Effective Altruism and End-Times Fascism

I'm also baffled by the rhetorical martyrdom and self-flagellation that became popular in EA circles post-FTX. It's surely worth forcefully pushing back against misleading coverage, having some courage in our convictions, and being clear about how ignorant (or sometimes outright dishonest) a lot of the critiques are.

Something I'm a bit torn on is the question of how much it's worth going on the offensive against competing ideologies. EA is a big tent, but it's true that a lot of us think anti-capitalism is bad and stupid. Personally, I do not have a positive opinion of Naomi Klein or others who are more left than liberal, so maybe it shouldn't be surprising that she wouldn't have a high opinion of a movement that contains many people who think like me. But a dialectical asymmetry results if those on the far left are constantly criticizing those who are more center-left, while the latter mostly bite their tongues and don't spend a lot of time explaining why we think the far left is so badly misguided. It leaves the far left with a moral high ground that I don't think they deserve (given how much they, in my view, prioritize symbolism over actually helping people).

This is easier said than done. EA has these problems in part because of our associations with the whole "TESCREAL" lumping together of various Silicon Valley centric ideologies. We're closely tied to the Rationalists of Less Wrong for various reasons (I once met Yudkowsky at an EA Global conference), and many of our so-called thought leaders like Bostrom and MacAskill are Oxford philosophers with a particular nexus of views that tend to be somewhat controversial right now.

We also, as a very open-minded, truth-seeking community, tend to, in my humble opinion, overly humour ideas that are contrarian and distinctly unpopular. The merits of Eugenics for instance, were debated here several times, though mostly disapproved of.

EA in general tends to make assumptions that are a subset of the umbrella of liberal philosophy, not necessarily progressive or socialist philosophy. We've historically tended to downplay systemic change (i.e. anti-capitalism, government intervention, etc.), in favour of individual actions like donating to charities and career change. This puts us in the crosshairs of criticism from the more left-wing progressives and socialists. The Guardian is, known to have become more progressive lately, and Naomi Klein is from a family with connections to the social democratic NDP in Canada.

This is not to say there aren't EAs who are sympathetic to more left-wing considerations. Many of the rank and file are, as seen in the EA Surveys. But many of our thought leaders are known to be more centrist, and even occasionally right-wing. Peter Thiel despises us now, but did give a talk at an EA conference, as did Elon Musk, way back in the day (circa 2013-2015).

EA has a complicated history, and unfortunately, a lot of it is controversial stuff that gets dredged up everytime someone wants to come criticize us, fairly or not.

Within EA there is definitely a diversity of views, and you're probably more familiar with the Global Health and Animal Welfare "faction" that does obviously good uncontroversial stuff, but we also have the AI Safety and Longtermism "faction" that gets strongly associated with Silicon Valley. I say faction, but there is obviously overlap and not clear boundaries, so much as different emphases.

So, it's hard. I've been around since the early days, and I really, really, dislike how the media mostly focuses on the controversy and ignores the good that we do. But I don't really see a way to solve this. Independent western journalism is hypercriticial of pretty much everything remotely political, and efforts at PR and optics by CEA tend to grate against the pure truth-seeking mindset of many EAs.

Your solution seems to be to "move EA into the centre of the Overton Window", and get better exemplars to represent EA. I'm not sure this is really possible. For the first, it'll strike many EAs as less than truth-seeking, to try to hue to arbitrary public opinion, and risks removing the differences between EA and generic progressivism or centrism or whatever you think fits the Overton Window (in which case, why bother becoming an EA?). The Overton Window may not even be a useful concept anymore in our highly polarized discourse.

As for exemplars, Peter Singer is actually somewhat controversial for his old position on infanticide, and the only famous celebrity I know of who is EA sympathetic is Joseph Gordan-Levitt, who recently had a bit of a scandal over being an invitee to Peter Thiel's Dialog secret society thing. Hank Green has also sometimes engaged with EA-like ideas, but has been critical of the kind of hyper-calculating, efficiency focused mindset we often use. There are a few vegan celebrities like Billie Eilish, but I don't know that they are on-board with EA generally.

So, about optics generally, it's not like people haven't tried. A few years back there were positive, sympathetic articles about EA, including this one about MacAskill. Vox Media also had its Future Perfect coverage of EA, that was pretty sympathetic.

Also, might as well mention that if you really want to dig into EA stuff, there's the simple fact that the by far the largest donor to EA is billionaire Dustin Moskovitz, through Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy). Admittedly, Moskovitz is surprisingly progressive for a billionaire, and was one of the largest donors to the Democrats in the last election.

Anyways, hope that helps to show how complicated the situation is.

If you find yourself "sadly nodding my head in agreement with so much of the article" until you get to the section that concerns an area you have first-hand experience of, whereupon you find the author to be grossly misrepresenting the subject matter, you should probably reduce your credence in the rest also.

Yeah, I have noticed multiple left-wing sources directly misrepresenting the ideas of Effective Altruism and the Guardian article certainly does that:

There is also effective altruism and longtermism, both of which skip over redistributive approaches to helping those in need in the here and now in favor of a cost-benefit approach to doing the most good in the long term.

This sounds absurd on its face―I've always supported "redistributive approaches to helping those in need in the here and now".

Though they can appear benign at first glance, these ideas are shot through with dangerous racial, ableist and gender biases about which parts of humanity are worth enhancing and saving – and which could be sacrificed for the supposed good of the whole.

Also obvious BS.

They also share a marked lack of interest in urgently addressing the underlying drivers of collapse – a responsible and rational goal that a growing cohort of figures now actively shun. 

wtf could they possibly be talking about?

Meanwhile, even darker philosophies are finding a wider audience...

ahh yes, the dark philosophy of trying to figure out how to make the future go well, prevent human extinction, raise the prosperity floor, reduce suffering etc... you would think that the alt-Right, with its celebration of cruelty, would be our natural enemies, but in fact they ignore us and certain leftists want to be our enemies instead. Why?

Personally I spend a lot of my time fighting against misinformation, a problem that EA has largely ignored. Well, the more we become the target of it, perhaps the more we will be motivated to think about the problem. I think that the high popularity of disinformation/misinformation's is one of the biggest, most consequential phenomena in the world, so we ought to pay a lot of attention to it.

Financial motivations for misinformation are best-known: tobacco companies not wanting people to believe that smoking causes lung cancer, Exxon Mobil not wanting people to know that burning fossil fuels causes global warming, Andrew Wakefield wanting people to believe that the MRR vaccine is hazardous because he has a patent on a would-be competing vaccine.

But while people think of Wakefield as the father of "vaccines cause autism", that wasn't his original angle. It seems like he wanted to steer discourse in a direction that would let him to sell his competing vaccine, but when his fraudulent activities were exposed, he found himself pulled toward the nascent anti-vax movement and accidentally turned into a figurehead: I guess they fed off Wakefield's popularity while Wakefield fed off their desire for thought leaders.

Which brings us to the second and much more common kind of misinformation, in which the incentives are social, not financial. Most people who preach that humans can't cause global warming have no financial motivation either. Anti-EA misinformation is roughly 100% of this second type. How does such misinformation work? How can it be countered? I don't really know, but if anybody wants to study this, color me interested!

This reminds me of my Mormon upbringing; many church talks were given on how important it was to be kind and virtuous in order to maintain and improve the church's reputation. Does it help? Not sure. They're surviving, but many people don't like them. Gemini says growth has slowed down, with +42% new wards in the decade ending 2000 vs +8.8% for 2020, despite the church's strong missionary program. In any case, seems better to have a missionary program than not. This also reminds me how much I wish I had an EA "church" building I could attend with my kids...