Beyond that, here are some criticisms I’ve heard or made. Hope it helps:
Preliminaries:
EA is both a philosophy and a social movement/group of existing people. Defenders tend to defend the philosophy and in particular the global health part, which is more unambiguously good. However, many of the more interesting things happen on the more speculative parts of the movement.
A large chunk of non-global health EA or EA-adjacent giving is controlled by Open Philanthropy. Alternatively, there needs to be a name for “the community around Open Philanthropy and its grantees” so that people can model it. Hopefully this sidesteps some definitional counterarguments.
Criticism outlines:
Open Philanthropy has created a class of grants officers who, by dint of having very high salaries, are invested in Open Philanthropy retaining its current giving structure.
EA the community is much more of a pre-existing clique and mutual admiration society than its emphasis on the philosophy when presenting itself would indicate. This is essentially deceptive, as it leads prospective members, particularly neurodivergent ones, to have incorrect expectations. cf. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2BEecjksNZNHQmdyM/don-t-be-bycatch
Leadership strongly endorsed FTX, which upended many plans from the rank and file after it turned out to be a fraud and its promised funding was recalled
EA has a narrative about how it searches for the best interventions using tools like cost-effectiveness analyses. But for speculative interventions, you need a lot of elbow grease, judgment calls. You have a lot of degrees of freedom. This amplies/enables clique dynamics.
The community health team lacks many of the good qualities of a (US) court, such as the division of powers between judge, jury and executioner, or the possibility to confront one’s accuser, or even know what one has been accused of. It is not resilient to adversarial manipulation, and priviledges the first party when both have strong emotions.
EA is trapped in a narrow conceptual toolkit, which makes critics very hard to understand/slightly schizophrenic once they step away from that toolkit. cf. Milan Griffes
Finally, for global health, something which keeps me up at night is the possiblity that subsaharan Africa is trapped in a malthusian equilibrium, where further aid only increases the population which increases suffering.
EA/OP does give large amounts of resources to areas that others find hard to care about, in a way which does seem more earnest & well-meaning than many other people in society
The alternative framework in which to operate is probably capitalism, which is also not perfectly aligned with human values either.
There is no evil mustache twirling mastermind. To the extent these dynamics arise, they do so out of some reasonably understandable constraints, like having a tight-knit group of people
In general it’s just pretty harsh to just write a list of negative things about someone/some group
It’s much easier to point out flaws than to operate in the world
There are many things to do in the world, and limited competent operators to throw at problems. Some areas will just see less love & talent directed to them. There is some meta-prioritization going on in a way which broadly does seem kind of reasonable.
Another important caveat is that the criticisms you mention are not common from people evaluating the effective altruism framework from the outside when allocating their donations or orienting their careers.
The criticisms you mention come from people who have spent a lot of time in the community, and usually (but not exclusively) from those of us who have been rejected from job applications, denied funding, or had bad social experiences/cultural fit with the social community.
This doesn’t necessarily make them less valid, but seems to be a meaningfully different topic from what this post is about. Someone altruistically deciding how much money to give to which charity is unlikely to be worried about whether they will be seduced into believing that they would be cherished members of a community.
Note that I do agree with many of your criticisms of the community[1], but I believe it’s important to remember that the vast majority of people evaluating effective altruism are not in the EA social community and don’t care much about it, and we should probably flag our potential bias when criticizing an organization after being denied funding or rejected from it (while still expressing that useful criticism.)
I would also add Ben Kuhn’s “pretending to try” critique from 11 years ago, which I assume shares some points with your unpublished “My experience with a Potemkin Effective Altruism group”
I found 1 unpopular EA post discussing your last point of the malthusian risk involved with global health aid in subsaharan Africa, and I’m unsure why this topic isn’t discussed more frequently on this forum. The post also mentions a study that found that East Africa may currently be in a malthusian trap such that a charity contributing to population growth in this region could have negative utility and be doing more harm than good.
Seems like a pretty niche worry, I wouldn’t read too much into it not being discussed much. It’s just that if true it does provide a reason to discount global health and development deeply.
The EA forum has tags. The one for criticisms of effective altruism is here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/criticism-of-effective-altruism
Beyond that, here are some criticisms I’ve heard or made. Hope it helps:
Preliminaries:
EA is both a philosophy and a social movement/group of existing people. Defenders tend to defend the philosophy and in particular the global health part, which is more unambiguously good. However, many of the more interesting things happen on the more speculative parts of the movement.
A large chunk of non-global health EA or EA-adjacent giving is controlled by Open Philanthropy. Alternatively, there needs to be a name for “the community around Open Philanthropy and its grantees” so that people can model it. Hopefully this sidesteps some definitional counterarguments.
Criticism outlines:
Open Philanthropy has created a class of grants officers who, by dint of having very high salaries, are invested in Open Philanthropy retaining its current giving structure.
