Review of The Good It Promises, the Harm It Does

Thanks for this review, Richard. 

In the section titled, "The Bad," you cite a passage from my essay--"Diversifying Effective Altruism's Longshots in Animal Advocacy"--and then go on to say the following: 

"Another author tells us (p. 81):

it is morally ill-advised to invest tens of millions of dollars in tech long shots that might someday have a huge impact on the world at large while failing to combat intimately related systemic injustices that are doing disproportionate damage right now to already at-risk communities.

(Of course, no argument is offered in support of this short-sighted thinking. It’s just supposed to be obvious to all right-thinking individuals. This sort of vacuous moralizing, in the total absence of any sort of grappling with—or even recognition of—opposing arguments, is found throughout the volume.)"

It sounds from your framing like you take it that I assert the claim in question, believe that the alleged claim is obvious, and hold this belief "in the total absence of any sort of grappling with--or even recognition of--opposing arguments." 

With respect, I don't think your reading is fair on any of these fronts.

First, I don't assert the claim in question. The passage you (partially) cite actually reads "One might object that it is morally ill-advised to invest...", and what I'm trying to do in this context is to get behind why someone skeptical of certain EA cause-prioritizations might be worried that it is morally ill-advised given other considerations that you don't mention in your review. (I recognize that one has limited space in a review and can't get to everything.)

Second, I don't believe that the claim you misattribute to me is "obvious to all right-thinking individuals." Here are two bits of support for my explicit recognition (in the chapter) of my belief that right-thinking people might disagree:

(i) On pages 79-80, the pages immediately before the passage you cite, I consider the hope to "mitigate important but often neglected 'longtermist' concerns about suffering-risk", providing footnotes to an FAQ on s-risk, citations to work by MacAskill, Bostrom, and Ord, and gratitude to Dominic Roser for "helping me to see the complexity of this problem through the lens of intergenerational justice." I go on to say, "Though it is tempting, given the pressing concern of inequitable cause prioritization, to weigh the opportunity costs of funding such tech long shots only in terms of the interests of presently disadvantaged communities, there are also the interests of future disadvantaged communities to consider", citing Roser and Seidel 2017. 

(ii) On page 80, about four lines of text before the passage that you cite as an instance of "vacuous moralizing", I say this: "A reasonable person could be forgiven, it seems, for judging the opportunity costs associated with possibly foiling a misaligned AI in fifty years to be too high, and for suspecting that these millions of dollars could be better invested elsewhere. (I should add that the same reasonable person might simultaneously conclude that it is nonetheless wise to devote some resources to mitigating s-risk; my intent here is not to try to minimize these serious risks, but to emphasize that significant investment in their potential mitigation, however important, is nonetheless a long shot with present opportunity costs worth keeping in mind.") 

Third, the above two bits also seem to me to sit ill with the framing of my essay as "lacking any sort of grappling with--or even recognition of--opposing arguments." I may still be engaged in "vacuous moralizing" by your lights, and perhaps I've fallen short of your standard for "any sort of grappling". But I hope I've at least succeeded in recognizing the existence of opposing arguments (maybe I cited the wrong people or too few of them?). 

On the bright side, those in this thread who are skeptical of steel-manning as a strategy for engaging critics will have no quarrel with you. :)

Thanks again for reading the piece and I'm sorry that it was a dispiriting experience!

It is sometimes hard for communities with very different beliefs to communicate. But it would be a shame if communication were to break down.

I think it is worth trying to understand why people from very different perspectives might disagree with effective altruists on key issues. I have tried on my blog to bring out some key points from the discussions in this volume, and I hope to explore others in the future.

I hope we can bring the rhetoric down and focus on saying as clearly as possible what the main cruxes are and why a reasonable person might stand on one side or another. 

Your discussion of the 'good' in the book doesn't mention a part of Amia's foreword that I think is a fairly powerful critique (though far from establishing "effective altruism is bad as currently practiced" or anything that strong): 

'These [above] are some of the questions raised when the story of Effective Altruism’s success is told not by its proponents, but by those engaged in liberation struggles and justice movements that operate outside Effective Altruism’s terms. These struggles, it must be said, long predate Effective Altruism, and it is striking that Effective Altruism has not found anything very worthwhile in them: in the historically deep and ongoing movements for the rights of working-class people, nonhuman animals, people of color, Indigenous people, women, incarcerated people, disabled people, and people living under colonial and authoritarian rule. For most Effective Altruists, these movements are, at best, examples of ineffective attempts to do good; negative examples from which to prescind or correct, not political formations from which to learn, with which to create coalition, or to join.'

