The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism
This article seems to carp at the downsides of institutionalizing any movement (which are legion) without touching the other (to me obvious, and clearly deteriorating) downside features of the EA community, to someone solely an outside observer to that community (but not to development or charity work):<p>It doesn&#x27;t care about individuals, does not seem to think about culture, and seems to have an unexamined savior complex and egotism that leads it down bad rabbit holes.<p>EA people have their hearts in good places.  But when you start to look at &#x27;maximum impact&#x27; and at the metrics used to define it, EA only focuses on statistically testable social group problems, and not on individual issues.  So the way that EA philosophy seems to me to regularly be expressed is that an EA proponent would say something like, &quot;unquestionably, we should give $50k to fund mosquito nets to raise the quality of life for 5k people&quot; and not even consider something like &quot;we should give 50k to train local trauma counselors to help 500 people be more mentally stable and whole&quot; and the vibe that I have sometimes gotten from reading blogs EA advocates that individuals are not worth helping because that&#x27;s not impactful or impactful enough.  We see the understandable precursor of this in the article, where Matt Wage talks about the idea of it being more impactful to cure 200-4000 people from glaucoma.  It gets a pass because it is framed around minor improvement to QOL in the West versus significant improvement in QOL in a developing country, but also, look at the quote just proceeding that, around saving people from a burning building.<p>See, the work that EA advocates do is important.  But when we only try to fix societal problems from the top down by addressing them at a society level, we often ignore or damage the individuals that we are nominally helping.  I&#x27;m not saying that mosquito nets, for example, are bad and shouldn&#x27;t be given to.  I am saying there is also a down and dirty component of individual attention and flourishing that has to be looked for and addressed.  I&#x27;m not saying that EA as a movement or as a set of goals is fundamentally wrong, just that it needs to have some temper with personal and individual care.  I see EA advocates looking down on people that &quot;do things that don&#x27;t scale&quot; in YC parlance, in areas of the world where there are plenty of people doing things that don&#x27;t scale because doing things that do scale is almost impossible to do well.  EA also seems, again from the outside perspective, to really focus on things that play well to Western mindsets, and doesn&#x27;t really consider community-versus-individualism or guilt&#x2F;innocence-versus-honor&#x2F;shame cultural paradigms.  It seems obvious to me that in 100 years, that the hands-off, Western-directed action promoted by EA will be seen as colonialism 5.0.  There are also really not a lot of prominent non-Western voices in the EA sphere, nobody that seems to have been raised to leadership levels, and that also is concerning for the long-term health of the institution.<p>In the quest to make the most impact, the savior complex and all the corrosives that come from it can easily permeate the movement (and indeed seem to be starting from the article), justifying institutions, power, prestige, and rank.  It&#x27;s easy to see MacAskill falling into that (see the braces&#x2F;teeth gap aside), and when I often read EA advocates, I note that many of them do not seem to spend any time doing thankless, individual work (like as a trivial example volunteering at a homeless shelter, let alone be in a developing country or war zone) and the ones that have seem to quickly burn out and decide that it is more proper&#x2F;moral for them to &#x27;earn-to-give&#x27; and donate more.  It is entirely possible that, not being in the EA community, I don&#x27;t know the people that do this well since they are not blogging&#x2F;community building.<p>All this may be a pot-calling-the-kettle-black since I too struggle with working with humans instead of developing systems, and in some ways I have chosen to earn to give instead of earning less money while doing more direct individual work.  But I think that this actually helps me lend some criticism that can be seen as &quot;I have thought about what you do, and see some weaknesses&quot; if any EA advocates read and consider this post.<p>The other struggle I have with EA is that there is a recycling of stoicism with early 20th Century progressivism there, tinged with monasticism and moral superiority.  I have worked with and have good friends who were in war zones or developing countries for years, and spent some time in one myself.  The personality types who seem to gravitate toward EA often seemed, when overseas or in impoverished communities, to burn out or be ineffective in building personal relationships or unable to have fun in the work.  EA needs to, in my personal estimation, figure out how to address some of these weaknesses if it is going to be able to be effective by outside measures.<p>(NB, I interact with development work mostly in Protestant Evangelical religious spaces, which has its own set of difficulties and pathologies that I am not entirely unaware of, but that also can provide some color to my critique)