In theory, effective altruists are committed to using reason and evidence to identify the best interventions. In practice, much of the available funding is controlled by a small number of actors including prominent donors – most recently, Sam Bankman-Fried, and now Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz. What these donors consider worth funding has a sizable influence on what actually gets funded.
Today’s post uses historical comparisons to the Christianization of Roman philanthropy as well as Gilded Age philanthropy in the United States to begin to think critically about the discretion afforded to wealthy donors in shaping philanthropic priorities. In particular, I suggest, philanthropists exhibit important conservative biases that may explain some of effective altruism’s muted reaction towards institutional critiques of effective altruism. And more broadly, philanthropists tend to favor many of the same views and practices that brought them success in industries which differ importantly from the areas to which they turn their philanthropic focus. It is not obvious that this tendency to project methods from one domain onto another is a healthy feature of philanthropy.
There is much more to be said about the role of donor discretion in philanthropy. The rest I will save for the next post in this series.
To be clear, Thorstadt has written around a hundred different articles critiquing EA positions in depth, including significant amounts of object level criticism.
I find it quite irritating that no matter how much in depth object level criticism people like Thorstadt or I make, if we dare to mention meta-level problems at all we often get treated like rabid social justice vigilantes. This is just mud-slinging: both meta level and object level issues are important for the epistemological health of the movement.