(Got the quote from David Thorstad's blog: https://ineffectivealtruismblog.com/2023/02/25/the-good-it-promises-the-harm-it-does-part-1-introduction/)

Now, we can debate the extent to which this is true (most EAs are actually pretty sympathetic to animal rights activism I suspect, Open Phil. gave money to criminal justice reform etc.). But insofar as it is true, I take it the challenge is something like: 'what's more likely, all those movements were in fact ineffective, or you're biased demographically against them'. And I think the bite of the challenge comes from something like this. Most EAs are *liberal/centre-left* in political orientation. So they probably believe that historically these movements have been of very high value and have produced important insights about the world and social reality. (Even if we also think some other things have been high value too, including perhaps some many people in these movements disliked or opposed.) So how come they act like those movements probably aren't still doing that? What changed? 

I think there are lots of good responses that can be made to this, but it's still a challenge very much worth thinking about. More worth thinking about than gloating/getting angry over the dumbest or most annoying things the book says. (And to be clear, I do find most of the passages Richard quotes in his review pretty annoying.) 

Thanks for writing this up Richard. There was a plan a few months ago on the forum to divide and conquer the book, and maybe post up a joint review, but it fell by the wayside. That's partly due to real-life being higher priority, but I also got ground down by the hostile nature of the book - and slogging through it to reproduce the arguments just wasn't going to happen. I welcome attempts to steelman parts of this book^[1], or associated works, as I do think it is important for EA to understand and to engage with our critics.

I think there are some good bits in there that are worth understand where critical/leftist challenges to Effective Altruism come from. Srinivasan's foreword is a good outline of a 'low decoupling' challenge to the analytic philosophy approach that's core to a lot of EA thinking, and I found Simone de Lima's Chapter 2 the highlight of what I read - I think that the Chapter title does it an injustice. I'd encourage people to read David Thorstad's review of that chapter for a charitable/steelman reading of it. In many places, especially the end of Chapter 17, the contributors are clear that they view Capitalism as the primary source of evil - and that this is a self-evident moral fact, and it's a pretty clear crux to understand their point-of-view.

But yeah, a lot of it is just... really, really bad. I'm going to single out Crary's Chapter 16 "Against Effective Altruism" here. I believe it's mostly a reproduction of a previous essay (perhaps with small changes) that are already in the public domain.^[2] Some points that are especially egregious to me:

• Crary presents the 'Institutional' and 'Philosophical' critiques, before combining them into her 'Composite' critique that is meant to carry the weight of both. But there's very little evidence cited for it at all - for the Composite Critique the main argument is that it "finds extensive support in philosophical reflection about the social sciences", such as the Frankfurt school, which... will do very little to persuade many EAs. If the choice is between EA or the Frankfurt school, then that's a very easy choice.
• Much like the rest of the book, there's an assumption that Capitalism is wrong, and that any deviations from removing it are of very little moral value. Instead of working with animal industries, we should be working for complete abolition. Instead of donating to Give Directly, we should be undoing the Bretton Woods organisations. This is, as you say, just a testimonial of their anti-capitalist perspective, and reads more as a rallying cry for fellow critics of EA to join the fight against it, rather than a consideration of whether EA is right at all.
• In particular, Crary keeps calling EA morally corrupt throughout her piece. Perhaps I have too naïve a view of the academy - but this seems beyond the pale. Any academics who are reading this, how often have mentors/reviewers/interlocutors called your work "a textbook case of moral corruption"? What do you think would happen if they did? In her reference to this, she quotes the original source of the idea as saying that this isn't villifying any individuals and - well, my response is "yeah right". You should know you're playing with fire when you use that kind of language, and cowardly hiding a get-out-of-jail free card in your citations about how your terminology doesn't mean what it usually means doesn't cut it. Calling what someone believes as 'moral corruption' is a serious and harmful attack.  
• Her quip at the end, that accepting her philosophical critiques and changing the way EA works would allow it "finally a step toward doing a bit of good" is I think both historically wrong and frankly insulting to the good work that EA individuals and organisations have done.

