This is a linkpost for https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PoDkqyxbN0QxGifo7N0CxR5n8pQBuaWEftKOB6NroY0/edit?usp=sharing
On October 17, 2022, Rebecca Ackermann published an MIT Technology Review editorial entitled “Inside effective altruism, where the far future counts a lot more than the present.” It is a piece on Effective Altruism that contains a number of untrue and misleading claims. In response, I offer a response to it in the form of annotations to the original text and figures. I’m open to corrections/criticism. I also thank Ackermann for the engagement and effort that went into the editorial. I believe it was written in good faith. By my count, there are 13 false and 24 misleading claims. Each is explained with sources in the annotations.
I would add that the criticism of supporting targeted interventions over letting people choose their own priorities is not unique to EA - it applies to almost all charities and government initiatives.
Chorus Foundation itself explicitly focuses on climate change and American organisations rather than letting local people set their own priorities (I don’t mean this as criticism of Chorus - I think cash transfers are the only way of letting people set their own priorities and even then you are sort of supporting targeted interventions when deciding who to transfer cash to).
Also, it is worth pointing out that when the article attempts to contrast EA with Chorus and says that most of Chorus’s grantee orgs are led by people of colour, all of those orgs are based in the USA, one of the richest countries in the world.