has a great post called Your Fave Is Problematic Politics. It begins with a discussion of a dark and wretched place where many go, where the devil and his angels would dwell aionas ton aionon, called Tumblr. Back in the day, there was a popular Tumblr page called “your fave is problematic,” where people dug up dirt about how problematic various celebrities were. The purpose wasn’t to change anyone’s behavior, but just to get them to acknowledge that their fave was problematic.
Ozy makes the point that people do this about politics too. Lots of progressives, before endorsing Kamala Harris, made some weak-sauce mealy-mouthed statement like “ugh, I hate that I’m having to endorse a prosecutor white supremacist war criminal who probably serves at the right hand of Satan, but it’s better than endorsing Trump who definitely is Satan.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement!
Another area where people are way too mealy-mouthed and defensive is in talking about effective altruism.
When defending it, people caveat and hedge and self-flagellate. They talk endlessly in vague terms about how EA has a lot of problems. They say they’re EA adjacent, even though they work on AI safety and donate a bunch of their income to effective charities. They make sure to acknowledge how their fave is problematic. Often people defending EA sound like they ran over your dog and are trying to defend their conduct.
And you don’t have to do that. Here is a better message when it comes to EA: EA is fucking awesome. It has done an incredible amount of good. Hundreds of thousands fewer people are dead because of EAs. Billions of animals have been spared intense suffering. We’ve been right over and over again even when we were being mocked (e.g. about AI). Pick any existential risk: probably a giant chunk of work to avert it is being done by EAs. Can the fact that we’ve saved 300,000+ lives get more covered than a one-off bandit attack?
The EA community is imperfect, but it’s made up mostly of earnest, kind, decent people striving to make the world a better place. People who spend their careers trying to improve the world. People who give away tens of thousands of dollars annually to spare children from horrible diseases. While a lot of public EA advocates are a bit like me—disagreeable philosopher types—the ordinary EA is the kind of person you want to be friends with.
Often the EA public figures are people like , who rose to prominence being the only person being sane on the AI water issue. Masley is the great Satan of a certain subset of Bluesky for pointing out straightforward facts about AI water use. Lots of the sanest commentators on the internet give away 10% of their income to effective charities (e.g. Jesse Singal and Matt Yglesias). The political commentators who are EAs on the side are consistently super reasonable.
You can often judge the quality of a group by their critics. So who are the EA critics? Somehow, they run the gamut from left-wingers to right-wingers but are united by being unreasonable at excessive rates. It’s hard to be hated by Andreessen, Hegseth, Gebru, and Torres. While these people share few common beliefs, they are united by being deranged.
This isn’t to say all of our critics are deranged—some are quite thoughtful—it’s just to say that being an EA critic *correlates *with being deranged. And when one reads most of the EA critics, their arguments are bad, they misstate what EA is, they make ludicrous factual claims, and they make repugnant moral claims. We don’t have to pretend that Timnit Gebru has good points about EA being a WHITE techbro cult.
Here are some mainstream objections that have been made to EA:
EA gives out malaria nets, but this is bad because a bandit stole them and killed two people.EA
does not“register… the value of care, empathy, and the pursuit of genuine altruism,” because we care about effectiveness rather than making the recipients of charitable grants feel good.EAs say you
should give toOxfam, but if everyone in the world did this, so that Oxfam acquired most capital in the world, that would be bad.Sometimes EAs say thingsthat disagree with common sense.
These are terrible arguments. If they were made in other contexts, we’d laugh at them. Routinely, high status people smear EA in the popular press by making arguments so bad that if my salad at lunch were to utter them, my only thought would be “what a stupid salad.” We should not pretend that bad arguments with bad premises and bad inferences made in support of a bad cause are good.
There is a movement of incredible people doing great stuff and saving hundreds of thousands of lives. We don’t need to be ashamed of that. Sure, EA is imperfect in a bunch of respects. What isn’t? When someone asks me if I’m a liberal, I say “yes,” rather than start listing all my problems with liberals. And the typical EA does much more good than the typical liberal.
What about Sam Bankman Fried? Should his misconduct make every discussion of EA sound like we’re about to recite the mourner’s kaddish? No! He did fraud and that was bad! Still, the fact that a bad guy was part of some social movement doesn’t permanently discredit the movement. Everyone in EA has uniformly condemned SBF. He’s in prison. And the bad stuff that he did is easily eclipsed by the incredible good EA has done.
So when someone asks you why you’re an EA, you don’t need to hedge or give some mealy-mouthed wishy-washy answer. You can say: “I’m an EA because I think doing good effectively is important, so I try to make it a big part of my life.” You can point to the incredible amount of good that EA has done. If something is very good, and people hate it irrationally, you don’t need to lean into the hatred by throwing it under the bus. You should say of that which is good that it is good and of that which is bad that it is bad!
Here are some things I think about EA:
The core ideas are obviously right, even if some ancillary ones adopted by some EAs aren’t.
The movement has done incredible amounts of good.
EAs are generally committed, reasonable, and morally serious.
There should be more EAs.
Many people aren’t EAs because they don’t want to do what’s right when it’s difficult. For example, the reason lots of people don’t give their money to prevent malaria is because they don’t want to.
If you, like me, think those things then that’s what you should lead with when discussing EA. No more of this hedging. If you can’t say you’re an EA without thirteen caveats—even when EA has done as much good as stopping a nuke from blowing up Oxford and Cambridge—then you should recognize that this is a problem with your spine and not with EA.
