Here is my criticism in more detail:
Effective altruism sounds so innocuous—who could possibly be opposed to doing good, more effectively? Yet it has inspired significant backlash in recent years. … Every decent person should share the basic goals or values underlying effective altruism.
It starts here in the abstract—writing this way immediately sounds condescending to me, making disagreement with EA sound like an entirely unreasonable affair. So this is devaluing the position of a hypothetical someone opposing EA, rather than honestly engaging with their criticisms.
Either their total evidence supports the idea that attempting to promote systemic change would be a better bet (in expectation) than safer alternatives, or it does not. … If it does not, then by their own lights they have no basis for thinking it a better option.
On systemic change: The whole point is that systemic change is very hard to estimate. It is like sitting on a local maximum of awesomeness, and we know that there must be higher hills—higher maxima—out there, but we do not know how to get there; any particular systemic change might as well make things worse. But if EA principles told us to only ever sit at this local maximum and never even attempt to go anywhere else, then those would not be principles I would be happy following.
So yes, people who support systemic change often do not have the mathematical basis to argue that it necessarily will be a good deal—but that does not mean that there is no basis for thinking attempting it is a good option.
Or, more clearly: By not mentioning uncertainty in this paragraph, I do believe you are arguing against a strawperson, as the presence of uncertainty is absolutely crucial to the argument.
Rare exceptions aside, most careers are presumably permissible. … This claim is both true and widely neglected. … Neither of these important truths is threatened by the deontologist’s claim that one should not pursue an impermissible career.
On earning to give: Again, the arguments are very simplified here. A career being permissible or not is not a binary choice, true or false. It is a gradient, and it fluctuates and evolves over time, depending on how what you are asked to do on the job fluctuates over time, and depending on how the ambient morality of yourself and society shifts over time. So the question is not “among all of these completely equivalent permissible options, should I choose the highest-paying one and earn to give?” but “what is the tradeoff I should be willing to make between the career being more morally iffy, and the positive impact I can have by donation from a larger income baseline?”, and additionally, if you still just donate e.g. 10% of your income but your income is higher it means that also there is a larger amount of money you do not donate, which counterfactually you might use to buy things you do not actually need that need to be produced and shipped and so on, in the worse case making the world a worse place for everyone to be in, so even just “more money = more good” is not a simple truth that just holds.
And despite all these simplifications, the sentence “This claim is … true” just really, really gets to me—such binary language again completely sweeps any criticism, any debate, any nuance under the rug.
EA explicitly acknowledges the fact that billionaire philanthropists are capable of doing immense good, not just immense harm. Some find this an inconvenient truth … Unless critics seriously want billionaires to deliberately try to do less good rather than more, it’s hard to make sense of their opposing EA principles on the basis of how they apply to billionaires.
On billionaire philanthropy: Yes, billionaires are capable of doing immense good, and again, I have not seen anyone actually arguing against that. The most common arguments I am aware of against billionaire philanthropists are (1) that billionaires in the first place just shouldn’t exist, as yes they have the capacity to do immense good, but also the capacity to do immense harm, and no single person should be allowed to have the capacity to do so much harm to living beings on a whim. And (2) billionaires are capable of paying people to advise them on how to best make it look like they are doing good, when actually, they are not (such as creating huge charitable foundations and equipping them with lots of money, but these foundations then actually just re-investing that money into projects run by companies these billionaires have shares in, etc.)
So that is what I mean by “arguing against strawpeople”—claims are so far simplified and/or misrepresented that they do not accurately represent the actual positions of EAers, or of people who criticise them.
Whoa, thank you so much for this post—the topic of outreach and aligning people’s moral intuitions seems incredibly important, as so many of the problems we are facing could be solved quite easily if everyone agreed to genuinely cooperate!
We do feel that two particular topics might have gotten a bit more attention (or maybe they are in there and we just didn’t notice?)
Maybe you could go a bit more in detail about how we can actually get people to enjoy the stories we write, and what is necessary to make them palatable / reach a wider audience?
Especially regarding the propaganda accusation (FAQ part, question 2) - maybe also talk about counterfactuals, and how any story that does not transport positive moral values is taking up space from other stories that would do so? (After thinking about this for a bit we feel it is actually quite a harmful action to write a story that gets read a lot, takes up a lot of space, but does not teach valuable lessons...)