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This article illustrates a big issue with people opposed to EA - they severely underestimate the risks associated with political change. Of course, we can just

by pcstl 5y ago

This article illustrates a big issue with people opposed to EA - they severely underestimate the risks associated with political change. Of course, we can just assume everything goes well, we agitate for political change, we get a change for the better, everything is great. But the risk of a different outcome never seems to be taken into consideration. For instance: We believe the conditions in our country are unfair. We start agitating and take down vital institutions in the name of change. Our movement gets hijacked by a military strongman who happens to be charismatic and liked by the people, and now we're under a brutal military dictatorship. Oops. History shows the likelihood of the second kind of outcome is, at the very least, non-ignorable. I would like to see more analysis on what causes bad outcomes of this kind, and to see them taken seriously, instead of this handwaving where poltical action always leads to good outcomes.

mLuby 5y ago
> We start agitating and take down vital institutions in the name of change. Our movement gets hijacked by a military strongman who happens to be charismatic and liked by the people, and now we're under a brutal military dictatorship. This risk is inherent in any political action (or inaction), and it could happen just as easily with a citizenry of Effective Altruists as with a bunch of scrooges. Charity and authoritarianism are orthogonal concepts. (IMO this risk is worth braving as we attempt to improve the human condition.)
- pcstl 5y ago
  >This risk is inherent in any political action (or inaction) Is your premise here that all actions have the same risk of hijacking by a malicious player? I reject this premise. Solid institutions are usually an effective safeguard against this sort of thing, and radical political action tends to have as its goal to destabilize institutions.
  - mLuby 5y ago
    Institutions, like laws, solidify existing power structures, whatever they may be. Though ideologically antipathetic toward each other, the bureaucracies of the U.S. Library of Congress and IngSoc's Ministry of Truth would be more similar than you might think. I think we're disagreeing about the implied premise that trying to solve a charity problem (e.g. ending homelessness) necessitates radical political action, and therefore carries radical risk of regime change. I agree that radical political action carries a higher risk of regime change, but I don't agree that altrustic policies are remotely that radical. For example, I believe that solving homelessness wouldn't break the bank nor would it significantly affect our institutions or culture (except likely increasing somewhat the size and power of a few psych/medical and housing departments). Glad we're both attuned to the risk of radical shake-ups though. :)
    - pcstl 5y ago
      The thing is that, if you don't propose radical political action, there is little to no reason to be opposed to EA. The only reason I can think someone might be opposed to EA is that they believe the only way society might be improved is through revolt and total reform, and therefore any kind of charity-based solution would just be stopping The People from rising up as they rightly should.
- lacker 5y ago
  Our movement gets hijacked by a military strongman who happens to be charismatic and liked by the people, and now we're under a brutal military dictatorship. This risk is inherent in any political action (or inaction) There is certainly a lot more risk of this when your charity is spending large sums of money in countries controlled by dictatorships, sums of money that in part go to taxes to fund those governments.
Uehreka 5y ago
I'd push back that a lot of the anti-political-activism stuff I see from EA people seems even more hand-wavy. Political activism has such enormous potential that any argument against it needs to be exceptionally strong. Now don't get me wrong, there are totally bits of conventional wisdom in political activism that I think are the exact kind of ineffective-but-makes-me-feel-good stuff that drive EA people nuts. I have hot takes about the oversaturation of phone-banking and door-knocking in presidential elections (although I'm searching for more evidence one way or the other before I make that argument in earnest). But the problem with arguments like "there's a non-ignorable chance that a military strongman could hijack our movement" is that that's like, three orders off from the kinds of problems that actually happen when you try to do political activism. I'm sure some activists are worried about that in the abstract, but the way more salient issues have to do with things like fundraising, cultivating movements in places where they don't exist yet, vetting candidates (particularly in local races where people come out of nowhere), forming coalitions between groups that don't think they have much in common, etc.
- pcstl 5y ago
  >that's like, three orders off from the kinds of problems that actually happen when you try to do political activism I think this just goes to show how people who live in places with stable political institutions take them for granted and don't value what they have. That you believe that political agitators who aim to destabilize institutions will face no problem greater than issues with fundraising or movement-building just goes to show that the conditions you live in are exceptionally stable. In most of the world, movements for change being taken over by malicious, self-interested players is a very real, very serious risk.
  - Uehreka 5y ago
    So, political activism doesn't necessarily mean ending capitalism and demolishing the system. Like, granted, when you play with matches you risk getting burned. But a lot of effective political activism is more about getting petition signatures and pressuring the state legislature to pass an ordinance banning factories from pumping heavy metals into the water table. Stuff that makes a difference, but is monumentally boring (and admittedly, stuff I personally haven't done enough of). [Edit - And before someone makes a dig about environmentalism-for-its-own-sake: In the above hypothetical, the factories are near an aquifer and there are concerns about drinking water.]
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
