeing (implicitly stemming from their freedom) can/should be celebrated until everyone has freedom (implicitly necessary to escape negative wellbeing)” which is consistent with some kind of lexical negative utilitarianism.
You’re right that if we insist that ‘freedom’ be interpreted identically in both places (parsimonious, granted, though I think the symmetry is better explained by aesthetic/rhetorical concerns) another reading explicitly neglects the marginal benefit of lifting merely some people out of illiberty. Which is only consistent with utilitarianism if we use an unusual aggregation theory (i.e. minimising) - though I have also seen this discussed under negative utilitarianism.
Anecdata: as someone whose (past) political background and involvement (waning!) is definitely some kind of lefty, and who, if it weren’t for various x- and s-risks, would plausibly consider some form (my form, naturally!) of lefty politics to be highly important (if not highly tractable), my reading of that claim at least goes something like the first one. I might not be representative in that respect.
I have no doubt that many people expressing that kind of sentiment would still celebrate marginal ‘releases’, while considering it wrong to celebrate further the fruits of such freedom, ignoring others’ lack of freedom.
Yeah, I definitely think that also many people from left-leaning spaces who come to EA also become sympathetic to suffering focused work in my experience, which also seems consistent with this.
but things like “the reference class for rich people in western countries trying to help poor people in Africa is quite bad, so we should start with a skeptical prior here” or “isolationism may not be the good-maximizing approach, but it could be the harm-minimizing approach that we should retreat to when facing cluelessness”
For onlookers I want to point out that this doesn’t read as leftist criticism.
This is very close (almost identical) to what classical conservatives say:
I think we can relieve suffering. But relieving suffering isn’t the only thing I care about. I also care about what I would call flourishing—that people should have the chance to use their skills in ways that are exhilarating and meaningful and they provide dignity.
And some of the challenges I think we face as rich Westerners is that we don’t know very much about those things. We don’t even know how to sustain the markets that sustain our standard of living to imply that we can solve that problem in different cultures and settings seems to be a bit of hubris.
So I don’t mean to be so pessimistic. But it seems to me that some of the value and return from it are going to be grossly overstated. Because we don’t have all the pieces at once.
...
I’m not convinced.… And that’s the hope: that a more scientific approach, a more evidence-based approach I would call it, we could always spend our money, might lead us to be more optimistic. But it might not be true.
...
Now, I’m on your side for sure in saying that it’s a small amount of money toward a big possible improvement and it’s worth spending because that’s your expected value. Which I find very persuasive. It’s just not obvious to me we know a lot about how to do that well.
...
We don’t know what the numbers are. I have no problem with giving people a fishing net, if that’s what they think is best to do with it—there may be some issues there. But, you know—children, etc. I think most people love their children and they are probably more worried about feeding them than keeping them malaria-free, I guess. But I do think there is this complexity issue that relentlessly makes this challenging.
I think the vocabulary is not fully separable from the ideology. As the latter evolves, I’d expect changes to be required in the former.
And for what it’s worth, all the versions you gave are equally intellectually challenging for me to understand. The jargon is easier for some people but harder for others, most importantly to outsiders. This also means it’s unfair to expect outsiders to voice their views in insider-speak.
Would you be interested in outside, non-EAs doing leftist critique? And if so, how would you convince them to participate by asking them to conform to our vocabulary? I am asking as I think that some of the best people to make a thoughtful critique of EA are placed in academia. If that is true, they would be much more interested in critiquing us if they are allowed to publish. And to publish there is a strong desire to “engage with and build on existing literature and thought in the field,” meaning they want to draw on academic work on international aid, decolonialism, philanthropy, etc.
Maybe something along the lines of: Thinking in terms of individual geniuses, heroes, Leviathans, top charities implementing vertical health interventions, central charity evaluators, etc. might go well for a while but is a ticking time bomb because these powerful positions will attract newcomers with narcissistic traits who will usurp power of the whole system that the previous well-intentioned generation has built up.
The only remedy is to radically democratize any sort of power, make sure that the demos in question is as close as possible to everyone who is affected by the system, and build in structural and cultural safeguards against any later attempts of individuals to try to usurp absolute power over the systems.
