Leif Wenar's 'Takedown' of Effective Altruism

This is a crosspost from my Substack newsletter.

This month’s most embarrassing piece of public philosophy appeared on invitation in a piece for The Economist by the Stanford philosopher Leif Wenar. Once more, Wenar tries to gain publicity by singing an obituary for effective altruism, one that oozes with self-confident smugness and hostility. All that may be forgiven if he were right, but his arguments, if one can even call them that, are so poor that I’m embarrassed to be part of the same profession.

BUDDHA, JESUS and Mo Tzu lived among the poor and taught compassion for all. The early British utilitarians championed human equality, as they campaigned to end slavery and win equal rights for women.

My fellow readers of The Economist may be bemused to hear that the effective altruists now have this century’s biggest idea. You mean, the folks who can look at our fractious and bedraggled world and declare, “We must save the shrimp”?

What’s good in effective altruism isn’t new, and what’s new isn’t good. Yet some effective altruists have power over artificial intelligence, and that’s a problem for us all.

Oh no! Caring about whether shrimps have their eyes crushed or cut off?! Caring about whether they are stunned before being killed?! The horror!!!

People like Wenar made the very same tired arguments over the last few decades when it came to caring about cows, pigs, chickens, and fish. Rather than engage with the arguments, which reflect an emerging consensus among animal consciousness and animal welfare researchers that shrimps, lobsters, and crabs can feel pain, and the fact that the UK has recently expanded legal protections to these creatures (alongside octopuses), he prefers to sneer at the very suggestion of caring about shrimps.

What he doesn’t understand is that effective altruists care about neglectedness. Some of the worst problems in the world have received insufficient attention.

A tiny donation of $15 can improve the lives of about 22,500 shrimps. There are few donations one could make with even remotely the same expected payoff. Even if we give shrimps only a small chance of actually experiencing pain, their numbers are so vast, outnumbering all other farmed animals, that we should try to prevent their suffering.

Wenar sounds a bit like the people who denied infant pain a couple of decades ago, trying to make everyone who cares about them look like a fool. But in the end, he just makes himself look heartless and uninformed. I have little doubt that he didn’t even bother to read anything about shrimp pain before trying to ridicule an entire movement. He could have bothered to look at the Wikipedia article on crustacean pain.

And you don’t even have to agree with giving to shrimp charities to be an EA. It’s just what many believe. There remain constant debates about whether and how much we should give to them. Those debates will not be solved by Wenar-style sneering. As it stands, shrimps receive much less than 0.1 per cent of all funding dedicated to animal welfare. Is that so insane? I’m currently writing a book arguing that it is not.

For years I have watched the growth of effective altruism with concern. I head Stanford University’s ethics centre; we run many programmes to help technologists think through the social impacts of what they are building. Part of our challenge is getting through to the students who just want to get rich. Sometimes more challenging still are the effective altruists, who want to save the world.

Moral ambition is great. Good judgment is more important. If you visit an EA message board, you’ll see many asseverations of civilisational importance, often presented in a goulash of mathy jargon. What you won’t see is much common sense about how the world works, or about the impact of policies on real people’s lives. You might not come away from the message board thinking that you’d want an effective altruist to babysit your kids.

Oh no! Again. The horror! I must imagine that Wenar struggled with mathematics if he cannot comprehend forum posts written by undergraduates. Perhaps we should all use common sense instead? All of the most serious ethical problems humanity faces involve a great deal of mathematics. This is inescapable, even if one wants to sneer at utilitarianism. Economics, artificial intelligence, biorisks: there are almost no issues of moral importance where one could avoid trying to assess risks.

Wenar provides no evidence for his claim that EAs have no understanding of the consequences of alternative policies. The opposite seems to be true. And to put the cherry on top, Wenar insists on adding the embarrassing remark that he wouldn’t trust an effective altruist to babysit. EAs, who have occasionally even donated organs to complete strangers.

My worry is the effective altruists who become too attached to being the hero. One popular EA book, Will MacAskill’s “What We Owe The Future”, tells you that “you can shape the course of history,” and explains how to “structure global society”. But if you check the footnotes on the climate-change charity that the book calls “extremely cost-effective”, you may be surprised by how shaky the book’s guesswork is and how shoddy its research.

Or consider the EA poverty-relief charity, GiveWell. Its front-page pitch is that its grants “will save over 340,000 lives” in poor countries. When you dig into GiveWell’s calculations, you’ll see that they omit many negative factors well known to development economists. GiveWell’s numbers also omit actual deaths. For example, a top-rated GiveWell charity that gives out cash in northern Nigeria reported that one of the many armed bandits who confronted its staff killed two people while looking for the cash. Those deaths are not counted as “minus two” in GiveWell’s “total lives saved” calculations, as by the charity’s own cost-effectiveness reasoning they should be.

You shouldn’t trust GiveWell, despite the 340,000 lives they saved, because bandits killed two of its staff members? Is this the best argument he has to underpin his case against EAs’ emphasis on effectiveness? If there is anyone who tries to assess tiny, off-chance risks and take them seriously, it is EAs. Not Wenar.