> This article illustrates a big issue with people opposed to EA - they severely underestimate the risks associated with political change. I think there is very little risk associated with political change, but the risk associated increases with the magnitude of political change. The fact that this even comes up makes me feel like most folks haven't actually tried to organize for a political cause. Yes, there are hot-button issues of our time, such as housing, healthcare, and UBI. But the vast majority of issues, from Celiac's sufferers to folks with nut allergies, are often a case of lack of awareness and resources rather than anything else. There's also ways to derisk political participation, but that's a separate conversation.
hnbad 5y ago
I think this argument actually illustrates a big issue with EA: for many people the "worse outcome" is no worse than the status quo. I'm not going to argue that an authoritarian theocracy or military dictatorship would be an improvement on the corporatist kleptocracy (or however we want to negatively describe the status quo). But political change is mostly not carried by those already doing moderately well under the status quo, even if they may often end up being the one implementing it. There's always a risk of existing power structures swooping in and opportunistically inserting themselves when the dominant ones are torn down but the problem isn't the tearing down of those structures but the continued existence of those that swoop in. This is btw why many leftists advocate for intersectionalism rather than hoping racism, sexism etc will go away on their own once the class hierarchy is defeated.
- pcstl 5y ago
  >for many people the "worse outcome" is no worse than the status quo. Is it really, though? In most cases where the worse outcome did happen, people were convinced they had nothing to lose and went with whatever radical idea was being proposed, then when things went pear-shaped they found out they did have a lot to lose. An extreme example is the Khmer Rouge.
  - hnbad 5y ago
    > Is it really, though? Yes, it is. If you're an unhoused diabetic living in the US without access to insulin, it literally doesn't matter if the country is run by Ivy League graduates or uncultured generalissimos. Note that I said "many", not "most". I'm not even making a claim about proportions but in the US alone there is a large quantity of people for whom the status quo is either a death sentence or at least entails a lifetime of suffering. This isn't even taking general trends (e.g. the income gap, militarization of the police, or Climate Change) into account. Note that I said "worse outcome", not "worst outcome". Yes, almost all bottom-up political change is brought about with "populism" (i.e. saying things are bad and promising that they can be changed for the better) that doesn't mean that all populism is deceptive or false. Generally drastic changes only happen when the situation is already sufficiently dire precisely because the status quo (no matter how undesirable) feels like a safer bet than a leap into the unknown. This is why these changes are often so drastic and the means to achieve them (by necessity) so violent: incrementalism has failed and left them no other choice. Whether the outcome is better or worse mostly has to do with what power dynamics will remain in place when the existing dominant power structure is gone. The Cambodian Civil War is messy and complicated but portraying it as "people wanted political change and got the Killing Fields" is reductionist to the point of satire. The government was on a left-leaning (and even pro-communist) progressive path leading up to the fraudulent 1966 election and then suddenly snapped to the violently repressive hard right only for the monarchy to intervene by imposing "centrism", alienating both sides. Note that all this went on while the US was also wrestling for control in the region and China was trying to shake off the Soviet Union. These things don't happen in a vacuum but even without the Khmer Rouge Cambodia was unstable and spiraling into chaos. Dropping in the Khmer Rouge as if Pol Pot is a meaningful representation of all political change is absurd, even if you only consider drastic changes (i.e. revolutions, overthrows, secessions and annexations). Outside of imperialist conquest almost every nation on Earth, past or present, is the result of such struggles. The foundational mistake is believing that the status quo is stable and permanent because it never is and never has been before. Even episodes in history that are considered "stable" (like the Roman Empire/Republic) are tumultuous and only seem somewhat stable because we're looking at them from a bird's eye view often thousands of years later.
BlueTemplar 5y ago
The problem with EA is that they seem to assume that they aren't doing politics. Except they are, and of the non-democratic kind. Now maybe they are right and current mainstream politics are so fucked up that secession is the best idea, but I would be very careful about thinking that you have politics all figured out! Also, the "Prime Directive" style non-intervention policies are common in science fiction for a reason!
- pas 5y ago
  Could you explain how they are doing politics and why that's non-democraticthis for someone who is not familiar with this? Thanks!
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    Let's go back to Politics 101 - Etymology : The English language bundles several concepts under the term "politics". Let's go back to the Ancient Greeks, to whom we owe many of our concepts, they had 3 different words for it : 1.) Politikos = community life 2.) Politeia = organization & management of the society, its Constitution, its government 3.) Politika = the power struggle In modern terms, every time that you do something that has an impact on the world outside of your nuclear family, you're doing politics. (Note that this is a somewhat artificial separation, because, for instance, the way that you raise your children is going to eventually have a pretty big impact on the rest of the society !) Now there are several ways to organize a society (= "polis") - these days we tend to consider that democracy (= political power equally spread among all* citizens) is the "worst of all, excluding all others". EA clearly doesn't trust democracy to do its job (otherwise they would tell you to donate to the government instead), and considers that some people know better than others, and should wield this power instead (in this case the power is coming from donations and the people wielding the power are the donors and the people deciding where to apply it). This kind of social organization is plutocracy and/or aristocracy = "the rule of the wealthiest and/or the best". This goes farther than just money though - the more you spend your time & thought on a separate political structure, the less time & thought you do on normal society politics. One of the effects is that it's going to reinforce your feeling that the normal political structure lacks legitimacy, resulting in a vicious circle of separatism.

