EA: Renaissance or Diaspora?
By TimothyTelleenLawton @ 2024-10-26T22:59 (+46)
@Elizabeth and I recently recorded a conversation of ours that we're hoping becomes a whole podcast series. The original premise is that we were trying to convince each other about whether we should both be EAs or both not be EAs. (She quit the movement earlier this year when she felt that her cries of alarm kept falling on deaf ears; I never left.)
Audio recording (35 min)
Some highlights:
- @Elizabeth's story of falling in love with, trying to change, and then falling out of love with Effective Altruism. That middle part draws heavily on past posts of hers, including EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem and Truthseeking is the ground in which other principles grow
- I told Elizabeth that I would also have left when she did (if I had had her experience).
- I claimed that EA is ready for a Renaissance.
- We both agreed that I should 'check the integrity of Hogwarts' by challenging EA to live up to my standards of integrity, and that I should also leave the movement if I give up on EA meeting that challenge (as Elizabeth did).
If you like the podcast or want to continue the conversation, tell us about it in the comments (or on LW if you want to make sure Elizabeth sees it), and consider donating toward future episodes.
Ariel Simnegar 🔸 @ 2024-10-29T23:57 (+17)
Thanks for the interesting conversation! Some scattered questions/observations:
- Your conversation reminds me of the debate about whether EA should be cause-first or member-first.
- My self-identification as EA is cause-first: So long as the EA community puts resources broadly into causes which maximize the impartial good, I'd call myself EA.
- Elizabeth's self-identification seems to me to be member-first, given that her self-identification seems more based upon community members acting with integrity towards each other than about whether or not EA is maximizing the impartial good.
- This might explain the difference between my and Elizabeth's attitudes about the importance of some EAs claiming that veganism doesn't entail tradeoffs without being corrected. I think being honest about health tradeoffs is important, but I'm far more concerned with shutting up and multiplying by shipping resources towards the best interventions. However, putting on a member-first hat, I could understand why from Elizabeth's perspective, this is so important. Do you think this is a fair characterization?
- I'd love to understand more about the way Elizabeth reasons about the importance of raising awareness of veganism's health tradeoffs relative to vegan advocacy:
- If Elizabeth is trying to maximize the impartial good, she should probably be far more concerned about an anti-veganism advocate on Facebook than about a veganism advocate who (incorrectly) denies veganism's health tradeoffs. Of course everyone should be transparent about health tradeoffs. However, if Elizabeth is being scope-sensitive about the dominance of farmed animal effects, I struggle to understand why so much attention is being placed on veganism's health tradeoffs relative to vegan advocacy.
- By analogy, this feels like sounding an alarm because EA's kidney donation advocates haven't sufficiently acknowledged its potential adverse health effects. Of course everyone should acknowledge that. But when also considering the person being helped, isn't kidney donation clearly the moral imperative?
MichaelStJules @ 2024-10-30T05:26 (+6)
I might say kidney donation is a moral imperative (or at least all-things-considered-good) if we consider only the effects on your welfare and the effects on the welfare of the beneficiaries. But when you consider indirect effects, things are less clear. There are effects on other people, nonhuman animals (farmed and wild), your productivity and time (which affects your EA work or income and donations), your motivation and your values. For an EA, productivity and time, motivation and values seem most important.
EDIT: And the same goes for veganism.
Sarah Cheng @ 2024-10-28T18:25 (+10)
Thank you for sharing this Timothy. I left a long comment on the LW version of the post. I'm happy to talk about this more with you or Elizabeth — if you're interested, you're welcome to reach out to me directly.