Given how many real problems EA has that could make for fruitful discussions, it is very annoying that in practice 80% of external criticism is socialists being mad that EAs aren't socialist. I guess you can write that article for the nth time if you really want to, but please do enough background reading to notice that GiveWell was started by hedge fund traders who sought to apply the ruthless profit-seeking mindset of stock investment towards the cause of saving lives. "EA has a capitalist mindset" is not a new observation, nor is it an accidental design flaw that has escaped our notice.
It feels a little bit like criticizing a dog shelter for caring about dogs more than about socialism. We already have groups trying to implement socialism , they're called "socialists" and anyone is free to join them.
I suspect the underlying problem is that both socialism and EA are attractive to people eith the basic idea of "make the world a better place", but there's a replacement thing going on where people who might otherwise have become socialists are now managing hedge funds and sponsoring bed nets.
Yeah, they seem to be annoyed that we prioritize funding low-cost interventions in underdeveloped countries instead of acting as a PAC for Bernie Sanders, and, like, yeah guys we aren't lobbying for raising the United States minimum wage to $15 an hour because we're busy with the people who would be thrilled to make $15 a day. This is all explained in the introductory pamphlet.
Sure we could focus on supporting liberal social movements in autocratic states instead of cash transfers, but are you sure you want *more* private western interests meddling in the internal politics of post-colonial states? We are in fact aware of the dangers of motivated foreigners with white savior complexes meddling in cultures they don't understand. We favor cash transfers because we don't presume to know better than individuals about what would most improve their lives.
I don't think we're making that big of a dent in the socialists' recruitment pool though. Our whole way of thinking is deeply repellant to the kind of people who tend to get into online leftism. There's also just vastly more of them than there are of us. We aren't particularly popular these days.
Is that actually true? Because the idea of subsidizing Western corporations to bribe corrupt far-right narcostates into selling their sovereignty to corporate-run neoreactionary city-states with the end goal of preventing any kind of social democracy in the global South seems to be popular among many EAs (with the discussion largely not revolving around how this is an obviously evil idea):
All things considered, I think I very much prefer the Soros playbook, it might at least accidentally create some room for substainable development of productive forces and formation of egalitarian social movements in the global South, instead of actively seeking to make things worse for everyone except rich Californians in tech.
You do realize that the people who want charter cities are doing it because they think charter cities will result in prosperity and development for the countries that build them, right? Personally I don't think they're cost-effective or even particularly useful, but nobody involved is trying to prevent e.g. Honduras from becoming a rich democracy.
It is just true that charter cities mean preventing Honduras (and all other countries in the global South) from becoming a democracy (by any meaningful sense of the term "democracy") by breaking them up into corporate-run city-states. Corporations aren't democratic. Why EAs think abolition of democracy is a worthwhile goal (in this case because they value unbounded economic growth over any other measure of social welfare like equality, human development, etc.) is another issue.
Probably because the SV capitalists fund and promote the EAs that champion those ideas, while not doing so for those that don't. For example, a lot of different EAs have attempted to start an EA youtube channel (a happier world, insights for impact...) but the only one that could get continuous funding and promotion was the one that promoted things like bitcoin and charter cities (rational animations).
-the tag for charter cities on EA Forum, which contains twelve posts, most dated to three years ago or older. The post at the top of the list is an in-depth review of the costs, benefits, and overall feasibility of charter cities, which concludes they are overall unlikely to produce positive results.
-a twitter discussion on the legitimacy of one city, with the only notable EA I can identify being Scott, that is obviously not recommending the establishment of charter cities as a cause area worthy of competing with mosquito nets.
EA as a movement grew out of a realization that standard modes of thought around charitable giving could be outperformed by in-depth research and discarding factors like "which actions make me feel like I'm Making A Difference." You will find all sorts of strange ideas earnestly advanced on EA forums which are advocated for or attacked on statistical details and not because commenters find them "obviously evil."
I don't think charter cities remotely meet the standards of being worth funding, and neither do most EAs.
The fact that the discussion is about whether working toward the creation of a neoreactionary world order is an efficient use of resources compared to other EA aims, and not the creation of a neoreactionary world order being itself a monumentally bad aim, is exactly my point. You can't reasonably claim "[EAs] are in fact aware of the dangers of motivated foreigners with white savior complexes meddling in cultures they don't understand" when this is the case.
Also, most "all sorts of strange ideas earnestly advanced on EA forums" do not have established institutes openly defending their projects as based on effective altruism and active projects made by bribing far-right narcostates, while receiving positive coverage from 80k Hours and Rational Animations. If Brian Tomasik was already halfway into successfully gaining the Anti-Life Equation in similar circumstances I would also see that as raising some alarms!