by pcstl 5y ago

mLuby 5y ago

> We start agitating and take down vital institutions in the name of change. Our movement gets hijacked by a military strongman who happens to be charismatic and liked by the people, and now we're under a brutal military dictatorship. This risk is inherent in any political action (or inaction), and it could happen just as easily with a citizenry of Effective Altruists as with a bunch of scrooges. Charity and authoritarianism are orthogonal concepts. (IMO this risk is worth braving as we attempt to improve the human condition.)

pcstl 5y ago
>This risk is inherent in any political action (or inaction) Is your premise here that all actions have the same risk of hijacking by a malicious player? I reject this premise. Solid institutions are usually an effective safeguard against this sort of thing, and radical political action tends to have as its goal to destabilize institutions.
- mLuby 5y ago
  Institutions, like laws, solidify existing power structures, whatever they may be. Though ideologically antipathetic toward each other, the bureaucracies of the U.S. Library of Congress and IngSoc's Ministry of Truth would be more similar than you might think. I think we're disagreeing about the implied premise that trying to solve a charity problem (e.g. ending homelessness) necessitates radical political action, and therefore carries radical risk of regime change. I agree that radical political action carries a higher risk of regime change, but I don't agree that altrustic policies are remotely that radical. For example, I believe that solving homelessness wouldn't break the bank nor would it significantly affect our institutions or culture (except likely increasing somewhat the size and power of a few psych/medical and housing departments). Glad we're both attuned to the risk of radical shake-ups though. :)
  - pcstl 5y ago
    The thing is that, if you don't propose radical political action, there is little to no reason to be opposed to EA. The only reason I can think someone might be opposed to EA is that they believe the only way society might be improved is through revolt and total reform, and therefore any kind of charity-based solution would just be stopping The People from rising up as they rightly should.
lacker 5y ago
Our movement gets hijacked by a military strongman who happens to be charismatic and liked by the people, and now we're under a brutal military dictatorship. This risk is inherent in any political action (or inaction) There is certainly a lot more risk of this when your charity is spending large sums of money in countries controlled by dictatorships, sums of money that in part go to taxes to fund those governments.