I honestly think that Crary's article might be one of worst anti-EA articles I've read and boy is that saying something, because there are a lot. As I said in the intro maybe someone can make a stronger case for it, it definitely riled me up, but it may honestly just be as bad an article as it seems. 

There is one final point worth considering though. There's a meme in some rationalist-spaces that EAs are "quokkas" - which I don't like^[3], but it may have a kernel of truth if we're so "turn the other cheek, don't fight noise with noise" etc. I want to suggest that EA should take a stronger response to this kind of critique in the future. I think the current line is to just not respond to this kind of thing? But I think we're big enough as a movement where our criticism is also noticeable, and will on its own persuade critics. I think it was completely avoidable for someone as prominent as Timnit Gebru to call us all fascists.  Instead, we should be pushing back on prominent criticisms that are clearly wrong and beyond the pale - and do so clearly but forcefully. In short, in cases like this, we may have too many Darwins and not enough Huxleys.

1. ^{^}

   Hopefully we can find someone in addition to Thorstad willing to give it a go?

2. ^{^}

   The earliest source I could find was this talk, but the article also appeared in Radical Philosophy in 2021.

3. ^{^}

   Clarification - I don't like the use of this term pejoratively. Quokkas themselves are objectively adorable.

The second chapter tells us that featuring endorsements from attractive celebrities constitutes “body shaming, ableism, and sexism.” (p. 13)

I haven't read the chapter or the book, but something like this just seems pretty plausible to me. By disproportionately featuring people filtered on the basis of a lookist^[1] selection process (e.g. their popularity in lookist industries, or partially directly based on how attractive we think they are to us or to society), we may be condoning and/or perpetuating (societal) lookism, and increasing its harms. And lookism of course overlaps with "body shaming, ableism, and sexism", e.g. people discriminate on the basis of how disabilities or other conditions look, which is ableist, and women and girls seem to be more often the targets of lookism and body shaming, which is sexist. By supporting a specific standard of beauty, we may invite comparisons to it, and so possibly body shaming.

However, featuring any attractive celebrities at all doesn't necessarily seem lookist. OTOH, it could be that attractive celebrities are so rare in the population we should be sampling from (and it's not clear what that is) that even featuring one would be very unlikely to happen other than through lookism at some step.

My guess is that our contribution to lookism here is very small relative to the impacts for animals (whether good or bad for animals).

I wonder if it would be acceptable to them if we offset our contributions to lookism (and/or "body shaming, ableism, and sexism") by supporting work against it, too. I'd guess it wouldn't be that costly to do, if fully offsetting just means not increasing lookism on net, rather than preventing every harm of lookism we'd (foreseeably?^[2]) cause.

1. ^{^}

   Discrimination on the basis of physical attractiveness against those considered less attractive or in favour of those considered more attractive.

2. ^{^}

   Trying to prevent every harm of lookism we'd cause, including unforeseeable ones, probably leads to decision paralysis, due to butterfly effects.

"What have we come to when we call a diversification of business portfolios by these [agribusiness and fast food] companies—which are involved, through their caucus in Congress, in the dismantlement of environmental laws, human rights, and animal protection laws—a success for the animals, and even going as far as to offer “vegan” certifications to a Unilever product?"

(I would’ve thought that any vegan product could be certified as such, but apparently it doesn’t count if it’s made by the wrong people?)

I think these are indeed successes overall, but I can imagine being more concerned about vegan-washing, humane-washing or otherwise legitimizing bad stuff a company does and improving their reputation and nonvegan/inhumane sales by applauding them for the little good they do or small improvements they make. The profits made off vegan products by non-vegan companies can also be reinvested in harmful products, at the same company or by shareholders in other nonvegan products, or to undermine "environmental laws, human rights, and animal protection laws". Of course, the profits can be reinvested into more vegan stuff, but we'd expect a greater share of reinvestment in vegan products from vegan companies.

Plus, I think products can still be labeled as vegan even if literal human slavery/forced labour was involved in their production (or at least wasn't certified not to be involved, from regions/industries of concern, like cocoa production). I don't think we should consider human slavery to be vegan.