But I think that’s better characterized as a libertarian critique, left or right. I can’t think of an authoritarian-left critique. I wouldn’t pass an authoritarian-left intellectual Turing test, but I have thought of myself as libertarian socialist at one point in my life.
I’m in favor of good leftist criticism and there isn’t any arch subtext here:
I’m a little worried that left criticism is going to just wander into a few stale patterns:
“Big giant revolution” whose effects rely on mass coordination.
Activists are correct, in the sense that society can shift, if a lot of people get behind it
But I’m skeptical of how often it actually happens
In addition to how often, I suspect the real reasons it does can be really different and unexpected from common narrative
If it doesn’t happen, it might rationalize decades of work, noise and burn out, and crowd out real work
The practices/actualization often seem poorly defined or unrealized
Defund the police, that came out of odious police abuse — did this go anywhere— was the particular asks viable in the first place?
I expect that if you looked at MLK and the patterns that caused his success, many people would be very surprised
A reasonable explanation is that the “founder effects”, or “seating” of the causes/asks are defective—if so, it seems like they are defective because of these very essays or activists in some way
This strategy rationalizes a lot of bad behavior and combined with poor institutions, structures and norms, you tend to see colonization/inveiglement by predators/”narcissists” and “cluster B” personality types.
There’s just bad governance in general and it leads to trashiness and repellence
I point out this same thought is behind a lot of movements (e.g. libertarianism), as well as apps and businesses, and other things.
Since this “giant movement/revolution” can achieve literally any outcome, shouldn’t we be suspicious of those who rely on it, versus using other strategies that require resources, institutional competence and relationship building?
“Value statements”, equity or fairness
This just is a value thing
There’s not much to be done here, if you value people on your street or country being equal or not suffering, even if they are objectively better off than the poorest people in the world
Because there’s not much to be done, a lot of arguments might boil down to using rhetoric/devices or otherwise smuggling in things, instead of being substantive
It would be very interesting to see a highly sophisticated (on multiple levels) leftist criticism EA.
I think there are very deep pools of thought or counter thought that could be brought out that isn’t being used
I’m aware “bed nets are colonialism” is kind of barely a strawman of some of the shallowest criticisms of EA from the political left but is that the literal equivalent of any real criticism you’ve seen?
Also strong upvote. I think nearly 100% of the leftist critiques of EA I’ve seen are pretty crappy, but I also think it’s relatively fertile ground.
For example, I suspect (with low confidence) that there is a community blindspot when it comes to the impact of racial dynamics on the tractability of different interventions, particularly in animal rights and global health.[1] I expect that this is driven by a combination of wanting to avoid controversy, a focus on easily quantifiable issues, the fact that few members of the community have a sociology or anthropology background, and (rightly) recognising that every issue can’t just be boiled down to racism.
Something I personally would like to see from this contest is rigorous and thoughtful versions of leftist critiques of EA, ideally translated as much as possible into EA-speak. For example, I find “bednets are colonialism” infuriating and hard to engage with, but things like “the reference class for rich people in western countries trying to help poor people in Africa is quite bad, so we should start with a skeptical prior here” or “isolationism may not be the good-maximizing approach, but it could be the harm-minimizing approach that we should retreat to when facing cluelessness” make more sense to me and are easier to engage with.
That’s an imaginary example—I myself am not a rigorous and thoughtful leftist critic and I’ve exaggerated the EA-speak for fun. But I hope it points at what I’d like to see!
Strong upvote. I’m a former leftist and I’ve got a soft spot for a few unique ideas in their memeplex. I read our leftist critics whenever I can because I want them to hit the quality target I know the ideas are worth in my mind, but they never do.
If anyone reading this knows leftist critics that you think have hit a reasonable quality bar or you want to coauthor a piece for the contest where we roleplay as leftists, DM me on the forum or otherwise hit me up.
I consider myself a current leftist, and I honestly don’t have a big “leftist critique of ea”. Effective altruism seems uncomplicatedly good according to all the ideas I have that I consider “leftist”, and leftism similarly seems good according to all the ideas that I consider EA.
