EA criticism contest: Why I am not an effective altruist

In regard to your blog. I write this quickly and bluntly, but I think I reflect the tone of your article so I think that's okay. I'm sure we'd enjoy chatting over dinner and I respect anyone who takes the time to write a blog.

Implicit claim: EAs are mostly utilitarians

IIRC about 70% of EAs are consequentialists, but I don't think most will response to your claims as you do. I think your claims are largely straw men.

Claim: Utilitarians would murder 1 person to save 5

a) No they wouldn't. They would know that they would be arrested and unable to help the many others in easier and less risky ways. Given how cheap it is to save a life, why would you risk prison? 

b) Noone in EA acts like this. Noone in EA tells people to act like this. It's a straw man.

Claim: There is a slippery slope where you have to become a moral angel and give everything away.

I think EA has probably messaged badly on this in the past. But now I guess there is concensus that you choose how much of your resources you want to use effectively then you do so. Will MacAskill donates everything above £26k. That's way too much for me and nearly everyone else. Sure, there is a status hierarchy of self denial (though there are other status hierarchies as well) but are we really gonna criticise that compared to all the other status hierarchies there are in other movements. Many people live normal lives and use there jobs or single digit % points of their income to help people. There is room for concern here, but I think it's overblown.

Claim: "Is the joy of rich people hiking really worth the equivalent of all the lives that could be stuffed into that land if it were converted to high-yield automated hydroponic farms and sprawling apartment complexes?"

This is not an EA view, it's my personal one. If there were a billion americans, the US would be less dense than the UK. It would be far less dense than England. There isn't a tradeoff here. But if there were I'd still lose the views and let billions have the lives we have. Is living in tokyo so bad? No. Fly and vacation somewhere people don't want to work so badly. If we argue it out I think I can convince you that wanting to keep immigrants out to preserve landscapes which wouldn't be built on anyway is actually a monstrous view. 

Claim: "This means that, at least in principle, to me effective altruism looks like a lot of good effort originating in a flawed philosophy. However, in practice rather than principle, effective altruists do a lot that I quite like and agree with and, in my opinion"

The upshot of the blog seems to be that EA is fine actually. Which means I don't really understand why you framed it so negatively. It's like saying "you shouldn't date that girl because maybe you'll get her pregnant and it will ruin your lives" sure, but how likely is that? If you think that EA largely gets these compromises correct, why are you writing an article describing it as poision? Maybe that is bad behaviour?

Claim: "would you be happier being a playwright than a stock broker? Who cares, stock brokers make way more money, go make a bunch of money to give to charity." 

Have you talked to any EAs this has happened to? I guess this has happened to 0 - 5 % of EAs in the last 5 years. Feel free to tell me I'm wrong. I don't think it's common. So I think this is unfair. I have seen plenty of EAs be told to enjoy their passions. Sometimes we are called libertines. 

Claim: "Who can say no to identifying cost-effective charities?"

Almost everyone. Hardly any of total charity donations goes to cost cost-effective charities. If you think this is obvious, I'd encourage you to write an article about it.  Depending on how many subscribers you have it might save a life on expectation.

Claim: "Whereas I’m of the radical opinion that the poison means something is wrong to begin with."

What is your alternative? Happy to read a blog about it.

And what about the poisions in other views. I haven't seen you say something like "now I don't think EA is much worse than other views, but it's new so I'm writing about it". There were many ways to make relative claims as well as absolute ones.

Claim: "Basically, just keep doing the cool shit you’ve been doing, which is relatively unjustifiable from any literal utilitarian standpoint, and keep ignoring all the obvious repugnancies taking your philosophy literally would get you into, but at the same time also keep giving your actions the epiphenomenal halo of utilitarian arbitrage, and people are going to keep joining the movement, and billionaires will keep donating, because frankly what you’re up to is just so much more interesting and fun and sci-fi than the boring stuff others are doing."

0) Yes you're right.

1) It's a fun essay to read but you are doing you are doing a C- job at convincing me you aren't an EA

2) It seems like you basically agree with EA recommendations in their entirety. It seems unfair that you've made up a bogey monster to criticise when you yourself acknowledge that in practice it's going really well.

3) I wish this essay wasn't so negative in framing, or that the "EA is poison" soundbite won't get to be quoted, when actually your conclusions are postive. I think that was bad behaviour from you and I don't think you'd like me to have done it.

4) I would enjoy an essay with concrete ways you think EA goes too far. I think that would be valuable. But I want bad outcomes that you actually think are going to happen. 

