In March I published a critique of EA in Wired. The responses I got, especially from young EAs, prompted me to write an open letter to my young friends in EA.
Thanks for reading.
In March I published a critique of EA in Wired. The responses I got, especially from young EAs, prompted me to write an open letter to my young friends in EA.
Thanks for reading.
To voters: Please remember that the downvote button is not a disagreevote button. Under the circumstances here, it is mainly a reduce visibility / push off the homepage button. This is an attempt by an important critic to engage with the community. Although my reaction to the letter is mixed, I -- like Owen -- think it is offered in good faith and has some important points to make. I would hesitate before making it harder for others to encounter and decide for themselves whether to read. I would particularly hesitate before downvoting primarily because you didn't like the Wired article (I didn't either) rather than on the merits of this open letter.
To readers: In my view, more of the value is nearer the end, so if you're short on time / feeling frustrated by the first parts, you might skip ahead to "Feedback from reality" on page 12 of 17 rather than jettisoning the whole document. I'd also say that the content gradually moves away from / beyond what I recall of the Wired article and into more practical advice for young EAs.
[I accidentally pressed ‘Comment’ before a previous version of this comment was finished; I have deleted that comment.]
I would encourage voters to vote based on your views about the merits of the letter, rather than the effects on its visibility. In general, I think voting based on effects is a kind of "naive consequentialism", which has worse consequences than voting based on merit when the effects of voting are properly accounted for.
I think "judging on quality" is not quite the right standard. Especially for criticisms of EA from people outside EA.
I think generally people in EA will be able to hear and benefit from criticisms that are expressed by someone in EA and knows how to frame them in ways that gel with the general worldview. On the other hand I think it's reasonable on priors to expect there to exist external critics who are failing to perceive some important things that EA gets right, but who nonetheless manage to perceive some important things that EA is missing or getting wrong.
If everyone on the EA forum judges "is this high quality?", it's natural for them to assess that on the dimensions that they have a good grasp of -- so they'll see the critic making mistakes and be inclined to dismiss it. The points it might be important for them to hear from the critics will be less obvious, since they're a bit more alien to the EA ontology. But this is liable to contribute to an echo chamber. And just as at a personal level I think the most valuable feedback you can get is often of the form "hey you seem to not be tracking dimension X at all", and it can initially seem annoying or missing the point but then turns out to be super helpful in retrospect, so I think at the group level that EA could really do with being able to sit with external criticism -- feel into where the critic is coming from, and where they might be tracking something important, even if they're making other big mistakes. So I'd rather judge on something closer to "is this saying potentially important things that haven't been hashed to death?".
(Note that minutes after posting my comment, I replaced “quality” with “merit”, because it better expresses what I was trying to communicate. However, I don’t think this makes a substantial difference to the point you are raising.)
I think that you managed to articulate clearly what I think is the strongest reason for a certain attitude I see among some EAs, which involves applying different standards to external criticism than to stuff written by members of our community.
Empirically, however, what you say doesn’t ring true to me. My impression is that EA has made progress over time primarily by a process of collective discussion with other EAs, as well as “EA-adjacent” folk like rationalists and forecasters, rather than external critics in the reference class Wenar instantiates. In my opinion, the net effect of such external criticism has, in fact, probably been negative: it has often created polarization and tribalism within the EA community, of the sort that makes it more difficult for us to make intellectual progress, and has misallocated precious community attention, which has in turn slowed down that progress.
So, I’d summarize my position as follows: “Yes, it may be reasonable on priors to expect there to exist critics who can see important problems with EA but who may not be able to articulate that criticism in a way that resonates with us. But our posterior, when we also factor in the evidence supplied by the social and intellectual history of EA, is that there is not much to be gained from engaging with that criticism (criticism that doesn’t seem valuable on its merits), and there is in fact a risk of harm in the form of wasting time and energy on unproductive and acrimonious discussion.”
OK, I don't feel a particular desire to fight you on the posterior.
But I do feel a desire to fight you on this particular case. I re-read the letter, and I think there's actually a bunch of great stuff in there, and I think a bunch of people would benefit from reading and thinking about it. I've made an annotated version here, where I include my comments about various parts of what seems valuable or misguided.
