I don't get what you mean by great timing? Or fucking lol? Any of this? It doesn't make sense as a response to the comment? It feels like you're responding in a "sick burn!" way Edit: I cannot...
I don't get what you mean by great timing? Or fucking lol? Any of this? It doesn't make sense as a response to the comment?
It feels like you're responding in a "sick burn!" way
Edit: I cannot believe I have to specify but I only care about nukeman's answer to this as it's a question about their meaning, and it's a genuine question as this seems weird and out of character for you.
Sorry for the confusion, I think @mycketforvirrad was being serious with their suggestion, the timing and specifics of it were just funny given the other thread (which I’ve been lurking from afar).
Sorry for the confusion, I think @mycketforvirrad was being serious with their suggestion, the timing and specifics of it were just funny given the other thread (which I’ve been lurking from afar).
the tag man showed up to reply to a comment about filtering a tag to suggest a tag that the tag man tagged before the comment about filtering a tag was tagged by the tag man with the tag man's reply
the tag man showed up to reply to a comment about filtering a tag to suggest a tag that the tag man tagged before the comment about filtering a tag was tagged by the tag man with the tag man's reply
Yeah, ok so I'm going to ignore people who aren't the person who I asked about their intentions answering a question that wasn't for them and then being weird about it.
Yeah, ok so I'm going to ignore people who aren't the person who I asked about their intentions answering a question that wasn't for them and then being weird about it.
Thank you for the breakdown (it accurately depicts my experience and opinion as well). I've gotten into a habit where I don't usually click links until there's some amount of discussion about the...
Thank you for the breakdown (it accurately depicts my experience and opinion as well).
I've gotten into a habit where I don't usually click links until there's some amount of discussion about the content here on Tildes. Especially if the title includes language that already makes it fairly likely that it isn't a high quality piece.
In this case it worked very well. I haven't read this article and never will, and by reading the conversation here I can be fairly certain I didn't miss out on anything important. Not only did I successfully avoid low quality content - I also got to read some insightful, thought-provoking and educational comments here that are certainly of value to me! For example, I had no idea "woke" used to have neutral or even positive connotations!
This is one of the main reasons why I love Tildes so much: for once an online hive mind seems to be working in ways that are beneficial to me. (Not every time, but generally speaking this holds true more often than it doesn't.)
I do sometimes wish that topics could be given the noise label just like comments. But such a feature could easily be abused by some resident hotheads and providing some sort of reasoning for criticism is important, so I think I prefer the system as it is now. When a few different users disagree on some content's validity and exchange some words about it, it's usually quite easy for me to gauge whether or not said content is something I want to expose myself to.
I don't know if there is a faster way to make me not take anything you have to say seriously than if you are a proponent of effective altruism. EA seems to solely exist to help rich people justify...
I don't know if there is a faster way to make me not take anything you have to say seriously than if you are a proponent of effective altruism. EA seems to solely exist to help rich people justify being rich in a world with extreme income inequality and poverty.
I don't want to trust someone to get rich and spend their money to help the world (how well did that work with SBF?). I want a world where it is impossible to become a billionaire in the first place and everyone is able to live their lives healthy, safely and however they wish within reason.
To me there’s a difference between effective altruism (focus on giving to effective, high-impact charities) and Effective Altruism (what you describe). I’d never heard of the latter being a...
To me there’s a difference between effective altruism (focus on giving to effective, high-impact charities) and Effective Altruism (what you describe). I’d never heard of the latter being a definition of EA until I came to Tildes.
It basically blew up as a discussion point with FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried as he was pretty obviously one of the poster children for the latter definition and in the media's brief love affair with...
It basically blew up as a discussion point with FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried as he was pretty obviously one of the poster children for the latter definition and in the media's brief love affair with him it put even more of a spotlight the whole discussion. Naturally whatever sane discussions that were being had were not the focus.
EA reminds me of some other "views" like rationalism or to go farther randian stuff.
It's the sort of thing where the cliff notes or core concept basically boil down to "yeah that's an interesting discussion point and thing to think about", however the people who seem to use it as a core point of their identity often do so to justify some behavior they don't want to admit might just possibly be harmful/selfish/batshit insane. Hell to throw grease on the fire I'd argue much the same about the hyper woke crowd as well.
I’ll borrow a definition from the nuclear sector: How does this relate to effective altruism? Silicon Valley folks tend to be early adopters of a lot of things/ideas, and EA is one of them. As...
I’ll borrow a definition from the nuclear sector:
Risk = frequency (or probability) x consequences
How does this relate to effective altruism? Silicon Valley folks tend to be early adopters of a lot of things/ideas, and EA is one of them. As artificial intelligence became more prominent in the tech sector, folks made the calculation that AI risk = (20-99%) x BAD = a very high risk of an AI catastrophe. Basically, they assumed the risk of an AI catastrophe was very high, potentially risking billions or trillions of future lives, or all of humanity. With those stakes, it’s very easy to justify doing anything to stop it (including donating a lot of money to AI safety charities). Personally, I think the probability is much lower, and that the bed nets are a more effective charitable contribution.
The whole "obviously we must invest our millions into AI" outcome is absolutely one of my reasons for disliking "EA" vs the concept of donating to charities that are effective in their use of...
The whole "obviously we must invest our millions into AI" outcome is absolutely one of my reasons for disliking "EA" vs the concept of donating to charities that are effective in their use of money like you describe. The former has absolutely poisoned the well for me against the use of the term for the latter. That and the idea that they're worth too much to volunteer their time as much as their money.
Like for example, the No One Dies Alone program, where the local hospital calls if they have someone with no family or family who cannot make it to the bedside so that people receiving hospice/end of life care aren't alone. The idea that this is not a worthwhile use of time because it's inefficient is pretty anathema to my sense of human dignity and respect (and to connect to the article, it's pretty much entirely unrelated to my feelings about non-human animals). It may certainly not be in someone's skill set, but I think that's why I don't trust the people reducing this down to a math equation to make those judgements about worth and value vs engaging with something they care about.
Like I found a post arguing about the dollar equivalent of donating blood and that since it's very likely someone else will donate, it's a waste of their time/resources. Like, that's certainly not an argument that can be universalized - it becomes the bystander effect for an entire population.
Idk that's why I don't like it as someone on the left.
About these particular examples of EA that give me the ick: Something clicked for me based on a comment about how "if people are saving thousands of lives they must be categorically better, and...
About these particular examples of EA that give me the ick:
Something clicked for me based on a comment about how "if people are saving thousands of lives they must be categorically better, and that would be bad so they must be evil" as a weird strawman of what "woke leftists" or whoever think. About why the reduction to numbers bothers me, because even if it was a useful way to think, it's deeply dishonest.
They want credit for saving so many lives via their indirect donations, but don't want the blame, the deduction, the red negative number for all the indirect harm they've done. That whole calculation of how many people has [Billionaire] killed to be a billionaire, in fractions of time lost because they made many people worse off. We can probably quantify how many people Musk indirectly killed through USAID cuts alone.
They reduce everything to a math equation and don't account for any of the debits to their account. You can give a kidney and then advocate eugenics talking points to thousands of people and surely there is some sort of negative to the positive. And then they assign a weight, a multiplier, to AI that means nothing else matters.
It's just reducing humans to math, but then it's cooking the books. If AI is Y * eleventy bajillion, then who cares who I hurt, and helping one person is pointless. It's possible to talk about efficacy in donations without sounding like a villain, and they're failing at it.
I very much agres that this zero-sum game "we need to maximise efficienty on everything" mentality is not great. I personally do like effective altruism, but more of the Rutger Bergman style I...
I very much agres that this zero-sum game "we need to maximise efficienty on everything" mentality is not great. I personally do like effective altruism, but more of the Rutger Bergman style I suppose, which is more "if you donate and want to help people, stop and think about how effective your donation is". Things like lobbying for leadless paint > funding for more cancer research. Not because that is bad, but because there is already enough resources allocated on solving that problem.
That being said, I still think donating to causes you personally feel connected to, or are local to you is good, I do it myself. Is donating to FOSS the most effective donation I could make? No, but I care so I do it anyway. I think of ea as a sort of diversification of my donations.
I don't know who Rutger Berman is but I agree, I just think that the name is tainted pretty heavily by classist people doing their best to reduce humanity to economics and then to somehow "win" it...
I don't know who Rutger Berman is but I agree, I just think that the name is tainted pretty heavily by classist people doing their best to reduce humanity to economics and then to somehow "win" it alongside the ones who just only think about solving the AI slave rebellion before it happens and/or creating the perfect AI slave to fix our problems for us. (I've seen both arguments, idk.)
Something like charity navigator or whatever is great, but like, someone needs to donate and volunteer at animal shelters too. It's not just all malaria nets ya know?
Rutger Bregman wrote the non-fiction book Humankind (and other stuff that I haven't read). I don't know anything about the person, but I very much recommend Humankind to every... human! I learned,...
Rutger Bregman wrote the non-fiction book Humankind (and other stuff that I haven't read).
I don't know anything about the person, but I very much recommend Humankind to every... human! I learned, for example, that as part of my education I received skewed information on studies that ostensibly "show" how callous and power-hungry humans are. The basic premise of the book is that humans are much more cooperative and caring than we are usually led to believe and the evidence for that is everywhere we look. We're just not taught to see it.
Ah thanks for the rec, for whatever reason, reading through a summary I think I'm aware of the major things he discusses in the book (and already have a fundamentally positive perspective about...
Ah thanks for the rec, for whatever reason, reading through a summary I think I'm aware of the major things he discusses in the book (and already have a fundamentally positive perspective about humanity, barring a few bad days). But I'll keep an eye out and snag it if it goes on sale.
He's written some more great works, and the publishing company he's a part of, The Correspondent, publishes many other great non-fiction works as well. The thing I was referring to was the "Moral...
He's written some more great works, and the publishing company he's a part of, The Correspondent, publishes many other great non-fiction works as well. The thing I was referring to was the "Moral Ambition" movement, where they try to encourage people with ambitious but morally gray jobs (think McKinsey and co) and puts them to do good for the world, like the lead paint initiative I mentioned, or lobbying against Big Tabacco.
(This is a tangent about Charity Navigator.) Having worked with nonprofits who cared deeply about their score, I find that Charity Navigator is a great tool, but its usefulness really depends on...
(This is a tangent about Charity Navigator.)
Having worked with nonprofits who cared deeply about their score, I find that Charity Navigator is a great tool, but its usefulness really depends on whether nonprofits fit the specific model that they're expecting. One spent almost all of its money on programs that involved a lot of easily categorized external labor and costs, and it had a great Charity Navigator score because CN cares about admin vs. program costs. A second was primarily an advocacy group for a given demographic's interests, and so had a very large communications department relative to its size. It meant that they could easily have a press release out to all of the local news outlets within hours of any event that was relevant to their interests, could provide soundbites and interviews to reporters, had staff to table at events, talked regularly to all of the local politicians, etc, etc. But it wasn't labeled as "program" work, because it wasn't about a particular program, it was just everything about how their organization operated and handled by internal staff. And their CN score was poor because they hadn't consistently done their accounting in a way that CN wanted to see it.
Was the one with a better score a better place to donate because their score was 20 points higher? It depends on your priorities, sure, but I wouldn't say that they were significantly more effective for having a higher score, they were just easier to measure and fit more easily into Charity Navigator's heuristic.
And beyond that, the efficacy of an organization that doesn't serve your interests is kind of irrelevant. If you love dogs and are indifferent to people getting malaria, a local pet shelter can be the choice that's right for you. Charity benefits from thoughtfulness.
Seems Goodhart's law is as applicable as ever, haha. Funnily enough, it's one of the big reasons I dislike effective altruism as a concept. The idea of ensuring efforts to do good are effective is...
Funnily enough, it's one of the big reasons I dislike effective altruism as a concept. The idea of ensuring efforts to do good are effective is a nice one, but it almost immediately runs into the problem of "what does 'effective' mean?" And woah man if that isn't a tough question. One for which it seems to happen all too often – in an EA context, anyway – that someone fools themselves by thinking they've found the one, true, final answer.
I would agree with your assumption and that AI is over blown as they need to keep selling it to us to justify all of the money they keep setting on fire. This would be one example of an issue I...
I would agree with your assumption and that AI is over blown as they need to keep selling it to us to justify all of the money they keep setting on fire. This would be one example of an issue I have with a fundamental part of EA. That it is better for them to make a ton of money and hire 1000 doctors than to become a doctor themselves. Out of touch billionaires tend to not be the best judge of how to spend their money to help people.
The reason it might seem this way is that donating money to charity is largely a rich-people problem and if you don't have a lot of money yourself, advising people who do have money is a great way...
The reason it might seem this way is that donating money to charity is largely a rich-people problem and if you don't have a lot of money yourself, advising people who do have money is a great way to have more impact.
That's a characteristic of the nature of charity work rather than EA in particular. Charitable foundations are started by rich people and young people interested in charity might go work for them.
That's also true of government and business: you can control or influence the spending of money that's not yours.
It's like the story of what a famous bank robber said when asked why he robbed banks: "that's where the money is."
It's also possible to raise money from small donations, but it's a lot more work. Politicians will do it to avoid accusations of being funded by the rich.
I think the "earn to give" stuff is misunderstood. Realistically, a lot of people who set out to be software engineers or whatever aren't going to quit their jobs and go to work at a low-paying job that supposedly does more good. And it might not be a good idea anyway if it's not what they're good at.
Perhaps giving money to charity is second-best, but it beats not doing it.
Justifying inequality is not what EA is about. It's about being practical. We can imagine a very different world, but it's not very relevant when you're deciding what to do in this world. If you're trying to get things done, putting "first, let's have a revolution" as step one of your plan means you never get to step two.
I'll also point out that convincing rich people to give money to poor people is working against inequality. It's not enough to prevent inequality because the forces working in the other direction are very strong. But it will matter a lot to the people it helps.
