Ah thanks for pointing out my mistake! And yes, I read this paragraph in the article, but still couldn’t work out how they could provide such a precise range
Will_Davison
Karma: 89
3. I really encourage you to read The Divide—it might change your mind
4. I really encourage you to read the linked resources, given that you are not yet familiar with the idea5. Could you say a little more about your views on degrowth? And what do you think about the anti-apartheid movement and LGBT rights movement? Would you agree that these have been successful? How about the overthrowing of various dictators around the world? Most of these movements had small anarchist funders that enabled their growth.
6. I really encourage you to understand the concept before disagreeing with it7. I agree that these conclusions are not obvious from the simple overview I gave. Maybe you would be open to investigating them further? The Guerrilla Foundation’s website have outlines of their relationship-based approach to funding and bringing funders into a movement.
It seems in a lot of cases you have disagreed with concepts before understanding them fully. Would you agree? And if so, why do you think this happened here, where I’m sure that you are great at making evidence-based judgements in other areas?
Thanks for the suggestions in your first three paragraphs! Looking forward to checking these out:)
The types of radical feminism you are mentioning in your first three bullet points are not types that I or the people or organisations I am mentioning would associate with. These groups are often labelled as Trans- or Sex worker- exclusionary radical feminists. It is a shame that they use this label too. They are generally funded by far right groups and instrumentalised to make it seem that they represent the feminist movement as a whole, or women’s interests more broadly. The fourth bullet point I hadn’t heard about, and that Contrapoints video has been on my watch list for a long time now- I should really watch it!
In my experience, people who have radical leftist economic views are generally hostile to the idea of people in high-income countries donating to charities that provide medicine or anti-malarial bednets or cash to poor people in low-income countries. It’s hard for me to imagine much cooperation or overlap between effective altruism and the radical left.
I agree with this, though maybe I would use a less strong word than hostile, such as ‘frustrated’ or ‘confused’. I also think that the frustration and confusion goes both ways. This post series is meant to be an attempt the help each group understand what causes the divide, and to facilitate cooperation and mutual learning. I also plan to share it with feminist groups.
The adrienne maree brown Vampire thing you are referring to is, I believe, from this 2009 blog post. I think that you have overinterpreted a whimsical remark. Or maybe I am missing another source? Either way most movements don’t stand up well to anecdotal ad-hominem attacks.
What is pleasure activism? After reading this, I don’t know. I’m not sure if adrienne marie brown knows, either.
Could you give a little more context on what you don’t understand? I’m not sure I can see the same issues, at least at the moment
But a lot of the radical left, to borrow a bon mot from Noam Chomsky, want to “live in some abstract seminar somewhere”. They have no ideas about how to actually make the world better in specific, actionable ways
This is a super interesting point. I’ll write about it in a future post in this series. The article you link to is really nice. One thing I’ll say for now is that there are certainly parts of the feminist movements that you will strongly disagree with, and that disagreement is welcome. I’d like to remind you that you feel the same about parts of the EA movement, as we have discussed elsewhere.
I agree that authoritarian communism is bad, but I have a lot more belief in degrowth. Could you give some more specifics on what your issues are with it?
Your concluding comments seem like rage-bait and might be an unnecessary addition to your otherwise very thoughtful reply.
This is a very interesting comment. I think a lot of the disagreement relates to a difference in what evidence is regarded as valuable within each field. I think this is a tension that both groups can learn from. I’ll write more about this, but I believe that EA ascribes too low value to non-numerical ways of knowing and radical feminists are reluctant to corroborate qualitative understanding using numbers.
I’d like to hear why you chose to label radical feminism as an ‘extremist group’. This has a lot of negative connotations carried, vs using a term like ‘radical’.
On epistemic sacrifices, this is not something that I have suggested. I suggest being curious about and open to learning from radical feminism. This allows you to discard ideas that you would like to discard, and take in ideas that you would not.
Your final comment indicates that perhaps you are not that familiar with radical feminism, and perhaps such a strongly weighted opinion would be best kept until after a little more research?
I’d love to hear some of your disagreements with radical feminism. Please share!
This post felt more like it argued why radical feminism would benefit from EA
Points 3 through 7 show how feminist tools can be used by EA to further EA’s aims. The post is showing both that cooperation would be mutually beneficial. I’m curious to see why you thought that it shows that radical feminism would benefit from EA?
I agree with a lot of your points here. I think the answer is to have distinct movements which use each other’s tools, and form coalitions. I give a little more detail in my reply to Ozzie’s comment
Thanks for pointing out the vagueness of the word ‘unite’. By this, I mean the following:
EA and radical feminism remain distinct approaches, rather than merging
EA and radical feminism understand each other’s methods, and use each other’s tools where appropriate
EA and radical feminism understand each other’s strategies when working on shared issues, so that their efforts can support rather than oppose each other e.g. reducing incarceration rates in the US
EA and radical feminism reduce competition against each other for funding and donor influence, and rather work together to move funders away from charities that both groups see as ineffective
Both movements recognise which issues their philosophies are well suited to solving, and which issues they are poorly suited to solving. They defer to ‘the expert’ movement in each area.
I’d be interested to hear you disagreements with the Marxist-leaning influences. Could you give a few examples?
How to unite radical feminism and EA. Vol 1: donor engagement
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I appreciate your apology and adjustment of tone. I hope that this can inform future dialogues in a way that is helpful for you and for the movement.
I’m not sure whether strangers drowning has the answers I’m hoping for. I listened to a podcast about it, and mostly it sounds like the people who face the world in that way end up extremely unhappy.
Your advice about a container is very wise. It’s a useful technique I discovered through therapy and I’m glad that more people know about it, and to have that faith in the idea validated.