Consulting is a pretty broad term and basically synonymous for "contractor with white-collar job".
In most cases (by number of workers; not sure about by dollar), it's a normal job. Alice wants a programmer to work on her widget software; instead of hiring one directly, she contracts Bob Consulting Ltd, who provides a programmer. This programmer may be the owner Bob himself, or Bob Consulting Ltd may hire Carol and send her to work for Alice.
In many cases, the consulting shop is specialised in some particular area, very often ads/marketing/similar analytics. Maybe Alice has her own widget-software programmers, but she wants someone to tell her if her ads are working. So she contracts Bob Consulting Ltd, sends Bob a spreadsheet of all the money she spent on ads and the widgets she sold, and Bob sends back recommendations for what types of ads she should buy more or less of.
This shades into a weird function of consulting: decision laundering. At Alice Inc, Mary Middle-Manager knows damn well what needs to be done, but she doesn't have the political sway to convince Alice the owner, or she wants to cover her ass in case it goes wrong. So she brings in Bob Consulting Ltd, tells Bob what she wants him to say, and he does, and it's all very official and shit can get done.
Similarly, sometimes it's hard for management to figure out what's going on in their own company. Things might just be messy, or employees might not dare talk sincerely with their bosses. In those cases, it can genuinely be cheaper to pay for a consultant to talk to your own employees and tell you what they said.
The standard joke about those situations is "A consultant is someone you pay to look at your watch and tell you what time it is".
So overall, you can't really make broad statements about consulting being good or bad, any more than you can for contractors or salaries. You can praise or condemn specific companies (dismantle McKinsey already) or areas (ads bad).
Yeah, your post summarizes the major functions of consulting, including "decision laundering." Decision laundering can be good or bad, largely depending on whether you're using it to launder good or bad decisions. Like, do you need someone with a nice suit and an impressive degree to say, "Burnout and turnover are destroying your company"? Or do you want to them to say, "You need to oppress the working classes more"? The fact is that sometimes it's easier to hear certain messages from outsiders. And ideally, those outsiders will also provide good expertise and advice.
But a big chunk of consulting is "We need some kind of specialist knowledge, advice or skill. Can we hire someone to provide it and teach us?" For example, if you're not a programmer, it can be very hard to hire good programmers, because you can't recognize them. Hiring someone to help you find a good engineering manager and/or tech lead can help! Or maybe you have a small team of skilled programmers who've worked for you for 10 years, and they know a ton about your business. But they've fallen badly behind on some useful technology or best practices, and you want to expose them to new ideas. (Like version control, sigh. Or automated builds.)
Finally, big organizations have all kinds of weird pathologies. Lots of people enjoy pointing out weird government pathologies, but big corporations do it. Large non-profits do it. Political parties do it. Basically, getting 10,000 people to all work towards a goal efficiently is super hard. There are tricks that can help, and you will inevitably end up accepting various inefficiences. Ideally, these inefficiences should be tempered by the efficiencies of scale. But a lot of "bullshit jobs", including some of the sillier forms of consulting, grow out of trying to get 10,000 people to move in the same direction.
What's wrong with being a defense engineer? The thing about war is that there are *sides*. If you are in an (imperfect!) liberal society, that is democratic and mostly peaceful, then working in the defense industry won't make "the world" have more weapons, it will make liberal democracies have more weapons (and the capacity to make them, which can't be built overnight). As long as you think liberal societies are better than imperialistic dictatorships, then these mostly peaceful societies must violently defend their borders from invasion and deny land, resources and people to the warmongers. It's pronounced pacifism.
This is really not remotely the good time to make this argument and look good. (Not that there is any such good time, but this is without any doubt the worse time to do so in my entire lifetime so far.)
This is an excellent time to make this argument, just look around. There are major dictatorships on the warpath that see themselves as in conflict with liberal societies. Liberalism has brought prosperity, peace and freedom to a large part of the world and we should defend it.
Keeping this bookmarked when someone else pretend white supremacist ideology isn't absolutely rampant in the effective altruist movement. I bet you also believe in "human biodiversity" or whatever other euphemism the neo-Nazi-sympathizer contingent in EA (or vice versa) has made up for it again.
It’s reassuring to know that when someone is claiming EA is full of white supremacy, the best evidence they can muster is that someone in Ozy’s comment section thinks their country should have a defense industry.
I’m grateful to Ozy and others for taking the time to fight junk arguments like this or Torres’, but personally seeing this sort of low-quality thinking is just a reminder that I should tune a lot of this criticism out and keep focusing my efforts on saving (mostly non-white, since that apparently matters to some) lives. I encourage others to do the same.
I don't see where OP mentions race anywhere in their comment?