This article starts by imploring me to consider various, deliberately unfairly constructed claims,1 and expects me to immediately drop my positions from that alone. This is a reversible argument:...
Exemplary
This article starts by imploring me to consider various, deliberately unfairly constructed claims,1 and expects me to immediately drop my positions from that alone. This is a reversible argument:
The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients.
The purpose of a cancer hospital is to make money off cancer treatments.
The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia.
The purpose of a military is to defend state power by sending the nation's people to die at the government's discretion. This one's extra loaded, because by making a counterpoint, I am made to seem as though I like Russia.
The purpose of the British government is to propose a controversial new sentencing policy, stand firm in the face of protests for a while, then cave in after slightly larger protests and agree not to pass the policy after all.
The purpose of the current British government is to test the waters over how it might further increase state control over citizenry, and back off to find subtler ones if sufficiently severe opposition forms.
The purpose of the New York bus system is to emit four billion pounds of carbon dioxide.
The purpose of the New York bus system is to emit whatever carbon dioxide it shall, without care for improving it.
The entire point of POSIWID is that you cannot claim a system is intended to do something which is constantly fails to do. It's not a matter of meeting 99% of a goal instead of 100% of one, it's a matter of "you say you want to do this, but your efforts are negligent if not outright counter to that." Courtesy of Wikipedia, we get a far better example than anything Scott has provided:
For example, an organization that has a high rate of accidents and illness may claim that its values are health and safety, but applying POSIWID shows that the organization's practices contradict those values.
The purpose of effective altruism is to justify inequality. Maybe you didn't want it to be that. But what people have done with the label is more important to its meaning than your personal beliefs are — if you wish to adhere to the principles that no longer fit that term, that's your prerogative, but I recommend using different words.
1. Scott's attempt to reinforce his list as fair by failing to find substantive discussion on Twitter of all places is doing nothing to improve my perception of his article.
It seems obvious that both statements are unfair? You're proving Scott's point. Anyone can play this game to prove anything they like. Finding a way to use this game to prove something that's true...
This article starts by imploring me to consider various, deliberately unfairly constructed claims,1 and expects me to immediately drop my positions from that alone. This is a reversible argument:
The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients.
The purpose of a cancer hospital is to make money off cancer treatments.
It seems obvious that both statements are unfair?
You're proving Scott's point. Anyone can play this game to prove anything they like. Finding a way to use this game to prove something that's true doesn't help, because you can prove just about anything. It's a way to make up any purpose you want.
You are taking the parts of my post designed to point out Scott's poor rhetoric1 and then responding to them as though they are my primary argument defending POSIWID, while ignoring the parts that...
You are taking the parts of my post designed to point out Scott's poor rhetoric1 and then responding to them as though they are my primary argument defending POSIWID, while ignoring the parts that are actually my primary points. As a matter of convenience, I'll quote the important parts in question:
The entire point of POSIWID is that you cannot claim a system is intended to do something which is constantly fails to do. It's not a matter of meeting 99% of a goal instead of 100% of one, it's a matter of "you say you want to do this, but your efforts are negligent if not outright counter to that." Courtesy of Wikipedia, we get a far better example than anything Scott has provided:
For example, an organization that has a high rate of accidents and illness may claim that its values are health and safety, but applying POSIWID shows that the organization's practices contradict those values.
The word "high" is present in that sentence, and it is relevant. Am I to drop POSIWID as a concept entirely, just because a qualifier like that was needed? No, because I can still recognize the utility of it. And as for the article's deeply flawed examples, I can understand that any axiom can be found to have holes if you create a ridiculous environment specifically designed to fail it.
POSIWID has utility. It is a recognition of a large disparity between stated goals and actual results. Just because you could theoretically extend it to an absurd situation doesn't make any of that untrue.
1. Incidentally, I don't actually find my rephrasings of those terribly unfair. A for-profit cancer hospital really is exactly that, for example.
Why not? Intentions and results are logically distinct. People fail to do what they intend all the time. It seems like you're asserting that it's a useful phase, but you haven't shown that it's...
The entire point of POSIWID is that you cannot claim a system is intended to do something which is constantly fails to do.
Why not? Intentions and results are logically distinct. People fail to do what they intend all the time.
It seems like you're asserting that it's a useful phase, but you haven't shown that it's useful other than as a misleading rhetorical move.
It's true that you might be suspicious that when a system that fails to achieve its supposed purpose, that purpose is just an empty phrase. Many company slogans are empty. It might be worth investigating. But suspicions aren't proof and repeating a catch-phrase doesn't actually turn it into proof.
People and systems are very different things. People's intentions are applied differently than the way systems intentions are applied; a person can generate an intention independently and tell you...
People and systems are very different things. People's intentions are applied differently than the way systems intentions are applied; a person can generate an intention independently and tell you it, whereas a system – being as it has no will – must have intent applied to it from without.1 This brings us full circle to why the phrase is useful, though: It lets us easily point out how a given intent is inappropriate to apply to a given system.
Naturally, you'll get awkward results if you try to apply a systems-focused rhetorical device to a person instead.
But suspicions aren't proof and repeating a catch-phrase doesn't actually turn it into proof.
Strictly speaking, no, it doesn't. Luckily for POSIWID, it's supposed to be a heuristic, not a proof. Secondarily, a great deal of rhetoric people use is not proof, nor does it come with any. That's pretty normal, and is not specific to this. Nevertheless, analysis does not require proof to be meaningful.
1. People operating within or for a system still qualify as this, as they are not themselves the system.
I don't think it's much of heuristic and maybe we should be more cautious about attributing intentions to a system. In computing, it's often unwarranted anthropomorphism. The people working on a...
I don't think it's much of heuristic and maybe we should be more cautious about attributing intentions to a system. In computing, it's often unwarranted anthropomorphism. The people working on a system (or as part of a system) may have intentions, and sometimes they conflict.
We aren't: If you're genuinely confused, just go back to the original phrasing, to whit: "Purpose of a system." I only used the word "intent" as you brought it up, and it is often used as a...
we should be more cautious about attributing intentions to a system.
We aren't:
whereas a system – being as it has no will – must have intent applied to it from without.
If you're genuinely confused, just go back to the original phrasing, to whit: "Purpose of a system." I only used the word "intent" as you brought it up, and it is often used as a roundabout way to refer to the same thing.
The people working on a system (or as part of a system) may have intentions, and sometimes they conflict.
My previous comment was about how the intent of people and the purpose of a system were different things.
At this point however, this discussion is getting very unnecessarily focused on semantics. I find that's often an indicator as to when a discussion has lost its value, and I'm circling my points a lot besides. So past this point, agree to disagree.
This linked article seems the exact type of thing that 286437714 was highlighting elsewhere under this post, even down to the twitter examples. I found it a fascinating that the author was...
This linked article seems the exact type of thing that 286437714 was highlighting elsewhere under this post, even down to the twitter examples. I found it a fascinating that the author was disappointed in the examples they found on twitter, as if twitter could ever be more thoughtful and considered than the kind of rage bait you get with the platform’s algorithm and userbase.
Yeah, I wouldn't have shared the article except that it was so on-point. I don't think that slogan is repeated very often? Although, it does have a Wikipedia page.
Yeah, I wouldn't have shared the article except that it was so on-point. I don't think that slogan is repeated very often? Although, it does have a Wikipedia page.
Can you provide some reason, any reason at all, to think this is true? The idea is that if we are to give to charity, we should try to maximize the positive impact of that donation, which seems...
EA seems to solely exist to help rich people justify being rich in a world with extreme income inequality and poverty.
Can you provide some reason, any reason at all, to think this is true? The idea is that if we are to give to charity, we should try to maximize the positive impact of that donation, which seems like that's a good idea.
I want a world where it is impossible to become a billionaire in the first place and everyone is able to live their lives healthy, safely and however they wish within reason.
I'm not sure why one would think that'd be incompatible with effective altruism.
So I'm confused on how this inference works. We have this fact (that I agree with) that: How does that give us a reason to think that EA solely exists to help rich people justify being rich in a...
So I'm confused on how this inference works. We have this fact (that I agree with) that:
Sam Bankman-Fried and the network around him tried to convince us he is a genius.
How does that give us a reason to think that EA solely exists to help rich people justify being rich in a world with extreme income inequality and poverty? How does this inference work, what kind of inference is this? How do we move from understanding a fact we are in agreement about to your conclusion which I deny?
Because it was used to justify his reckless spending before his massive financial crime was exposed. EA is good in theory, but millionaires and billionaires rarely show a true desire to help...
Because it was used to justify his reckless spending before his massive financial crime was exposed.
EA is good in theory, but millionaires and billionaires rarely show a true desire to help people, as those qualities rarely go hand in hand with what is needed to become a billionaire.
So it sounds like you have beliefs that work like this: "If X is used as a pretext for bad people to do something bad, then X solely exists for bad people to justify their bad behavior." I feel...
So it sounds like you have beliefs that work like this:
"If X is used as a pretext for bad people to do something bad, then X solely exists for bad people to justify their bad behavior."
I feel that this kind of inference is neither sound nor cogent. It neither entails nor even raises the probably of the conclusion.
Yeah I don't know, when you start telling someone how they think, that's probably a good time to dip. I don't know what EA billionaire nerve I hit, but let's agree to disagree.
Yeah I don't know, when you start telling someone how they think, that's probably a good time to dip.
I don't know what EA billionaire nerve I hit, but let's agree to disagree.
Let me, butting on from the sidelines, put it like this: Upon starting my first job earning the kind of money that enables setting something aside for later, I decided I probably want to donate a...
Let me, butting on from the sidelines, put it like this: Upon starting my first job earning the kind of money that enables setting something aside for later, I decided I probably want to donate a smidge of that. Some time previous to that, I must have heard, one way or another, of Effective Altruism. Can't have been in the context of SBF, or any other billionaire for that matter. More of a grass roots thing. So, I go look for the biggest lever by looking at a few EA and EA-adjecent organizations and what they recommend putting your money towards. The org I end up at, pretty much explicitly wearing the EA label, recommended at the time: Global poverty (among which mosquito nets in Africa), animal suffering and climate change. For each of those goals they recommend different orgs with slightly different goals and different approaches. Just today, I found they've added two more big-picture goals to their list: Safeguarding democracy and "preserving the future and AI risks". Looking into it, because I know the mere mention of AI risks will cause people to associate certain things: Their first recommendation is a broader longer-term existential risks: Pandemics, nuclear war, and yes, AI. THeir second recommendation is AI-only. AI-related disbursements from those funds are mostly towards lobbying and policysetting and less so about pouring money into AI research. This category also has roughly a tenth of the donations for this org as compared to poverty, and about a fourth of the donations to climate change. It's a small, small part of what they recommend.
That's my background with EA. I've met people who are active in EA organizations that (presumably) have even less money to give away. I've never seen/heard anyone with fuck-you money recommend or advertise EA philosophy; except perhaps indirectly Bill Gates when he talks about how he allocates his donations.
I have also occasionally read internet drama about SBF<->EA. It does not color my judgement of EA that someone else would use a good thing as a shield to deflect from their bad deeds. People do it all the time. What, is a bad person going to just declare themselves a villain? Of course they'll try to hide behind something.
So I urge you to look at this entire discussion from that perspective. In particular, I'd like to call out this statement of yours:
I don't know what EA billionaire nerve I hit
You didn't. But maybe you can now imagine what non-billionaire nerve you hit by -basically- painting my small contribution towards climate change mitigation as billionaire bootlicking. Because judging from the comments here, my EA contributions towards climate change are perpetuating a system that justifies the existence of rich people. Because I route donations through an organization that in turn routes most of its donations to addressing global poverty....???
And I get it. It's easy to go through life never hearing about EA in any capacity except billionaires shilling how morally good they are. That's understandable and I see how that would inform your views on the topic. But that's also just your perspective. To take a deliberately pointed comparison: It's similarly easy for a young man to go through their adolescence never knowingly meeting a feminist, but hearing a lot about feminism through 4chan level caricatures. That's not necessarily a good basis for decision making about feminism.
There is a difference between effective altruism and Effective Altruism. The main thrust of Effective Altruism is basically: if you have the capacity to acquire capital efficiently, then you...
There is a difference between effective altruism and Effective Altruism. The main thrust of Effective Altruism is basically: if you have the capacity to acquire capital efficiently, then you should stop being good, and acquire as much capital as possible, which you then use to pay other people to be good on your behalf. Eg. Malaria nets, which is where this line of reasoning begins but it gets derailed immediately because:
The other weird prong of EA is longtermism which is tied in somewhat closely with the kind of stupid found on lesswrong.
Longtermism is basically, we can do more to help net global happiness by accelerating AGI than we could spending those resources in reducing present suffering because future humans have equal moral weight as current humans.
So the two dovetail in this incestuous way: the best and most moral thing to do is to acquire capital, and shockingly the most moral way to spend that capital is on my hobbies rather than actual real world present day suffering alleviation.
I’m not sure if you are familiar with this movement, but check out the writing of Will MacAskill if not.
The biggest problem with EA is that people have discussed a lot of out-there ideas over the years and then someone comes along and pretends that's what EA is all about. The "earn to give" stuff is...
The biggest problem with EA is that people have discussed a lot of out-there ideas over the years and then someone comes along and pretends that's what EA is all about.
The "earn to give" stuff is certainly something that some EA websites promote, but it's only one part of EA that not everyone in EA agrees with. As is existential risk, and longtermism. Animal welfare is another big one. There are lots of causes and people don't agree on which ones are best.
The idea that if you donate a lot of money to charity then you should "stop being good" is a caricature. It's not like buying indulgences or something. (This is somewhat related to utilitarianism, but people don't need to agree with utilitarianism.)
I live in the sticks and make well below the median wage (and way below the average wage), so I can't afford to donate a lot. So it's extremely important to me that what little I can donate has as...
