One brief point against Left EA: solidarity is not altruism.
low effort shortform: do pingback to here if you steal these ideas for a more effortful post
It has been said in numerous places that leftism and effective altruism owe each other some relationship, stemming from common goals and so on. In this shortform, I will sketch one way in which this is misguided.
I will be ignoring cultural/social effects, like bad epistemics, because I think bad epistemics are a contingent rather than necessary feature of the left.
Solidarity appeals to skin-in-the-game. Class awareness is good to team up with your colleague to bargain for higher wages, but it’s literally orthogonal to cosmopolitanism/impartiality. Two objections are mutual aid and some form of “no actually leftism is cosmopolitanism”. Under mutual aid, at least as it was taught at the philly food not bombs chapter back in my sordid past, we observe the hungry working alongside the fed to feed even more of the hungry, that you can coalition across the hierarchical barrier between charitable action and skin in the game, or reject the barrier flatly. While this lesson works great for meals or needle exchanges, I’m skeptical about how well it generalizes even to global poverty, to say nothing of animals or the unborn. The other objection, that leftism actually is cosmopolitan, only really makes sense to the thought-leaders of leftism and is dissonant with theories of change that involve changing ordinary peoples’ minds (which is most theories of change). A common pattern for leftist intellectuals to take is “we have to free the whole world from the shackles of capitalism, working class consciousness shows people that they can fight to improve their lot” (or some flavor of “think global act local”). It is always the intellectual who’s thinking about that highfalutin improving the lot of others, while the pleb rank and file is only asked to advocate for themselves. Instead, EAs should be honest: that we do not fight via skin in the game, we fight via caring about others; EA thought leaders and EA rank and file should be on the same page about this. This is elitist to only the staunchest horizontalist. (However, while I think it is sparingly that we defer to standpoint epistemology, for good reason, it’s very plausible that it has it’s moments to shine, and plausible that we currently don’t standpoint epistemology enough, but that’s getting a bit afield).
One brief point against Left EA: solidarity is not altruism.
low effort shortform: do pingback to here if you steal these ideas for a more effortful post
It has been said in numerous places that leftism and effective altruism owe each other some relationship, stemming from common goals and so on. In this shortform, I will sketch one way in which this is misguided.
I will be ignoring cultural/social effects, like bad epistemics, because I think bad epistemics are a contingent rather than necessary feature of the left.
Solidarity appeals to skin-in-the-game. Class awareness is good to team up with your colleague to bargain for higher wages, but it’s literally orthogonal to cosmopolitanism/impartiality. Two objections are mutual aid and some form of “no actually leftism is cosmopolitanism”. Under mutual aid, at least as it was taught at the philly food not bombs chapter back in my sordid past, we observe the hungry working alongside the fed to feed even more of the hungry, that you can coalition across the hierarchical barrier between charitable action and skin in the game, or reject the barrier flatly. While this lesson works great for meals or needle exchanges, I’m skeptical about how well it generalizes even to global poverty, to say nothing of animals or the unborn. The other objection, that leftism actually is cosmopolitan, only really makes sense to the thought-leaders of leftism and is dissonant with theories of change that involve changing ordinary peoples’ minds (which is most theories of change). A common pattern for leftist intellectuals to take is “we have to free the whole world from the shackles of capitalism, working class consciousness shows people that they can fight to improve their lot” (or some flavor of “think global act local”). It is always the intellectual who’s thinking about that highfalutin improving the lot of others, while the pleb rank and file is only asked to advocate for themselves. Instead, EAs should be honest: that we do not fight via skin in the game, we fight via caring about others; EA thought leaders and EA rank and file should be on the same page about this. This is elitist to only the staunchest horizontalist. (However, while I think it is sparingly that we defer to standpoint epistemology, for good reason, it’s very plausible that it has it’s moments to shine, and plausible that we currently don’t standpoint epistemology enough, but that’s getting a bit afield).