So, it could cause harm, which may be of concern even if the benefits seem greater, and, at least a priori, it could even cause more harm than benefit.

But I disagree with them (or at least what I expect they're arguing; again I haven't read any of the book, although I've read Crary's critiques elsewhere), because I think benefits can outweigh harms, the numbers actually matter, and the specific harms they worry about seem small in comparison to the more direct benefits (the effects on farmed animals from people buying vegan products instead of nonvegan ones), and they might even have the sign wrong for the harms.^[1] Some similar points here: https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/foundational-questions-summaries#momentum-vs.-complacency-from-welfare-reforms.

Also, brand recognition could be important. I'd guess vegan items from large nonvegan companies would replace more animal products than vegan items sold by vegan companies, because the former sell more among those who aren't committed to veganism than the latter, and we don't get as much out of targeting committed vegans.

1. ^{^}

   The more a company is invested in vegan or more humane products, the less their profits depend on opposing them and laws protecting animals, and the more likely they are to actually support animal protection laws, even just to avoid being undercut by less humane companies (e.g. cage-free eggs vs caged eggs). It's not even clear counterfactuals matter to them; maybe just participating in a system that cause harm, even if your particular participation has no expected effect on how much harm is caused by that system (or even reduces it?).

About this footnote:

============================

Carol Adams even informs us that:

Sebo and Singer flourish as academics in a white supremacist patriarchal society because others, including people of color and those who identify as women, are pushed down. (p. 135, emphasis added.)

Maybe treading on the oppressed is a crucial part of Singer’s daily writing routine, without which he would never have written a word? If there’s some other reason to believe this wild causal claim, we’re never told what it is.

=============================

Here's a potential more charitable interpretation of this claim. Adams might not be claiming:

"Singer personally performs some act of oppression as part of his writing process."

Adam's causal model might be more of the following:

"Singer's ideas aren't unusually good; there are lots of other people, including people of color and those who identify as women, who have ideas that are as good or better. But those other people are being pushed down (by society in general, not by Singer personally) which leaves that position open for Singer. If people of color and those who identify as women weren't oppressed, then some of them would be able to outcompete Singer, leaving Singer to not flourish as much."

This is a pretty good review that highlights the biggest problems with this book quite well. I was also annoyed by the lack of good arguments throughout the book. This book feels like a missed opportunity in two senses.

First, it seems like a missed opportunity to collect actually impressive criticisms of effective altruism (which I believe very much can exist). For example, many authors of this book suggest effective altruism is problematically capitalist, which could be an interesting critique, but in my opinion they barely offer any interesting arguments to support this critique. The same thing applies for the critique that effective altruism's approach to animal advocacy is ineffective, which is another claim that is at once central in the book yet not adequately argued for.

Second, it seems like a missed opportunity to create a meaningful contribution to the debate on effective altruism. As David Thorstad pointed out, the authors of this book clearly have quite different worldviews and backgrounds than many effective altruists do. It is admirable that Thorstad tries to overcome this obstacle to debate by reading this book as charitably as possible so as to convince effective altruists not to dismiss it all too quickly. However, most of the authors of this book seem to make almost no serious effort to make themselves clear to people who do not already basically agree with their views. I find it very ironic that Amia Srinivasan writes in the book's foreword that

There is every possibility, then, that Effective Altruists will ignore what these voices [the authors of the essays of this book] have to say—or fail to take the time to understand what their significance might be. (p. 17)

However, as of writing this, there have already been four posts on this forum to discuss this book (the above topic, a discussion of the book, a topic about a reading group for the book, and a post about the book before it was even published). Conversely, as far as I am aware, none of the 22 authors who have contributed to this book have ever attempted to engage in conversation with effective altruists (on this forum or elsewhere). Matthew C. Halteman, one of the book's authors, has had constructive discussion with the author of the above post! Even if I think the book's essays were quite flawed, I can still imagine constructive debate taking place between effective altruists and the book's authors. But this will require more effort on the part of the contributors to the book.