What effective altruists love is portentous pronouncements. What they don’t tend to love is accountability. GiveWell may grant a billion dollars this year—but it has never published its “lives saved” claim in a peer-reviewed journal, and the people targeted by its grants seem to have few rights to redress if things go badly. I sometimes wonder whether effective altruists have begun to pronounce so much about the “long-term” future because they know they’ll be dead long before they’re proved wrong.

What peer-reviewed positive effect has Wenar’s ethics centre at Stanford had on the world? Maybe we should defund it, too? Now things are getting ridiculous. Unlike other organisations, GiveWell publishes its data publicly, seeking transparency and continued improvement. What journal would even publish that publicly available data?

Effective altruism may be ending as a coherent movement. The proponent who most fully lived out its credo to do the most good with the resources available was the crypto whizz-kid Sam Bankman-Fried. He quite logically saw other people as resources to be used, and he’s now serving 25 years in federal prison for fraud. The old EA leaders who clustered around him have been discredited by their consistently bad judgment. (As the economist Tyler Cowen said, how can we trust their predictions about humanity’s future when they couldn’t even see the risks of Mr Bankman-Fried to their own organisation?) My brightest students now see effective altruism as a bit cringeworthy.

Sam Bankman-Fried fooled not just EAs but basically everyone else. By that logic, a great many financiers and public figures would be discredited, and no one who didn’t see it coming would be accorded any heightened status in turn. No EA thinks he did the right thing (see Benjamin Todd’s analysis). Basically no one else predicted his fraud either. People like to imagine that if they had been in the situation of people in the past who made mistakes, they wouldn’t have made those mistakes. More likely, they are just arrogant and mistake the power of hindsight for foresight.

With the Wenar’s mindset of just follow your common sense, Wenar would be more likely to be a defender of slavery if born a couple centuries back, than the utilitarians that challenged it. And heaven forbid if he was born to a German family in 1930.

If the movement is mostly over, its legacy will not be all bad. Effective altruism’s main funders are now speaking in public more like reasonable adults. And some of their money is going to fund basic science and public health, just as governments cut back.

Maybe Wenar should consider the good movements like EA do before disparaging them in public. If they are successful in their smear campaigns the result will measurably be thousands of lives lost. But they appear awfully indifferent or ignorant towards human lives. Otherwise they’d use actual arguments instead of smears.

EA smear campaigners realising that their efforts to remove funding from GiveWell will result in deaths

Yet what really matters now is the effective altruists building AI. Their creed has always played well in Silicon Valley, where the vibe is permanently Peter Pan. Many effective altruists have joined big tech firms, particularly frontier AI labs such as Anthropic.

He just can’t hold himself back from sneering. If anyone should grow up, then it’s people who think all you need to regulate AIs is common sense and good judgement. Is this what tech people pay to learn from Wenar?

AI is powerful and poorly understood. To guide its future, nothing can substitute for good judgment. People of good judgment know the dangers of self-deception and groupthink. They want to be held accountable, because they want to keep contact with reality. They respect the rules and institutions that have evolved to check man’s hubris.

Do the effective altruists in AI have good judgment? Anthropic’s recent safety problems are being investigated by groups with close ties to the boss’s EA friends and family. The main author of the moral “constitution” of Anthropic’s Claude has long intellectual and personal involvement in effective altruism. As far as I can see, there aren’t many external forces that will check such people’s choices. Whether they have a real understanding of human affairs and human lives may soon become clear.

Anthropic, an organization with perhaps the strongest historical ties to the effective altruism movement, has indeed done the most among the major players in the AI space to take risks seriously. So I am not sure what dunk Wenar hopes to accomplish here, other than to imply that EAs should be kept out of any important decisions. Even the idea that we’d need non-EAs to check EA recommendations is a bit conspiratorial. For experts, whether affiliated with EA or not, actually hold quite similar views on AI policies:

My hope, as always, is for my students. They are so admirable in wanting to use their gifts to better the world. I tell them to start by living among the people they want to help. Then get deep expertise—and dwell on the human consequences when some brainy scheme goes wrong. For simple life experience, maybe go into local politics. Or mentor a neighbour’s struggling kid.

It’s probably too late for the effective altruists in AI to do any of this. Their movement’s final legacy may indeed be measured in human lives—just not in ways that they ever imagined.

Ah yes! Of course. If one wants to do good in the world, one should just help a local kid. Or perhaps donate to the local animal shelter. Except that donating to effective animal charities can save far more lives. The same is true when it comes to humans. Wenar is literally preaching ignorance. If you want to do good in the world? Just follow your gut. One can only hope that people like Wenar, unlike effective altruists, do not have much influence. His article demanded that EAs grow up. But it turns out that he is the childish one. And unfortunately, the result of such childishness is just thousands of needless deaths.

Leif Wenar once again offers, as Richard Y Chappell pointed out two years ago, “a masterclass in how to exploit status quo bias to turn your audience into worse people.” So I can only hope few people will attend his lectures. But at least one could get a master-class in poor reasoning when he talks about effective altruism.