3 ms·
When reading teardowns of Effective Altruism, I always find them light on substance and preferable alternatives. I see two typical failure modes. Half of the t
by fardo 3y ago
When reading teardowns of Effective Altruism, I always find them light on substance and preferable alternatives.
I see two typical failure modes. Half of the time, they fall into a
> cannot separate the man from the idea
trap of “someone with a corrupted moral compass once believed this, ergo the idea itself is bad”, which doesn’t follow.
The other half does engage with the idea, but seemingly only ever half of it. They tend make the first step successfully,
> People can use a veneer of charity and rationality to ignore ethical issues
Which is definitely true, but don’t seem to actually take on the ideas purported main thrust, that “if one intends to give charitably, one ought to bias their choices towards causes that give money as effectively as possible at meeting your goals”, which frankly seems pretty air-tight
I think the core is that a lot of people have a problem with admitting someone they dislike had a pretty sensible idea.
- HideousKojima 3y agoSimplest teardown of EA: it's heavily derived from/based on utilitarianism, a moral philosophy that very few people actually believe in and one that leads to monstrously evil results if followed to its logical conclusion in certain circumstances.
- BoxFour 3y agoUtilitarianism, the principle of maximizing good for the greatest number of people, is fairly common in informing social norms and policy-making. It's a guideline, but not an absolute rule. We can acknowledge its value as a general approach yet also recognize situations where a strictly utilitarian choice would be abhorrent. Life is not so black-and-white.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- supriyo-biswas 3y agoThe points that you (and other commenters) make is ultimately related to the fact that when a person being shunned belongs to an outgroup, they are categorized as a representative sample of the group. In other words, the entire group is assumed to be consisted of homogeneous individuals, exhibiting roughly the same behavior as the one being discredited. However, if said person were to belong to an ingroup, then said person is categorized as an outlier by its members. We can see lots of such examples in politics, such as people casting similar aspersions about how the recent action of a single person in an outgroup proves the larger aspirations of said group, about how "they're out to destroy society", and the like.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago> I think the core is that a lot of people have a problem with admitting someone they dislike had a pretty sensible idea. He had a very twisted interpretation of what is, arguably, a pretty sensible idea. Or maybe not so sensible. EA may be an idea that could be a sensible one, but in practice may be too easy to get twisted and wind up in some really insane places, and therefore may not be so sensible in practice.