I live in the sticks and make well below the median wage (and way below the average wage), so I can't afford to donate a lot. So it's extremely important to me that what little I can donate has as much impact as possible, especially now that Trump shut down USAID and hundreds of thousands of people have died as a consequence. (I don't live in the US, but I am a US citizen, so I feel supremely shameful of what Trump has done even though I voted against him.)
So... I donate through an Australian effective altruist organization to combat deadly diseases in Africa and Southeast Asia. That seems to be the best way to ensure my donation, pitiful as it is, actually saves some lives.
Do you really mean it when you say you won't take anything I say seriously now that I've admitted to supporting an EA charity?
given that the second world does not currently exist and doesn't seem likely to exist any time soon, is it not better to encourage people who otherwise would not do so to donate to charities which...
I don't want to trust someone to get rich and spend their money to help the world (how well did that work with SBF?). I want a world where it is impossible to become a billionaire in the first place and everyone is able to live their lives healthy, safely and however they wish within reason.
given that the second world does not currently exist and doesn't seem likely to exist any time soon, is it not better to encourage people who otherwise would not do so to donate to charities which help people as much as possible?
EA seems to solely exist to help rich people justify being rich in a world with extreme income inequality and poverty.
I don't think a world without EA would have less rich people. the biggest difference would be tens of thousands more people in sub-saharan africa having died of malaria (among other major causes which major EA orgs like giveWell support), which seems much more important than the feelings of rich people.
I think the argument is that the rich use this as additional justification to further exploit their workers and increase wealth disparity, because the money is doing better work in their hands.
I think the argument is that the rich use this as additional justification to further exploit their workers and increase wealth disparity, because the money is doing better work in their hands.
idk I just don't find that particularly convincing. Thinking of ways to falsify this, were rich people less exploitative before EA was popularised? I don't think I've ever heard people claim...
idk I just don't find that particularly convincing. Thinking of ways to falsify this, were rich people less exploitative before EA was popularised? I don't think I've ever heard people claim something like this, but to me it seems like that would be the implication of taking the argument to be true
I disagree with that... most EA orgs I know of are pretty transparent about where their money goes, and allow even rather small donations. There's no reason for me to give up my wages to some...
I disagree with that... most EA orgs I know of are pretty transparent about where their money goes, and allow even rather small donations. There's no reason for me to give up my wages to some billionaire to then route some of that to my preferred EA org to then end up aiding the goals I support. I can just take a bigger paycheck and donate it myself, knowing that I have better control over the money and probably a tax advantage through the lack of additional intermediaries.
Like, the conspiracy that this is all to justify billionaires makes no sense if it doesn't actually need (or encourage) billionaires being in the loop kind of falls apart.
Yes, they're using it to whitewash their wealth. But they'd find another way of doing that.
Structurally, a problem with articles like this is that they are responding to bad takes on the Internet. There is an infinite supply of bad takes on the Internet. Most of us don't care about them...
Structurally, a problem with articles like this is that they are responding to bad takes on the Internet.
There is an infinite supply of bad takes on the Internet. Most of us don't care about them because we haven't read them, and often we have never heard of the people who wrote them, even if they're celebrities in some circles.
I think it's fine if you are inspired to write by bad takes on the Internet. That often motivates me too! But maybe the response should be more indirect? You could explain how something works that a lot of people don't seem to know.
I was thinking the same thing. This article feels very inside baseball, so to speak. I agree with @RNG that a few people here are making the sort of strawman arguments against veganism/effective...
I was thinking the same thing. This article feels very inside baseball, so to speak. I agree with @RNG that a few people here are making the sort of strawman arguments against veganism/effective altruism that the author rallies against, but on the other hand, the author isn't making a positive case for veganism or effective altruism in this blog post, either. It's really just a rant. Which is fine, of course, but that doesn't leave much substance to actually critique.
I've never read an article that was so in line with my opinion on effective altruism. Extreme, self righteous, uncompromising, with a level of zealotry usually reserved for the most ardent...
I've never read an article that was so in line with my opinion on effective altruism. Extreme, self righteous, uncompromising, with a level of zealotry usually reserved for the most ardent evangelists. The choice to use a subjective opinion on the morality of veganism to justify effective altruism while going after native practices is just.... so on the nose. I'm imagining the author becoming fully erect to Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons, missing any modern commentary on its sexist and racist origins. The plea to rationality while presenting none. The article works hard to misrepresent arguments for traditional ecological knowledge and indigenous food ways, and the author seemingly can not view anything outside of their world view with anything other than extreme contempt. And by doing so he has completely lost the forest to the trees. To me, the tone of the article itself is a great caution against EA.
The progressive critique of effective altruism is the same critique of all philanthropy, it leaves the fulfillment of the needs the general population to whims of the wealthy. As far as I can tell, the argument here is that EA has made large impacts towards a better future for hundreds of thousands of animals and any benefit should be applauded. That heaped with a metric fuckton of contempt for anyone who disagrees. So here in lies the rub: with EA communities the people with the money - in this case our faithful author - has full jurisdiction over what funding is spent on. Considering their extreme ideological bent, I would assume more pressing priorities for the general populace such as food security would be deprioritized in favor of mandated veganism. What progressive ideology calls for is support and benefit to all folks society, with priorities set by the collective. This runs headlong into the ethos of EA, where he with the funds knows best.
I love articles like this because the mask has slipped, the extreme views have been surfaced, and it validates that altruism is not the goal - ideological supremacy is.
Even on the vegan question we're into trolley problem territory. Are we optimizing for the health of the ecosystem or for maximum avoidance of deaths? If we're just trying to stop things from dying should we be culling species that are responsible for the most predation? They do that in japan with dolphins and whales, granted for the goal of increasing fish stocks for harvesting, not protecting, but if killing 100 dolphin saved 5000 tuna would it be worth it? Or are we optimizing for the overall health and fecundity of an ecosystem? In that case, traditional hunting practices can be beneficial to ecosystem health and population management.
Progressive support of traditional practices is that they sustainably manage natural resources, particularly when compared to modern commercial practices. We have been part of the food chain for tens of thousands of years. With traditional harvesting practices we're into the question of removing an established predator from an ecosystem. So to me our author is not concerned about ecosystem or population health, it's just numbers saved. So our author has saved 100,000 chickens from the axe, amazing. Now where are you going to have 100,000 invasive birds, bred to be as vulnerable to predation as possible, live out their days bliss? I'd argue that purchasing a chicken farm, finishing the current "crop" of chickens for their intended purpose of food, and then converting half to vegetal produce and half restored to nature would be far more altruistic. But the nuance of navigating actually beneficial solutions doesn't jive with ideological extremism.
A couple of quotes that I think best encapsulate the main point of the first two paragraphs (and they were what you were building up to it seemed like): Your issue appears to be with the tone of...
A couple of quotes that I think best encapsulate the main point of the first two paragraphs (and they were what you were building up to it seemed like):
To me, the tone of the article itself is a great caution against EA.
Your issue appears to be with the tone of the article, not the content of the article, which ironically is precisely what the article is criticizing.
I love articles like this because the mask has slipped, the extreme views have been surfaced, and it validates that altruism is not the goal - ideological supremacy is.
This is honestly a bizarre claim, I'm not even sure what to make of it.
If we're just trying to stop things from dying should we be culling species that are responsible for the most predation? They do that in japan with dolphins and whales, granted for the goal of increasing fish stocks for harvesting, not protecting, but if killing 100 dolphin saved 5000 tuna would it be worth it? Or are we optimizing for the overall health and fecundity of an ecosystem?
We kill 80,000,000,000 animals in factory farms year over year that live their lives in absolutely nightmarish conditions crafted by decades of maximizing efficiency. It's not clear what, if anything, we can do to make natural ecosystems better. One clear thing we can do is stop the torture and slaughter of 80,000,000,000 animals per year.
(edit) (just as a heads up, since I feel that the fact that top level responses are sent to one's inbox can seem aggressive, I'm not attacking you. Please understand that I'm slinging digital ink...
(edit) (just as a heads up, since I feel that the fact that top level responses are sent to one's inbox can seem aggressive, I'm not attacking you. Please understand that I'm slinging digital ink at Mr. Bulldog, and at the general concepts at play for discussion)
In wealthy countries, almost everyone could go vegan if they so chose.
Nah. I'll put as much effort into my rebuttal as this blogger did into their research ❤️
Vaguely, the argument: "Poor people are making me feel sad for making a lot of money, then donating a portion of it (for tax receipts). They need to stop hurting my feelings, or I'll stop building [1] hospitals!!"
Ooh, thank you Mr. Bulldog! That was my argument, actually: effective altruism inherently requires [2] wealth disparity, and a dysfunctional democracy, to function. It's a moral philosophy that can only exist by ceding power to the 1% of people who have sufficient wealth to make choices for the unwashed masses. Hypothetically, in a democracy, we all get one vote about how our collective country's resources are spent -- but when you hoard cash, and dole out a pittance of it for posterity, you're kinda expending 107 billion votes to my one. But I guess I should be thanking my abuser for pulling one punch out of ten?
[1]: "I" and "building" are used loosely, since the occasion is rare that an EA-enthusiast physically performs labour, given that useless occupations such as construction worker or volunteer are opportunity cost sinkholes. Obviously.
[2]: _In_effective altruism is the one where Sarah McLauchlin convinces your mom to donate one dollar to a sad puppy, taking a year to raise what Jeff Bezos makes in roughly half a day's "work".
I'm not sure why (or even if) you think food deserts falsify the claim linked. If you do, you didn't provide any reason to think this is the case. If I'm reading the comment correctly, it seems...
Nah. I'll put as much effort into my rebuttal as this blogger did into their research ❤️
I'm not sure why (or even if) you think food deserts falsify the claim linked. If you do, you didn't provide any reason to think this is the case. If I'm reading the comment correctly, it seems like you felt the article was low effort and in turn your response was low effort, which if it were me would be a good reason to think that maybe I shouldn't have posted the reply.
Vaguely, the argument: "Poor people are making me feel sad for making a lot of money, then donating a portion of it (for tax receipts). They need to stop hurting my feelings, or I'll stop building [1] hospitals!!"
This wasn't the argument; respectfully I don't think a sincere effort to honestly engage with the substance of the article was put forward.
np; I'll break down the argument a smidge for ya. The first paragraph does a decent job explaining why I can barely read this: This intro paragraph uses three rhetorical tricks in order to lend...
Exemplary
I'm not sure why (or even if) you think food deserts falsify the claim linked.
np; I'll break down the argument a smidge for ya. The first paragraph does a decent job explaining why I can barely read this:
A common talking point from leftists whenever veganism comes up is that veganism is white and privileged. These leftists see nothing wrong with eating the flesh of tortured innocent animals who didn’t want to die. What they find really objectionable is if you suggest that people should stop eating animals in a way that sets off their privilege alarm (a highly delicate instrument, never too far from going off). Similarly, the woke love to snipe at effective altruism as being white, privileged, neglecting colonialism, or whatever else the complaint of the month is.
This intro paragraph uses three rhetorical tricks in order to lend credence to a poor argument:
They group "leftists" into a monolith, in order to attack the group as a whole without addressing several of their underlying concerns (i.e. food deserts exist, so gaining access to vegan meals to begin with is difficult),
They then create a straw man argument to knock over: leftists (now addressed as a singular whole), are hypocritical ("nothing is wrong with eating the flesh of tortured innocent animals") and anti-white (you've got eyes and can see this XD),
Now that you've established your enemy as stupid, pivot to giving them another argument you want them to lose -- namely, that effective altruism is bad.
As a result, your readers get the impression that "the leftists" are a bunch of dumb people (since they argue against something as obviously wholesome as veganism), so now their arguments against effective altruism must been examined with the undertone that they're incapable of reason.
The author does this again, actually!
If you talk about veganism, you will inevitably get many complaints from leftists. They will point out that indigenous people eat animals sometimes and claim that not everyone can afford to go vegan—even though the cheapest vegan food is much cheaper than the cheapest non-vegan food. Though they eat meat for trivial pleasure, they seem to have much more to say about those who are overzealous in condemnation of the meat industry than about the industry itself.
Genuinely in my time on this great planet I have never seen a flesh and blood, real, actual living human being make this argument. I assume someone has -- eight billion people and all that -- but this is truly the strawest of strawman arguments. This is the freaking 21st century; the noble savage stereotype needs to die.
I can keep going about analyzing the article if you'd like? It's pretty much slop tbh but it's always useful to hone my literary criticism blade, so to speak. One lens I like to use for analysis like this -- which I learned from the Less Wrong forums many moons ago! -- is Schopenhauer's 38 Stratagems, or 38 Ways to Win an Argument. It's a pretty succinct list of how to be rhetorically dishonest and seem convincing!
This wasn't the argument; respectfully I don't think a sincere effort to honestly engage with the substance of the article was put forward.
Respectfully, disagreed. I'm responding to this subsection of the author's rant:
And we’ve been amazingly successful. Hundreds of thousands of children live because of effective altruists. Hundreds of millions of chickens have been spared from a cage every single year. The future is in safer hands because of the actions of EAs. And yet these spectacular, overwhelming successes are wholly ignored by the leftist critics, who prefer to make narrow ideological complaints about how EAs talk or supposed bits of EA ideology that are inessential to the core things EAs advocate.
[...]
EAs are out there giving big portions of their money to effective charities to save the lives of children. And their critics, from within the comfort of their Marxist reading groups, talk endlessly and achieve nothing. Yet they have the nerve to lecture us about our behavior. What have the EA critics achieved that can hold a candle to the good that EAs do routinely? What has all this highfalutin theory achieved?
The unspoken subtext is that we should be grateful to the rich people, exploiting systems that they perpetuate, tossing fat wads down at us. Wait, no, sorry that's actually in the text nvm:
If you criticize something that has been overwhelmingly good, then your commentary shouldn’t be exclusively critical.