Russia vs Ukraine is not a racially charged war, it's just Putin trying to Make Russia Great Again. If you have a job working on HIMARS rocket systems, you can be justifiably proud that you're helping Ukraine resist conquest by an authoritarian regime.
I don't know how you got access to the 2024 Internet from 2022, but an US-backed authoritarian fundamentalist ethnostate is currently invading a multicultural liberal democracy. Supporters of "scientific" racism use "Western values" and the like as a racially charged dogwhistle for the "inherent psychological characteristics" of the "white race" to be of course "defended" through subjugation, expulsion, or extermination of <racial slurs>.
I do appreciate that you mention "fit" in this article. I'm a relatively well-off Westerner who can afford to donate a certain percentage of my income to charity. I also find it hard to imagine a *truly* high-paying job that I wouldn't hate my life if I worked in (possible exception for like, famous author, but I mean in terms of realistic options). If you're lucky enough to work a job that you enjoy and that doesn't feel like drudgery, that's pretty lucky. I have the moral stamina to commit to donating, but not to base my career around earnings instead of happiness. I suspect that many others are in a similar position.
(If I remember right, Jeff Kaufman said that he considered being a full-time contra dance musician, but chose to be a programmer instead because of the much greater pay. That's one of the only actual examples I can think of of someone choosing a higher-paying career for EA reasons!)
Just for history on the question, C. S. Lewis wrote about the difficulty of finding honest work-- I'm not sure when, but 1950 feels right. He didn't think there was an obligation to refuse dishonest work if it was all that was available.
If I remember correctly, it was in an essay about general scamminess rather that strong immorality. It might have been the one about fake rabbit fur, and then people were lying about selling the better fake rabbit fur.
> When they talk about morally controversial jobs, they’re not really talking about defense engineers or petrochemical company CEOs: effective altruists don’t work those jobs.
This is not a central case of "defense engineer" but, as an EA working in pandemic prevention via detecting novel pathogens, my engineering work often falls under "biodefense". And I work with the military and am trying to get them to fund our work.
One argument I would add against going into unethical jobs to "earn to give" is that of the value drift as people age. Young people tend to be very idealistically motivated which then slowly decreases, and once they get children and a house in the suburbs that becomes the biggest priority. Since the EA movement is mostly young people, telling them to get into crypto-trading or other morally dubious but high paying jobs so they have more money to give will probably end up with them staying in those morally dubious careers while not giving more once they get older. Whereas, if you get them into morally impactful careers, and they get the skills and career capital to thrive in that environment, they will continue to do so long after their initial burst of idealism has run out.
I think the crypto-people also realized this and since crypto is by and large a "greater fool scheme" they hoped to poach EAs, a shocking amount of whom fell for it in part because people like MacAskill and other high profile EAs encouraged it.
Reality check 1: This kind of criticism of effective altruism seems to be just as common coming from liberals (in the US sense) to me.
Reality check 2: The two "organizing efforts" mentioned by Robinson (Fight For 15 and Justice For Janitors) are just as popular among liberals (in the US sense)
Lemma: Talking about socialism and capitalism here seems like a red herring.
Proposition 1: "I think even liberal-identified TESCREALists have notable libertarian sympathies." is doing a significant amount of work here. It seems to me that, due to their level of education (yet lack of advanced knowledge of political history and philosophy), when EAs say they are liberals they oscillate between liberalism in the US sense (~= radicalism or republicanism) and liberalism in the classical, philosophical, and European sense (~= libertarianism in the American sense), which average out to something like classical liberalism + paternalistic belief that the elites have a responsibility to care for the poor.
Proposition 2: "strike me as being at best incredibly naive about politics and social action, and at worst utterly unwilling to entertain possible solutions that would require radical changes to the economic and political status quo" is what classical liberal beliefs (the existence of a universal truth in moral and political matters that can be achieved through pure reason) looks like from the perspective of non-liberals (*including* liberals in the US sense i.e. radicals and republicans).
I am quite confused by what you're talking about. For example, in one paragraph you equate classical liberalism to approximately libertarianism, and in the next paragraph you equate it to believing in the existence of a universal truth in moral matters that can be achieved through pure reason. But I don't think these two things are the same, or even especially associated. I am similarly lost about every ideology noun in your post.
It is maybe a bit much to venture an object-level opinion when I can't even tell if we agree or not. But I think Americans who vote for Democrats often think that finance and consulting are morally controversial jobs, even though they aren't socialists. (They usually think tech is fine.) Their critiques are more along the lines of "greedy bankers", concern about the 2008 financial crisis, and so on. I suspect the disagreement between effective altruists and some Democrat voters is that effective altruists tend to believe the consensus of economists* and Democrat voters usually don't.
*importantly different from what is taught in Econ 101, of course.
