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 also add that this article generally suggests that trade-offs when donating money are unique to EA.
Eg -
“EA rewards alliance with its worldviews and penalises nonprofits who have different views”
This is true for all individual donors and all philanthropic philosophies. Chorus Foundation rewards organisations led by Americans working on climate change and “penalises” organisations in the poorest countries working on malaria. Rewarding alliance with your worldview is not inherently bad - all donors have finite money and “penalise” some nonprofits when they donate to other nonprofits.
(As an ethnic minority westerner, but as an internationalist, I do not think that the lives of ethnic minority westerners matter more than those of worse off people in the global south, so I disagree with Chorus’s worldview of focusing on the USA, but don’t think it’s wrong for them to donate in line with their worldview).