This is a post I wrote up a little while ago and recently decided to share here. I suspect its lessons will lack external validity beyond the US, but I'm curious to hear if anything resonates with non-US students.
I take as a prima facie good that we want to increase recruitment and retention, regardless of political inclination. If you want to bemoan the prospect of diluted epistemics or weigh the merits of left-wing students vis-à-vis moderates, you can go nuts in the comments.
Spaces and Bodies: Appropriating Leftist Rhetoric for EA Retention
“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” — Nelson Mandela
In two years of introducing college students to Effective Altruism, I have consistently found that leftist political beliefs can inhibit the retention of promising EAs. I’m not referring to your garden variety college liberals, who constitute the majority at many schools, nor the more elusive old-guard Marxists (though the objections of this latter group, including the neglected longrun returns to community organizing, deserve their own attention). Instead, I am referring to students who “move in activist spaces,” focusing on issues like criminal justice, climate change, sexual violence, and immigration reform.
I attend a very liberal university, where I have worked with an even more liberal housing justice organization for the past four years, including most recently as its director, so I am receptive to these students’ objections, but I often find them specious. I have also talked to other students who lived with a foot in both worlds before rejecting EA in favor of activism (or vice versa). I hope this post will equip community builders to anticipate, pre-empt, and address the concerns of college leftists because this group is worth recruiting and retaining.
Language
Leftist rhetoric abounds with poetic terms like “spaces,” “bodies,” and “ways of knowing/being.” I won’t attempt an exhaustive list, but I encourage community builders to familiarize themselves with these phrases and deploy them appropriately. Here are four opportunities that often arise when introducing students to EA.
PlayPumps
Many introductory college fellowships begin with Doing Good Better, and MacAskill’s account of PlayPumps International elicits universal disgust. Social justice-minded students might identify the PlayPumps debacle as a failure of accountability. Activist organizations sometimes ask “Who do we stand accountable to in our work?” By developing such a flawed product and then doubling down when those flaws were exposed, PlayPumps demonstrated that it was not accountable to the communities it professed to serve.
QALYs
When discussing global health and development, QALYs arise to intermediate tradeoffs between the duration and severity of ailments, as well as the severity of qualitatively distinct ailments (e.g., blindness vs malnutrition). In these conversations, you can reassure students that QALY estimates derive from surveys of people with lived experiences of various health conditions. Making this connection can prove useful because identitarian organizations often emphasize that they “ground their work in lived experience” or “center the voices of people with lived experience.”
Global Health & Development
More broadly, when discussing this issue area, I think community builders should not shy away from terms like oppression and imperialism. In fact, you may find it useful to counter people’s commitments to proximal issues like police brutality by presenting donations to global health causes as reparations. Leftist students are likely to hold that their country is responsible for the suffering that these donations could address, and they also likely believe that they have personally inherited the benefits of this exploitation, strengthening their sense of reparative obligation.
Career Choices
While we have good reason to avoid guilt framings when we introduce newcomers to EA, some people react positively to discussion of the privileges of high income and career flexibility that attend living in a rich Western country. Simple online tools can convince students who might not consider themselves wealthy of their relative position in the distribution of global resources. Some students express that, as the children of immigrants, they find it particularly difficult to justify their unconventional career paths and donation decisions to their families. I find that it can be useful to proactively identify this concern.
Framing
Beyond your specific language, activist students might be more receptive to certain ways of packaging EA concepts. Here are five instances of framing that I have found useful.
Optimism
Progressives are invested in bringing about a better world, and leftists are often interested in “imagining” just alternatives to the status quo. To accommodate this mentality, you can indulge in some flowery longtermist utopianism of the “music we lack the ears to hear” variety. Some might find it cheesy, but if they respond well, you can direct them to The Precipice for a masterclass in this technique.
Examples
You can gain some trust by drawing on social justice cause areas to illustrate your points. For example, slavery in the US evokes the possibility of an ongoing moral catastrophe, and criminal justice reform presents tractable opportunities to do good. See the introduction to What We Owe the Future for a thorough example.
Selflessness
If you encounter reluctance to deprioritize pet causes that "feel more meaningful," you can point out that privileging one’s emotional experience over the needs of those served is a feature of voluntourism programs. These students likely view voluntourism as an outlet for white guilt that fails to benefit those purportedly served. With global health and development, specifically, you should anticipate debate over the white savior complex. As a cautionary note, however, I think pointing out features of white supremacy culture is ultimately a losing game for EAs right now; for example, many of the characteristics in this popular article apply to EA, including suspicion of emotional decision-making.)