Other than that, I had a bunch of smaller issues with this book. Fifteen of the book's seventeen essays focus mainly or exclusively on effective altruism's approach to animal advocacy, but this choice is never justified. This focus is not bad per se, especially considering how compared to global health and x-risks, animal advocacy is relatively neglected in effective altruism. But it is quite misleading for a volume that promises to provide general critiques of effective altruism (the book's editors claim that it is "the first book-length critique of Effective Altruism"). The book's editing overall could have been far better, anyway. I felt like many of the essays made the same points, and a lot of sections were rather irrelevant to effective altruism. This was especially troubling in what I think is one of the worst essays of the book (5. 'Who Counts?') which was basically just a lengthy history of US wildlife conservation, followed by the vague and tendentious claim - of course without good arguments in support of it - that effective altruists treat animals like objects, in the same way that hunting lobbyists historically have done.

To the book's credit, I think the final essay (17. 'The Change We Need') was surprisingly good, and I think it rightly emphasizes that reforms should always keep an ideal in mind. When they do not, they risk merely making the whole problem worse. But I do not know enough about animal advocacy to know whether effective altruist animal advocacy actually lacks vision.

I agree with Thorstad that effective altruists should engage with what this book's worth anyway, even if that is certainly not easy, considering all the book's flaws.

Just putting up a link of this previous post about this book, on which there was quite a bit of discussion in the comments.

The following comment was initially intended to be some combination of synthesis, steelmanning, "translation" into EA concepts, and riffing on the result. It's gone more heavily into the last two categories as I have written it. It's possible that some or even all of the authors wouldn't agree with how I have translated/riffed on their concerns. I've deliberately not attempted to reference specific articles for that reason.

I do not have object-level opinions of any significance in the animal-welfare space, and I do not indentify as a member of the ideological left. I don't have a clear opinion on whether EA should act differently in the animal-welfare space. However, I do think the book's contributors at least indirectly touch on some broader themes that are worth reflecting on.

How Farmed Animal Welfare Might Be Different

One key theme of the book seems to be an argument that EA methodology is reductionistic -- including that EA's cost-effectiveness analyses cannot capture the complexity of the world particularly well (especially in diverse cultural contexts), that a heavy focus on utilitarianism fails to capture all the dimensions we should be evaluating on, and so forth. Some of the authors seem to advocate for what I might call methodological diversification -- those authors don't necessarily seem opposed to EA-style interventions, but don't think animal advocacy should put too many vegan egg-substitutes in that (or perhaps any) basket.

It occured to me that how we think about methodological diversification could be different in farmed animal welfare than other cause areas. In (e.g.) global health & development, EA spend is a small fraction of total spend in the cause area. So EA GH&D work is relatively focused on what the other funders have missed or undervalued, and the methodological diversity in GH&D comes predominately from what non-EA funders (e.g., Gates, governments) do. You can think that EA-favored projects and frameworks fail to measure and evaluate a lot of important outcomes, or that they give more credence to utilitarianism than warranted, and still think they are the best use of your marginal charitable dollar. In some other areas, EA may be the only actor, and so there is no risk of actively displacing pre-existing approaches. 

I don't have a good sense of how large EA funding is a percentage of the entire farmed animal welfare (FAW) funding world. However, it seems plausible that, given how underfunded FAW has been historically, EA functions as a big fish in what is a rather small pond. And many of the authors seem to view EA in that light. Moreover, much existing non-EA funding may be bound as a practical matter to existing work, so it's plausible that an large proportion of the FAW funding potentially available for new or expanded work may be EA-flavored even if it's not as large in absolute terms.

Thus, the FAW context causes us to reflect on whether we think there is a limit on the proportion of charitable endeavor in a given cause area that should be conducted according to EA principles, and whether not disrupting methodological diversity becomes an important consideration at some point.

On Skepticism of Big Fish

EAs spill a lot of digital ink about epistemics. I wonder if a sizable fraction of the authors' concerns about and criticism of EA relate to epistemics -- what are the purposes of the FAW movement, and how can they best be achieved? Who decides the answers to those questions, and how?

Like most attempts at doing good, FAW needs a framework of ethical systems and values against which to evaluate its efforts. Where should that come from? I think the authors would be much more comfortable with answers like "the viewpoints of people who have made sustained and significant personal sacrifices for FAW" or even "a survey of faculty in philosophy departments" rather than giving much weight to "the views of a few major EA funders and their agents." 