Uehreka 5y ago

I'd push back that a lot of the anti-political-activism stuff I see from EA people seems even more hand-wavy. Political activism has such enormous potential that any argument against it needs to be exceptionally strong. Now don't get me wrong, there are totally bits of conventional wisdom in political activism that I think are the exact kind of ineffective-but-makes-me-feel-good stuff that drive EA people nuts. I have hot takes about the oversaturation of phone-banking and door-knocking in presidential elections (although I'm searching for more evidence one way or the other before I make that argument in earnest). But the problem with arguments like "there's a non-ignorable chance that a military strongman could hijack our movement" is that that's like, three orders off from the kinds of problems that actually happen when you try to do political activism. I'm sure some activists are worried about that in the abstract, but the way more salient issues have to do with things like fundraising, cultivating movements in places where they don't exist yet, vetting candidates (particularly in local races where people come out of nowhere), forming coalitions between groups that don't think they have much in common, etc.

pcstl 5y ago
>that's like, three orders off from the kinds of problems that actually happen when you try to do political activism I think this just goes to show how people who live in places with stable political institutions take them for granted and don't value what they have. That you believe that political agitators who aim to destabilize institutions will face no problem greater than issues with fundraising or movement-building just goes to show that the conditions you live in are exceptionally stable. In most of the world, movements for change being taken over by malicious, self-interested players is a very real, very serious risk.
- Uehreka 5y ago
  So, political activism doesn't necessarily mean ending capitalism and demolishing the system. Like, granted, when you play with matches you risk getting burned. But a lot of effective political activism is more about getting petition signatures and pressuring the state legislature to pass an ordinance banning factories from pumping heavy metals into the water table. Stuff that makes a difference, but is monumentally boring (and admittedly, stuff I personally haven't done enough of). [Edit - And before someone makes a dig about environmentalism-for-its-own-sake: In the above hypothetical, the factories are near an aquifer and there are concerns about drinking water.]

Karrot_Kream 5y ago

> This article illustrates a big issue with people opposed to EA - they severely underestimate the risks associated with political change. I think there is very little risk associated with political change, but the risk associated increases with the magnitude of political change. The fact that this even comes up makes me feel like most folks haven't actually tried to organize for a political cause. Yes, there are hot-button issues of our time, such as housing, healthcare, and UBI. But the vast majority of issues, from Celiac's sufferers to folks with nut allergies, are often a case of lack of awareness and resources rather than anything else. There's also ways to derisk political participation, but that's a separate conversation.

hnbad 5y ago

I think this argument actually illustrates a big issue with EA: for many people the "worse outcome" is no worse than the status quo. I'm not going to argue that an authoritarian theocracy or military dictatorship would be an improvement on the corporatist kleptocracy (or however we want to negatively describe the status quo). But political change is mostly not carried by those already doing moderately well under the status quo, even if they may often end up being the one implementing it. There's always a risk of existing power structures swooping in and opportunistically inserting themselves when the dominant ones are torn down but the problem isn't the tearing down of those structures but the continued existence of those that swoop in. This is btw why many leftists advocate for intersectionalism rather than hoping racism, sexism etc will go away on their own once the class hierarchy is defeated.