[...]
We all fall short of doing as much good as we can. That’s a normal, human thing. But when you throw sand in the faces of those who consciously aim to do a lot of good, that is pathological.
In conclusion, like, I don't know what the actual substance of the article is, so it's difficult to engage with it. Roughly I think the author's reasoning goes like this:
Lefty people all universally have a bad take on veganism, which is that it's bad (?) because the Indians use all of the animal, and Indians are good.
Because this is wrong, all Lefty People takes are also wrong,
One of their takes is that effective altruism is bad, but because they're all poor and marxists and elitists, they've accomplished nothing. Proving that effective atruism is good!
But that's ... not an argument. Or at least, it's barely worth engaging in. This feels like commenting on a tumblr post.
So to address this, many leftists are effective altruists. The critique is aimed at leftists who provide awful critiques of veganism and effective altruism. This is a subset of leftists. And even...
They group "leftists" into a monolith, in order to attack the group as a whole without addressing several of their underlying concerns (i.e. food deserts exist, so gaining access to vegan meals to begin with is difficult),
They then create a straw man argument to knock over: leftists (now addressed as a singular whole), are hypocritical ("nothing is wrong with eating the flesh of tortured innocent animals") and anti-white (you've got eyes and can see this XD),
Now that you've established your enemy as stupid, pivot to giving them another argument you want them to lose -- namely, that effective altruism is bad.
As a result, your readers get the impression that "the leftists" are a bunch of dumb people (since they argue against something as obviously wholesome as veganism), so now their arguments against effective altruism must been examined with the undertone that they're incapable of reason.
So to address this, many leftists are effective altruists. The critique is aimed at leftists who provide awful critiques of veganism and effective altruism. This is a subset of leftists. And even non-EA leftist vegans constantly criticize leftists who are okay with paying for factory farmed animals, look at any leftist vegan online space.
Genuinely in my time on this great planet I have never seen a flesh and blood, real, actual living human being make this argument. I assume someone has -- eight billion people and all that -- but this is truly the strawest of strawman arguments.
I've seen this take constantly, primarily from white liberals, defending their financial support of factory farming. Also the article linked an example of someone making this exact argument...
Lefty people all universally have a bad take on veganism, which is that it's bad (?) because the Indians use all of the animal, and Indians are good.
The first clause is false for reasons I addressed. I can't even make sense of what the second clause is trying to say in the present context.
Because this is wrong, all Lefty People takes are also wrong
Can you link literally anything from the article you just read that could even possibly imply this?
One of their takes is that effective altruism is bad, but because they're all poor and marxists and elitists, they've accomplished nothing. Proving that effective atruism is good!
I'm not even sure there's anything to say about this one...
Could you quote a part of the article which indicates that it's aimed at only "leftists who provide awful critiques of veganism and effective altruism"? From my read, the author very clearly...
So to address this, many leftists are effective altruists. The critique is aimed at leftists who provide awful critiques of veganism and effective altruism. This is a subset of leftists. And even non-EA leftist vegans constantly criticize leftists who are okay with paying for factory farmed animals, look at any leftist vegan online space.
Could you quote a part of the article which indicates that it's aimed at only "leftists who provide awful critiques of veganism and effective altruism"? From my read, the author very clearly delineates between "leftists" and "Effective Altruists", and never states that there's an overlap. Maybe their other works are more precise in their wording, but I'm unfamiliar with the authorship of Mr. Bulldog?
I've seen this take constantly, primarily from white liberals, defending their financial support of factory farming. Also the article linked an example of someone making this exact argument...
Eight billion people. Because this is the Internet, I can find you a person who genuinely believes with their whole heart that the Earth is sealed under a clear dome and flies through space as our little blue disc. I'll be more specific: in the thousands of people I run into IRL -- sometimes in spaces populated very heavily by people in vegan/animal rights circles -- I have never met a single soul who pushed the rhetoric that Mr. Bulldog dug up.
Can you link literally anything from the article you just read that could even possibly imply this?
I ... literally did. That's why we're discussing the first paragraph, which creates a false equivalence between the "leftists against veganism" argument and the "leftists against effective altruism" argument. I suppose to quote it again:
(emphasis mine)
A common talking point from leftists whenever veganism comes up is that veganism is white and privileged. These leftists see nothing wrong with eating the flesh of tortured innocent animals who didn’t want to die. What they find really objectionable is if you suggest that people should stop eating animals in a way that sets off their privilege alarm (a highly delicate instrument, never too far from going off). Similarly, the woke love to snipe at effective altruism as being white, privileged, neglecting colonialism, or whatever else the complaint of the month is.
The author creates a false narrative about leftists and veganism, somehow, and then links it to their argumentation against effective altruism. Which as I noted in my lead comment, is completely different to my primary argument against it: if you're so fabulously wealthy that you can donate large sums of money to vanity charity projects, the system is broken and you are behaving inherently undemocraticly. Hey, it can be effective, idc, but it seems that the truly most effective altruism would be donating towards groups that are attempting to end the systems which make it effective to start with.
I'm not even sure there's anything to say about this one...
Hey what the heck, I'll quote the article at you:
(emphasis mine)
And their critics, from within the comfort of their Marxist reading groups, talk endlessly and achieve nothing. Yet they have the nerve to lecture us about our behavior. What have the EA critics achieved that can hold a candle to the good that EAs do routinely? What has all this highfalutin theory achieved?
And to be clear, and break down my jokey tone a bit:
"they're all poor" -> if they were rich, they could be effective altruists; alas the common folks must descend into marxism
"marxists" -> literally in the text
"elitists" -> if 'highfalutin theory' isn't anything less than a sideways glance at anti-elitism rhetoric, I don't know what to believe.
The lack of the word "all" prior to using the term? There are obviously vegan and EA leftists that Matthew Adelstein (the author) is aware of, is friends with, and has co-written with. Maybe I'm...
Could you quote a part of the article which indicates that it's aimed at only "leftists who provide awful critiques of veganism and effective altruism"? From my read, the author very clearly delineates between "leftists" and "Effective Altruists", and never states that there's an overlap. Maybe their other works are more precise in their wording, but I'm unfamiliar with the authorship of Mr. Bulldog?
The lack of the word "all" prior to using the term? There are obviously vegan and EA leftists that Matthew Adelstein (the author) is aware of, is friends with, and has co-written with. Maybe I'm biased from knowing the author in question, but he never said anywhere that this criticism is exclusively from leftists and constitutes what all leftists say. Obviously the biggest opponents of vegan causes are conservatives, but they are less hypocritical in their responses, as they are mask-off ghouls on all of their positions.
Eight billion people. Because this is the Internet, I can find you a person who genuinely believes with their whole heart that the Earth is sealed under a clear dome and flies through space as our little blue disc. I'll be more specific: in the thousands of people I run into IRL -- sometimes in spaces populated very heavily by people in vegan/animal rights circles -- I have never met a single soul who pushed the rhetoric that Mr. Bulldog dug up.
Are you a vegan? Have you ever advocated publicly for the welfare of the animals we brutalize on factory farms? I promise you, this is in the rotation of mindless criticisms aimed at vegans. I've heard this argument constantly, including from a real life leftist friend.
I ... literally did. That's why we're discussing the first paragraph, which creates a false equivalence between the "leftists against veganism" argument and the "leftists against effective altruism" argument.
The claim I was looking for some backing for was "Because this [Lefty people all universally have a bad take on veganism] is wrong, all Lefty People takes are also wrong". Maybe I'm dense, but I'm not sure how what you stated substantiated this claim. The charitable reading of your comment is that Adelstein is moving from "anti-vegan leftists are wrong about veganism" to "anti-EA leftists are wrong about EA" which I wouldn't find as objectionable as the original claim.
you can donate large sums of money to vanity charity projects, the system is broken and you are behaving inherently undemocraticly. Hey, it can be effective, idc
First, we can care about more than one thing at a time, and if you care about donating to charity at all, it seems good to care about your contributions being effective and high-impact.
it seems that the truly most effective altruism would be donating towards groups that are attempting to end the systems which make it effective to start with.
Like a Marxist revolutionary party or something? Are we not allowed to participate in charitable giving unless it is to The Correct Leftist Revolutionary Movement™ (which is, incidentally, incompatible with all other leftist revolutionary projects). I don't think we have a good reason to think there's a project like this that just a little bit of funding away from transforming the lives of the global south, the working class, and factory farmed animals, such that in expectation it does the most good to donate to them.
Fair enough! As noted, I'm completely unaware of the author's other works, so all I have to go off of are his linked words. Typically I'd assume that a professional (?) writer would make clear...
The lack of the word "all" prior to using the term? There are obviously vegan and EA leftists that Matthew Adelstein (the author) is aware of, is friends with, and has co-written with. Maybe I'm biased from knowing the author in question, but he never said anywhere that this criticism is exclusively from leftists and constitutes what all leftists say. Obviously the biggest opponents of vegan causes are conservatives, but they are less hypocritical in their responses, as they are mask-off ghouls on all of their positions.
Fair enough! As noted, I'm completely unaware of the author's other works, so all I have to go off of are his linked words. Typically I'd assume that a professional (?) writer would make clear that distinction, but I guess it's super implicit to everyone else.
Are you a vegan?
If you put a gun to my head, yep! I don't like to associate in groups, but since you're asking me a direct question, I lean further into that one that out of it. I repeatedly fail -- especially when my favourite restaurant slips ham into their tofu sandwiches (>:|) -- but I do all the vegan things (avoid meat and animal byproducts, leather, etc.). This is transgressive, but I extend forgiveness to myself (and others!) when I screw up or have to pause for a moment due to health issues (it's effectively impossible in my area to get cost effective, prepared, vegan meals, so it's oatmeal for every meal otherwise). That also goes for any prepared food with sugar as a listed ingredient, since it'll often use bone char, and eliminating everything that has not been marked with the big 'ol V is outside of my budget. Then there's veganic farming, which is not even in the same postal code as my budget!
Feel free to call me whatever you'd like, however! I've almost certainly been called worse.
The charitable reading of your comment is that Adelstein is moving from "anti-vegan leftists are wrong about veganism" to "anti-EA leftists are wrong about EA" which I wouldn't find as objectionable as the original claim.
Thank you for reading my comment charitably; I hope that we are both doing the same! I was being hyperbolic to make a point, as I felt that Mr. Bulldog (Adelstein?) was equally exaggerating his points for effect. I do not think you dense, fwiw, I just expect that I'm making unexpected arguments -- coated in a crunchy layer of sarcasm, which never helps with comprehension -- and that's likely hindering our ability to communicate.
First, we can care about more than one thing at a time, and if you care about donating to charity at all, it seems good to care about your contributions being effective and high-impact.
[...]
Like a Marxist revolutionary party or something? Are we not allowed to participate in charitable giving unless it is to The Correct Leftist Revolutionary Movement™ (which is, incidentally, incompatible with all other leftist revolutionary projects). I don't think we have a good reason to think there's a project like this that just a little bit of funding away from transforming the lives of the global south, the working class, and factory farmed animals, such that in expectation it does the most good to donate to them.
I dunno! I'm neither rich enough to be an Effective Altruist, nor a marxist, or a leftist! I'm just sitting on the sidelines musing about how a movement that promotes "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible" -- as depicted in this article, I am really not into this subculture, so maybe you can dig up some alternate views -- apparently doesn't expend effort dismantling the institutions which gave them inequal power and influence to start with. It's terribly fascinating. The implicit conclusion seems to be that the Effective Altruists' perspectives' are superior, since the alternative would be giving the power of self-direction (i.e. shitloads of money) to the rest of us, which per their stated philosophy must mean that doing so is a globally inferior alternative than deciding for them?
But yeah these are just the musings of a spectator; as an individual without a large stake in this, I'm mostly going to be swept by the wayside anyhow, so I'm just enjoying the show.
That's sufficient to identify as a vegan in my book. I don't think it's always practicable to tell if the sugar in some treat was made with bone char, but it's easy not to buy chicken nuggies or...
If you put a gun to my head, yep! I don't like to associate in groups, but since you're asking me a direct question, I lean further into that one that out of it.
That's sufficient to identify as a vegan in my book. I don't think it's always practicable to tell if the sugar in some treat was made with bone char, but it's easy not to buy chicken nuggies or buy cows' milk. By the way, this wasn't intended to be a purity test or anything, it's just my opinion that most who defend animal rights online hear the same arguments over and over again (crop deaths, too expensive, it doesn't make a difference, plants feel pain, it's racist/colonialist, food deserts, it tastes good, etc.) I'd just be surprised if anyone who has spoken up for animal rights hadn't heard it, but maybe you haven't made a concerted effort to argue with folks online.
I sincerely thank you for taking steps to reduce your contributions to animal agriculture. People who are making a concerted effort to reduce animal consumption are making a significant impact on both reducing demand for animal products and normalizing animal-free diets.
(it's effectively impossible in my area to get cost effective, prepared, vegan meals, so it's oatmeal for every meal otherwise)
I know this isn't the point of the discussion, but I am more than willing to send you some of my favorite meal prep recipes! They are super cheap, and can cook a lot of food at a time (like a weeks worth of lunches.) I recommend an InstantPot for convenience or just a rice cooker otherwise, as there's tons of options that open up for low-cost meal prep. One of my favorites is this fried rice recipe:
1 cup rinsed white rice
1.25 cup mixed veggies (usually come in 1.25 cup-sized bags for less than a buck)
.5 cup shelled edamame
1.5 cups of water
(optionally add some garlic or other spices)
Store in fridge. I like frying up leftovers in a pan with soy sauce and sesame oil if I have time! Optionally add some tofu or other vegan protein alternative (I like Just Egg), but that's optional.
apparently doesn't expend effort dismantling the institutions which gave them inequal power and influence to start with
Not everyone who donates to charity is a billionaire. Peter Singer and Will MacAskill are not billionaires. SBF was, and he was obviously a bad look for the movement, but I don't think there's anything wrong with charitable giving or prioritizing effective, high-impact charities. If you live in a western country and benefit from that, one might think you have an obligation to do something more valuable with your wealth than horde it, and none of that entails anything about what you think or support regarding the rough distribution of wealth in a society.
