How to unite radical feminism and EA. Vol 1: donor engagement

There are a few people who support both effective altruism and radical leftist politics who have written about how these two schools of thought might be integrated. Bob Jacobs, the former organizer of EA Ghent in Belgium, is one. You might be interested in his blog Collective Altruism: https://bobjacobs.substack.com/ 

Another writer you may be interested in is the academic philosopher David Thorstad. I don't know what his political views are. But his blog Reflective Altruism, which is about effective altruism, has covered a few topics relevant to this post, such as billionaire philanthropy, racism, sexism, and sexual harassment in the effective altruist movement: https://reflectivealtruism.com/post-series/

There is also a pseudonymous EA Forum user called titotal whose politics seem leftist or left-leaning. They have written some criticisms of certain aspects of the EA movement both here on the forum and on their blog: https://titotal.substack.com/

I don't know if any of the people I just mentioned wholeheartedly support radical feminism, though. Even among feminists and progressives or leftists, the reputation of radical feminism has been seriously damaged through a series of serious mistakes, including:

• Support for the oppression of and systemic violence and discrimination against trans people^[1]
• Support for banning pornography^[2]
• Opposition to legalizing or decriminalizing sex work^[3]
• Arguing that most sex is unethical^[4]

I'm vaguely aware that probably some radical feminists today take different stances on these topics, and probably there have historically been some radical feminists who have disagreed with these bad opinions, but the movement is tarnished from these mistakes and it will be difficult to recover. 

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. 

Effective altruism was founded as a movement focused on the effectiveness of charities that work on global poverty and global health. A lot of radical leftists — I'd guess the majority — fundamentally reject this idea. So, how many radical leftists are realistically going to end up supporting effective altruism? (I'm talking about radical leftists here because most radical feminists and specifically some of the ones you mentioned also have radical leftist economic and political views.)

Finally, although there are many important ideas in radical feminist thought that I think anyone — including effective altruists — could draw from, there is also a large amount of low-quality scholarship and bad ideas to sift through. I already mentioned some of the bad ideas. One example of low-quality scholarship, in my opinion, is adrienne maree brown's book Pleasure Activism. I tried to read this book because it was recommended to me by a friend. 

To give just one example of what I found to be low-quality scholarship, adrienne maree brown believes in vampires, believes she has been bitten by a vampire, and has asked for vampires to turn her into a vampire. 

To give another example, the book is called Pleasure Activism, but it does not give a clear definition or explanation of what the term "pleasure activism" is supposed to mean. If you make a concept the title of your book, and you write a book that is nominally about that concept, then if I read your book, I should be able to understand that concept. Instead, the attempt to define the concept is too brief and too vague. This is the full extent of the definition from the book:

Pleasure activism is the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy.

Pleasure activism asserts that we all need and deserve pleasure and that our social structures must reflect this. In this moment, we must prioritize the pleasure of those most impacted by oppression.

Pleasure activists seek to understand and learn from the politics and power dynamics inside of everything that makes us feel good. This includes sex and the erotic, drugs, fashion, humor, passion work, connection, reading, cooking and/or eating, music and other arts, and so much more.

Pleasure activists believe that by tapping into the potential goodness in each of us we can generate justice and liberation, growing a healing abundance where we have been socialized to believe only scarcity exists.

Pleasure activism acts from an analysis that pleasure is a natural, safe, and liberated part of life — and that we can offer each other tools and education to make sure sex, desire, drugs, connection, and other pleasures aren’t life-threatening or harming but life-enriching.

Pleasure activism includes work and life lived in the realms of satisfaction, joy, and erotic aliveness that bring about social and political change.

Ultimately, pleasure activism is us learning to make justice and liberation the most pleasurable experiences we can have on this planet.

What is pleasure activism? After reading this, I don't know. I'm not sure if adrienne marie brown knows, either.

To be clear, I'm a feminist, I'm LGBT, I believe in social justice, and I've voted for a social democratic political party multiple times. I took courses on feminist theory and queer studies when I was university and I think a lot of the scholarship in those fields is amazingly good.

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,^[5] or they have hazy ideas they can't clearly define or explain (like pleasure activism), or they have completely disastrous ideas that would lead to nightmares in real life (such as economic degrowth or authoritarian communism). 

This is fine if you want to live in some abstract seminar somewhere, if you want to enjoy an aesthetic of radical change while changing nothing — and if we can rely on no governments ever trying to implement the disastrous ideas like degrowth or authoritarian communism that would kill millions of people — but what if you want to help rural families in sub-Saharan Africa not get malaria or afford a new roof for their home or get vaccines or vitamins for the children? Then you've got to put away the inscrutable theory and live in the real world (which does not have vampires in it). 

