The Black Vegans one is about different consumer price elasticities between racial groups along various axises.
Queer Eye on the EA Guys is about different measures of animal suffering and coordination between EA and animal activists broadly.
Chapter 11 I also expected to be about degrowthers but it’s about regulatory capture and Jevon’s paradox.
Moreover, I think naming conventions for left-wing texts just have this effect. It depends on how the audience pattern-matches I guess. Also Queer Eye on the EA Guys is just a funny pun. It’s an interesting read for me personally at least. I don’t think it changed any of my opinions or actions.
Disclaimer: I read it a while ago and this is reproduction fast from memory. I also have bad memory of some of the weirder chapters (the Christianity one for instance). These also do not express my personal opinions but rather steelmans and reframings of the book.
I’m from the continental tradition and read a lot of the memeplex (e.g. Donna Harraway, Marcuse, and Freire). I’ll try to make this short summary more EA legible:
1. The object level part of its criticisms draw upon qualitative data from animal activists who take higher risk of failure but more abolitionist approaches. The criticism is then the marginal change pushed by EA makes abolition harder because of the following: (a) lack of coordination and respect for the animal rights activists on the left and specifically the history there, (b) how funding distorts the field and eats up talent and competes against the left (c) how they have to bend themselves to be epistemically scrutable to EA.
An EA steelman example of similar points of thinking are EAs who are incredibly anti-working for OpenAI or Deepmind at all because it safety washes and pushes capabilities anyways. The criticism here is the way EA views problems means EA will only go towards solution that are piecemeal rather than transformative. A lot of Marxists felt similarly to welfare reform in that it quelled the political will for “transformative” change to capitalism.
For instance they would say a lot of companies are pursuing RLHF in AI Safety not because it’s the correct way to go but because it’s the easiest low hanging fruit (even if it produces deceptive alignment).
2. Secondarily there is a values based criticism in the animal rights section that EA is too utilitarian which leads to: (a) preferencing charities that lessen animal suffering in narrow senses and (b) when EA does take risks with animal welfare it’s more technocratic and therefore prone to market hype with things like alternative proteins.
A toy example that might help is that something like cage free eggs would violate (a) because it makes the egg company better able to dissolve criticism and (b) is a lack of imagination on the part of ending egg farming overall and sets up a false counterfactual.
3. Thirdly, on global poverty it makes a few claims:
a. The motivation towards quantification is a selfish one citing Herbert Marcuse’s arguments on how neoliberalism has captured institutions. Specifically, the argument criticises Ajeya Cotra’s 2017 talk about effective giving and how it’s about a selfish internal psychological need for quantification and finding comfort in that quantification.
b. The counterfactual of poverty and possible set of actions are much larger because it doesn’t consider the amount of collective action possible. The author sets out types of consciousness raising examples of activism that on first glance is “small” and “intractable” but spark big upheavals (funnily names Greta Thundberg among Black social justice activists which offended my sensibilities).
c. EA runs interference for rich people and provide them cover and potential political action against them (probably the weakest claim of the bunch).
I think a lot of the anti-quantification type arguments that EAs thumb their noses at should be reframed because they are not as weak as they seem nor as uncommon in EA. For instance, the arguments on SPARC and other sorts of community building efforts are successful because they introduce people to transformative ideas. E.g. it’s not a specific activity done but the combination of community and vibes broadly construed that leads to really talented people doing good.
3. Longtermism doesn’t get much of a mention because of publishing time. There’s just a meta-criticism that the switch over from neartermism to longtermism reproduces the same pattern of thinking but also the subtle intellectual. E.g. EAs used to say things were too moonshot with activism and systemic change but now they’re doing longtermism.
I feel like a lot of cruxes of how you receive these criticisms are dependent on what memeplex you buy into. I think if people are pattern-matching to Torres type hit pieces they’re going to be pleasantly surprised. These are real dyed in the wool leftists. It’s not so much weird gotchas that are targeted at getting retweets from twitter beefs and libs it’s for leftist students and seems to be more targeted towards the animal activism side and specific instances of left animal activists and EA clashes at parts.