"I think Americans who vote for Democrats often think that finance and consulting are morally controversial jobs, even though they aren't socialists." Yes, this is my point. Talking about Robinson being a socialist is a red herring when this criticism of EA will be shared by many people well beyond socialists.
I didn't *equate* classical liberalism to that. I use the terms liberalism and republicanism as they are typically used in the political philosophy literature. You can read the work of Philip Pettit for the most celebrated analyst of this. Liberalism in this sense is typically based on such a belief¹, and then on a belief that, paraphrasing this very post of yours, the free market naturally rewards the people who provide the most value to society due to their greatest use of pure reason to access such truths. (This is where liberals would part with, say, Aristotelian-Thomist reactionaries who also believe in natural law.)
There, different schools of liberalism will part on how making those truths the basis of policy is best achieved:
- The og classical liberals of the 18th and 19th centuries (e.g. the Old Whigs in the UK, the Federalists and Whigs in the US, the Girondins and Orléanists in France, etc.) typically believed in a constitutional monarchy with limited suffrage for the rich.
- Neoliberals (e.g. the Mount Pelerin Society, the Chicago School of Economics, the post-Thatcher UK Tories, New Labour, post-Reagan US Republicans, New Democrats, etc.) believe in the creation of a world order of treaties that would enforce on nations liberal policies, and of independent central banks governed by liberal monetarist economists who would control (what neoliberals believe are) the most important levers of macroeconomic policy.
- Minarchist libertarians (e.g. Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick) believe in a constitutional republic where liberal policies would be unimpeachable.
- Anarcho-capitalists (e.g. Murray Rothbard) believe in doing away with polities with a monopoly on the use of force altogether to have private individuals directly contract private militias, because the free market would here again naturally converge toward the objective truth of liberalism.
- Techno-commercialists (who I guess have now moved to being called e/accs) believe in decentralizing society in a series of privately-owned city-states that would be managed as joint-stock corporations.
But ultimately those are all different strategies to achieve the same end goal and you'll see plenty of people and ideas hopping from one set to another.
Radicalism (in the historical sense), or republicanism in the philosophical sense, was the main rival of liberalism inside the Enlightenment and in 19th-century politics. In contrast to liberals upholding natural law theory, republicans in Rousseau's tradition upheld social contract theory and legal positivism, according to which politics is the result of individuals with different desires seeking to act with each other as equals. Pettit famously reframed this as defining liberty as non-domination (as opposed to absence of interference). To actualize this they support a secular republic, universal suffrage, and universal secular public education, and fought against liberals for a century to obtain those. Historical examples would include the Foxites and Radicals in the UK, the Anti-Federalists and Radical Republicans in the US, the Mountain and Radicals in France, and various other self-styled Radical Parties across continental Europe and Latin America.
¹: Note this is more or less the definition of liberalism which you gave on your old blog in "Love Me I'm a Liberal"
You are equivocating between liberalism the political philosophy and libertarianism the political belief. Your taxonomy of "liberals" carefully separates out von Mises and Rothbard, but somehow excludes Rawls (probably the most famous liberal political philosopher of the 20th century) and John Stuart Mill (whom I would think would be somewhat relevant when discussing effective altruism).
Philip Pettit seems, from his bibliography, to have heard of both Rawls and Amartya Sen. I am not sure if you're claiming that he classifies them as non-liberals (a very unusual use of the term and one both men would reject) or that they are secretly fellow travelers of von Mises (....bwahahahahahahaha).
The vast majority of people in the United States support liberalism the political philosophy, in many cases without fully realizing that any alternative philosophy exists. The vast majority of people in the United States are not libertarians. Effective altruists are somewhat more likely than average Americans to be libertarians, and much more likely to believe in liberalism-the-political-philosophy as a matter of principle rather than as the stuff in the water supply.
I was disagreeing with two specific people. I was not trying to provide any sort of complete theory of everyone who thinks that finance is a morally controversial job. There are a lot of different people who believe that, from environmentalists to traditional Catholics to anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. Though they often influence each other, there is no single underlying cause.
"The vast majority of people in the United States support the political philosophy, in many cases without fully realizing that any alternative philosophy exists." Are you sure it's not you who is not fully realizing that any alternative philosophy exists ? In US mainstream politics only New Democrats and Never-Trump Republicans are liberals; EAs obviously belong to that cluster. The left wing of the Democrats up to Warren and what remain of the Republicans are obviously not liberals in this sense.
Given how many real problems EA has that could make for fruitful discussions, it is very annoying that in practice 80% of external criticism is socialists being mad that EAs aren't socialist. I guess you can write that article for the nth time if you really want to, but please do enough background reading to notice that GiveWell was started by hedge fund traders who sought to apply the ruthless profit-seeking mindset of stock investment towards the cause of saving lives. "EA has a capitalist mindset" is not a new observation, nor is it an accidental design flaw that has escaped our notice.
