Vox's "Future Perfect" column frequently has flawed journalism

I would distinguish between poor journalism and not taking a very EA perspective. We shouldn't conflate the two. It's worth noting that Future Perfect is inspired by EA, rather than an EA publication. I also think it's important for the journalists writing to be able to share their own perspective even if it disagrees with the EA consensus. That said, some articles I've seen have been overly ideological or unnecessarily polarising and that worries me.

3. I have no personal or inside info on Future Perfect, Vox, Dylan Matthews, Ezra Klein, etc. But it seems like they've got a fair bit of respect for the EA movement--they actually care about impact, and they're not trying to discredit or overtake more traditional EA figureheads like MacAskill and Singer.

Therefore I think we should be very respectful towards Vox, and treat them like ingroup members. We have great norms in the EA blogosphere about epistemic modesty, avoiding ad hominem attacks, viewing opposition charitably, etc. that allow us to have much more productive discussions. I think we can extend that relationship to Vox.

Using this piece as an example, if you were criticizing Rob Wiblin's podcasting instead of Vox's writing, I think people might ask you to be more charitable. We're not anti-criticism -- We're absolutely committed to truth and honesty, which means seeking good criticism -- but we also have well-justified trust in the community. We share a common goal, and that makes it really easy to cooperate.

Let's trust Vox like that. It'll make our cooperation more effective, we can help each other achieve our common goal, and, if necessary, we can always take back our trust later.

I agree generally with your criticisms. It's not particularly surprising given the frequency with which they publish and the variation in quality if Vox's reporting in general.

I would say your advice to read and check the overall soundness of the message before sharing could probably be broadly applied - and strikes me as a bit self-evident. Do you feel like these poor quality FP articles are getting shared widely? Do you have reason to believe it is being done without the sharer reading them?

Really valuable post, particularly because EA should be paying more attention to Future Perfect--it's some of EA's biggest mainstream exposure. Some thoughts in different threads:

1. Writing for a general audience is really hard, and I don't think we can expect Vox to maintain the fidelity standards EA is used to. It has to be entertaining, every article has to be accessible to new readers (meaning you can't build up reader expecations over time, like a sequence of blog posts or book would), and Vox has to write for the audience they have rather than wait for the audience we'd like.

In that light, look at, say, the baby Hitler article. It has to be connected to the average Vox reader's existing interests, hence the Ben Shapiro intro. It has to be entertaining, so Matthew's digresses onto time travel and Matrix. Then it has to provide valuable information content: an intro to moral cluelessness and expected value.

It's pretty tough for one article to do all that, AND seriously critique Great Man history, AND explain the history of the Nazi Party. To me, dropping those isn't shoddy journalism, it's valuable insight into how to engage your readers, not the ideal reader.

Bottom line: People who took the 2018 EA Survey are twice more likely than the average American to hold a bachelor's degree, and 7x more likely to hold a Ph.D. That's why Robin Hanson and GiveWell have been great reading resources so far. But if we actually want EA to go mainstream, we can't rely on econbloggers and think-tanks to reach most people. We need easier explanations, and I think Vox provides that well.

...

(P.S. Small matter, Matthews does not say that it's "totally impossible" to act in the face of cluelessness, unlike what you implied--he says the opposite. And then: "If we know the near-term effects of foiling a nuclear terrorism plot are that millions of people don't die, and don't know what the long-term effects will be, that's still a good reason to foil the plot." That's a great informal explanation. Edit to correct that?)

2. Just throwing it out there: Should EA embrace being apolitical? As in, possible official core virtue of the EA movement proper: Effective Altruism doesn't take sides on controversial political issues, though of course individual EAs are free to.

Robin Hanson's "pulling the rope sideways" analogy has always struck me: In the great society tug-of-war debates on abortion, immigration, and taxes, it's rarely effective to pick a side and pull. First, you're one of many, facing plenty of opposition, making your goal difficult to accomplish. But second, if half the country thinks your goal is bad, it very well might be. On the other hand, pushing sideways is easy: nobody's going to filibuster to prevent you from handing out malaria nets-- everybody thinks it's a good idea.

