EA - Going more meta on EA criticism by Nick Whitaker

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Going more meta on EA criticism, published by Nick Whitaker on July 27, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Apologies for more meta, written for a wider audience but thought people here might be curious. Crossposted from High Modernism When outsiders criticize Effective Altruism, the criticism mostly revolves around the culture and movement: EA is demanding, in that it imposes an implausible and unfairly high moral burden on people that disrupts the normal pace of their lives EA is totalizing, in that EAs end up only thinking about EA and hanging out with EAs EA lacks a certain vibe and aesthetic, which functions as a sort of reductio to larger swaths of the philosophy or movement being misled. Take Michael Neilsen’s Notes on Effective Altruism: This is a really big problem for EA. When you have people taking seriously such an overarching principle, you end up with stressed, nervous people, people anxious that they are living wrongly. The correct critique of this situation isn't the one Singer makes: that it prevents them from doing the most good. The critique is that it is the wrong way to live. (demanding) Similar themes are evident in Kerry Vaughan occasional complaints (totalizing) or in Aella’s recent thread (vibe). I think there are obvious reasons to push back on these lines of critique: The “demanding” nature of EA can often be the result of a selection effect: people who are naturally neurotic are attracted to a movement that offers them clear goals, as naturally neurotic people are attracted to prestigious colleges or stratified careers. Also, just as people suffer from the moral demands of EA, so too do many suffer from having no larger purpose. It would be worth trying to figure out which is more common. The “totalizing” effect of EA seems overestimated by those outside the community. Plenty of members have well-balanced lives. And some enjoy going “all in” on a community–it’s as true for EA as it is for rock climbing. That seems fine if it works for them. Reductio ad vibes seems like a suspicious line of argumentation. Lots of communities are accused of having undesirable vibes, and presumably the bar should be higher for showing that community is actually undesirable. But it seems worth getting a bit more meta. Why are these arguments so central in EA criticism, and even if they were true, how much should that matter? When EA’s criticize EA, it’s often about thinking and tactics: Are EAs using good moral reasoning? Are EAs correctly prioritizing causes? Are EAs being rigorous in their thinking and employing good epistemic practices? Is the movement employing its resources well? This is obviously a very different flavor than the outside criticism. So which matters more: Whether EAs are correctly identifying and solving some of the most important problems, or whether movement dynamics are ideal? There’s an analogy I think is instructive here: A fireman is trying to put out a fire in a house that is about to erupt into flames. The fireman would do well to hear “There isn’t actually a fire and here’s why” or “You have no idea how to fight fires” or even “You’re actually making the fire bigger.” But to tell the fireman: “You shouldn’t feel like you need to put out every fire. There’s more to life than fires” “You’re quite extreme about this whole firefighting thing. All you do is drive back and forth from the fire station. Do you have any friends besides firefighters?” “Well I don’t know about the fire but you’re being a bit cringe about this whole thing” These just sort of miss the mark entirely. There’s a fire! It could be the case that the fireman should relax and enjoy life more, but this seems like a discussion worth having after the fire is out. Is the firefighter doing something useful? This is the key question! I presume that most critics of EAs do...