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Criticism of effective altruism

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Applied to The biggest risk of free-spending EA is not optics or motivated cognition, but grift by Vaidehi Agarwalla at 8d

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Applied to Bad Omens in Current Community Building by Tessa at 10d

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Applied to EA will likely get more attention soon by evelynciara at 10d

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Applied to Has this EA critique article been discussed/responded to? by michaelchen at 21d

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Applied to Effective altruism’s odd attitude to mental health by Lizka at 23d

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Applied to Virtue signaling is sometimes the best or the only metric we have by Lizka at 24d

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Applied to Longtermist EA needs more Phase 2 work by Owen Cotton-Barratt at 1mo

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Applied to Organizations prioritising neat signals of EA alignment might systematically miss good candidates by Lizka at 1mo

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Applied to Free-spending EA might be a big problem for optics and epistemics by George Rosenfeld at 1mo

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Applied to Four categories of effective altruism critiques by evelynciara at 1mo

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Applied to Sophie’s Choice as a time traveler: a critique of strong longtermism and why we should fund more development. by Vaidehi Agarwalla at 1mo

evelynciara1mo5

Hi all! I recommend using the Criticism of the effective altruism community tag for posts that primarily criticize (or discuss criticism of) the EA community, behaviors, and dynamics, but using the Criticism of effective altruism tag for criticisms of core ideas in EA, since many criticisms of the community are not criticisms of EA itself. I created the "Criticism of the EA community" tag a while ago but have noticed that many people are still not using it.

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Applied to Against the "smarts fetish" by Magnus Vinding at 1mo

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Applied to Let's make EA easier to critique! by evelynciara at 1mo

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Applied to EA and Global Poverty. Let's Gather Evidence by Vaidehi Agarwalla at 2mo

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Applied to Where is the Social Justice in EA? by Leo at 2mo

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Applied to Issues with centralised grantmaking by Vaidehi Agarwalla at 2mo

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Applied to EA and the United Nations by Lizka at 2mo

Pablo v1.15.0Mar 28th 2022 (+537) 2

Further reading

Kuhn, Ben (2013) A critique of effective altruism, Ben Kuhn’s Blog, December 2.

McMahan, Jeff (2016) Philosophical critiques of effective altruism, The Philosophers’ Magazine, vol. 73, pp. 92–99.

Wiblin, Robert & Keiran Harris (2019) Vitalik Buterin on effective altruism, better ways to fund public goods, the blockchain’s problems so far, and how it could yet change the world, 80,000 Hours, September 3.

Zhang, Linchuan (2021) The motivated reasoning critique of effective altruism, Effective Altruism Forum, September 14.