(This doesn't mean not involving yourself in politics. 80k writes on improving political decision making or becoming a congressional staffer--they're both nonpartisan ways to do good in politics.)

If EA were officially apolitical like this, we would benefit by Hanson's logic: we can more easily achieve our goals without enemies, and we're more likely to be right. But we'd could also gain credibility and influence in the long run by refusing to enter the political fray.

I think part of EA's success is because it's an identity label, almost a third party, an ingroup for people who dislike the Red/Blue identity divide. I'd say most EAs (and certainly the EAs that do the most good) identify much more strongly with EA than with any political ideology. That keeps us more dedicated to the ingroup.

But I could imagine an EA failure mode where, a decade from now, Vox is the most popular "EA" platform and the average EA is liberal first, effective altruist second. This happens if EA becomes synonymous with other, more powerful identity labels--kinda how animal rights and environmentalism could be their own identities, but they've mostly been absorbed into the political left.

If apolitical were an official EA virtue, we could easily disown German Lopez on marijuana or Kamala Harris and criminal justice--improving epistemic standards and avoiding making enemies at the same time. Should we adopt it?

Hi OP! Thanks for writing this up. A few comments on the section about Booker's policy proposal.

1) I agree that journalists should focus more on poverty alleviation in the poorest parts of the world, such as sub-Saharan African countries. Fortunately, Future Perfect (FP) does cover global poverty reduction efforts much more than most mainstream media outlets. Now, you are right that the piece on Booker's proposal is part of a tendency for FP to focus more on US politics and US poverty alleviation than most EA organisations. However, I think this approach is justified for (at least) two reasons: a) For the foreseeable future, the US will inevitably spend a lot more on domestic social programs than on foreign aid. Completely neglecting a conversation about how the US should approach social expenditure would, I believe, be a huge foregone opportunity to do a lot of good. Yes, a big part of EA is to figure out which general cause areas that should receive most attention. But I believe that EA is also about figuring out what the best approaches are within different important cause areas, such as poverty in the US. I think that FP doing this is a very good thing. b) Part of the intended audience for FP (rightly) cares a lot about poverty in the US. Covering this issue can be a way of widening the FP audience, thus bringing much-needed attention to other important issues also covered by FP, such as AI safety.

2) I personally agree with the "basic moral imperative to get as many people as possible out of poverty" as you call it. But, without getting deep into normative ethics, I think it is fair to say that several moral theories are concerned with grave injustices such as the current state of racial inequity in the United States. Closing the race-wealth gap will only be a "strange thing to focus on" if you assume, with great confidence, utilitarianism to be true.

3) Even if one assumes utilitarianism to be true, there are solid arguments for focusing on racial inequity in the US. Efforts to support people of colour specifically in the US is not just to "fixate" on an arbitrarily selected race. It is to fixate on a group of people who have been systematically downtrodden for most of US history and who until very recently (if not still) have been discriminated against by the government in ways that have kept them from prospering. (For anyone curious about this claim, I strongly encourage you to read this essay for historical context.) I totally agree with you that "unequal racial distribution can have important secondary effects", and this is why there is a solid case for paying attention to the race-wealth gap, even on utilitarian grounds. You argue that this "should take a backstage" to general poverty alleviation. I actually agree, and that is also how the EA movement is already acting and prioritising. But 'taking a backstage' does not have to (and should not) mean being completely neglected, and I for one really appreciate that FP is applying the methods and concepts of effective altruism to a wider range of issues.

Cheers! :)

Joshua, former Co-President of Yale EA.

Dylan Matthews' claim that nuclear war would cause "much or all of humankind" to suddenly vanish is unsubstantiated. The idea that billions of people worldwide will die from nuclear war is not supported by models with realistic numbers of nuclear warheads. "Much" is a very vague term, but speculation that every (or nearly every) human will die is a false alarm. Now that is easy to forgive, as it's a common belief within EA anyway and probably someone will try to argue with me about it.

Could you expand on this or give sources? I do hear EAs talking about nuclear war and nuclear winter being existential threats.