Feb 10, 2023·edited Feb 10, 2023Liked by Ozy Brennan
"Finally, some of this homogeneity is about things that are… true?"
Yeah, I was a bit surprised that this wasn't paragraph one of your response. I read that list going, "oh shit, there aren't enough pro-rapists or believers in the Four Humours theory of disease!"
Being at least consequentialist-adjacent in ethics is pretty much the central concept of the movement. I guess there might be a person in the Bruce Springsteen Fan Club who doesn't enjoy listening to music, but I wouldn't be shocked that there weren't many.
And thinking space is cool is like thinking puppies are cute or thinking chocolate tastes good. How many people does it filter out?
FWIW, I'm not connected to the organized movement except tangentially online, live far away, and 100% of my donations are to vegan outreach in countries where money goes substantially farther than it does for me.
> Animal Charity Evaluators doesn’t provide a numerical cost-effectiveness estimate of its charities because their estimates are so uncertain that a numerical cost-effectiveness estimate is actively misleading
I disagree that a numerical estimate would be actively misleading, and I've been trying to get them to change that.
> Which is not centrist and is actually quite radical. I wish the centrist opinion was unsure whether America should have full open borders or merely increase immigration by four hundred percent.
I think the mislabeling as "centrist" is worth remarking a bit more on. I didn't read the original post you're replying to but you mention that the authors are leftists.
In general -- ignoring leftism for the moment -- people frequently make the mistake (or what I would consider to be the mistake) of assuming politics works along a single 1-dimensional axis, and then projecting everything onto that axis, erasing all other distinctions. Also frequently that axis is whatever thing they most care about, so that one end is them and the other end is *all* the various things they're most opposed to, even if those things don't themselves go together. And anything else, that just varies in some other way, is "centrist".
I think that's what's going on here -- especially because the authors are leftists. I said that everyone makes this mistake, but leftists (as I understand it) have a whole theory about how everything is actually labor (left) vs capital (right), and everything else is a mask for that. So in most people I would consider this way of thinking to be a cognitive error resulting from not thinking things through, but in leftist thought it's not a cognitive error (whatever its origins) but rather a positive belief (one I obviously disagree with).
I think that's the likely explanation for this claim, that you and I would consider to be an error.
I imagine fundamentalists might do something similar with God vs Satan? But that's not a group I really run into...
My biggest problem with the article was honestly that it should have been split into like ten articles, so there wasn't so much sifting through low-quality criticisms to get to the stuff that matters.
Do you still agree with your earlier posts about how Effective Altruism needs to be more welcoming to political conservatives, non-utilitarians, and religious people?
I loved those posts, and your seeming dismissal of *any* concern about EA being too ideologically homogenous seems to contradict them.
At the very least, you argued that EA should take care not to seem actively hostile to or contemptuous of people who disagree with the ideological consensus here.
Fair enough; I agree that those authors are strategically confused about what they actually want & how they can reach it. So:
Suppose me and my friends have seriously considered knitting, or joining a non-EA entity in the nonprofit/academia blob, or starting our own movement. We want a niche for detailed sympathetic conversations about some topics that aren't treated as salient within current EA frames. But we also want significant continuity and ongoing engagement with core-EA. We're unsure how our own conversations/projects/norms will develop, and we're unsure how receptive core-EA will end up being.
Got any advice for navigating a hypothetical & unprecedented situation like that?
It's worth noting that atheists, autistics, Jews, and East Asians are *not* privileged groups.
"Finally, some of this homogeneity is about things that are… true?"
Yeah, I was a bit surprised that this wasn't paragraph one of your response. I read that list going, "oh shit, there aren't enough pro-rapists or believers in the Four Humours theory of disease!"
Being at least consequentialist-adjacent in ethics is pretty much the central concept of the movement. I guess there might be a person in the Bruce Springsteen Fan Club who doesn't enjoy listening to music, but I wouldn't be shocked that there weren't many.
And thinking space is cool is like thinking puppies are cute or thinking chocolate tastes good. How many people does it filter out?
FWIW, I'm not connected to the organized movement except tangentially online, live far away, and 100% of my donations are to vegan outreach in countries where money goes substantially farther than it does for me.
> Animal Charity Evaluators doesn’t provide a numerical cost-effectiveness estimate of its charities because their estimates are so uncertain that a numerical cost-effectiveness estimate is actively misleading
I disagree that a numerical estimate would be actively misleading, and I've been trying to get them to change that.
> Which is not centrist and is actually quite radical. I wish the centrist opinion was unsure whether America should have full open borders or merely increase immigration by four hundred percent.
I think the mislabeling as "centrist" is worth remarking a bit more on. I didn't read the original post you're replying to but you mention that the authors are leftists.
In general -- ignoring leftism for the moment -- people frequently make the mistake (or what I would consider to be the mistake) of assuming politics works along a single 1-dimensional axis, and then projecting everything onto that axis, erasing all other distinctions. Also frequently that axis is whatever thing they most care about, so that one end is them and the other end is *all* the various things they're most opposed to, even if those things don't themselves go together. And anything else, that just varies in some other way, is "centrist".
I think that's what's going on here -- especially because the authors are leftists. I said that everyone makes this mistake, but leftists (as I understand it) have a whole theory about how everything is actually labor (left) vs capital (right), and everything else is a mask for that. So in most people I would consider this way of thinking to be a cognitive error resulting from not thinking things through, but in leftist thought it's not a cognitive error (whatever its origins) but rather a positive belief (one I obviously disagree with).
I think that's the likely explanation for this claim, that you and I would consider to be an error.
I imagine fundamentalists might do something similar with God vs Satan? But that's not a group I really run into...
This is great, and deals with broad classes of (bad) EA criticisms. Please consider posting this on the EA forum.
My biggest problem with the article was honestly that it should have been split into like ten articles, so there wasn't so much sifting through low-quality criticisms to get to the stuff that matters.
Do you still agree with your earlier posts about how Effective Altruism needs to be more welcoming to political conservatives, non-utilitarians, and religious people?
I loved those posts, and your seeming dismissal of *any* concern about EA being too ideologically homogenous seems to contradict them.
At the very least, you argued that EA should take care not to seem actively hostile to or contemptuous of people who disagree with the ideological consensus here.
Fair enough; I agree that those authors are strategically confused about what they actually want & how they can reach it. So:
Suppose me and my friends have seriously considered knitting, or joining a non-EA entity in the nonprofit/academia blob, or starting our own movement. We want a niche for detailed sympathetic conversations about some topics that aren't treated as salient within current EA frames. But we also want significant continuity and ongoing engagement with core-EA. We're unsure how our own conversations/projects/norms will develop, and we're unsure how receptive core-EA will end up being.
Got any advice for navigating a hypothetical & unprecedented situation like that?
This is a great post.
Good post, agree with ~everything
> should have les power
Typo