No OP, but there isn't comprehensive data on if vegan food systems could support earth population or even if that wouldn't come with it's own externalities like requiring more land conversion for...
I'm not sure why (or even if) you think food deserts falsify the claim linked. If you do, you didn't provide any reason to think this is the case. If I'm reading the comment correctly, it seems like you felt the article was low effort and in turn your response was low effort, which if it were me would be a good reason to think that maybe I shouldn't have posted the reply.
No OP, but there isn't comprehensive data on if vegan food systems could support earth population or even if that wouldn't come with it's own externalities like requiring more land conversion for agriculture. It's a big talking point within the mariculture community. I assume that kacey is pointing out that the author gave no evidence to back up their claims so they would only provide scant evidence to support theirs. I took it as food deserts show that vegan diets are currently inaccessible to large portions of the population so what happens to them during this mandated conversion?
Ecology degree here, plus a background in agricultural research. It has been extremely well established for decades (certainly longer than I've been alive) that animal agriculture requires far...
Exemplary
No OP, but there isn't comprehensive data on if vegan food systems could support earth population or even if that wouldn't come with it's own externalities like requiring more land conversion for agriculture. It's a big talking point within the mariculture community.
Ecology degree here, plus a background in agricultural research.
It has been extremely well established for decades (certainly longer than I've been alive) that animal agriculture requires far greater inputs —land, water, fertilizer, etc. — than plant agriculture, by about an order of magnitude depending on which trophic level we're looking at (herbivorous animals require far less input than omnivorous or carnivorous animals) and some species-specific factors (e.g., small animals, like crickets, are substantially more efficient than large animals, like cattle; likewise, not all crops are created equal).
There are some special cases where this might not be the case. For example, livestock can sometimes grown on marginal land that's not suitable for cropping. However, this accounts for only a small percentage of meat consumption (primarily practiced by subsistence farmers in developing countries) and it comes with its own host of ecological issues, like desertification, erosion, soil compaction, etc.
The math is a lot more complicated and less clearcut when we're talking about aquatic ecosystems, since those are supported to varying extents by nutrient runoff from terrestrial ecosystems, and the trophic levels get absolutely bonkers. But the great bulk of humanity is living primarily off terrestrial agriculture where the efficiency is pretty easy to work out (enough so that farmers broadly know exactly what their land's productivity will be under different kinds of crops and livestock, even if they've never grown them before).
I want to call out, I'm not trying to strawman for big ag and I'd love to see a huge reduction in the amount of animal agriculture and the type of animal agriculture, I'm just passing on what I've...
I want to call out, I'm not trying to strawman for big ag and I'd love to see a huge reduction in the amount of animal agriculture and the type of animal agriculture, I'm just passing on what I've heard pretty consistently working in the ecology adjacent space for about a decade. I went back for a masters in Coastal Science and Policy and it was a continuous heated debate between a few of my cohort that were vegan and a few of the faculty who worked in marine protected areas. The faculty's argument was that vegetation based agriculture wasn't enough to meet human nutritional needs, but that with mariculture you could effectively remove the need for terrestrial animal agriculture. This is also info from 2018 so take that with a grain of salt.
I'm all about reducing impact, and eating at lower trophic scales and so many of your points on terrestrial practices are on the nose. Even cattle that are reared on land that is not suitable for cropping - like sage grouse territory BLM land - are often sent to feed farms to fatten up for a year before slaughter (I worked on a project documenting their impact on the local sage grouse populations.) I in no way think animal ag is better than vegetation ag. But what I still haven't seen is a source that says you can meet the nutritional needs of our country or planet with just plants. I've just given it another cursory go and can't find a source that has data on that. Not asking for a lit review, but with your background if you know of literature that makes that claim I would be grateful if you'd be up for sharing it.
I myself am like 99% vegetarian, I think we radically need to rethink our food systems and think animal based factory farming is horrible. I'm piping off the way I am because of how the article is framing the need for immediate shift in our food systems without thinking about the populations that would be effected by that and the weird focus on traditional practices as a hurdle to adopting vegan systems. As an ecologist I'm sure you're familiar with Social Ecological Systems, and this pretty much flys in the face of those principals. Absolutely no shade to you, I appreciate you adding nuance and info to the discussion. But there also seems to be a lot of requests for nuance and evidence in the discussion section for an article that had none.
Chickens integrate perfectly well with crops. They're the best organic pesticide we have. Goats and Sheep are essential for producing natural fibers when trying to reduce microplastics. Not eating...
Chickens integrate perfectly well with crops. They're the best organic pesticide we have.
Goats and Sheep are essential for producing natural fibers when trying to reduce microplastics.
Not eating them at the end of their usable lifespan is wasteful.
The problem is that we expect to farm animals like corn, and to farm corn like a factory line.
Thank you for jumping out ahead of this! And yeah, I wasn't going in-depth in any of my arguments, since I didn't feel that the author did their bare minimum of performing adequate research to...
Thank you for jumping out ahead of this! And yeah, I wasn't going in-depth in any of my arguments, since I didn't feel that the author did their bare minimum of performing adequate research to establish their baseline premises.
I would note that I have a slightly different take? I haven't dug into the agricultural side of veganism, and was focused more on the practicalities of immediately converting diets of at least ~18 million people in the USA -- that they can't get access to any decent quality ingredients, on the regular, let alone vegan ingredients. But I should add the agricultural perspective to my reading list, too, thank you for the suggestion!
Can you link to where the author talked about a mandated conversion? The point is that the majority of people in wealthy countries do not have to purchase factory farmed animal products. Also, the...
I took it as food deserts show that vegan diets are currently inaccessible to large portions of the population so what happens to them during this mandated conversion?
Can you link to where the author talked about a mandated conversion? The point is that the majority of people in wealthy countries do not have to purchase factory farmed animal products. Also, the cheapest and most ubiquitous food options don't come from animals (rice, beans, vegetables, lentils, etc.) So two main points I have:
No reason at all was given for why we should think food deserts mean some people have to purchase factory farmed animal products. If anything, given that plant-based foods are among the cheapest and most widely available, they should be in at least as good of a position as the average westerner
If I'm wrong about the previous point, this doesn't address the previous claim that the majority of people in wealthy countries can go vegan if they wanted to
I think one major problem is that I think it's pretty safe to say that more or less only the right uses the term 'woke' anymore, so having that word in the title, especially with a critical tone,...
I think one major problem is that I think it's pretty safe to say that more or less only the right uses the term 'woke' anymore, so having that word in the title, especially with a critical tone, automatically throws up alarm bells that this is not the left (or even the center) doing good-faith criticism.
For all the hot water I get myself in about using new terms, I can't help but cling to woke (positive). In its original sense, it's playfully self-congratulatory, very apt/easy to explain, and...
For all the hot water I get myself in about using new terms, I can't help but cling to woke (positive). In its original sense, it's playfully self-congratulatory, very apt/easy to explain, and doesn't really imply anything negative about anyone but racists and their power structures. In the short period where it just meant "progressive (positive)", it lost some charm, but now that fascists are going around acting triggered by alarm clocks and labeling taxation as woke, it has become an excellent bait term for the purposes of disrupting the language of right wing propaganda in one-on-one conversations. The moral panic is so transparent that all but true blue fascists immediately deflate once they're defending some of it.
It's an AAVE term that absolutely has a strong positive association. Super annoying that people in online spaces have been co-opting it and twisting it into something it's not, but it's hardly the...
It's an AAVE term that absolutely has a strong positive association. Super annoying that people in online spaces have been co-opting it and twisting it into something it's not, but it's hardly the first time (e.g., look at how people use "bro" to dismiss and insult groups they don't like).
I know language is dynamic and blah blah blah, but I do really wish people would stop assigning negative meanings to positive AAVE terms.
It's the right's one trick: tell you that CRT/DEI/woke/etc is dangerous and then call as much as possible by that term derogatorily and use that to get people to ban everything you don't like....
It's the right's one trick: tell you that CRT/DEI/woke/etc is dangerous and then call as much as possible by that term derogatorily and use that to get people to ban everything you don't like. Telling kids that slavery was bad? Woke CRT! BANNED!
But yeah woke has the twist of it being co-opted too. Just not only in online spaces unfortunately.
I agree with the overall sentiment of the article. I think the arguments in favor of veganism are so sound—and, moreover, if those arguments are correct, then their ethical implications are so...
I agree with the overall sentiment of the article. I think the arguments in favor of veganism are so sound—and, moreover, if those arguments are correct, then their ethical implications are so damning—that basically every common argument against veganism is both comically bad and also a transparent psychological defense mechanism.
But this article strikes me more as a single slap in a particular slap fight than a reasoned defense of veganism. Maybe that's an unreasonable critique—maybe the article never purported to be a reasonable defense of veganism—but, even so, I don't really see its value. Very short on light and very long on heat.
(That said, it did point me to this article on "reasonable moods", which I find very compelling in general, even if I'm skeptical of some of its specific claims.)
Sidenote: All I know about effective altruism I read from Scott Alexander. From what I understand main idea is "if possible, make a donation, to help others in maximum way now or in the future"....
Sidenote:
All I know about effective altruism I read from Scott Alexander.
From what I understand main idea is "if possible, make a donation, to help others in maximum way now or in the future". Help can include donating money to charity by your choice, donating kidney to stranger in need, or helping in some other way. He (Scott Alexander) sometime post a list of charities/fonds to which he thinks make sense to donate. Sometime it's different medical research facilities, AI safety groups, and other research fonds.
I see nothing wrong here? In the end it's just a donation, and nothing wrong with idea to try to do a maximum good with it. It's your decision to donate or not, and donate to whom in the end.
You could make a start by adding the
woketag to your filters.Nah, I think @mycketforvirrad was being serious, the timing was just funny given the other thread.
Fucking lol. Great timing!
I don't get what you mean by great timing? Or fucking lol? Any of this? It doesn't make sense as a response to the comment?
It feels like you're responding in a "sick burn!" way
Edit: I cannot believe I have to specify but I only care about nukeman's answer to this as it's a question about their meaning, and it's a genuine question as this seems weird and out of character for you.
Sorry for the confusion, I think @mycketforvirrad was being serious with their suggestion, the timing and specifics of it were just funny given the other thread (which I’ve been lurking from afar).
Ok it felt off in tone as then did the other replies to me by the other poster. Appreciate the clarification
mycketforvirrad is the tag man
Yeah but that tag was already there before mycket's and nukeman's comment doesn't make any sense to me, hence me asking them what they meant.
the tag man showed up to reply to a comment about filtering a tag to suggest a tag that the tag man tagged before the comment about filtering a tag was tagged by the tag man with the tag man's reply
Yeah, ok so I'm going to ignore people who aren't the person who I asked about their intentions answering a question that wasn't for them and then being weird about it.
thank you
Thank you for the breakdown (it accurately depicts my experience and opinion as well).
I've gotten into a habit where I don't usually click links until there's some amount of discussion about the content here on Tildes. Especially if the title includes language that already makes it fairly likely that it isn't a high quality piece.
In this case it worked very well. I haven't read this article and never will, and by reading the conversation here I can be fairly certain I didn't miss out on anything important. Not only did I successfully avoid low quality content - I also got to read some insightful, thought-provoking and educational comments here that are certainly of value to me! For example, I had no idea "woke" used to have neutral or even positive connotations!
This is one of the main reasons why I love Tildes so much: for once an online hive mind seems to be working in ways that are beneficial to me. (Not every time, but generally speaking this holds true more often than it doesn't.)
I do sometimes wish that topics could be given the noise label just like comments. But such a feature could easily be abused by some resident hotheads and providing some sort of reasoning for criticism is important, so I think I prefer the system as it is now. When a few different users disagree on some content's validity and exchange some words about it, it's usually quite easy for me to gauge whether or not said content is something I want to expose myself to.
I don't know if there is a faster way to make me not take anything you have to say seriously than if you are a proponent of effective altruism. EA seems to solely exist to help rich people justify being rich in a world with extreme income inequality and poverty.
I don't want to trust someone to get rich and spend their money to help the world (how well did that work with SBF?). I want a world where it is impossible to become a billionaire in the first place and everyone is able to live their lives healthy, safely and however they wish within reason.
To me there’s a difference between effective altruism (focus on giving to effective, high-impact charities) and Effective Altruism (what you describe). I’d never heard of the latter being a definition of EA until I came to Tildes.
It basically blew up as a discussion point with FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried as he was pretty obviously one of the poster children for the latter definition and in the media's brief love affair with him it put even more of a spotlight the whole discussion. Naturally whatever sane discussions that were being had were not the focus.
EA reminds me of some other "views" like rationalism or to go farther randian stuff.
It's the sort of thing where the cliff notes or core concept basically boil down to "yeah that's an interesting discussion point and thing to think about", however the people who seem to use it as a core point of their identity often do so to justify some behavior they don't want to admit might just possibly be harmful/selfish/batshit insane. Hell to throw grease on the fire I'd argue much the same about the hyper woke crowd as well.
That's fair. I suppose I cannot say with certainty that it's all bad. Maybe I have been poisoned by SBF and general hatred for tech bro billionaires.
I’ll borrow a definition from the nuclear sector:
How does this relate to effective altruism? Silicon Valley folks tend to be early adopters of a lot of things/ideas, and EA is one of them. As artificial intelligence became more prominent in the tech sector, folks made the calculation that AI risk = (20-99%) x BAD = a very high risk of an AI catastrophe. Basically, they assumed the risk of an AI catastrophe was very high, potentially risking billions or trillions of future lives, or all of humanity. With those stakes, it’s very easy to justify doing anything to stop it (including donating a lot of money to AI safety charities). Personally, I think the probability is much lower, and that the bed nets are a more effective charitable contribution.