It feels a little bit like criticizing a dog shelter for caring about dogs more than about socialism. We already have groups trying to implement socialism , they're called "socialists" and anyone is free to join them.
I suspect the underlying problem is that both socialism and EA are attractive to people eith the basic idea of "make the world a better place", but there's a replacement thing going on where people who might otherwise have become socialists are now managing hedge funds and sponsoring bed nets.
Yeah, they seem to be annoyed that we prioritize funding low-cost interventions in underdeveloped countries instead of acting as a PAC for Bernie Sanders, and, like, yeah guys we aren't lobbying for raising the United States minimum wage to $15 an hour because we're busy with the people who would be thrilled to make $15 a day. This is all explained in the introductory pamphlet.
Sure we could focus on supporting liberal social movements in autocratic states instead of cash transfers, but are you sure you want *more* private western interests meddling in the internal politics of post-colonial states? We are in fact aware of the dangers of motivated foreigners with white savior complexes meddling in cultures they don't understand. We favor cash transfers because we don't presume to know better than individuals about what would most improve their lives.
I don't think we're making that big of a dent in the socialists' recruitment pool though. Our whole way of thinking is deeply repellant to the kind of people who tend to get into online leftism. There's also just vastly more of them than there are of us. We aren't particularly popular these days.
Is that actually true? Because the idea of subsidizing Western corporations to bribe corrupt far-right narcostates into selling their sovereignty to corporate-run neoreactionary city-states with the end goal of preventing any kind of social democracy in the global South seems to be popular among many EAs (with the discussion largely not revolving around how this is an obviously evil idea):
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/charter-cities
https://x.com/GarrisonLovely/status/1831441397817430271
All things considered, I think I very much prefer the Soros playbook, it might at least accidentally create some room for substainable development of productive forces and formation of egalitarian social movements in the global South, instead of actively seeking to make things worse for everyone except rich Californians in tech.
You do realize that the people who want charter cities are doing it because they think charter cities will result in prosperity and development for the countries that build them, right? Personally I don't think they're cost-effective or even particularly useful, but nobody involved is trying to prevent e.g. Honduras from becoming a rich democracy.
It is just true that charter cities mean preventing Honduras (and all other countries in the global South) from becoming a democracy (by any meaningful sense of the term "democracy") by breaking them up into corporate-run city-states. Corporations aren't democratic. Why EAs think abolition of democracy is a worthwhile goal (in this case because they value unbounded economic growth over any other measure of social welfare like equality, human development, etc.) is another issue.
Probably because the SV capitalists fund and promote the EAs that champion those ideas, while not doing so for those that don't. For example, a lot of different EAs have attempted to start an EA youtube channel (a happier world, insights for impact...) but the only one that could get continuous funding and promotion was the one that promoted things like bitcoin and charter cities (rational animations).
You have cited:
-the tag for charter cities on EA Forum, which contains twelve posts, most dated to three years ago or older. The post at the top of the list is an in-depth review of the costs, benefits, and overall feasibility of charter cities, which concludes they are overall unlikely to produce positive results.
-a twitter discussion on the legitimacy of one city, with the only notable EA I can identify being Scott, that is obviously not recommending the establishment of charter cities as a cause area worthy of competing with mosquito nets.
EA as a movement grew out of a realization that standard modes of thought around charitable giving could be outperformed by in-depth research and discarding factors like "which actions make me feel like I'm Making A Difference." You will find all sorts of strange ideas earnestly advanced on EA forums which are advocated for or attacked on statistical details and not because commenters find them "obviously evil."
I don't think charter cities remotely meet the standards of being worth funding, and neither do most EAs.
The fact that the discussion is about whether working toward the creation of a neoreactionary world order is an efficient use of resources compared to other EA aims, and not the creation of a neoreactionary world order being itself a monumentally bad aim, is exactly my point. You can't reasonably claim "[EAs] are in fact aware of the dangers of motivated foreigners with white savior complexes meddling in cultures they don't understand" when this is the case.
Also, most "all sorts of strange ideas earnestly advanced on EA forums" do not have established institutes openly defending their projects as based on effective altruism and active projects made by bribing far-right narcostates, while receiving positive coverage from 80k Hours and Rational Animations. If Brian Tomasik was already halfway into successfully gaining the Anti-Life Equation in similar circumstances I would also see that as raising some alarms!
Consulting is a pretty broad term and basically synonymous for "contractor with white-collar job".
In most cases (by number of workers; not sure about by dollar), it's a normal job. Alice wants a programmer to work on her widget software; instead of hiring one directly, she contracts Bob Consulting Ltd, who provides a programmer. This programmer may be the owner Bob himself, or Bob Consulting Ltd may hire Carol and send her to work for Alice.