Effective altruists as individuals aren’t always radical leftist of course, though they are pretty much all left of center. If you press me to come up with criticisms of EA, I can think of harmful statements or actions made by high profile individuals to critique, I guess, though idk if that would be useful to anyone involved. I can also say that the community as a whole doesn’t particularly escape the structural problems and interpersonal prejudices found in larger society—but it’s certainly not any worse than larger society. Also EA organizations, are not totally immune to power and corruption and internal politics and things like that, these things could be pointed out too. What I am saying is, effective altruists and institutions aren’t immune from things like racism and sexism and stuff like that. But that’s true of most people and organizations, including leftist ones. But there’s nothing that un-leftist about effective altruism, the ideology.
If the whole idea is that you’re impartially treating everyone equally and doing the most you can to help them then that’s… almost tautologically and by definition, good, from almost all reasonable political perspectives, leftist or otherwise? I think you really gotta make some stronger and more specific claims which touch upon a leftist angle, if you want someone to refute them from a leftist angle.
Hey, I’ve written up a post along these lines. If you’re still interested: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oD3zus6LhbhBj6z2F/red-teaming-contest-demographics-and-power-structures-in-ea
I definitely agree with this. Here are a bunch of ideas that are vaguely in line with this that I imagine a good critique could be generated from (not endorsing any of the ideas, but I think they could be interesting to explore):
Welfare is multi-dimensional / using some kind of multi-dimensional analysis captures important information that a pure $/lives saved approach misses.
Relatedly, welfare is actually really culturally dependent, so using a single metric misses important features.
Globalism/neoliberalism are bad in the longterm for some variety of reasons (cultural loss that makes human experience less rich and that’s really bad? Capitalism causes more harms than benefits in the long run? Things along those lines).
Some change is really expensive and takes a really long time and a really indirect route to get to, but it would be good to invest in anyway even if the benefits aren’t obvious immediately. (I think this is similar to what people mean when they argue for “systemic” change as an argument against EA).
I think that one issue is that lots of the left just isn’t that utilitarian, so unless utilitarianism itself is up for debate, it seems hard to know how seriously people in the EA community will take lefty critiques (though I think that utilitarianism is worth debating!). E.g. “nobody’s free until everyone is free” is fundamentally not a utilitarian claim.
Minor nitpick: “nobody’s free until everyone is free” is precisely a (negative) utilitarian claim (albeit with unusual wording)
That doesn’t seem quite right—negative utilitarians would still prefer marginal improvements even if all suffering didn’t end (or in this case, a utilitarian might prefer many become free even if all didn’t become free). The sentiment is interesting because it doesn’t acknowledge marginal states that utilitarians are happy to compare against ideal states, or worse marginal states.
Got it, I think you’re quite right on one reading. I should have been clearer about what I meant, which is something like
there is a defensible reading of that claim which maps to some negative utilitarian claim (without necessarily being a central example)
furthermore I expect many issuers of such sentiments are motivated by basically pretheoretic negative utilitarian insight
E.g. imagine a minor steelification (which loses the aesthetic and rhetorical strength) like “nobody’s positive wellbeing (implicitly stemming from their freedom) can/should be celebrated until everyone has freedom (implicitly necessary to escape negative wellbeing)” which is consistent with some kind of lexical negative utilitarianism.
You’re right that if we insist that ‘freedom’ be interpreted identically in both places (parsimonious, granted, though I think the symmetry is better explained by aesthetic/rhetorical concerns) another reading explicitly neglects the marginal benefit of lifting merely some people out of illiberty. Which is only consistent with utilitarianism if we use an unusual aggregation theory (i.e. minimising) - though I have also seen this discussed under negative utilitarianism.
Anecdata: as someone whose (past) political background and involvement (waning!) is definitely some kind of lefty, and who, if it weren’t for various x- and s-risks, would plausibly consider some form (my form, naturally!) of lefty politics to be highly important (if not highly tractable), my reading of that claim at least goes something like the first one. I might not be representative in that respect.
I have no doubt that many people expressing that kind of sentiment would still celebrate marginal ‘releases’, while considering it wrong to celebrate further the fruits of such freedom, ignoring others’ lack of freedom.
That makes sense to me.
Yeah, I definitely think that also many people from left-leaning spaces who come to EA also become sympathetic to suffering focused work in my experience, which also seems consistent with this.
For onlookers I want to point out that this doesn’t read as leftist criticism.