The whole "obviously we must invest our millions into AI" outcome is absolutely one of my reasons for disliking "EA" vs the concept of donating to charities that are effective in their use of money like you describe. The former has absolutely poisoned the well for me against the use of the term for the latter. That and the idea that they're worth too much to volunteer their time as much as their money.
Like for example, the No One Dies Alone program, where the local hospital calls if they have someone with no family or family who cannot make it to the bedside so that people receiving hospice/end of life care aren't alone. The idea that this is not a worthwhile use of time because it's inefficient is pretty anathema to my sense of human dignity and respect (and to connect to the article, it's pretty much entirely unrelated to my feelings about non-human animals). It may certainly not be in someone's skill set, but I think that's why I don't trust the people reducing this down to a math equation to make those judgements about worth and value vs engaging with something they care about.
Like I found a post arguing about the dollar equivalent of donating blood and that since it's very likely someone else will donate, it's a waste of their time/resources. Like, that's certainly not an argument that can be universalized - it becomes the bystander effect for an entire population.
Idk that's why I don't like it as someone on the left.
About these particular examples of EA that give me the ick:
Something clicked for me based on a comment about how "if people are saving thousands of lives they must be categorically better, and that would be bad so they must be evil" as a weird strawman of what "woke leftists" or whoever think. About why the reduction to numbers bothers me, because even if it was a useful way to think, it's deeply dishonest.
They want credit for saving so many lives via their indirect donations, but don't want the blame, the deduction, the red negative number for all the indirect harm they've done. That whole calculation of how many people has [Billionaire] killed to be a billionaire, in fractions of time lost because they made many people worse off. We can probably quantify how many people Musk indirectly killed through USAID cuts alone.
They reduce everything to a math equation and don't account for any of the debits to their account. You can give a kidney and then advocate eugenics talking points to thousands of people and surely there is some sort of negative to the positive. And then they assign a weight, a multiplier, to AI that means nothing else matters.
It's just reducing humans to math, but then it's cooking the books. If AI is Y * eleventy bajillion, then who cares who I hurt, and helping one person is pointless. It's possible to talk about efficacy in donations without sounding like a villain, and they're failing at it.
I very much agres that this zero-sum game "we need to maximise efficienty on everything" mentality is not great. I personally do like effective altruism, but more of the Rutger Bergman style I suppose, which is more "if you donate and want to help people, stop and think about how effective your donation is". Things like lobbying for leadless paint > funding for more cancer research. Not because that is bad, but because there is already enough resources allocated on solving that problem.
That being said, I still think donating to causes you personally feel connected to, or are local to you is good, I do it myself. Is donating to FOSS the most effective donation I could make? No, but I care so I do it anyway. I think of ea as a sort of diversification of my donations.
I don't know who Rutger Berman is but I agree, I just think that the name is tainted pretty heavily by classist people doing their best to reduce humanity to economics and then to somehow "win" it alongside the ones who just only think about solving the AI slave rebellion before it happens and/or creating the perfect AI slave to fix our problems for us. (I've seen both arguments, idk.)
Something like charity navigator or whatever is great, but like, someone needs to donate and volunteer at animal shelters too. It's not just all malaria nets ya know?
Rutger Bregman wrote the non-fiction book Humankind (and other stuff that I haven't read).
I don't know anything about the person, but I very much recommend Humankind to every... human! I learned, for example, that as part of my education I received skewed information on studies that ostensibly "show" how callous and power-hungry humans are. The basic premise of the book is that humans are much more cooperative and caring than we are usually led to believe and the evidence for that is everywhere we look. We're just not taught to see it.
Ah thanks for the rec, for whatever reason, reading through a summary I think I'm aware of the major things he discusses in the book (and already have a fundamentally positive perspective about humanity, barring a few bad days). But I'll keep an eye out and snag it if it goes on sale.
Rebecca Solnit also did good work demonstrating patterns of generosity in her book A paradise built in hell.
Actually, I've been looking for something like this to read. Thanks for the rec!
He's written some more great works, and the publishing company he's a part of, The Correspondent, publishes many other great non-fiction works as well. The thing I was referring to was the "Moral Ambition" movement, where they try to encourage people with ambitious but morally gray jobs (think McKinsey and co) and puts them to do good for the world, like the lead paint initiative I mentioned, or lobbying against Big Tabacco.
(This is a tangent about Charity Navigator.)
Having worked with nonprofits who cared deeply about their score, I find that Charity Navigator is a great tool, but its usefulness really depends on whether nonprofits fit the specific model that they're expecting. One spent almost all of its money on programs that involved a lot of easily categorized external labor and costs, and it had a great Charity Navigator score because CN cares about admin vs. program costs. A second was primarily an advocacy group for a given demographic's interests, and so had a very large communications department relative to its size. It meant that they could easily have a press release out to all of the local news outlets within hours of any event that was relevant to their interests, could provide soundbites and interviews to reporters, had staff to table at events, talked regularly to all of the local politicians, etc, etc. But it wasn't labeled as "program" work, because it wasn't about a particular program, it was just everything about how their organization operated and handled by internal staff. And their CN score was poor because they hadn't consistently done their accounting in a way that CN wanted to see it.
Was the one with a better score a better place to donate because their score was 20 points higher? It depends on your priorities, sure, but I wouldn't say that they were significantly more effective for having a higher score, they were just easier to measure and fit more easily into Charity Navigator's heuristic.
And beyond that, the efficacy of an organization that doesn't serve your interests is kind of irrelevant. If you love dogs and are indifferent to people getting malaria, a local pet shelter can be the choice that's right for you. Charity benefits from thoughtfulness.
Seems Goodhart's law is as applicable as ever, haha.
Funnily enough, it's one of the big reasons I dislike effective altruism as a concept. The idea of ensuring efforts to do good are effective is a nice one, but it almost immediately runs into the problem of "what does 'effective' mean?" And woah man if that isn't a tough question. One for which it seems to happen all too often – in an EA context, anyway – that someone fools themselves by thinking they've found the one, true, final answer.
Yep that's fair, I definitely was making the offhand reference because I know it's more complicated than that but I appreciate the detail
I would agree with your assumption and that AI is over blown as they need to keep selling it to us to justify all of the money they keep setting on fire. This would be one example of an issue I have with a fundamental part of EA. That it is better for them to make a ton of money and hire 1000 doctors than to become a doctor themselves. Out of touch billionaires tend to not be the best judge of how to spend their money to help people.
The reason it might seem this way is that donating money to charity is largely a rich-people problem and if you don't have a lot of money yourself, advising people who do have money is a great way to have more impact.
That's a characteristic of the nature of charity work rather than EA in particular. Charitable foundations are started by rich people and young people interested in charity might go work for them.
That's also true of government and business: you can control or influence the spending of money that's not yours.
It's like the story of what a famous bank robber said when asked why he robbed banks: "that's where the money is."
It's also possible to raise money from small donations, but it's a lot more work. Politicians will do it to avoid accusations of being funded by the rich.
I think the "earn to give" stuff is misunderstood. Realistically, a lot of people who set out to be software engineers or whatever aren't going to quit their jobs and go to work at a low-paying job that supposedly does more good. And it might not be a good idea anyway if it's not what they're good at.
Perhaps giving money to charity is second-best, but it beats not doing it.
Justifying inequality is not what EA is about. It's about being practical. We can imagine a very different world, but it's not very relevant when you're deciding what to do in this world. If you're trying to get things done, putting "first, let's have a revolution" as step one of your plan means you never get to step two.
I'll also point out that convincing rich people to give money to poor people is working against inequality. It's not enough to prevent inequality because the forces working in the other direction are very strong. But it will matter a lot to the people it helps.
The purpose of a system is what it does
Counterpoint: Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does
This article starts by imploring me to consider various, deliberately unfairly constructed claims,1 and expects me to immediately drop my positions from that alone. This is a reversible argument:
The purpose of a cancer hospital is to make money off cancer treatments.
The purpose of a military is to defend state power by sending the nation's people to die at the government's discretion. This one's extra loaded, because by making a counterpoint, I am made to seem as though I like Russia.
The purpose of the current British government is to test the waters over how it might further increase state control over citizenry, and back off to find subtler ones if sufficiently severe opposition forms.
The purpose of the New York bus system is to emit whatever carbon dioxide it shall, without care for improving it.
The entire point of POSIWID is that you cannot claim a system is intended to do something which is constantly fails to do. It's not a matter of meeting 99% of a goal instead of 100% of one, it's a matter of "you say you want to do this, but your efforts are negligent if not outright counter to that." Courtesy of Wikipedia, we get a far better example than anything Scott has provided:
The word "high" is present in that sentence, and it is relevant. Am I to drop POSIWID as a concept entirely, just because a qualifier like that was needed? No, because I can still recognize the utility of it. And as for the article's deeply flawed examples, I can understand that any axiom can be found to have holes if you create a ridiculous environment specifically designed to fail it.
The purpose of effective altruism is to justify inequality. Maybe you didn't want it to be that. But what people have done with the label is more important to its meaning than your personal beliefs are — if you wish to adhere to the principles that no longer fit that term, that's your prerogative, but I recommend using different words.
1. Scott's attempt to reinforce his list as fair by failing to find substantive discussion on Twitter of all places is doing nothing to improve my perception of his article.
It seems obvious that both statements are unfair?
You're proving Scott's point. Anyone can play this game to prove anything they like. Finding a way to use this game to prove something that's true doesn't help, because you can prove just about anything. It's a way to make up any purpose you want.
This is similar to proof by contradiction in mathematics.
You are taking the parts of my post designed to point out Scott's poor rhetoric1 and then responding to them as though they are my primary argument defending POSIWID, while ignoring the parts that are actually my primary points. As a matter of convenience, I'll quote the important parts in question:
POSIWID has utility. It is a recognition of a large disparity between stated goals and actual results. Just because you could theoretically extend it to an absurd situation doesn't make any of that untrue.
1. Incidentally, I don't actually find my rephrasings of those terribly unfair. A for-profit cancer hospital really is exactly that, for example.
Why not? Intentions and results are logically distinct. People fail to do what they intend all the time.
It seems like you're asserting that it's a useful phase, but you haven't shown that it's useful other than as a misleading rhetorical move.
It's true that you might be suspicious that when a system that fails to achieve its supposed purpose, that purpose is just an empty phrase. Many company slogans are empty. It might be worth investigating. But suspicions aren't proof and repeating a catch-phrase doesn't actually turn it into proof.
People and systems are very different things. People's intentions are applied differently than the way systems intentions are applied; a person can generate an intention independently and tell you it, whereas a system – being as it has no will – must have intent applied to it from without.1 This brings us full circle to why the phrase is useful, though: It lets us easily point out how a given intent is inappropriate to apply to a given system.
Naturally, you'll get awkward results if you try to apply a systems-focused rhetorical device to a person instead.
Strictly speaking, no, it doesn't. Luckily for POSIWID, it's supposed to be a heuristic, not a proof. Secondarily, a great deal of rhetoric people use is not proof, nor does it come with any. That's pretty normal, and is not specific to this. Nevertheless, analysis does not require proof to be meaningful.
1. People operating within or for a system still qualify as this, as they are not themselves the system.
I don't think it's much of heuristic and maybe we should be more cautious about attributing intentions to a system. In computing, it's often unwarranted anthropomorphism. The people working on a system (or as part of a system) may have intentions, and sometimes they conflict.
We aren't:
If you're genuinely confused, just go back to the original phrasing, to whit: "Purpose of a system." I only used the word "intent" as you brought it up, and it is often used as a roundabout way to refer to the same thing.
My previous comment was about how the intent of people and the purpose of a system were different things.
At this point however, this discussion is getting very unnecessarily focused on semantics. I find that's often an indicator as to when a discussion has lost its value, and I'm circling my points a lot besides. So past this point, agree to disagree.
This linked article seems the exact type of thing that 286437714 was highlighting elsewhere under this post, even down to the twitter examples. I found it a fascinating that the author was disappointed in the examples they found on twitter, as if twitter could ever be more thoughtful and considered than the kind of rage bait you get with the platform’s algorithm and userbase.
Yeah, I wouldn't have shared the article except that it was so on-point. I don't think that slogan is repeated very often? Although, it does have a Wikipedia page.
I don't think relevancy is a good reason to share a bad article.
Can you provide some reason, any reason at all, to think this is true? The idea is that if we are to give to charity, we should try to maximize the positive impact of that donation, which seems like that's a good idea.
I'm not sure why one would think that'd be incompatible with effective altruism.
Sure, Sam Bankman-Fried and the network around him that tried to convince us he is a genius.
So I'm confused on how this inference works. We have this fact (that I agree with) that:
How does that give us a reason to think that EA solely exists to help rich people justify being rich in a world with extreme income inequality and poverty? How does this inference work, what kind of inference is this? How do we move from understanding a fact we are in agreement about to your conclusion which I deny?
Because it was used to justify his reckless spending before his massive financial crime was exposed.
EA is good in theory, but millionaires and billionaires rarely show a true desire to help people, as those qualities rarely go hand in hand with what is needed to become a billionaire.
So it sounds like you have beliefs that work like this:
"If X is used as a pretext for bad people to do something bad, then X solely exists for bad people to justify their bad behavior."
I feel that this kind of inference is neither sound nor cogent. It neither entails nor even raises the probably of the conclusion.
Yeah I don't know, when you start telling someone how they think, that's probably a good time to dip.
I don't know what EA billionaire nerve I hit, but let's agree to disagree.
