This article makes one specific point I want to push back on:
It’s not that E.A. institutions were necessarily more irresponsible, or more neglectful, than others in their position would have been; the venture capitalists who worked with Bankman-Fried erred in the same direction. But that’s the point: E.A. leaders behaved more or less normally. Unfortunately, their self-image was one of exceptionalism.
Anyone who has ever interacted with EA knows that this is not true. EAs are constantly, even excessively, criticizing the movement and trying to figure out what big flaws could exist in it. It’s true, a bit strange, and a bad sign, that these exercises did not for the most part highlight this flaw of reliance on donors who may use EA to justify unethical acts—unless you counted the reforms proposed by Carla Zoe Cremer that were never adopted cited by the article. Yes, there is some blame that could be assigned for never adopting these reforms, but the pure quantity of EA criticism and other potential fault points suggests IMO that it’s really hard to figure out a priori what will fail a movement. EA is not perfect, nobody has ever claimed as much, and to some extent I think this article is disingenuous for implying this. “People focused on doing the most good” =/= “moral saints who think they are above every human flaw”.
I think internal criticism in EA is motivated by aiming for perfection, and is not motivated by aiming to be as good as other movements / ideologies. I think internal criticism with this motivation is entirely compatible with a self-image of exceptionalism.
While I think many EAs view the movement as exceptional and I agree with them, I think too many EAs assume individual EAs will be exceptional too, which I think is an unjustified expectation. In particular, I think EAs assume that individual EAs will be exceptionally good at being virtuous and following good social rules, which is a bad assumption.
I think EA also relies too heavily on personal networks, and especially given the adjacency to the rationalist community, EA is bad at mitigating against the cognitive biases this can cause in grantmaking. I expect that people overestimate how good their friends are at being virtuous and following good social rules, and given that so many EAs are friends with each other at a personal level, this exacerbates the exceptionalism problem.
I mean, of course Effective Altruism is striving for perfection, every movement should, but this is very different than thinking that EA has already achieved perfection. I think you listed a couple of things that I had read as EA self-criticism pre-FTX collapse, suggesting that EAs were aware of some of the potential pitfalls of the movement. I just don’t think many people thought EA exceptional in the “will avoid common pitfalls of movements” perfection sense as implied by the article.
This article makes one specific point I want to push back on:
Anyone who has ever interacted with EA knows that this is not true. EAs are constantly, even excessively, criticizing the movement and trying to figure out what big flaws could exist in it. It’s true, a bit strange, and a bad sign, that these exercises did not for the most part highlight this flaw of reliance on donors who may use EA to justify unethical acts—unless you counted the reforms proposed by Carla Zoe Cremer that were never adopted cited by the article. Yes, there is some blame that could be assigned for never adopting these reforms, but the pure quantity of EA criticism and other potential fault points suggests IMO that it’s really hard to figure out a priori what will fail a movement. EA is not perfect, nobody has ever claimed as much, and to some extent I think this article is disingenuous for implying this. “People focused on doing the most good” =/= “moral saints who think they are above every human flaw”.
Some reasons I disagree:
I think internal criticism in EA is motivated by aiming for perfection, and is not motivated by aiming to be as good as other movements / ideologies. I think internal criticism with this motivation is entirely compatible with a self-image of exceptionalism.
While I think many EAs view the movement as exceptional and I agree with them, I think too many EAs assume individual EAs will be exceptional too, which I think is an unjustified expectation. In particular, I think EAs assume that individual EAs will be exceptionally good at being virtuous and following good social rules, which is a bad assumption.
I think EA also relies too heavily on personal networks, and especially given the adjacency to the rationalist community, EA is bad at mitigating against the cognitive biases this can cause in grantmaking. I expect that people overestimate how good their friends are at being virtuous and following good social rules, and given that so many EAs are friends with each other at a personal level, this exacerbates the exceptionalism problem.
I mean, of course Effective Altruism is striving for perfection, every movement should, but this is very different than thinking that EA has already achieved perfection. I think you listed a couple of things that I had read as EA self-criticism pre-FTX collapse, suggesting that EAs were aware of some of the potential pitfalls of the movement. I just don’t think many people thought EA exceptional in the “will avoid common pitfalls of movements” perfection sense as implied by the article.