In many cases, the consulting shop is specialised in some particular area, very often ads/marketing/similar analytics. Maybe Alice has her own widget-software programmers, but she wants someone to tell her if her ads are working. So she contracts Bob Consulting Ltd, sends Bob a spreadsheet of all the money she spent on ads and the widgets she sold, and Bob sends back recommendations for what types of ads she should buy more or less of.
This shades into a weird function of consulting: decision laundering. At Alice Inc, Mary Middle-Manager knows damn well what needs to be done, but she doesn't have the political sway to convince Alice the owner, or she wants to cover her ass in case it goes wrong. So she brings in Bob Consulting Ltd, tells Bob what she wants him to say, and he does, and it's all very official and shit can get done.
Similarly, sometimes it's hard for management to figure out what's going on in their own company. Things might just be messy, or employees might not dare talk sincerely with their bosses. In those cases, it can genuinely be cheaper to pay for a consultant to talk to your own employees and tell you what they said.
The standard joke about those situations is "A consultant is someone you pay to look at your watch and tell you what time it is".
So overall, you can't really make broad statements about consulting being good or bad, any more than you can for contractors or salaries. You can praise or condemn specific companies (dismantle McKinsey already) or areas (ads bad).
Yeah, your post summarizes the major functions of consulting, including "decision laundering." Decision laundering can be good or bad, largely depending on whether you're using it to launder good or bad decisions. Like, do you need someone with a nice suit and an impressive degree to say, "Burnout and turnover are destroying your company"? Or do you want to them to say, "You need to oppress the working classes more"? The fact is that sometimes it's easier to hear certain messages from outsiders. And ideally, those outsiders will also provide good expertise and advice.
But a big chunk of consulting is "We need some kind of specialist knowledge, advice or skill. Can we hire someone to provide it and teach us?" For example, if you're not a programmer, it can be very hard to hire good programmers, because you can't recognize them. Hiring someone to help you find a good engineering manager and/or tech lead can help! Or maybe you have a small team of skilled programmers who've worked for you for 10 years, and they know a ton about your business. But they've fallen badly behind on some useful technology or best practices, and you want to expose them to new ideas. (Like version control, sigh. Or automated builds.)
Finally, big organizations have all kinds of weird pathologies. Lots of people enjoy pointing out weird government pathologies, but big corporations do it. Large non-profits do it. Political parties do it. Basically, getting 10,000 people to all work towards a goal efficiently is super hard. There are tricks that can help, and you will inevitably end up accepting various inefficiences. Ideally, these inefficiences should be tempered by the efficiencies of scale. But a lot of "bullshit jobs", including some of the sillier forms of consulting, grow out of trying to get 10,000 people to move in the same direction.
What's wrong with being a defense engineer? The thing about war is that there are *sides*. If you are in an (imperfect!) liberal society, that is democratic and mostly peaceful, then working in the defense industry won't make "the world" have more weapons, it will make liberal democracies have more weapons (and the capacity to make them, which can't be built overnight). As long as you think liberal societies are better than imperialistic dictatorships, then these mostly peaceful societies must violently defend their borders from invasion and deny land, resources and people to the warmongers. It's pronounced pacifism.
This is really not remotely the good time to make this argument and look good. (Not that there is any such good time, but this is without any doubt the worse time to do so in my entire lifetime so far.)
This is an excellent time to make this argument, just look around. There are major dictatorships on the warpath that see themselves as in conflict with liberal societies. Liberalism has brought prosperity, peace and freedom to a large part of the world and we should defend it.
Keeping this bookmarked when someone else pretend white supremacist ideology isn't absolutely rampant in the effective altruist movement. I bet you also believe in "human biodiversity" or whatever other euphemism the neo-Nazi-sympathizer contingent in EA (or vice versa) has made up for it again.
It’s reassuring to know that when someone is claiming EA is full of white supremacy, the best evidence they can muster is that someone in Ozy’s comment section thinks their country should have a defense industry.
I’m grateful to Ozy and others for taking the time to fight junk arguments like this or Torres’, but personally seeing this sort of low-quality thinking is just a reminder that I should tune a lot of this criticism out and keep focusing my efforts on saving (mostly non-white, since that apparently matters to some) lives. I encourage others to do the same.
The lodebearing main funder of EA think EA has a white supremacy problem and he's not sure even he has the ability to fix it altogether, stop playing dumb about what has been common knowledge for a while: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/foQPogaBeNKdocYvF/linkpost-an-update-from-good-ventures?commentId=pCMmvqeCifE9PE3C9
I don't see where OP mentions race anywhere in their comment?
