YouTube Description:
"When we donate to charity, we aim to have the most significant impact possible, yet it's easy to feel like our giving makes zero difference. The rise of effective altruism, a philosophical model designed to achieve the most substantial potential impact with giving, seemed poised to combat this, but does treating people like data help? Or does it exclude the dimensions of life and what actually makes us human? In this episode, Adam is joined by Amy Schiller, author of "The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong—And How to Fix It," to discuss these cultural shifts in philanthropy and what we can do to ensure we are making an impact. Find Amy's book at factuallypod.com/books"
I was wondering if you had any thoughts about this conversation, or Amy Schiller's book.
I watched the video and then downvoted this post. The video is a criticism of EA and philanthropy, but there isn't anything new, thoughtful, or useful. I would have upvoted if I thought the criticism was insightful. We've had much better left-wing criticism of EA before on the forum.
Adam and Amy make basic mistakes. For example at 15:30, Adam says that GiveWell recommends funding AI alignment work, and that caused him to become critical because they weren't also recommending climate change mitigation. Adam treats GiveWell, SBF, and the entire EA movement as the same entity. Amy claims that EA is entirely about saving human lives. Neither demonstrated they were aware of the intense debate on saving vs. improving lives, or the concern for animals.
Among Amy's examples of good philanthropy are a billion dollars for the Amazon strike fund, and purchasing lots in NYC to make them community gardens instead of housing. Adam comes away from the conversation thinking that his philanthropic dollars that he gave to the Against Malaria Foundation would have better been spent on the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC or a local community garden (60:00). Both celebrate scope neglect, nepotism, and a worldview that the root of problems is political. They mock trolley problems and other philosophy thought problems as a masturbatory, navel-gazing effort, with no real world implications. All they have to offer in support of their preferred charities is an onslaught of left-wing buzzwords.
I think keeping people aware of criticism is worthwhile, but this would be better as a quick take than a full post because it's the same old stuff.
Some criticism isn't worthy of even a quick take, but the author's bio has enough to justify one here, especially since she just published a book on the topic and seems to be on a marketing campaign.
I put this video into summarize.tech and this is what it came back with:
It might help if you summarized the arguments made in the video or, ideally, shared a transcript.
I didn't know if it was okay for me to push the whole transcript onto here, is that usually done that way?
Is there an existing transcript you can link to? I feel like generally it’s worth including the film transcript in the forum post when the comment is worth engaging with on a detailed level - in this case it sounds like the criticism itself has little worth engaging with
I just wanted to point out some more errors with this podcast (though Matthew's comment does it well, and perhaps better), just to underscore how a poor a job I think both did with the EA section. Like even if you agree with this worldview and perspective to criticise EA from, you have to be better than this. To Joseph, I feel like if you can (as a left-wing EA?) be a part of bridge-building between the movements that would be good. But this seems to be the latest in a long string of left-leaning criticisms that goes so far beyond the facts, and never thinking about whether they've got their case right:
tl;dr - This was a highly frustrating listen, mostly because there are some interesting lines of critique I feel this podcast could have gone down in an alternate universe where Adam and Amy cared more to find out more about what EA actually is and what EA says. I don't think either of them are intentionally lying per se, but they definitely don't seem interested in questioning whether they've got the basic facts of the case right, and it just seems to lead them to make obviously wrong claims and just have a bad-quality discussion overall.
Including myself
I think in the second half Amy tries to ground this is local ties of community, solidarity, and mutual aid. I just find these very unconvincing compared to the alternatives, to be honest.
again
Yes, I think there is a growing group of "left-wing/progressive" people that attack EA with mostly lazy/old arguments. To me, I feel they have a sizable audience that genuinely care about the state of the world, and maybe we could have something like an "Anti- Anti-EA F.A.Q.", seeing as how Anti-"TESCREAL"ists are surging