Ozy in Asterisk
Somewhat against Emile Torres
I’ve written an article in Asterisk critiquing the viewpoints of anti-effective-altruist author Emile Torres. Check it out!
A section I particularly enjoyed writing:
However, Torres is rarely careful enough to make the distinction between people’s beliefs and the premises behind the conversations they’re having. They act like everyone who believes one of these ideas believes in all the rest. In reality, it’s not uncommon for, say, an effective altruist to be convinced of the arguments that we should worry about advanced artificial intelligence without accepting transhumanism or extropianism. All too often, Torres depicts TESCREALism as a monolithic ideology — one they characterize as “profoundly dangerous.” To them, TESCREALism is “a new, secular religion, in which ‘heaven’ is something we create ourselves, in this world,” invented by “a bunch of 20th-century atheists [who] concluded that their lives lacked the meaning, purpose and hope provided by traditional religion.”
Atheists, who don’t expect justice to come from an omnibenevolent God or a blissful afterlife, have sought meaning, purpose, and hope in improving this world since at least the writing of the 1933 Humanist Manifesto. It is perfectly natural and not especially sinister. If a community working together to create a better world is sufficient criteria to qualify as a religion, I’m all for religion.
Torres’ primary argument that TESCREALism is dangerous centers on the fondness that effective altruists, rationalists, and longtermists hold for wild thought experiments — and what they might imply about what we should do. Torres critiques philosopher Nick Bostrom for arguing that very tiny reductions in the risk of human extinction outweigh the certain death of many people who currently exist, Eliezer Yudkowsky for arguing that we should prefer to torture one person rather than allow more people than there are atoms in the universe to get dust specks in their eyes, and effective altruists (as a group) for arguing that it might be morally right to work for an “evil” organization and donate the money to charity.
It seems like the thing Torres might actually be objecting to is analytic ethical philosophy.
I feel like this essay kind of pulls its punches a bit, and yes I'm saying that despite the fact that it says "your preferred policy will kill babies!" :P Like, it says "here are some particular negative consequences of degrowth", but it doesn't, like, really attempt to dig into degrowth and rebut it in the big picture, it doesn't attempt to say "here is the fundamental thing that the degrowthers have gotten wrong, why they are wrong on the whole and not just in some details".
I also don't think the fact that Torres is a degrowther and that they object to analytic ethical philosophy are unrelated, but I guess it makes sense to not go into that in order to stay away from arguments that could easily get inflammatory...
What I find most confusing about Torres is that they seem to be a TESCREAL-ist themself. I'm used to seeing criticism of EA for allowing AI safety and other x-risks to take any resources from global health/poverty measures because they think AI risk is nonsense, but Torres doesn't! If anything, they propose far more drastic measures to counter it than most. I am confused about in what sense Torres believes they are not a longtermist, because as you have pointed out they demand far greater sacrifices from the current population for the sake of the future than MacAskill ever would. I guess it's okay because they refuse to think about it?