Russia vs Ukraine is not a racially charged war, it's just Putin trying to Make Russia Great Again. If you have a job working on HIMARS rocket systems, you can be justifiably proud that you're helping Ukraine resist conquest by an authoritarian regime.
I don't know how you got access to the 2024 Internet from 2022, but an US-backed authoritarian fundamentalist ethnostate is currently invading a multicultural liberal democracy. Supporters of "scientific" racism use "Western values" and the like as a racially charged dogwhistle for the "inherent psychological characteristics" of the "white race" to be of course "defended" through subjugation, expulsion, or extermination of <racial slurs>.
I do appreciate that you mention "fit" in this article. I'm a relatively well-off Westerner who can afford to donate a certain percentage of my income to charity. I also find it hard to imagine a *truly* high-paying job that I wouldn't hate my life if I worked in (possible exception for like, famous author, but I mean in terms of realistic options). If you're lucky enough to work a job that you enjoy and that doesn't feel like drudgery, that's pretty lucky. I have the moral stamina to commit to donating, but not to base my career around earnings instead of happiness. I suspect that many others are in a similar position.
(If I remember right, Jeff Kaufman said that he considered being a full-time contra dance musician, but chose to be a programmer instead because of the much greater pay. That's one of the only actual examples I can think of of someone choosing a higher-paying career for EA reasons!)
Just for history on the question, C. S. Lewis wrote about the difficulty of finding honest work-- I'm not sure when, but 1950 feels right. He didn't think there was an obligation to refuse dishonest work if it was all that was available.
If I remember correctly, it was in an essay about general scamminess rather that strong immorality. It might have been the one about fake rabbit fur, and then people were lying about selling the better fake rabbit fur.
> When they talk about morally controversial jobs, they’re not really talking about defense engineers or petrochemical company CEOs: effective altruists don’t work those jobs.
This is not a central case of "defense engineer" but, as an EA working in pandemic prevention via detecting novel pathogens, my engineering work often falls under "biodefense". And I work with the military and am trying to get them to fund our work.
One argument I would add against going into unethical jobs to "earn to give" is that of the value drift as people age. Young people tend to be very idealistically motivated which then slowly decreases, and once they get children and a house in the suburbs that becomes the biggest priority. Since the EA movement is mostly young people, telling them to get into crypto-trading or other morally dubious but high paying jobs so they have more money to give will probably end up with them staying in those morally dubious careers while not giving more once they get older. Whereas, if you get them into morally impactful careers, and they get the skills and career capital to thrive in that environment, they will continue to do so long after their initial burst of idealism has run out.
I think the crypto-people also realized this and since crypto is by and large a "greater fool scheme" they hoped to poach EAs, a shocking amount of whom fell for it in part because people like MacAskill and other high profile EAs encouraged it.
Reality check 1: This kind of criticism of effective altruism seems to be just as common coming from liberals (in the US sense) to me.
Reality check 2: The two "organizing efforts" mentioned by Robinson (Fight For 15 and Justice For Janitors) are just as popular among liberals (in the US sense)
Lemma: Talking about socialism and capitalism here seems like a red herring.
Proposition 1: "I think even liberal-identified TESCREALists have notable libertarian sympathies." is doing a significant amount of work here. It seems to me that, due to their level of education (yet lack of advanced knowledge of political history and philosophy), when EAs say they are liberals they oscillate between liberalism in the US sense (~= radicalism or republicanism) and liberalism in the classical, philosophical, and European sense (~= libertarianism in the American sense), which average out to something like classical liberalism + paternalistic belief that the elites have a responsibility to care for the poor.
Proposition 2: "strike me as being at best incredibly naive about politics and social action, and at worst utterly unwilling to entertain possible solutions that would require radical changes to the economic and political status quo" is what classical liberal beliefs (the existence of a universal truth in moral and political matters that can be achieved through pure reason) looks like from the perspective of non-liberals (*including* liberals in the US sense i.e. radicals and republicans).
I am quite confused by what you're talking about. For example, in one paragraph you equate classical liberalism to approximately libertarianism, and in the next paragraph you equate it to believing in the existence of a universal truth in moral matters that can be achieved through pure reason. But I don't think these two things are the same, or even especially associated. I am similarly lost about every ideology noun in your post.
It is maybe a bit much to venture an object-level opinion when I can't even tell if we agree or not. But I think Americans who vote for Democrats often think that finance and consulting are morally controversial jobs, even though they aren't socialists. (They usually think tech is fine.) Their critiques are more along the lines of "greedy bankers", concern about the 2008 financial crisis, and so on. I suspect the disagreement between effective altruists and some Democrat voters is that effective altruists tend to believe the consensus of economists* and Democrat voters usually don't.