Let me, butting on from the sidelines, put it like this: Upon starting my first job earning the kind of money that enables setting something aside for later, I decided I probably want to donate a smidge of that. Some time previous to that, I must have heard, one way or another, of Effective Altruism. Can't have been in the context of SBF, or any other billionaire for that matter. More of a grass roots thing. So, I go look for the biggest lever by looking at a few EA and EA-adjecent organizations and what they recommend putting your money towards. The org I end up at, pretty much explicitly wearing the EA label, recommended at the time: Global poverty (among which mosquito nets in Africa), animal suffering and climate change. For each of those goals they recommend different orgs with slightly different goals and different approaches. Just today, I found they've added two more big-picture goals to their list: Safeguarding democracy and "preserving the future and AI risks". Looking into it, because I know the mere mention of AI risks will cause people to associate certain things: Their first recommendation is a broader longer-term existential risks: Pandemics, nuclear war, and yes, AI. THeir second recommendation is AI-only. AI-related disbursements from those funds are mostly towards lobbying and policysetting and less so about pouring money into AI research. This category also has roughly a tenth of the donations for this org as compared to poverty, and about a fourth of the donations to climate change. It's a small, small part of what they recommend.
That's my background with EA. I've met people who are active in EA organizations that (presumably) have even less money to give away. I've never seen/heard anyone with fuck-you money recommend or advertise EA philosophy; except perhaps indirectly Bill Gates when he talks about how he allocates his donations.
I have also occasionally read internet drama about SBF<->EA. It does not color my judgement of EA that someone else would use a good thing as a shield to deflect from their bad deeds. People do it all the time. What, is a bad person going to just declare themselves a villain? Of course they'll try to hide behind something.
So I urge you to look at this entire discussion from that perspective. In particular, I'd like to call out this statement of yours:
You didn't. But maybe you can now imagine what non-billionaire nerve you hit by -basically- painting my small contribution towards climate change mitigation as billionaire bootlicking. Because judging from the comments here, my EA contributions towards climate change are perpetuating a system that justifies the existence of rich people. Because I route donations through an organization that in turn routes most of its donations to addressing global poverty....???
And I get it. It's easy to go through life never hearing about EA in any capacity except billionaires shilling how morally good they are. That's understandable and I see how that would inform your views on the topic. But that's also just your perspective. To take a deliberately pointed comparison: It's similarly easy for a young man to go through their adolescence never knowingly meeting a feminist, but hearing a lot about feminism through 4chan level caricatures. That's not necessarily a good basis for decision making about feminism.
There is a difference between effective altruism and Effective Altruism. The main thrust of Effective Altruism is basically: if you have the capacity to acquire capital efficiently, then you should stop being good, and acquire as much capital as possible, which you then use to pay other people to be good on your behalf. Eg. Malaria nets, which is where this line of reasoning begins but it gets derailed immediately because:
The other weird prong of EA is longtermism which is tied in somewhat closely with the kind of stupid found on lesswrong.
Longtermism is basically, we can do more to help net global happiness by accelerating AGI than we could spending those resources in reducing present suffering because future humans have equal moral weight as current humans.
So the two dovetail in this incestuous way: the best and most moral thing to do is to acquire capital, and shockingly the most moral way to spend that capital is on my hobbies rather than actual real world present day suffering alleviation.
I’m not sure if you are familiar with this movement, but check out the writing of Will MacAskill if not.
The biggest problem with EA is that people have discussed a lot of out-there ideas over the years and then someone comes along and pretends that's what EA is all about.
The "earn to give" stuff is certainly something that some EA websites promote, but it's only one part of EA that not everyone in EA agrees with. As is existential risk, and longtermism. Animal welfare is another big one. There are lots of causes and people don't agree on which ones are best.
The idea that if you donate a lot of money to charity then you should "stop being good" is a caricature. It's not like buying indulgences or something. (This is somewhat related to utilitarianism, but people don't need to agree with utilitarianism.)
I live in the sticks and make well below the median wage (and way below the average wage), so I can't afford to donate a lot. So it's extremely important to me that what little I can donate has as much impact as possible, especially now that Trump shut down USAID and hundreds of thousands of people have died as a consequence. (I don't live in the US, but I am a US citizen, so I feel supremely shameful of what Trump has done even though I voted against him.)
So... I donate through an Australian effective altruist organization to combat deadly diseases in Africa and Southeast Asia. That seems to be the best way to ensure my donation, pitiful as it is, actually saves some lives.
Do you really mean it when you say you won't take anything I say seriously now that I've admitted to supporting an EA charity?
given that the second world does not currently exist and doesn't seem likely to exist any time soon, is it not better to encourage people who otherwise would not do so to donate to charities which help people as much as possible?
I don't think a world without EA would have less rich people. the biggest difference would be tens of thousands more people in sub-saharan africa having died of malaria (among other major causes which major EA orgs like giveWell support), which seems much more important than the feelings of rich people.
I think the argument is that the rich use this as additional justification to further exploit their workers and increase wealth disparity, because the money is doing better work in their hands.
idk I just don't find that particularly convincing. Thinking of ways to falsify this, were rich people less exploitative before EA was popularised? I don't think I've ever heard people claim something like this, but to me it seems like that would be the implication of taking the argument to be true
I disagree with that... most EA orgs I know of are pretty transparent about where their money goes, and allow even rather small donations. There's no reason for me to give up my wages to some billionaire to then route some of that to my preferred EA org to then end up aiding the goals I support. I can just take a bigger paycheck and donate it myself, knowing that I have better control over the money and probably a tax advantage through the lack of additional intermediaries.
Like, the conspiracy that this is all to justify billionaires makes no sense if it doesn't actually need (or encourage) billionaires being in the loop kind of falls apart.
Yes, they're using it to whitewash their wealth. But they'd find another way of doing that.
Structurally, a problem with articles like this is that they are responding to bad takes on the Internet.
There is an infinite supply of bad takes on the Internet. Most of us don't care about them because we haven't read them, and often we have never heard of the people who wrote them, even if they're celebrities in some circles.
I think it's fine if you are inspired to write by bad takes on the Internet. That often motivates me too! But maybe the response should be more indirect? You could explain how something works that a lot of people don't seem to know.
I was thinking the same thing. This article feels very inside baseball, so to speak. I agree with @RNG that a few people here are making the sort of strawman arguments against veganism/effective altruism that the author rallies against, but on the other hand, the author isn't making a positive case for veganism or effective altruism in this blog post, either. It's really just a rant. Which is fine, of course, but that doesn't leave much substance to actually critique.
I've never read an article that was so in line with my opinion on effective altruism. Extreme, self righteous, uncompromising, with a level of zealotry usually reserved for the most ardent evangelists. The choice to use a subjective opinion on the morality of veganism to justify effective altruism while going after native practices is just.... so on the nose. I'm imagining the author becoming fully erect to Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons, missing any modern commentary on its sexist and racist origins. The plea to rationality while presenting none. The article works hard to misrepresent arguments for traditional ecological knowledge and indigenous food ways, and the author seemingly can not view anything outside of their world view with anything other than extreme contempt. And by doing so he has completely lost the forest to the trees. To me, the tone of the article itself is a great caution against EA.
The progressive critique of effective altruism is the same critique of all philanthropy, it leaves the fulfillment of the needs the general population to whims of the wealthy. As far as I can tell, the argument here is that EA has made large impacts towards a better future for hundreds of thousands of animals and any benefit should be applauded. That heaped with a metric fuckton of contempt for anyone who disagrees. So here in lies the rub: with EA communities the people with the money - in this case our faithful author - has full jurisdiction over what funding is spent on. Considering their extreme ideological bent, I would assume more pressing priorities for the general populace such as food security would be deprioritized in favor of mandated veganism. What progressive ideology calls for is support and benefit to all folks society, with priorities set by the collective. This runs headlong into the ethos of EA, where he with the funds knows best.
I love articles like this because the mask has slipped, the extreme views have been surfaced, and it validates that altruism is not the goal - ideological supremacy is.
Even on the vegan question we're into trolley problem territory. Are we optimizing for the health of the ecosystem or for maximum avoidance of deaths? If we're just trying to stop things from dying should we be culling species that are responsible for the most predation? They do that in japan with dolphins and whales, granted for the goal of increasing fish stocks for harvesting, not protecting, but if killing 100 dolphin saved 5000 tuna would it be worth it? Or are we optimizing for the overall health and fecundity of an ecosystem? In that case, traditional hunting practices can be beneficial to ecosystem health and population management.
Progressive support of traditional practices is that they sustainably manage natural resources, particularly when compared to modern commercial practices. We have been part of the food chain for tens of thousands of years. With traditional harvesting practices we're into the question of removing an established predator from an ecosystem. So to me our author is not concerned about ecosystem or population health, it's just numbers saved. So our author has saved 100,000 chickens from the axe, amazing. Now where are you going to have 100,000 invasive birds, bred to be as vulnerable to predation as possible, live out their days bliss? I'd argue that purchasing a chicken farm, finishing the current "crop" of chickens for their intended purpose of food, and then converting half to vegetal produce and half restored to nature would be far more altruistic. But the nuance of navigating actually beneficial solutions doesn't jive with ideological extremism.
A couple of quotes that I think best encapsulate the main point of the first two paragraphs (and they were what you were building up to it seemed like):
Your issue appears to be with the tone of the article, not the content of the article, which ironically is precisely what the article is criticizing.
This is honestly a bizarre claim, I'm not even sure what to make of it.
We kill 80,000,000,000 animals in factory farms year over year that live their lives in absolutely nightmarish conditions crafted by decades of maximizing efficiency. It's not clear what, if anything, we can do to make natural ecosystems better. One clear thing we can do is stop the torture and slaughter of 80,000,000,000 animals per year.
(edit) (just as a heads up, since I feel that the fact that top level responses are sent to one's inbox can seem aggressive, I'm not attacking you. Please understand that I'm slinging digital ink at Mr. Bulldog, and at the general concepts at play for discussion)
Several reactions 🎉
To quote Inigo Montoya ...
Nah. I'll put as much effort into my rebuttal as this blogger did into their research ❤️
Ooh, thank you Mr. Bulldog! That was my argument, actually: effective altruism inherently requires [2] wealth disparity, and a dysfunctional democracy, to function. It's a moral philosophy that can only exist by ceding power to the 1% of people who have sufficient wealth to make choices for the unwashed masses. Hypothetically, in a democracy, we all get one vote about how our collective country's resources are spent -- but when you hoard cash, and dole out a pittance of it for posterity, you're kinda expending 107 billion votes to my one. But I guess I should be thanking my abuser for pulling one punch out of ten?
[1]: "I" and "building" are used loosely, since the occasion is rare that an EA-enthusiast physically performs labour, given that useless occupations such as construction worker or volunteer are opportunity cost sinkholes. Obviously.
[2]: _In_effective altruism is the one where Sarah McLauchlin convinces your mom to donate one dollar to a sad puppy, taking a year to raise what Jeff Bezos makes in roughly half a day's "work".
I'm not sure why (or even if) you think food deserts falsify the claim linked. If you do, you didn't provide any reason to think this is the case. If I'm reading the comment correctly, it seems like you felt the article was low effort and in turn your response was low effort, which if it were me would be a good reason to think that maybe I shouldn't have posted the reply.
This wasn't the argument; respectfully I don't think a sincere effort to honestly engage with the substance of the article was put forward.
np; I'll break down the argument a smidge for ya. The first paragraph does a decent job explaining why I can barely read this:
This intro paragraph uses three rhetorical tricks in order to lend credence to a poor argument:
As a result, your readers get the impression that "the leftists" are a bunch of dumb people (since they argue against something as obviously wholesome as veganism), so now their arguments against effective altruism must been examined with the undertone that they're incapable of reason.
The author does this again, actually!
Genuinely in my time on this great planet I have never seen a flesh and blood, real, actual living human being make this argument. I assume someone has -- eight billion people and all that -- but this is truly the strawest of strawman arguments. This is the freaking 21st century; the noble savage stereotype needs to die.
I can keep going about analyzing the article if you'd like? It's pretty much slop tbh but it's always useful to hone my literary criticism blade, so to speak. One lens I like to use for analysis like this -- which I learned from the Less Wrong forums many moons ago! -- is Schopenhauer's 38 Stratagems, or 38 Ways to Win an Argument. It's a pretty succinct list of how to be rhetorically dishonest and seem convincing!
Respectfully, disagreed. I'm responding to this subsection of the author's rant:
The unspoken subtext is that we should be grateful to the rich people, exploiting systems that they perpetuate, tossing fat wads down at us. Wait, no, sorry that's actually in the text nvm:
In conclusion, like, I don't know what the actual substance of the article is, so it's difficult to engage with it. Roughly I think the author's reasoning goes like this:
But that's ... not an argument. Or at least, it's barely worth engaging in. This feels like commenting on a tumblr post.
So to address this, many leftists are effective altruists. The critique is aimed at leftists who provide awful critiques of veganism and effective altruism. This is a subset of leftists. And even non-EA leftist vegans constantly criticize leftists who are okay with paying for factory farmed animals, look at any leftist vegan online space.
I've seen this take constantly, primarily from white liberals, defending their financial support of factory farming. Also the article linked an example of someone making this exact argument...
The first clause is false for reasons I addressed. I can't even make sense of what the second clause is trying to say in the present context.
Can you link literally anything from the article you just read that could even possibly imply this?
I'm not even sure there's anything to say about this one...
Could you quote a part of the article which indicates that it's aimed at only "leftists who provide awful critiques of veganism and effective altruism"? From my read, the author very clearly delineates between "leftists" and "Effective Altruists", and never states that there's an overlap. Maybe their other works are more precise in their wording, but I'm unfamiliar with the authorship of Mr. Bulldog?
Eight billion people. Because this is the Internet, I can find you a person who genuinely believes with their whole heart that the Earth is sealed under a clear dome and flies through space as our little blue disc. I'll be more specific: in the thousands of people I run into IRL -- sometimes in spaces populated very heavily by people in vegan/animal rights circles -- I have never met a single soul who pushed the rhetoric that Mr. Bulldog dug up.
