13 Comments
Nov 6Liked by Ozy Brennan

This post was really lovely. I donated $100 to give directly's immigrant relief category. It really is hopeful to remember people are still trying to help each other. Thank you

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Nov 7Liked by Ozy Brennan

Donated, thank you for this.

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This is the wisest election take I've seen yet.

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Former EA here, I think EA is worse than you think. Elon Musk used to be on the "EA people page" before I took him down with a comment explaining why, which got downvoted so much I had to ask friends to upvote it. Musk got praised/promoted so much by EA, and in fact it was MacAskill that was the liaison between SBF and Musk when it came to trying to set them up to jointly buy twitter. Which is a platform that Musk now uses to ban and suppress journalists and leftwing thinkers, while also promoting far-right conspiracy theories that directly aided Trump's election (and promoting MacAskill's book). Not to mention people in the EA-community giving a platform to Curtis Yarvin, whose "philosophy" formed the basis for project 2025.

I don't think EA has been a net negative in the world, but you can buy malaria nets without supporting a movement with such a... let's call it 'mixed track record'. Despite how it's sometimes presented, EA didn't invent developmental economics, nor does it belong to them. Rejecting EA doesn't mean rejecting developmental economics or analyzing interventions, and I think you can be much more effective as an altruist by not being part of the "Effective Altruism" movement.

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author

I absolutely agree that you don't have to identify with EA or think much of EA leadership to buy malaria nets.* I strongly encourage everyone to buy malaria nets regardless of what they think of EA.

Overall, my loyalty isn't to Big Institutional EA, about which I try to maintain a healthy skepticism. My loyalty is to my friends and community, who are sincerely and earnestly attempting to do good as best they can. I am a much better person because of the parts of the EA community that I interact with, and I don't know any other community that could begin to replace them. If this isn't true of you, then don't be an EA-- and I will still be proud to count you as a member of Project Make The World Better.

*Although if your distrust extends to GiveWell probably you should donate to GiveDirectly instead, or do your own research.

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I don't distrust GiveWell, and in fact I rely heavily on their research for the Belgian effective giving org we're setting up.

I do think EA focuses too much on big charities/foundations focused on narrow, direct, continuous effects. I kinda get the measurement-bias and even the bias towards bigger charities, but the bias towards continuous effects seems unwarranted. It probably stems from EAs coming from a (anglo-saxon/neoclassical) economics background (which focuses on marginalism) while being less informed/interested in sociology (which focuses on thresholds). It's somewhat improving very very slowly, (e.g. the EA forum now has a tag for politics), but it's still thoroughly lopsided (e.g. the EA forum has still no sociology tag, but has many many different tags for economics).

This is somewhat unfortunate for those of us that want to create *systemic change* (e.g. we couldn't get EA funding to try to add animal welfare to the Belgian constitution, even though we did end up narrowly pulling it off), but that doesn't mean GiveWell's recommendations aren't still really really good.

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I think It is good to have consistent terminology that retains meaning, uncorrupted by those who take it as their banner, because then anyone can take any term and find bad people identifying with it to then shame other people who also identify with that term into not using it, robbing them of their ability to label themselves or communicate effectively what they are all about. Especially a term like "effective altruism" where it's composed of more stable terms such that its pretty clear what the term means and what it means for someone to be an effective altruist.

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Of course the meaning becomes corrupted by those who use it, meaning *comes* from use. Languages aren't static so meaning isn't either. One can wave the swastika with the intention of retaining the pro-buddhist meaning all they want, they'll *actually* signal a pro-nazi sentiment, that's how communication works. Even if it *was* somehow possible to retain the meaning of a term before a movement took it, "EA" was invented *for* the movement.

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"This isn’t cherrypicked, she was the second person on GiveDirectly Live when I wrote this post." make me curious who was first. Unless the feed order changes, it's Baraka, a mototaxi driver from Kenya. https://live.givedirectly.org/newsfeed/95bad284-4c34-4156-a252-d247b2debd18/267228?context=newsfeed

He's getting small repeated payments rather than a lump sum: is that why you didn't pick him? He spends the money on food, motorbike repairs, and toiletries. He's also saving up some of the money to build a house and to send his daughter to school when she's old enough.

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Yeah, I got the first one who was getting a lump sum!

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This is great. I made the same point at the end of my election take. Good to focus on the good we can all do in the world. https://open.substack.com/pub/blastfaxkudos/p/how-you-a-kamala-harris-voter-should?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

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Thank you, this is just the post I needed to read. :)

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This is a lovely take, Ozy, thanks for sharing!

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