pcstl 5y ago
>for many people the "worse outcome" is no worse than the status quo. Is it really, though? In most cases where the worse outcome did happen, people were convinced they had nothing to lose and went with whatever radical idea was being proposed, then when things went pear-shaped they found out they did have a lot to lose. An extreme example is the Khmer Rouge.
- hnbad 5y ago
  > Is it really, though? Yes, it is. If you're an unhoused diabetic living in the US without access to insulin, it literally doesn't matter if the country is run by Ivy League graduates or uncultured generalissimos. Note that I said "many", not "most". I'm not even making a claim about proportions but in the US alone there is a large quantity of people for whom the status quo is either a death sentence or at least entails a lifetime of suffering. This isn't even taking general trends (e.g. the income gap, militarization of the police, or Climate Change) into account. Note that I said "worse outcome", not "worst outcome". Yes, almost all bottom-up political change is brought about with "populism" (i.e. saying things are bad and promising that they can be changed for the better) that doesn't mean that all populism is deceptive or false. Generally drastic changes only happen when the situation is already sufficiently dire precisely because the status quo (no matter how undesirable) feels like a safer bet than a leap into the unknown. This is why these changes are often so drastic and the means to achieve them (by necessity) so violent: incrementalism has failed and left them no other choice. Whether the outcome is better or worse mostly has to do with what power dynamics will remain in place when the existing dominant power structure is gone. The Cambodian Civil War is messy and complicated but portraying it as "people wanted political change and got the Killing Fields" is reductionist to the point of satire. The government was on a left-leaning (and even pro-communist) progressive path leading up to the fraudulent 1966 election and then suddenly snapped to the violently repressive hard right only for the monarchy to intervene by imposing "centrism", alienating both sides. Note that all this went on while the US was also wrestling for control in the region and China was trying to shake off the Soviet Union. These things don't happen in a vacuum but even without the Khmer Rouge Cambodia was unstable and spiraling into chaos. Dropping in the Khmer Rouge as if Pol Pot is a meaningful representation of all political change is absurd, even if you only consider drastic changes (i.e. revolutions, overthrows, secessions and annexations). Outside of imperialist conquest almost every nation on Earth, past or present, is the result of such struggles. The foundational mistake is believing that the status quo is stable and permanent because it never is and never has been before. Even episodes in history that are considered "stable" (like the Roman Empire/Republic) are tumultuous and only seem somewhat stable because we're looking at them from a bird's eye view often thousands of years later.

BlueTemplar 5y ago

The problem with EA is that they seem to assume that they aren't doing politics. Except they are, and of the non-democratic kind. Now maybe they are right and current mainstream politics are so fucked up that secession is the best idea, but I would be very careful about thinking that you have politics all figured out! Also, the "Prime Directive" style non-intervention policies are common in science fiction for a reason!

pas 5y ago
Could you explain how they are doing politics and why that's non-democraticthis for someone who is not familiar with this? Thanks!
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  Let's go back to Politics 101 - Etymology : The English language bundles several concepts under the term "politics". Let's go back to the Ancient Greeks, to whom we owe many of our concepts, they had 3 different words for it : 1.) Politikos = community life 2.) Politeia = organization & management of the society, its Constitution, its government 3.) Politika = the power struggle In modern terms, every time that you do something that has an impact on the world outside of your nuclear family, you're doing politics. (Note that this is a somewhat artificial separation, because, for instance, the way that you raise your children is going to eventually have a pretty big impact on the rest of the society !) Now there are several ways to organize a society (= "polis") - these days we tend to consider that democracy (= political power equally spread among all* citizens) is the "worst of all, excluding all others". EA clearly doesn't trust democracy to do its job (otherwise they would tell you to donate to the government instead), and considers that some people know better than others, and should wield this power instead (in this case the power is coming from donations and the people wielding the power are the donors and the people deciding where to apply it). This kind of social organization is plutocracy and/or aristocracy = "the rule of the wealthiest and/or the best". This goes farther than just money though - the more you spend your time & thought on a separate political structure, the less time & thought you do on normal society politics. One of the effects is that it's going to reinforce your feeling that the normal political structure lacks legitimacy, resulting in a vicious circle of separatism.