This is very close (almost identical) to what classical conservatives say:
From:
https://www.econtalk.org/peter-singer-on-the-life-you-can-save/
https://www.econtalk.org/william-macaskill-on-effective-altruism-and-doing-good-better/
This seemed to confuse Julia Wise too, and she’s really smart.
I think the vocabulary is not fully separable from the ideology. As the latter evolves, I’d expect changes to be required in the former.
And for what it’s worth, all the versions you gave are equally intellectually challenging for me to understand. The jargon is easier for some people but harder for others, most importantly to outsiders. This also means it’s unfair to expect outsiders to voice their views in insider-speak.
Would you be interested in outside, non-EAs doing leftist critique? And if so, how would you convince them to participate by asking them to conform to our vocabulary? I am asking as I think that some of the best people to make a thoughtful critique of EA are placed in academia. If that is true, they would be much more interested in critiquing us if they are allowed to publish. And to publish there is a strong desire to “engage with and build on existing literature and thought in the field,” meaning they want to draw on academic work on international aid, decolonialism, philanthropy, etc.
Maybe something along the lines of: Thinking in terms of individual geniuses, heroes, Leviathans, top charities implementing vertical health interventions, central charity evaluators, etc. might go well for a while but is a ticking time bomb because these powerful positions will attract newcomers with narcissistic traits who will usurp power of the whole system that the previous well-intentioned generation has built up.
The only remedy is to radically democratize any sort of power, make sure that the demos in question is as close as possible to everyone who is affected by the system, and build in structural and cultural safeguards against any later attempts of individuals to try to usurp absolute power over the systems.
But I think that’s better characterized as a libertarian critique, left or right. I can’t think of an authoritarian-left critique. I wouldn’t pass an authoritarian-left intellectual Turing test, but I have thought of myself as libertarian socialist at one point in my life.
I’m in favor of good leftist criticism and there isn’t any arch subtext here:
I’m a little worried that left criticism is going to just wander into a few stale patterns:
“Big giant revolution” whose effects rely on mass coordination.
Activists are correct, in the sense that society can shift, if a lot of people get behind it
But I’m skeptical of how often it actually happens
In addition to how often, I suspect the real reasons it does can be really different and unexpected from common narrative
If it doesn’t happen, it might rationalize decades of work, noise and burn out, and crowd out real work
The practices/actualization often seem poorly defined or unrealized
Defund the police, that came out of odious police abuse — did this go anywhere— was the particular asks viable in the first place?
I expect that if you looked at MLK and the patterns that caused his success, many people would be very surprised
A reasonable explanation is that the “founder effects”, or “seating” of the causes/asks are defective—if so, it seems like they are defective because of these very essays or activists in some way
This strategy rationalizes a lot of bad behavior and combined with poor institutions, structures and norms, you tend to see colonization/inveiglement by predators/”narcissists” and “cluster B” personality types.
There’s just bad governance in general and it leads to trashiness and repellence
I point out this same thought is behind a lot of movements (e.g. libertarianism), as well as apps and businesses, and other things.
Since this “giant movement/revolution” can achieve literally any outcome, shouldn’t we be suspicious of those who rely on it, versus using other strategies that require resources, institutional competence and relationship building?
“Value statements”, equity or fairness
This just is a value thing
There’s not much to be done here, if you value people on your street or country being equal or not suffering, even if they are objectively better off than the poorest people in the world
Because there’s not much to be done, a lot of arguments might boil down to using rhetoric/devices or otherwise smuggling in things, instead of being substantive
It would be very interesting to see a highly sophisticated (on multiple levels) leftist criticism EA.
I think there are very deep pools of thought or counter thought that could be brought out that isn’t being used
I’m aware “bed nets are colonialism” is kind of barely a strawman of some of the shallowest criticisms of EA from the political left but is that the literal equivalent of any real criticism you’ve seen?
Also strong upvote. I think nearly 100% of the leftist critiques of EA I’ve seen are pretty crappy, but I also think it’s relatively fertile ground.
For example, I suspect (with low confidence) that there is a community blindspot when it comes to the impact of racial dynamics on the tractability of different interventions, particularly in animal rights and global health.[1] I expect that this is driven by a combination of wanting to avoid controversy, a focus on easily quantifiable issues, the fact that few members of the community have a sociology or anthropology background, and (rightly) recognising that every issue can’t just be boiled down to racism.
See, for eg, my comment here.