Diversity
If your conversation tends to center Will MacAskill, Toby Ord, and Peter Singer, you can sympathize with your students’ frustration over the influence of these three white men. But this frustration should motivate us to expand recruitment rather than reject EA entirely.
Playing God
Another common objection implicates us for “playing God.” I think the best response involves problematizing the act-omission distinction as Holly Elmore does in this passage: “Making better choices through conscious triage is no more ‘playing God’ than blithely abdicating responsibility for the effects of our actions. Both choices are choices to let some live and others die. The only difference is that the person who embraces triage has a chance to use their brain to improve the outcome.” If you dig deeper into this objection, you may find that it is justified on epistemic grounds; ie, "who am I to make this decision on someone else's behalf?" If this is the case, you can respond that EA takes epistemic humility very seriously, but there are of course some circumstances under which we have enough information to act in someone else's best interests (eg performing CPR).
Cause Areas
There are some further points that might resonate with activist students when discussing particular cause areas and interventions.
Factory Farming
There are a number of ways that factory farms hurt the worst-off people in our society, including dangerous working conditions, air and water pollution, and violations of indigenous values.
Cash Transfers
Students who work with people experiencing homelessness will be painfully familiar with the paternalism that plagues social services. Just as individuals often harbor reservations about giving money to panhandlers, many nonprofits will only provide in-kind support to their clients. Donations to GiveDirectly, then, might appeal to students as a means to disrupt the usual paternalistic logic of nonprofits. Doing Good Better presents cash transfers as a benchmark against which other interventions should be compared: there is a burden of proof to justify why another intervention might outperform cash transfers (e.g., if there is no market for the service). And GiveWell employs this reasoning in their recommendation process.
Structural Change
You should endorse it. Dismissing structural change would be a nonstarter for many activist students, particularly if the justification is tantamount to “the revolution is low-probability.” Make sure they read That One Article. In addition to being bullish on systemic change, these students may be extra averse to charity, particularly since the release of Dean Spade’s essay “Solidarity Not Charity.” But even the most committed activists recognize the importance of mutual aid and harm reduction, even though they do not target root causes. And, after all, Friedrich Engels may have been the first person who earned-to-give (but you probably don’t want to bring up the rest of that article).
Students with experience in social justice organizing can become valuable assets to EA, and I think these suggestions are simple to incorporate into conversations, so it is worth the time to tailor our messaging to these newcomers.
It seems incredibly important that EA, as a community, maintains extremely high epistemic standards and is a place where we can generally assume that people, while not necessarily having the same worldviews or beliefs as us, can communicate openly and honestly about the reasons for why they're doing things. A primary reason for this is just the scale and difficulty of the things that we're doing.
That's what makes me quite uncomfortable with saying global health and development work is reparation for harms that imperialist countries have caused poor countries! We should work on aid to poor countries because it's effective, because we have a chance to use a relatively small-to-us amount of money to save lives and wildly improve the conditions of people in poor countries—not because aid represents reparations from formerly imperial countries to formerly subjugated ones
I think many people who identify with social justice and leftist ideologies are worth recruiting and retaining. But I care more about our community having good epistemics in general, about being able to notice when we are doing things correctly and when we are not, and conveying our message honestly seems really important for this. This objection is not "leftists have bad epistemics," like you mentioned at the start of this article - you should increase recruitment and retention but not lower your own epistemic standards as a communicator to do so.
I think parts of this post are quite good, and I think when you can do low-cost things that don't lower your epistemic standards (like using social justice focused examples, supporting the increase of diversity in your movement, saying things that you actually believe in order to support your arguments in ways that connect with people). But I think this post at the current moment needs a clear statement of not lowering epistemic standards when doing outreach to be advice that helps overall.
The goal with roping in the anti-imperialist crowd should be "come for the deontological thing (i.e. justice or reparations), stay for the consequentialist thing (i.e. independent of history, looking forward, the next right thing to do is help)." The first part (where we essentially platform deontology) doesn't actually seem super dangerous to me, in the way that compromising on epistemics is dangerous.
I agree with quinn. I'm not sure what the mechanism is by which we end up with lowered epistemic standards. If an intro fellow is the kind of person who weighs reparative obligations very heavily in their moral calculus, then deworming donations may very well satisfy this obligation for them. This is not an argument that motivates me very much, but it may still be a true argument. And making true arguments doesn't seem bad for epistemics? Especially at the point where you might be appealing to people who are already consequentialists, just consequentialists with a developed account of justice that attends to reparative obligations.