Be Proud To Be An Effective Altruist

Crossposted on my blog.  

When I was at Manifest, Austin Chen said something interesting to me: that one thing that he liked about my blog was that I was proud to be an effective altruist. I didn’t treat it as an embarrassing quirk, but as something that’s actively good, that’s worth encouraging. A lot of EAs don’t do this, which I think is sad. Scott Alexander amusingly quips:

I hate having to post criticism of EA.

Not because EA is bad at taking criticism. The opposite: they like it too much. It almost feels like a sex thing. “Please, tell me again how naughty I’m being!” I went to an EA organization’s offices once - I think it was OpenPhil, but don’t quote me on that - and the whole place was strewn with the most critical books you can imagine - Robert Reich, Anand Giradharadas, that kind of thing.

I remember when I was out tabling for the effective altruism club at my University, some woman came up and started trotting out braindead anti-effective altruism arguments—something about tech bros and SBF and white saviorism. The other very reasonable and responsible EAs at the club were saying things like “hmm, yeah, that’s a very interesting criticism, well, if you want to come to a meeting, we’d be happy to discuss it.”

I wanted to scream! These aren’t serious criticisms. This is complete bullshit.

Spend enough time listening to the criticisms of effective altruism and it becomes clear that, aside from those arguing for small tweaks at the marigns, they all stem from either a) people being very dogmatic and having a worldview that’s strangely incompatible with doing good things (if, for instance, they don’t help the communist revolution); b) people wanting an excuse to do nothing in the face of extreme suffering; or c) people disliking effective altruists and so coming up with some half-hearted excuse for why EA is really something-something colonialism.

I don’t want to be too mean about this, but the criticisms are unbelievably dumb. They are confused to a really extraordinary degree. The reasoning is so exquisitely poor that it’s very clearly motivated. I don’t say that about other subjects—this is the only subject on which the critics don’t have any half-decent objections. And yet despite this, lots of effective altruists treat the criticisms as serious.

1,000 children die a day of malaria. Think about how precious the life is of a young child—concretely picture a small child coughing up blood and lying in bed with a fever of 105. We—the effective altruists—are the ones doing something about that. And not just doing a bit about it—working as hard as possible to eradicate malaria, taking seriously how precious the lives of those children are. GiveWell does research into the charities that avert misery most effectively, and then tens of thousands of EAs all around the world give to those charities, because they recognize that though they’ll never see the children they help, those children matter.

This is not something to be embarrassed about. Giving money to effective charities and getting others to do the same is by far the best thing I have ever done in my life. Every nice thing I’ve done interpersonally doesn’t have half a percent the value of saving lives, of funneling money into the hands of charities so that little kids don’t get horrible diseases that kill them.

And yet these critics who do nothing, who sit on their asses as children die whose deaths they can easily avert have the gall to criticize those of us who are doing something, who are working to avert deaths as effectively as possible. They have the gall to criticize those of us who are working to free animals from the horrifying torture chambers known as factory farms.

It’s one thing to do nothing as children die. But it’s utterly repugnant to spend one’s time and energy criticizing the people doing something about it.

The effective altruism movement has saved about 50,000 lives a year since its inception. While the critics wax poetic, we’re actually doing things about the world’s problems. We’re doing things to avert about 17 9/11s worth of death every single year. One can certainly criticize the movement at the margins: maybe we should spend a bit less on the longtermism stuff. But the movement, as a whole, has clearly been an enormous good. The best kind of life one can live would certainly involve doing lots of things recommended by effective altruists.

And sorry, I’m not going to be embarrassed about trying to improve the world well—about being part of a movement that’s saved hundreds of thousands of people. No matter how many ridiculous hit pieces there are, no matter how many mean names people call effective altruists, no matter how many people try to pin SBF’s fraud on the principles of effective altruism, I’m not going to be embarrassed about it. While one can have marginal disagreements with some of the things done by the movement, those who criticize the movement as a whole are deeply intellectually unserious. I’m not going to pretend that they have real objections: they do not, all they have is some combination of rhetorical barbs, spite, and apathy.

Nearly everyone in the modern world effectively walks past drowning children, doing nothing about children whose lives they could save. The few people doing something about the drowning children, recognizing, in the face of the row of corpses, that something deeply horrible is going on and something must be done about it, are worthy of utmost respect and reverence, not snark or cheap rhetoric or disdain.

When children are drowning, you shouldn’t be ashamed to wade in to save them.