Book critique of Effective Altruism

Thanks for the post, I found that interesting! 

Sorry you felt like you'd make mistakes here. We all make mistakes, I make them constantly. 

I look forward to your future posts.

Thanks for sharing this!  I'm not too optimistic, though, as the editors' introduction on the OUP blog doesn't inspire confidence.  E.g. they write:

To step inside the utilitarian frame is to accept that values that count as “good” can be abstractly quantified. Its methods leave it incapable of addressing historically sedimented structural injustices and intergenerational injuries, since these aren’t the sorts of things that can be quantified by EA-style metrics.

This seems conceptually confused. Any kind of injustice or injury could, in principle, be associated with an estimated welfare cost. (Unless it was literally harmless, but that's surely not what they intend.)

I know there have been past methodological critiques of the particular vein of classic (GiveWell-style) EA that was addressed to aid skeptics and focused on just the most robustly-evidenced global health interventions. But obviously there's nothing in utilitarianism (or EA more broadly) that rules out making use of more speculative evidence and expected-value reasoning.

It sounds to me like their real complaint is something like: How dare EA/utilitarianism prioritize other things over my pet causes, just because there's no reason to think that my pet causes are optimal? 

E.g.: "To grasp how disastrously an apparently altruistic movement has run off course, consider that... covering the costs of caring for survivors of industrial animal farming in sanctuaries is seen as a bad use of funds."

Note that they don't even attempt to offer reasons for thinking that animal sanctuaries are a better use of funds than existing EA priorities. Indeed, they don't seem to acknowledge the reality of tradeoffs at all.  It's just supposed to be obvious that refusing funding to them and their allies is "grievous harm".

Hopefully some of the papers in the volume will offer some actual arguments that are worth engaging with.

I'm planning to write about this book for my blog when it is released. It is an important book which draws on valuable perspectives that are underrepresented in effective altruism.

It is possible (even healthy) to disagree with some aspects of the book while recognizing that all of the authors have valuable things to say, and have over their lifetimes built valuable stores of knowledge to share. This week, more than ever, I think we should recognize the importance of drawing on diverse sources of knowledge to inform altruistic decisionmaking.

On the tone of the book, I wonder what readers make of an article by the author of the introduction to the volume, Prof. Amia Srinivasan? ("The aptness of anger": https://users.ox.ac.uk/~corp1468/Research_files/jopp.12130.pdf.)This article argues that anger can be an apt response to injustice. More generally, I hope that discussions of this book can move past questions of tone to examine the substance of arguments and the evidence brought forth to support them.

If I had to make one criticism of the book, it would be that the book focuses in many places on short-termist EA projects. It is very hard for critics of EA to keep up with the rapid pace at which the EA movement evolves, particularly given that academic research tends to move slowly. I hope that this feature of the book can be contextualized within an academic publishing system in which it can take many years to bring an edited volume to press, and that readers will do their best to consider how the views expressed in this book might apply to longtermist causes as well.

Yeah, hopefully, someone writes a review of that book for the forum.

Hey Manuel,
thanks for pointing this out. 

Your first post passed the scrutiny. Congratulations. ;-)

I suggest adding a link to the Amazon page with the book. Like this: https://www.amazon.com/-/en/dp/019765570X/ or better inside your text like this.

You are welcome.

I just downloaded the e-book. It's quite lengthy and consists of separate papers. Perhaps the people who are interested to review it are interested in collaborating on a google-doc where, according to some good epistemic norms, we identify the best critiques, correct or improve the worst ones and provide context and factual information where it is necessary? It seems unlikely that one person can do this all, since the book goes into GH&D, Animal Welfare, Longtermism, Moral Philosophy etc. Perhaps someone can then write a good book review based on that Doc.

Big thumbs up to MichaelB for steelmanning. We should do as much as that as possible! Although it must be said, I just read some pages and I feel very frustrated now for constantly being called out for my whiteness, being called a supporter of fascist structures, being naïve, glorifying whiteness, disrespecting social movements in the past etc. It's going to take a lot of goodwill to review this pretty hostile book in the best way possible, but we should be able to conjure up that goodwill together :)

Here you can access request access to the Google Doc! You'll have to request access, because the book can be accessed through there (I bought it) and I don't want to be accused of piracy.