I'm sure most of the authors had thought about utilitarianism as it relates to animal advocacy before EA got involved; Peter Singer wrote a while ago, and by my count six of the contributors hold positions in philosophy departments (plus two in religious studies). It's not unreasonable for them to doubt that the increased influence of utilitarianism on what gets funded in FAW was primarily driven by advances in utilitarian thought or by its increasing acceptance by a broad swath of society. 

If you're sympathetic to EA ways of doing things, then having EA firepower in a cause area you care about is a good thing. If you aren't sympathetic, then you are probably worried about the effect of that firepower on the epistemics of your cause area. If that cause area is FAW, you probably don't think it healthy that the power wielded by a small group of people (wealthy capitalists and their agents) has an outsize effect on what the FAW movement does -- both now and in the future. Stated another way, you probably don't think that what major EA FAW donors think should update you much at all on what the epistemics of the FAW movement should be. 

And this is consistent with how we might think about the epistemic implications of New Big Fish in general, behind a veil of ignorance of sorts (i.e, without knowing whether their perspective is better or worse than the mix of existing perspectives in one's cause area). We'd likely conclude that their viewpoints shouldn't change cause area epistemics much at all, because there is no a priori reason to think the New Big Fish knows better than the greater number of other participants.

A thought experiment: imagine someone lurking the Forum suddenly died and left Open Phil-level money in their will, restricted to the pursuit of effective altruism in a cause area that is currently viewed as second-tier and/or with a methodology that is currently viewed as second-tier. What would the likely effects on EA epistemics be? My guess is that, within a decade, people would think the cause area or methodology was significantly more important / more sound than they would have thought in the absence of the lurking benefactor. In other words, throwing lots of money around tends to alter epistemics in practice. Although it's possible that the hypothetical mysterious lurker knew better than the community consensus, it's more likely that they were acting as a unilateralist and generated net harmful changes in EA epistemics.

The Unilateralist's Curse

Although perhaps not clearly stated as such, I think there is a kernel of an argument about the unilateralist's curse in the book that goes something like this:

• (1) Some/many EA-inspired projects in FAW are bad, overrated, etc.
• (2) Despite (1), they still get a ton of funding because they don't have to persuade a broad range of the relevant community of their worth; they only have to persuade one wealthy EA funder (or that person's agents). 
• (3) Pre-EA, an activist would need to get a lot of buy-in from others before taking an action that could produce a big net negative result (e.g., the risk that widespread cage-free corporate campaigns will impede efforts at getting people to stop eating eggs altogether, and the benefits of corporate campaigns are not worth that cost). Thus, the structural features of the pre-EA FAW world provided substantial protection against the risk of projects with significant net expected value.
• (4) There is no ex ante reason to believe that wealthy EA funders (or their agents) are more capable of determining what is in animals' best interest than a larger group of people who have devoted significant sweat equity and sacrifice to the cause of FAW. In other words, ability to make a lot of money in the tech industry has little correlation with ability to serve as a proxy for farmed animals. Where the EA funder acts in opposition to the broader universe of people invested in FAW, this observation significantly raises the possibility that the wealthy EA funder is acting as a cursed unilateralist.

My takeaway would be: when one is entering a new cause area with a large pocketbook, one should be careful to consult with existing stakeholders about proposed new projects, and listen carefully to any concerns they have about downside risk. (I don't know whether this happened in FAW or not.)

Thinking about the Long Term

Considering the effects of EA on the broader FAW ecosystem is particularly important to the extent that neither we nor the authors know where EA will focus its resources in a decade or two. For instance, it's plausible that more and more resources will flow to longtermist causes. 

Apart from EA, FAW is most likely to draw funding and workers from communities that are rather left-focused in orientation. So, to the extent that EA's long-term commitment to the field isn't ironclad, it should be particularly careful to ensure that -- if it exits or sharply reduces investment -- the field is left in a position where it can carry on with the resources it has available to it. For instance, it would be bad for EA to transform the FAW field into one focused on working with corporations (e.g., corporate crate-free campaigns, alternative protein), to such an extent that there is a loss of institutional memory about other approaches, and then leave.

A Lesson for Each Side?