5) If this is going to leave you with the opinion that EAs are all defensive, then tell me and I'll edit it. I wrote it in haste. But in my defence, I did read the entirety of your blog and respond to the points I thought were important.

6) I think you wrote this in good faith.

Hi Erik,

I just wanted to leave a very quick comment (sorry I'm not able to engage more deeply).

I think yours is an interesting line of criticism, since it tries to get to the heart of what EA actually is. 

My understanding of your criticism is that EAs attempts to find an interesting middle ground between full utilitarianism and regular sensible do-gooding, whereas you claim there isn't one. In particular, we can impose limits on utilitarianism, but they're arbitrary and make EA contentless. Does this seem like a reasonable summary?

I think the best argument that an interesting middle ground exists the fact that EAs in practice have come up with ways of doing that that aren't standard (e.g. only a couple of percent of US philanthropy is spent on evidence-backed global health at best, and << 1% on ending factory farming + AI safety + ending pandemics). 

More theoretically, I see EA as being about something like "maximising  global wellbeing while respecting other values". This is different from regular sensible do-gooding in being more impartial, more wellbeing focused and more focused on finding the very best ways to contribute (rather than the merely good). I think another way EA is different is being more skeptical, open to weird ideas and trying harder to take a bayesian, science-aligned approach to finding better ways to help. (Cf the key values of EA.) 

However, it's also different from utilitarianism since you can practice these values without saying maximising hedonic utility is the only  thing that matters, or a moral obligation.

(Another way to understand EA is the claim that we should pay more attention to consequences, given the current state of the world, but not that only consequences matter.)

You could respond that there's arbitrariness in how to adjudicate conflicts between maximising wellbeing and other values. I basically agree.

But I think all moral theories imply crazy things ("poison") if taken to extremes (e.g. not lying to the axe murder as a deontologist; deep ecologists who think we should end humanity to preserve the environment; people who hold the person-affecting view in population ethics who say there's nothing bad about creating a being who's life is only suffering).

So imposing some level of arbitrary cut offs on your moral views is unavoidable. The best we can do is think hard about the tradeoffs between different useful moral positions, and try to come up with an overall course of action that's non-terrible on the balance of them.

When sharing this article you tweeted:

"In the last week alone, the effective altruist movement has been on the cover of The New Yorker, The NYT, and Time Magazine. It has billions in funding, and wants to make the world a better place. The problem is that it's poisonous."

However you finished that same thread by tweeting:

"10/ Ultimately this is what the "longtermism" view is - merely a dilution of the utilitarianism in effective altruism to caring only about existential risk, which is something everyone can get on board with"

I dislike the implication that EA is poisonous, but fair enough. But seemingly you don't believe this either, hence you tweeted your final tweet. That seems clickbaity. 

Also, if you think that EA gets the balance right in practice, I don't think it's okay to say it's a poision. If the median EA does the things as you'd want them done, then it seems like EA is antivenom, even if parts of the dose would be venomous on their own. This seems unreasonable.

What's more, would you call the need to tell an axe murdered where your friend is hiding a "poison" in virtue ethics? Or most people's denial of those dying in the developing world in a way that can be cheaply prevented? This seems an unfair judgement of EA alone.

I think the framing (which again, even you don't seem to believe) of EA being a poison is unreasonable, unfair and clickbaity.  

A point that seems worth noting, from Puzzles for Everyone:

In an especially striking example of conflating utilitarianism with anything remotely approaching systematic thinking, popular substacker Erik Hoel recently characterized the Beckstead & Thomas paper on decision-theoretic paradoxes as addressing “how poorly utilitarianism does in extreme scenarios of low probability but high impact payoffs.” Compare this with the very first sentence of the paper’s abstract: “We show that every theory of the value of uncertain prospects must have one of three unpalatable properties.” Not utilitarianism. Every theory.

(Alas, when I tried to point this out in the comments section, after a brief back-and-forth in which Erik initially doubled down on the conflation, he abruptly decided to instead delete my comments explaining his mistake.)

No comment here really engages with the core argument in Erik Hoels text. Utilitarianism must be the basis of EA.  How would you measure effectiveness if not through maximizing utility? 

I identify as an EA, and have been drawn to utilitarianism my whole adult life, but always got stuck on the seemingly impossible problem of comparing suffering and pleasure. I guess some form of rule utilitarianism is where I ended up. (e.g. don't kill unless to stop a killing), but it doesn't completely solve the problem.