I ... literally did. That's why we're discussing the first paragraph, which creates a false equivalence between the "leftists against veganism" argument and the "leftists against effective altruism" argument. I suppose to quote it again:
(emphasis mine)
The author creates a false narrative about leftists and veganism, somehow, and then links it to their argumentation against effective altruism. Which as I noted in my lead comment, is completely different to my primary argument against it: if you're so fabulously wealthy that you can donate large sums of money to vanity charity projects, the system is broken and you are behaving inherently undemocraticly. Hey, it can be effective, idc, but it seems that the truly most effective altruism would be donating towards groups that are attempting to end the systems which make it effective to start with.
Hey what the heck, I'll quote the article at you:
(emphasis mine)
And to be clear, and break down my jokey tone a bit:
The lack of the word "all" prior to using the term? There are obviously vegan and EA leftists that Matthew Adelstein (the author) is aware of, is friends with, and has co-written with. Maybe I'm biased from knowing the author in question, but he never said anywhere that this criticism is exclusively from leftists and constitutes what all leftists say. Obviously the biggest opponents of vegan causes are conservatives, but they are less hypocritical in their responses, as they are mask-off ghouls on all of their positions.
Are you a vegan? Have you ever advocated publicly for the welfare of the animals we brutalize on factory farms? I promise you, this is in the rotation of mindless criticisms aimed at vegans. I've heard this argument constantly, including from a real life leftist friend.
The claim I was looking for some backing for was "Because this [Lefty people all universally have a bad take on veganism] is wrong, all Lefty People takes are also wrong". Maybe I'm dense, but I'm not sure how what you stated substantiated this claim. The charitable reading of your comment is that Adelstein is moving from "anti-vegan leftists are wrong about veganism" to "anti-EA leftists are wrong about EA" which I wouldn't find as objectionable as the original claim.
First, we can care about more than one thing at a time, and if you care about donating to charity at all, it seems good to care about your contributions being effective and high-impact.
Like a Marxist revolutionary party or something? Are we not allowed to participate in charitable giving unless it is to The Correct Leftist Revolutionary Movement™ (which is, incidentally, incompatible with all other leftist revolutionary projects). I don't think we have a good reason to think there's a project like this that just a little bit of funding away from transforming the lives of the global south, the working class, and factory farmed animals, such that in expectation it does the most good to donate to them.
Fair enough! As noted, I'm completely unaware of the author's other works, so all I have to go off of are his linked words. Typically I'd assume that a professional (?) writer would make clear that distinction, but I guess it's super implicit to everyone else.
If you put a gun to my head, yep! I don't like to associate in groups, but since you're asking me a direct question, I lean further into that one that out of it. I repeatedly fail -- especially when my favourite restaurant slips ham into their tofu sandwiches (>:|) -- but I do all the vegan things (avoid meat and animal byproducts, leather, etc.). This is transgressive, but I extend forgiveness to myself (and others!) when I screw up or have to pause for a moment due to health issues (it's effectively impossible in my area to get cost effective, prepared, vegan meals, so it's oatmeal for every meal otherwise). That also goes for any prepared food with sugar as a listed ingredient, since it'll often use bone char, and eliminating everything that has not been marked with the big 'ol V is outside of my budget. Then there's veganic farming, which is not even in the same postal code as my budget!
Feel free to call me whatever you'd like, however! I've almost certainly been called worse.
Thank you for reading my comment charitably; I hope that we are both doing the same! I was being hyperbolic to make a point, as I felt that Mr. Bulldog (Adelstein?) was equally exaggerating his points for effect. I do not think you dense, fwiw, I just expect that I'm making unexpected arguments -- coated in a crunchy layer of sarcasm, which never helps with comprehension -- and that's likely hindering our ability to communicate.
I dunno! I'm neither rich enough to be an Effective Altruist, nor a marxist, or a leftist! I'm just sitting on the sidelines musing about how a movement that promotes "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible" -- as depicted in this article, I am really not into this subculture, so maybe you can dig up some alternate views -- apparently doesn't expend effort dismantling the institutions which gave them inequal power and influence to start with. It's terribly fascinating. The implicit conclusion seems to be that the Effective Altruists' perspectives' are superior, since the alternative would be giving the power of self-direction (i.e. shitloads of money) to the rest of us, which per their stated philosophy must mean that doing so is a globally inferior alternative than deciding for them?
But yeah these are just the musings of a spectator; as an individual without a large stake in this, I'm mostly going to be swept by the wayside anyhow, so I'm just enjoying the show.
That's sufficient to identify as a vegan in my book. I don't think it's always practicable to tell if the sugar in some treat was made with bone char, but it's easy not to buy chicken nuggies or buy cows' milk. By the way, this wasn't intended to be a purity test or anything, it's just my opinion that most who defend animal rights online hear the same arguments over and over again (crop deaths, too expensive, it doesn't make a difference, plants feel pain, it's racist/colonialist, food deserts, it tastes good, etc.) I'd just be surprised if anyone who has spoken up for animal rights hadn't heard it, but maybe you haven't made a concerted effort to argue with folks online.
I sincerely thank you for taking steps to reduce your contributions to animal agriculture. People who are making a concerted effort to reduce animal consumption are making a significant impact on both reducing demand for animal products and normalizing animal-free diets.
I know this isn't the point of the discussion, but I am more than willing to send you some of my favorite meal prep recipes! They are super cheap, and can cook a lot of food at a time (like a weeks worth of lunches.) I recommend an InstantPot for convenience or just a rice cooker otherwise, as there's tons of options that open up for low-cost meal prep. One of my favorites is this fried rice recipe:
Store in fridge. I like frying up leftovers in a pan with soy sauce and sesame oil if I have time! Optionally add some tofu or other vegan protein alternative (I like Just Egg), but that's optional.
Not everyone who donates to charity is a billionaire. Peter Singer and Will MacAskill are not billionaires. SBF was, and he was obviously a bad look for the movement, but I don't think there's anything wrong with charitable giving or prioritizing effective, high-impact charities. If you live in a western country and benefit from that, one might think you have an obligation to do something more valuable with your wealth than horde it, and none of that entails anything about what you think or support regarding the rough distribution of wealth in a society.
No OP, but there isn't comprehensive data on if vegan food systems could support earth population or even if that wouldn't come with it's own externalities like requiring more land conversion for agriculture. It's a big talking point within the mariculture community. I assume that kacey is pointing out that the author gave no evidence to back up their claims so they would only provide scant evidence to support theirs. I took it as food deserts show that vegan diets are currently inaccessible to large portions of the population so what happens to them during this mandated conversion?
Ecology degree here, plus a background in agricultural research.
It has been extremely well established for decades (certainly longer than I've been alive) that animal agriculture requires far greater inputs —land, water, fertilizer, etc. — than plant agriculture, by about an order of magnitude depending on which trophic level we're looking at (herbivorous animals require far less input than omnivorous or carnivorous animals) and some species-specific factors (e.g., small animals, like crickets, are substantially more efficient than large animals, like cattle; likewise, not all crops are created equal).
There are some special cases where this might not be the case. For example, livestock can sometimes grown on marginal land that's not suitable for cropping. However, this accounts for only a small percentage of meat consumption (primarily practiced by subsistence farmers in developing countries) and it comes with its own host of ecological issues, like desertification, erosion, soil compaction, etc.
The math is a lot more complicated and less clearcut when we're talking about aquatic ecosystems, since those are supported to varying extents by nutrient runoff from terrestrial ecosystems, and the trophic levels get absolutely bonkers. But the great bulk of humanity is living primarily off terrestrial agriculture where the efficiency is pretty easy to work out (enough so that farmers broadly know exactly what their land's productivity will be under different kinds of crops and livestock, even if they've never grown them before).
I want to call out, I'm not trying to strawman for big ag and I'd love to see a huge reduction in the amount of animal agriculture and the type of animal agriculture, I'm just passing on what I've heard pretty consistently working in the ecology adjacent space for about a decade. I went back for a masters in Coastal Science and Policy and it was a continuous heated debate between a few of my cohort that were vegan and a few of the faculty who worked in marine protected areas. The faculty's argument was that vegetation based agriculture wasn't enough to meet human nutritional needs, but that with mariculture you could effectively remove the need for terrestrial animal agriculture. This is also info from 2018 so take that with a grain of salt.
I'm all about reducing impact, and eating at lower trophic scales and so many of your points on terrestrial practices are on the nose. Even cattle that are reared on land that is not suitable for cropping - like sage grouse territory BLM land - are often sent to feed farms to fatten up for a year before slaughter (I worked on a project documenting their impact on the local sage grouse populations.) I in no way think animal ag is better than vegetation ag. But what I still haven't seen is a source that says you can meet the nutritional needs of our country or planet with just plants. I've just given it another cursory go and can't find a source that has data on that. Not asking for a lit review, but with your background if you know of literature that makes that claim I would be grateful if you'd be up for sharing it.
I myself am like 99% vegetarian, I think we radically need to rethink our food systems and think animal based factory farming is horrible. I'm piping off the way I am because of how the article is framing the need for immediate shift in our food systems without thinking about the populations that would be effected by that and the weird focus on traditional practices as a hurdle to adopting vegan systems. As an ecologist I'm sure you're familiar with Social Ecological Systems, and this pretty much flys in the face of those principals. Absolutely no shade to you, I appreciate you adding nuance and info to the discussion. But there also seems to be a lot of requests for nuance and evidence in the discussion section for an article that had none.
Chickens integrate perfectly well with crops. They're the best organic pesticide we have.
Goats and Sheep are essential for producing natural fibers when trying to reduce microplastics.
Not eating them at the end of their usable lifespan is wasteful.
The problem is that we expect to farm animals like corn, and to farm corn like a factory line.
Thank you for jumping out ahead of this! And yeah, I wasn't going in-depth in any of my arguments, since I didn't feel that the author did their bare minimum of performing adequate research to establish their baseline premises.
I would note that I have a slightly different take? I haven't dug into the agricultural side of veganism, and was focused more on the practicalities of immediately converting diets of at least ~18 million people in the USA -- that they can't get access to any decent quality ingredients, on the regular, let alone vegan ingredients. But I should add the agricultural perspective to my reading list, too, thank you for the suggestion!
Can you link to where the author talked about a mandated conversion? The point is that the majority of people in wealthy countries do not have to purchase factory farmed animal products. Also, the cheapest and most ubiquitous food options don't come from animals (rice, beans, vegetables, lentils, etc.) So two main points I have:
No reason at all was given for why we should think food deserts mean some people have to purchase factory farmed animal products. If anything, given that plant-based foods are among the cheapest and most widely available, they should be in at least as good of a position as the average westerner
If I'm wrong about the previous point, this doesn't address the previous claim that the majority of people in wealthy countries can go vegan if they wanted to
I think one major problem is that I think it's pretty safe to say that more or less only the right uses the term 'woke' anymore, so having that word in the title, especially with a critical tone, automatically throws up alarm bells that this is not the left (or even the center) doing good-faith criticism.
For all the hot water I get myself in about using new terms, I can't help but cling to woke (positive). In its original sense, it's playfully self-congratulatory, very apt/easy to explain, and doesn't really imply anything negative about anyone but racists and their power structures. In the short period where it just meant "progressive (positive)", it lost some charm, but now that fascists are going around acting triggered by alarm clocks and labeling taxation as woke, it has become an excellent bait term for the purposes of disrupting the language of right wing propaganda in one-on-one conversations. The moral panic is so transparent that all but true blue fascists immediately deflate once they're defending some of it.
It's an AAVE term that absolutely has a strong positive association. Super annoying that people in online spaces have been co-opting it and twisting it into something it's not, but it's hardly the first time (e.g., look at how people use "bro" to dismiss and insult groups they don't like).
I know language is dynamic and blah blah blah, but I do really wish people would stop assigning negative meanings to positive AAVE terms.
It's the right's one trick: tell you that CRT/DEI/woke/etc is dangerous and then call as much as possible by that term derogatorily and use that to get people to ban everything you don't like. Telling kids that slavery was bad? Woke CRT! BANNED!
But yeah woke has the twist of it being co-opted too. Just not only in online spaces unfortunately.
I agree with the overall sentiment of the article. I think the arguments in favor of veganism are so sound—and, moreover, if those arguments are correct, then their ethical implications are so damning—that basically every common argument against veganism is both comically bad and also a transparent psychological defense mechanism.
But this article strikes me more as a single slap in a particular slap fight than a reasoned defense of veganism. Maybe that's an unreasonable critique—maybe the article never purported to be a reasonable defense of veganism—but, even so, I don't really see its value. Very short on light and very long on heat.
(That said, it did point me to this article on "reasonable moods", which I find very compelling in general, even if I'm skeptical of some of its specific claims.)
Sidenote:
All I know about effective altruism I read from Scott Alexander.
From what I understand main idea is "if possible, make a donation, to help others in maximum way now or in the future". Help can include donating money to charity by your choice, donating kidney to stranger in need, or helping in some other way. He (Scott Alexander) sometime post a list of charities/fonds to which he thinks make sense to donate. Sometime it's different medical research facilities, AI safety groups, and other research fonds.
I see nothing wrong here? In the end it's just a donation, and nothing wrong with idea to try to do a maximum good with it. It's your decision to donate or not, and donate to whom in the end.
So I assume Scott Alexander only has one kidney?
Yep, he wrote about how he decided to donate a kidney and the process he went through here.
I am genuinely impressed and my opinion of SA has risen greatly (tbh I forget the exact reason I soured on him).
(the eugenics?)
Oh yea. So back down like 3/5ths. Still gets at least a few kudos.
I didn't know that! That's pretty awesome.
Yes, he definitely quite brave, imho.