Interestingly, I think some of the lessons to draw from the book potentially apply to both sides (albeit to different extents and in different ways). 

One suggestion is that, when critiquing those with different methodological commitments, one should always hold the mirror up to yourself as well.  For instance, the author of the main post suggests a conflict of interest on the book authors' part, suggesting that at least some of them are reacting to threats of harm "to the wallets of the authors and their allies." I think it's proper to consider that the authors may have personal reasons for their positions -- many have invested significant portions of their careers into that work and presumably draw a great sense of purpose/meaning/fulfillment from it. (I doubt many people in FAW are getting rich off the work, though!)

However, EAs should recognize that they have their own personal interests as well and are -- well, human (i.e., not dispassionate dispensers of utilons). For example, many people who have done well in a capitalist system are at higher risk of underrating arguments that capitalism is the root of much harm. And it's common to care a lot about how much impact you are personally generating, which could potentially bias people into favoring top-down solutions rather than taking a more indirect role of supporting grassroots activism.

It seems that it would be helpful to turn the temperature down a bit on both sides. That is not to suggest that disagreements shouldn't be vetted, that people's feelings aren't allowed to get hurt, or that anyone needs to sing songs around the campfire together. On a related note, I think sitting down and talking to one another is usually more productive than writing articles/blog posts/etc. at the other group (although the latter has its place). I don't have a podcast or anything, but think it would be fruitful to have some of these authors on an EA podcast for a mutual attempt at understanding perspectives and cruxes.

It seems one of the core ideas you describe here corresponds directly to “Explicit vs implicit prioritisation” from my post, “a socialist’s view on liberal progressive criticisms of EA” (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/f58guFdECnXgsjn2v/a-socialist-s-view-on-liberal-progressive-criticisms-of-ea).

From your post it seems this set of essays is more primarily aimed at informing other American liberal-progressive social justice types that some EA principles differ from theirs, and these essays aren’t really aimed at convincing EAs or others that EA should do things differently.

Thanks this is brilliantly articulated and also fun to read. The sad thing is that strong arguments can be made for the expected value of many forms of smart, even semi-revolutionary activist methods (and have been on this forum) but like you said they seem not keen to engage with our framework at all.

Perhaps they should have hired you to help them write more compelling book!

I have one observation about your use of the term "social justice" which surprised me a little. The way I used to use the word at least, I would consider effective altruism's approach to be an effective "social justice" approach, to rectify social injustices like kids dying from malaria and factory farming. But your use (and perhaps the generally accepted use now) is very different. Like here...

"We should fully expect maximizing welfare to generate complaints about “inequitable cause prioritization” (p. 82) from those who care more about social justice."

I would have thought of maximizing welfare to be one form of social justice, and they would certainly not be mutually exclusive, but apparently the term now has more sinister connotations. When I think of social justice, I think of MLK, Ghandi and Mandela, all pragmatic activists who were wildly successful at creating lasting change with a cost effectiveness and scale that should make effective altruists salivate. I find it sad that "social justice" these days seems to carry the baggage of something like a...

Far-left-slightly-unstable-person-ranting-on-the-internet-about-identity-politics

And "social justice warrior" seems to be even worse. Until 15 years ago I would have been proud to identify as a social justice warrior, ie someone who thoughtfully and effectively fights injustice against animals, malaria deaths as well as racial inequity, but I fear the politicisation and pigeonholing of the term may now be irreversible.

Mind you I've lived in Uganda for the last 10 years and so perhaps I'm just behind on a legitimate evolution of the English language!

Would be interested to hear your thoughts.

It's interesting, I had heard some vague criticism from social justice communities that EA is bad, but at first I had dismissed it. Your review made me look up the book and compare what the book says to how EAs (that is, you) interpret the book. And I've got to say, a lot of the social justice criticism of EA really looks spot-on as critiques of your review. I'd encourage readers to do some epistemic spot checks of this review, as at least when I did so, it didn't seem to fare super well. On the other hand I will probably read the full book when I find the time.

This is something EAs have discussed a bit before (often by making purely theoretical arguments that the “best bet” maximizes expected value),

Coincidentally, I recent wrote my (negative) perspective on worldview diversification here: <https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/04/25/worldview-diversification/>. It could be of interest.