I agree with you that the answer to this question will likely be very individual. Sometimes to the extent where it can be quite lonely.
Thanks for the RobCast recommendation. I’ll listen to it. Likewise for Rising Strong. I like D&D but have struggled with most scifi, apart from more feminist sci fi like Ursula LeGuin.
I absolutely agree with your sentiments on the ability of EAs on average for processing these feelings. I’d love to make it a bigger part of EA—I think many people could hugely benefit from it. And also I believe that it makes your ability to do good so much greater—it has for me at least. Both in terms of having energy to take action, and
If you’re looking for recommendations for your own journey on this, I can really recommend reading ‘a field guide to climate anxiety’. It helped me a lot.
I really enjoyed reading your HSS post and think you have some great points in there. I like how you take out some of the vague language of ‘intervening in complex systems’ that is often used to justify unsuccessful top down managerial changes in large organisations. Most complexity theory that I have come across would absolutely
I think the Mulago foundation article has some great points, such as trust and data not being mutually exclusive. Toby Lowe also has a great talk about this. But the article is also is too dismissive of applying non-quantitative funding e.g. to illiterate groups, or groups working on changing cultural values through art. I think the article is written to be clickbaity and controversial, which is a style I don’t find especially constructive.
I think the reason you disagree with point one might be that you are interpreting ‘complex systems’ still in the healthcare service provision field, whereas when it comes to health I would extend it to systems such as air pollution and income inequality, which are highly bound to complex political systems, where interventions are hard to measure using RCTs due to small sample sizes and a lack of counterfactuals. As has become my catch phrase, most disagreement is a result of miscommunication.
Interested to hear your thoughts
Your comment relates to interventions that directly target improving patient health, and I think that Toby’s paper applies well to these examples. My difficulty is rather with using it to analyse charities outside of global health, or charities that create less measurable forms of change, as highlighted in the end of Cody’s paper.
This is an awesome article and I hadn’t seen it before posting. Thanks for sharing and for all the work in writing it:)
If you also include interventions whose effectiveness can’t be measured in advance, then I’d expect the spread to be larger by another factor of 2–10, though it’s hard to say how the results would generalise to areas without data.
I found this claim very interesting. @Cody_Fenwick would you be open to giving a little more detail on this range and how you came to it?:)
I agree that the paper support the claim. I highlighted the title to clarify the niche subject matter of the graph, which is also adequately described in Toby’s paper. My reason for doing so was to show that you can’t extrapolate from this context to charities in general.
Perhaps taking a list of registered charities, and weighting their cost effectiveness by their donation revenue would be the most apt way to measure the average cost effectiveness? But I also think that we can only aptly measure the effectiveness of charities that are designed to have measurable effectiveness using RCTs. For charities with no good counterfactual or small sample sizes, quantifying effectiveness becomes impossible. Try measuring the effectiveness of Oxfam as a whole, for example.
Thanks for the first comment and for this note! I hadn’t seen the 80k article, which would have been a useful document to feed in. But regardless I think the strength of the title matched the confidence of my belief (perhaps 98%)
We don’t have evidence that the best charities are over 1000x more cost effective than the average
I guess my mistake was interpreting your quick take as a sincere question rather than a rhetorical question. I now realize you were asking a rhetorical question in order to make an argument and not actually asking for people to try to answer your question
Thanks for the consideration, but you were actually correct the first time. This was a genuine question, and my view has adjusted based on both your comments, which I am grateful for. I haven’t agreed with everything that you have said, but that does not mean that I haven’t found it valuable. Thank you again for the time and thought.
What I was most hoping to get out of this post was answers to my two other questions: “Has anyone else experienced the grief of realising the extent of this atrocity embedded in casual day-to-day life in middle class parts of wealthy countries? Did you also have a breakdown?”. I pushed back a little on your ‘no’ to the first question, with the hope of answering these too.I wanted to help alleviate your guilt, which I think when taken to such an extreme can be paralyzing and counterproductive. I’ve seen no evidence it actually helps anyone and lots of evidence of it doing harm.
I totally agree with this. For me it has been at times paralysing, but at times extremely motivating. My aim with the post was to see how I can deal with this grief, since I believe it to be justified. I have changed my lifestyle such that I no longer feel guilt (spending less, donating more, working on impactful things), but the despair remains. Maybe it would have been wiser for me to totally avoid it, but having these ideas is not something I regret. When I try to motivate others to action, I follow the evidence that you mention and am more likely to use ‘drowning child’ style reflections about positive interventions that can be made.
Many families are affected by the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust. It seems completely disrespectful to them to try to turn their suffering and loss into effective altruist rhetoric.
I’m Jewish, and highlighting the comparable moral atrocity has been useful for me. I know that won’t be the case for everyone, and it can definitely be a triggering topic.
But I think it would be a stretch to try to apply the concept of “willful ignorance” to global poverty or the world economic system, since people’s ignorance of the “hidden violence” you describe — if it indeed exists — is genuine and not a ruse to try to avoid culpability.
This is a really good point, and definitely helps to diminish the size of the grief. I have vaguely thought along these lines before, but I like the way that you formulate it. I think there is still some gray area here: a lot of people I know do continue to work in jobs that they know are destructive. But I agree that it is not the case for most.
So, I have indulged the Nazi analogies enough. I will not entertain this any more.
This sounds like this exchange has been unpleasant for you, and I am sorry to hear that. I hope some of the detail in this reply have softened some of this, but regardless I hope that you were able to enjoy some parts of it, and continue to make other valuable contributions on this forum. Take care.
Would anyone be up for reading and responding to this article? I find myself agreeing with a lot of it.
”Effective altruism is a movement that excludes poor people”