*importantly different from what is taught in Econ 101, of course.
"I think Americans who vote for Democrats often think that finance and consulting are morally controversial jobs, even though they aren't socialists." Yes, this is my point. Talking about Robinson being a socialist is a red herring when this criticism of EA will be shared by many people well beyond socialists.
I didn't *equate* classical liberalism to that. I use the terms liberalism and republicanism as they are typically used in the political philosophy literature. You can read the work of Philip Pettit for the most celebrated analyst of this. Liberalism in this sense is typically based on such a belief¹, and then on a belief that, paraphrasing this very post of yours, the free market naturally rewards the people who provide the most value to society due to their greatest use of pure reason to access such truths. (This is where liberals would part with, say, Aristotelian-Thomist reactionaries who also believe in natural law.)
There, different schools of liberalism will part on how making those truths the basis of policy is best achieved:
- The og classical liberals of the 18th and 19th centuries (e.g. the Old Whigs in the UK, the Federalists and Whigs in the US, the Girondins and Orléanists in France, etc.) typically believed in a constitutional monarchy with limited suffrage for the rich.
- Neoliberals (e.g. the Mount Pelerin Society, the Chicago School of Economics, the post-Thatcher UK Tories, New Labour, post-Reagan US Republicans, New Democrats, etc.) believe in the creation of a world order of treaties that would enforce on nations liberal policies, and of independent central banks governed by liberal monetarist economists who would control (what neoliberals believe are) the most important levers of macroeconomic policy.
- Minarchist libertarians (e.g. Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick) believe in a constitutional republic where liberal policies would be unimpeachable.
- Anarcho-capitalists (e.g. Murray Rothbard) believe in doing away with polities with a monopoly on the use of force altogether to have private individuals directly contract private militias, because the free market would here again naturally converge toward the objective truth of liberalism.
- Techno-commercialists (who I guess have now moved to being called e/accs) believe in decentralizing society in a series of privately-owned city-states that would be managed as joint-stock corporations.
But ultimately those are all different strategies to achieve the same end goal and you'll see plenty of people and ideas hopping from one set to another.
Radicalism (in the historical sense), or republicanism in the philosophical sense, was the main rival of liberalism inside the Enlightenment and in 19th-century politics. In contrast to liberals upholding natural law theory, republicans in Rousseau's tradition upheld social contract theory and legal positivism, according to which politics is the result of individuals with different desires seeking to act with each other as equals. Pettit famously reframed this as defining liberty as non-domination (as opposed to absence of interference). To actualize this they support a secular republic, universal suffrage, and universal secular public education, and fought against liberals for a century to obtain those. Historical examples would include the Foxites and Radicals in the UK, the Anti-Federalists and Radical Republicans in the US, the Mountain and Radicals in France, and various other self-styled Radical Parties across continental Europe and Latin America.
¹: Note this is more or less the definition of liberalism which you gave on your old blog in "Love Me I'm a Liberal"
You are equivocating between liberalism the political philosophy and libertarianism the political belief. Your taxonomy of "liberals" carefully separates out von Mises and Rothbard, but somehow excludes Rawls (probably the most famous liberal political philosopher of the 20th century) and John Stuart Mill (whom I would think would be somewhat relevant when discussing effective altruism).
Philip Pettit seems, from his bibliography, to have heard of both Rawls and Amartya Sen. I am not sure if you're claiming that he classifies them as non-liberals (a very unusual use of the term and one both men would reject) or that they are secretly fellow travelers of von Mises (....bwahahahahahahaha).
The vast majority of people in the United States support liberalism the political philosophy, in many cases without fully realizing that any alternative philosophy exists. The vast majority of people in the United States are not libertarians. Effective altruists are somewhat more likely than average Americans to be libertarians, and much more likely to believe in liberalism-the-political-philosophy as a matter of principle rather than as the stuff in the water supply.
I was disagreeing with two specific people. I was not trying to provide any sort of complete theory of everyone who thinks that finance is a morally controversial job. There are a lot of different people who believe that, from environmentalists to traditional Catholics to anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. Though they often influence each other, there is no single underlying cause.
"The vast majority of people in the United States support the political philosophy, in many cases without fully realizing that any alternative philosophy exists." Are you sure it's not you who is not fully realizing that any alternative philosophy exists ? In US mainstream politics only New Democrats and Never-Trump Republicans are liberals; EAs obviously belong to that cluster. The left wing of the Democrats up to Warren and what remain of the Republicans are obviously not liberals in this sense.
Where exactly does Torres state they're anprim? I mean I know they're a degrowther, but do they go that far?
In the linked post, they repeatedly reference "our hunter-gatherer ancestors" as the state they'd like to return to.
Sorry I'm a dumbass who just skimmed it
Well said!