Thanks for the review, Richard!

We learn that EA funders have focused on two main strategies to reform or eventually upend animal agriculture: (i) corporate cage-free (and similar) campaigns, and (ii) investment in meat alternatives.

Relatedly, the Sentience Institute has a nice summary of the pros and cons of welfare reforms.

There’s a larger issue (not really addressed in this volume) of when it makes sense for a funder to go “all in” on their best bets vs. when they’d do better to “diversify” their philanthropic portfolio. This is something EAs have discussed a bit before (often by making purely theoretical arguments that the “best bet” maximizes expected value), but I’d be excited to see more work on this problem using different methodologies, including taking into account the risk of “model error” or systemic bias in our initial EV estimates. (Maybe such work is already out there, and I just don’t know about it? The closest I can think of is Open Philanthropy’s work on worldview diversification, which I like a lot.)

There's also We can do better than argmax, but yeah, seems like surprisingly little discussion so far on such an important topic.

Thank you for reading and reviewing the book for the rest of us!
Disappointed to hear it is close minded in regards to the political framework it comes from.
I do think there are many valid arguments to be made to criticize EA on its own terms and hope this is what the book set out to do.

Hi Richard, thank for sharing your opinions. 

The thing is, we all have opinions, it is great to think. However, when accumulated scientific evidence shows a direction on a certain topic, we are supposed to align our actions probably with the scientific facts.

Now we know quite clearly that economic growth is a major driver of ecological collapse (you can check the works of Parrique, Kallis, Hickel, Meadows, Haberl as a starting point). The rate of economic growth is so fast that our countermeasures (efficiency improvements, carbon capture technologies, etc.) are not sufficient enough to neutralize ecological impact due to the exponential growth of economic activities. In the past decades, Kuznetz claimed that after reaching a certain 'development' level of the economy, the ecological impact would reach a peak point, then start to decline despite the economic growth. Yet this did not happen and there is no supporting evidence that it is likely to happen in short run. Some argues that, for instance Hannah Ritchie from Our World in Data, that absolute decoupling of greenhouse gas emissions and economic growth has been achieved in some developed countries. This is true, yet it does not mean that these developed countries are still crossing planetary boundaries far more than their fair share (check  2023 The Lancet Planetary Health article of Vogel). Their decoupling rate is insufficient and must be at least 16 times faster. And it is only about ghg emissions. A common mistake is to view the world with carbon tunnel vision. Economic activities do not only produce greenhouse gas emissions, and resource and material use have definitely not been decoupled from economic growth.

The main reason for the significant ecological impact of economic growth is that the world economy must continuously grow (otherwise, it collapses). This growth and economic activity is measured in gross domestic product. Any type of production contributes to the growth of gross domestic product (GDP). The production of food, housing, and clothes (basic needs) contributes to it. And also production of weapons, private jets, luxury items, space shuttles, animal products (unnecessary and unrelated to human welfare). I think the former can be classified as good, and the latter group can be classified as bad. We must be aware that the 'bad group of produced goods' contributes a lot to the growth of the world economy. Therefore, your argument that " Generally speaking, I think economic growth and technological progress is good" is refuted.

Lastly, about the book you criticized. I did not read it, but I will definitely read it. You seem to be giving emotional reactions to its critics. Yet the book provides with opportunity for ea people to improve. The following quote for instance:

"Effective Altruists will no doubt continue to see hopeful signs of incremental, quantitative progress in specific areas of policy—e.g., in extreme poverty or malaria reduction—right up to the moment when the entire system collapses, leaving billions to starve to death and all animal life obliterated. (pp. 218-19, emphasis added)"

This quote emphasizes that we are moving toward an ecological and systemic collapse. The probability of it happening is increasing after every COP or climate summit fails to address the root causes of the crisis. Of course, EA people should continue to do their best to help others effectively. However, the inability to see the direction of systemic collapse is widespread among EA people. For instance, the opinion of 80000 on climate change is very much a carbon-tunnel vision and can even be considered climate denialism (they do not even evaluate ecological collapse and 6th mass species extinction from planetary boundaries and ecological tipping points perspective). Soon, there might not be a functioning society EA people would be able to do their philantrophy in.