Somewhat of an aside but I was wondering if some others could confirm or deny my observations:

From interacting with EA folks, my impression was that the community has quite a pluralistic attitude towards utilitarianism. That is, not everyone is utilitarian, and those who are are often aware of the debates in philosophy, meaning that there's a variety of views in terms of if people accept total utilitarianism vs. average utilitarianism, as well as act/rule/preference utilitarianism. Yet a lot of the criticisms seem to see the EA community as having an rigid consensus on kind of OG Bentham-esque act utilitarianism.

Thus it seems to me that either

1. my impression is wrong, EA is committed to simple hedonistic act utilitarianism, or
2. there's an opportunity for some messaging to better reflect that EA is more of a "big tent" in this regard.

Incidentally, I think this is a well-written and useful article. It voices concerns that many people have, and does so with an unusual amount of charity,  so I think it would be a positive thing to try to read it in good faith.

Thanks, I enjoyed reading this. 

Is this a correct summary of your position:

1. EA descends heavily from utilitarianism. E.g. Peter Singer's drowning child analogy is foundational, most people in EA appeal to utilitarianism to some degree, there's no real opposition to utilitarianism in EA, etc etc. 
2. Utilitarianism has many, many problems, such as the incomparability of some moral actions/lack of ethics being well-ordered. Attempts to make it into a theory of everything of morality end up either diluting it beyond recognition, include lots and lots (too many) epicycles, include repugnancies that should lead us to reject utilitarianism, or some or all of these. 
3. In practice, EAs do a lot of great, altruistic work that you want to see promoted. But little to none of this depends on utilitarianism. 

Is there anything you want to add or correct to this? 

I think the comparison between calling yourself a Christian but not believing in the Divinity of Jesus or something is a worse analogy to being a non-Utilitarian EA than calling yourself a Republican but not believing in the divinity of Jesus. It’s true that utilitarianism is overrepresented among EAs including influential ones, and most of their favored causes are ones utilitarians like, but it is my impression that most EAs are not utilitarians and almost none of them think utilitarianism is just what EA is.

Given this, the post reads to me sort of like “I’m a pro-life free market loving Buddhist, but Christianity is wrong therefore I can’t be a Republican”.

This makes the rest of the post less compelling to me to be honest, debates about high level moral philosophy are interesting but unlikely to be settled over one blogpost (even just the debate over pure aggregation is extremely complicated, and you seem to take a very dismissive attitude towards it), and the connection to EA as a movement made in the post seems too dubious to justify it. The piece seems like a good explanation of why you aren’t a utilitarian, but I don’t take it that that was your motive.

The article seems to contradict itself in the end. In the beginning of the article, I thought you were saying you're not an EA because you're not a utilitarian (because utilitarianism is poison), and to be an EA is just to be a utilitarian in some form—and that even if EAs are utilitarians in a very diluted form, the philosophy they are diluting is still a poison, no matter how diluted, and so is unacceptable. So, I was expecting you to offer some alternative framework or way of thinking to build an altruistic movement on, like moral particularism or contractualism or something, but the solution I read you as giving is for EAs to keep doing exactly what you start off saying they shouldn’t do: for them to base their movement on utilitarianism in a diluted form. 

I hope this isn't uncharitable, but this is how your core argument actually comes across to me: “I’m not an EA because EAs ground their movement on a diluted form of utilitarianism, which is poisonous no matter how much you dilute it. What do I suggest instead? EAs should keep doing exactly what they’re doing—diluting utilitarianism until it’s no longer poisonous!” (Maybe my biggest objection to your article is that you missed the perfect opportunity for a homeopathy analogy here!) This seems contradictory to me, which makes it hard to figure out what to take from your article.  

To highlight what made me confused, I'll quote what I saw as the most contradictory seeming passages. In the first four quotes here, you seem to say that diluting utilitarianism is futile because this can’t remove the poison:

“the origins of the effective altruist movement in utilitarianism means that as definitions get more specific it becomes clear that within lurks a poison, and the choice of all effective altruists is either to dilute that poison, and therefore dilute their philosophy, or swallow the poison whole.

“This poison, which originates directly from utilitarianism (which then trickles down to effective altruism), is not a quirk, or a bug, but rather a feature of utilitarian philosophy, and can be found in even the smallest drop. And why I am not an effective altruist is that to deal with it one must dilute or swallow, swallow or dilute, always and forever.” … 

“But the larger problem for the effective altruist movement remains that diluting something doesn’t actually make it not poison. It’s still poison! That’s why you had to dilute it.” 

“I’m of the radical opinion that the poison means something is wrong to begin with.”