1. ^{^}

   See the Wikipedia article on gender-critical feminism or the extraordinarily good video essay "Gender Critical" by the YouTuber and former academic philosopher ContraPoints.

2. ^{^}

   One ban was actually passed, but then overturned by a court.

3. ^{^}

   I haven't read this article, but if you're unfamiliar with this topic, at a glance, it seems like a good introduction to the debate: https://scholarlycommons.law.cwsl.edu/fs/242/

4. ^{^}

   ContraPoints' movie-length video essay "Twilight" covers this topic beautifully. Yes, it's very long, but it's so good! 

5. ^{^}

   Here's a refreshing instance of some radical leftists candidly admitting this: https://2021.lagrandetransition.net/en/conference-themes/

This is the first post in a series on uniting these two movements. We are stronger together, and I hope to demonstrate that each movement contains immense power to help the other. I see myself as a radical feminist and an Effective Altruist and I view those identities as symbiotic rather than contradictory.

Quickly - I think that all smart and truth-seeking people have a lot to learn from each other. My quick impression is that the radical feminist academic community has a mix of good and bad work, as is true with similar movements. I personally admire some of the combination of radicalism and scholarship, but I have disagreements with a lot of the Marxist-leaning influences that seem prevalent. 

At the same time, it's not clear to me what it would even mean to "unite" exactly. I imagine both communities would feel anxious about some of this.

I don't currently see what the benefit to the EA movement of attempting some form of integration would be, and the differences in worldview seem pretty deep and insurmountable, though I would love to be convinced otherwise! This post felt more like it argued why radical feminism would benefit from EA

Though, my perspective is obviously flavoured by disagreeing with radical feminism on many things, and if you feel differently then naturally integration would seem much better

I agree with the other commenters that it's not clear why 'uniting' with this particular extremist group is particularly desirable. Doing so seems like it would require us to make epistemic sacrifices and potentially alienate more mainstream and influential groups. But actually the main thing I took away from this was... radical feminism seems a lot more like just socialism, and a lot less about women than I expected?

We are stronger together, and I hope to demonstrate that each movement contains immense power to help the other.

This is plausible, but not obvious.

My default model is more along the lines of altruistic pluralism. Having a number of altruistic communities, each pursuing its distinct goals, strategies, and objectives with vigor generally strikes me as a good thing. In that universe, we get the benefits of each community not watered down with a bunch of other stuff. Each movement has the ability to adapt to its own niche, wherein it can play to its strengths and is less impeded by the tradeoffs it accepted along the way. Although synergies exist, I submit that there is a considerable risk of creating something like the United Way or altruistic nutraloaf by trying to mix a bunch of different and somewhat inconsistent approaches into a Grand Unified Theory of altruism.

Here, it seems to me that there would be considerable costs to both EA and radical feminism from a synergized approach. On the topic of donor relations, I predict that EA would end up irritating its donors in an attempt to be minimally acceptable to radical feminists, and radical feminism would have to seriously water down its critique of capitalism to make synergy potentially viable. I suspect you'd see more anti-synergies than synergies in other domains as well. For instance, being perceived as sympathetic toward radical feminism is going to hurt ability to influence the current US regime and other regimes on AI safety, while being perceived as sympathetic to EA is likely to hurt radical feminism's relationship with more naturally allied movements. I'm just not seeing enough benefits to either movement over those available in a more pluralistic structure to overcome the costs.

I was reading a blog about EA by the Guerilla Foundation, which contained the quote:

[EA] provides wealth owners with a saviour narrative and a ‘veil of impartiality’ that might hinder deeper scrutiny into the origins of philanthropic money, and stifle personal transformation and solidarity.

And how do EAs respond to this? 

I can't respond for "EAs in total" but I can respond for myself.

For this specific point, I find it a very vague and early hypothesis. A much more concrete and precise claim might be,
"Donors that give to EA causes do so at the expense of greater altruism. We should generally expect that in empirical settings, donors that think they have some sort of 'veil of impartiality' fail to do much investigation, and thus wind up donating to worse causes."

This sounds interesting to me, but it seems like an empirical question, and I'd really want some data or something before making big decisions with it. I could easily see the opposite being true, like,
"Donors who give to causes they think are highly effective will think of themselves as people who care about effectiveness, and then would be more likely to do research and prioritization in the future."

Basically, this seems to me a lot like a just-so story at this stage.