EA seduces some people into believing that they would be cherished members, but then leaves them unable to find jobs and in a worse position that they otherwise would have been if they had built their career capital elsewhere. cf. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2BEecjksNZNHQmdyM/don-t-be-bycatch
EA the community is much more of a pre-existing clique and mutual admiration society than its emphasis on the philosophy when presenting itself would indicate. This is essentially deceptive, as it leads prospective members, particularly neurodivergent ones, to have incorrect expectations. cf. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2BEecjksNZNHQmdyM/don-t-be-bycatch
It’s amusing that the Center for Effective Altruism has taken a bunch of the energy of the EA movement, but itself doesn’t seem to be particularly effective cf. https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/10/15/ea-forum-stewardship/
EA has tried to optimize movement building naïvely, but focus on metrics has led it to focus on the most cost-effective interventions for the wrong thing, in a way which is self-defeating cf. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xomFCNXwNBeXtLq53/bad-omens-in-current-community-building
Worldview diversification is an ugly prioritization framework that generally doesn’t follow from the mathematical structure of anything but rather from political gerrymandering cf. https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/04/25/worldview-diversification/
Leadership strongly endorsed FTX, which upended many plans from the rank and file after it turned out to be a fraud and its promised funding was recalled
EA has a narrative about how it searches for the best interventions using tools like cost-effectiveness analyses. But for speculative interventions, you need a lot of elbow grease, judgment calls. You have a lot of degrees of freedom. This amplies/enables clique dynamics.
Leaders have been somewhat hypocritical around optimizing strongly, with a “do what I say not what I do” attitude towards deontological constraints. cf. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5o3vttALksQQQiqkv/consequentialists-in-society-should-self-modify-to-have-side
The community health team lacks many of the good qualities of a (US) court, such as the division of powers between judge, jury and executioner, or the possibility to confront one’s accuser, or even know what one has been accused of. It is not resilient to adversarial manipulation, and priviledges the first party when both have strong emotions.
EA/OP doesn’t really know how to handle the effects of throwing large amounts of money on people’s beliefs. Throwing money at a particular set of beliefs makes it gain more advocates and harder to update away from it. Selection effects will apply at many levels. cf. https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/01/23/my-highly-personal-skepticism-braindump-on-existential-risk/
EA is trapped in a narrow conceptual toolkit, which makes critics very hard to understand/slightly schizophrenic once they step away from that toolkit. cf. Milan Griffes
Finally, for global health, something which keeps me up at night is the possiblity that subsaharan Africa is trapped in a malthusian equilibrium, where further aid only increases the population which increases suffering.
Here are some caveats/counterpoints:
EA/OP does give large amounts of resources to areas that others find hard to care about, in a way which does seem more earnest & well-meaning than many other people in society
The alternative framework in which to operate is probably capitalism, which is also not perfectly aligned with human values either.
There is no evil mustache twirling mastermind. To the extent these dynamics arise, they do so out of some reasonably understandable constraints, like having a tight-knit group of people
In general it’s just pretty harsh to just write a list of negative things about someone/some group
It’s much easier to point out flaws than to operate in the world
There are many things to do in the world, and limited competent operators to throw at problems. Some areas will just see less love & talent directed to them. There is some meta-prioritization going on in a way which broadly does seem kind of reasonable.
Another important caveat is that the criticisms you mention are not common from people evaluating the effective altruism framework from the outside when allocating their donations or orienting their careers.
The criticisms you mention come from people who have spent a lot of time in the community, and usually (but not exclusively) from those of us who have been rejected from job applications, denied funding, or had bad social experiences/cultural fit with the social community.
This doesn’t necessarily make them less valid, but seems to be a meaningfully different topic from what this post is about. Someone altruistically deciding how much money to give to which charity is unlikely to be worried about whether they will be seduced into believing that they would be cherished members of a community.
People evaluating effective altruism “from the outside” instead mention things like the paternalism and unintended consequences, that it doesn’t care about biodiversity, that quantification is perilous, that socialism is better, or that capitalism is better.
Note that I do agree with many of your criticisms of the community[1], but I believe it’s important to remember that the vast majority of people evaluating effective altruism are not in the EA social community and don’t care much about it, and we should probably flag our potential bias when criticizing an organization after being denied funding or rejected from it (while still expressing that useful criticism.)
I would also add Ben Kuhn’s “pretending to try” critique from 11 years ago, which I assume shares some points with your unpublished “My experience with a Potemkin Effective Altruism group”
I found 1 unpopular EA post discussing your last point of the malthusian risk involved with global health aid in subsaharan Africa, and I’m unsure why this topic isn’t discussed more frequently on this forum. The post also mentions a study that found that East Africa may currently be in a malthusian trap such that a charity contributing to population growth in this region could have negative utility and be doing more harm than good.
Seems like a pretty niche worry, I wouldn’t read too much into it not being discussed much. It’s just that if true it does provide a reason to discount global health and development deeply.