I don't intend to convince you to leave EA, and I don't expect you to convince me to stay. But typical insider "steel-manned" arguments against EA lack imagination about other people's perspectives: for example, they assume that the audience is utilitarian. Outsider anti-EA arguments are often mean-spirited or misrepresent EA (though I think EAs still under-value these perspectives). So I provide a unique perspective: a former "insider" who had a change of heart about the principles of EA.
Like many EAs, I'm a moral anti-realist. This is why I find it frustrating that EAs act as if utilitarianism is self-evident and would be the natural conclusion of any rational person. (I used to be guilty of this.) My view is that morality is largely the product of the whims of history, culture, and psychology. Any attempt to systematize such complex belief systems will necessarily lead to unwanted conclusions. Given anti-realism, I don't know what compels me to "bite bullets" and accept these conclusions. Moral particularism is closest to my current beliefs.
Some specific issues with EA ethics:
- Absurd expected value calculations/Pascal's mugging
- Hypothetically causing harm to individuals for the good of the group. Some utilitarians come up with ways around this (e.g. the reputation cost would outweigh the benefits). But this raises the possibility that in some cases the costs won't outweigh the benefits, and we'll be compelled to do harm to individuals.
- Under-valuing violence. Many EAs glibly act as if a death from civil war or genocide is no different from a death from malaria. Yet this contradicts deeply held intuitions about the costs of violence. For example, many people would agree that a parent breaking a child's arm through abuse is far worse than a child breaking her arm by falling out of a tree. You could frame this as a moral claim that violence holds a special horror, or as an empirical claim that violence causes psychological trauma and other harms, which must be accounted for in a utilitarian framework. The unique costs of violence are also apparent through people's extreme actions to avoid violence. Large migrations of people are most associated with war. Economic downturns cause increases in migration to a lesser degree, and disease outbreaks to a far lesser degree. This prioritization doesn't line up with how bad EAs think these problems are.
Once I rejected utilitarianism, much of the rest of EA fell apart for me:
- Valuing existential risk and high-risk, high-reward careers rely on expected value calculations
- Prioritizing animals (particularly invertebrates) relied on total-view utilitarianism (for me). I value animals (particularly non-mammals) very little compared to humans and find the evidence for animal charities very weak, so the only convincing argument for prioritizing farmed animals was their large numbers. (I still endorse veganism, I just don't donate to animal charities.)
- GiveWell's recommendations are overly focused on disease-associated mortality and short-term economic indicators, from my perspective. They fail to address violence and exploitation, which are major causes of poverty in the developing world. (Incidentally, I also think that they undervalue how much reproductive freedom benefits women.)
The remaining principles of EA, such as donating significant amounts of one's money and ensuring that a charity is effective in achieving its goals, weren't unique enough to convince me to stay in the community.
No, it's not cold. It's indifferent, and normal. No one in any social movement worries about wasting the time of people who come to learn about things. Churches don't worry that they're wasting people's time when inviting them to come in for a sermon; they don't advertise all the reasons that people don't believe in God. Feminists don't worry that they're wasting people's time by not advertising that they want white women to check their privilege before colored ones. BLM doesn't worry that it's wasting people's time by not advertising that they don't welcome people who are primarily concerned with combating black-on-black violence. And so on.
Learning what EA is about does not take a long time. This is not like asking people to read Marx or the LessWrong sequences. The books by Singer and MacAskill are very accessible and do not take long to read. If someone reads it and doesn't like it, so what? They heard a different perspective before going back to their ordinary life.
Who thinks "I'm an effective altruist and I feel unwelcome here in effective altruism because people who don't agree with effective altruism aren't properly shielded from our movement"? If you want to make people feel welcome then make it a movement that works for them. I fail to see how publicly broadcasting incompatibility with others does any good.
Sure, it's nice to have a clearly defined outgroup that you can contrast yourselves with, to promote solidarity. Is that what you mean? But there are much easier and safer punching bags to be used for this purpose, like selfish capitalists or snobby Marxist intellectuals.
Intersectionality does not mean simply looking at people's experiences from different backgrounds. It means critiquing and moving past sweeping modernist narratives of the experiences of large groups by investigating the unique ways in which orthogonal identity categories interact. I don't see why it's helpful, given that identity hasn't previously entered the picture at all in this conversation, and that there don't seem to be any problematic sweeping identity narratives floating around.
I am a little bit confused here. You are the one saying that we should make outward facing statements telling people that EA isn't suited for them. How is that not going to drive away valuable people, in particular the ones who have diverse perspectives?
And in what way is failing to make such statements an unhealthy conversational norm? I have never seen any social movement perform this sort of behavior. If doing so is a conversational norm then it's not one which people have grown accustomed to expect.
Moreover, the street goes two ways. Here's a different perspective which you may have overlooked due to your background: some people want to be in a movement that's solid and self-assured. Creating an environment where language is constantly being policed for extreme niceness can lead some people to feel uninterested in engaging in honest dialogue.
You can reject quantitative metrics, and you can also give some credence to allegations of bias. But you can't rely on this sort of thing to form a narrative. You have to find some kind of evidence.
This is a strawman of my statements, which I have no interest in validating through response.