I think Leif Wenar’s “Open Letter to Young EAs” has significant flaws, but also has a lot going for it, and I would seriously recommend people who want to think about the ideal shape of EA should read it.
I went through the letter making annotations about the bits I thought were good or bad. If you want to see my annotated version, you can do that here. If you want to be able to comment, let me know and I’ll quite likely be happy to grant you permission (but didn’t want to set it to “anyone with the link can comment” for fear of it getting overwhelmed).
As with ~all criticisms of EA, this open letter doesn’t have any concrete description of what would be better than EA. Like just once, I would like to see a criticism say, “You shouldn’t donate to GiveWell top charities, instead you should donate to X, and here is my cost-effectiveness analysis.”
The only proposal I saw was (paraphrased) “EA should be about getting teenagers excited to be effectively altruistic.” Ok, the movement-building arm of EA already does that. What is your proposal for what those teenagers should then actually do?
I mean it kind of has the proposal that they each need to work that out for themselves. (I think this is mistaken, and not the place I found the letter valuable.)
I think Leif Wenar’s “Open Letter to Young EAs” has significant flaws, but also has a lot going for it, and I would seriously recommend people who want to think about the ideal shape of EA should read it.
I went through the letter making annotations about the bits I thought were good or bad. If you want to see my annotated version, you can do that here. If you want to be able to comment, let me know and I’ll quite likely be happy to grant you permission (but didn’t want to set it to “anyone with the link can comment” for fear of it getting overwhelmed).
As with ~all criticisms of EA, this open letter doesn’t have any concrete description of what would be better than EA. Like just once, I would like to see a criticism say, “You shouldn’t donate to GiveWell top charities, instead you should donate to X, and here is my cost-effectiveness analysis.”
The only proposal I saw was (paraphrased) “EA should be about getting teenagers excited to be effectively altruistic.” Ok, the movement-building arm of EA already does that. What is your proposal for what those teenagers should then actually do?
I mean it kind of has the proposal that they each need to work that out for themselves. (I think this is mistaken, and not the place I found the letter valuable.)