It seems like you’re saying we should neither drink the poison of pure utilitarianism nor try to fool ourselves into thinking it’s okay to drink it because we have diluted it. Yet here, at the end of the article, you sound like a Dr Bronner’s bottle commanding “dilute dilute dilute!”: 

“So here’s my official specific and constructive suggestion for the effective altruism movement: … keep diluting the poison. Dilute it all the way down, until everyone is basically just drinking water. You’re already on the right path. …

“I really do think that by continuing down the path of dilution, even by accelerating it, the movement will do a lot of practical good over the next couple decades as it draws in more and more people who find its moral principles easier and easier to swallow…  
 

“What I’m saying is that, in terms of flavor, a little utilitarianism goes a long ways. And my suggestion is that effective altruists should dilute, dilute, dilute—dilute until everyone everywhere can drink.”
 

If “everyone everywhere” is drinking diluted utilitarianism at the end, doesn’t that include you? Are you saying you’re not an EA because EAs haven’t diluted utilitarianism quite enough yet, but eventually you think they’ll get there? Doesn’t this contradict what you say earlier about poison being poison no matter how diluted? You seem to begin the essay in fundamental opposition to EA, and you conclude by explicitly endorsing what you claim is the EA status quo: “Basically, just keep doing the cool shit you’ve been doing”! 
 

I assume there are ways to re-phrase the last section of your article so you’re not coming across as contradicting yourself, but as it’s written now, your advice to EA seems identical to your critique of EA. 

What made you shy away from suggesting EA shift from utilitarianism to a different form of consequentialism or to a different moral (or even non-moral) framework entirely? It can't be that you think all the utilitarian EAs would have ignored you if you did that, because you say in the article that you know you’ll be ignored and lose this contest because your critique of EA is too fundamental and crushing for EAs to be able to face. Do you think diluted utilitarianism is the best basis for an altruistic movement? It certainly doesn't seem so in the beginning, but that's all I am able to get out of the ending. 

I think this is the standard reply to the repugnant conclusion, from Yudkowsky's Ends Don't Justify Means (Among Humans) (emphasis mine).

So here's a reply to that philosopher's scenario, which I have yet to hear any philosopher's victim give:

"You stipulate that the only possible way to save five innocent lives is to murder one innocent person, and this murder will definitely save the five lives, and that these facts are known to me with effective certainty.  But since I am running on corrupted hardware, I can't occupy the epistemic state you want me to imagine.  Therefore I reply that, in a society of Artificial Intelligences worthy of personhood and lacking any inbuilt tendency to be corrupted by power, it would be right for the AI to murder the one innocent person to save five, and moreover all its peers would agree.  However, I refuse to extend this reply to myself, because the epistemic state you ask me to imagine, can only exist among other kinds of people than human beings.

ie. the repugnant conclusion tells us a lot more about how human cognition works rather than how consequentionalism fundamentally works.

Hi Eric, thanks for sharing this, made me think differently, which is much appreciated. 
I’d like to comment on one point you made: “One can see repugnant conclusions pop up in the everyday choices of the movement: would you be happier being a playwright than a stock broker? Who cares, stock brokers make way more money, go make a bunch of money to give to charity.”

I have a personal, subjective example which contradicts your criticism of this idea. I don’t know how prevalent this single experience will be in others, but I believe this idea is worth pushing back against. 

I was a musician, which was my “passion,” but was extraordinarily unhappy whilst working as a musician. The poor financial prospects, difficulty in making ends meet, and requirement to piece together unpleasant part-time and freelance gigs in order to survive, and maybe fund the “fun” and more “artisically fulfilling” stuff once in a blue moon resulted in developing repugnance towards music entirely. Most people who pursue their passions risk this experience, as the success rate of all artists is infinitesimally low. Or, they often keep going, even though they don’t like it anymore, for any number of reasons.

Now, changing careers towards research/academia (which obviously does not have a reputation of being lucrative, but compared with what I made as a musician looks like a goldmine), I finally made the GWWC pledge, and net happiness has increased for myself and others: I’m happier because I can afford to pay for rent and food, and on top of that, can afford to donate as an EA. Other people are presumably happier because they benefit from those donations. 

On top of the EA donations, I do tend to do what you mention at the end of the blog. Especially as I have so many artist friends that I want to support. And that is extra (on top of EA donations). And again, increases happiness for myself and others, as well as hitting at this diluted, longtermism view you give, by, for example, facilitating art making (which artists get to enjoy, and then consumers of the art) in addition to saving lives. 

I’m not sure how useful this is or isn’t to you - clearly, we largely agree. I’m just adding a hint of perspective on this idealistic mention of “pursue your passion because it will make you happier,” which you describe as being a move which contradicts EA philosophy. Because, I believe the odds are that it actually won’t, and in many circumstances, one might actually be happier as that stock broker.