And then I feel bad about whatever policy people are following that is leading this to attract so many downvotes.
I'm really surprised you're so positive towards his 'share of the total' assumptions (like, he seems completely unaware of Parfit's refutation, and is pushing the 1st mistake in a very naive way, not anything like the "for purposes of co-ordination" steelman that you seem to have in mind). And I'm especially baffled that you had a positive view of his nearest test. This was at the heart of my critique of his WIRED article:
Can you explain what advantage Wenar's biased test has over the more universal imaginative exercises recommended by R.M. Hare and others?
[P.S. I agree that the piece as a whole probably shouldn't have negative karma, but I wouldn't want it to have high karma either; it doesn't strike me as worth positively recommending.]
Ok hmm I notice that I'm not especially keen to defend him on the details of any of his views, and my claim is more like "well I found it pretty helpful to read".
Like: I agree that he doesn't show awareness of Parfit, but think that he's pushing a position which (numbers aside) is substantively correct in this particular case, and I hadn't noticed that.
On the nearest test: I've not considered this in contrast to other imaginative exercises. I do think you should do a version without an action/inaction asymmetry. But I liked something about the grounding nature of the exercise, and I thought it was well chosen to prompt EAs to try to do that in connection with important decisions, when I think culturally there can be a risk of getting caught up in abstractions, in ways that may mean we fail to track things we know at some level.
Ok, I guess it's worth thinking about different audiences here. Something that's largely tendentious nonsense but includes something of a fresh (for you) perspective could be overall epistemically beneficial for you (since you don't risk getting sucked in by the nonsense, and might have new thoughts inspired by the 'freshness'), while being extremely damaging to a general audience who take it at face value (won't think of the relevant 'steelman' improvements), and have no exposure to, or understanding of, the "other side".
I saw a bunch of prominent academic philosophers sharing the WIRED article with a strong vibe of "This shows how we were right to dismiss EA all along!" I can only imagine what a warped impression the typical magazine reader would have gotten from it. The anti-GiveWell stuff, especially, struck me as incredibly reckless and irresponsible for an academic to write for a general audience (for the reasons I set out in my critique). So, at least with regard to the WIRED article, I'd encourage you to resist any inference from "well I found it pretty helpful" to "it wasn't awful." Smart people can have helpful thoughts sparked by awful, badly-reasoned texts!
Yeah, I agree that audience matters. I would feel bad about these articles being one of the few exposures someone had to EA. (Which means I'd probably end up feeling quite bad about the WIRED article; although possibly I'd end up thinking it was productive in advancing the conversation by giving voice to concerns that many people already felt, even if those concerns ended up substantively incorrect.)
But this letter is targeted at young people in EA. By assumption, they're not going to be ignorant of the basics. And besides any insights I might have got, I think there's something healthy and virtuous about people being able to try on the perspective of "here's how EA seems maybe flawed" -- like even if the precise criticisms aren't quite right, it could help open people to noticing subtle but related flaws. And I think the emotional register of the piece is kind of good for that purpose?
To be clear: I'm far from an unmitigated fan of the letter. I disagree with the conclusions, but even keeping those fixed there are a ton of changes that would make me happier with it overall. I wouldn't want to be sending people the message "hey this is right, you need to read it". But I do feel good about sending the message "hey this has some interesting perspectives, and this also covers reasons why some smart caring people get off the train; if you're trying to deepen your understanding of this EA thing, it's worth a look (and also a look at rebuttals)". Like I think it's valuable to have something in the niche of "canonical external critique", and maybe this isn't in the top slot for that (I remember feeling good about Michael Nielsen's notes), but I think it's up there.
Yeah, I don't particularly mind this letter (though I see a lot more value in the critiques from Nielsen, NunoSempere, and Benjamin Ross Hoffman). I'm largely reacting to your positive annotated comments about the WIRED piece.
That said, I really don't think Wenar is (even close to) "substantively correct" on his "share of the total" argument. The context is debating how much good EA-inspired donations have done. He seems to think the answer should be discounted by all the other (non-EA?) people involved in the causal chain, or that maybe only the final step should count (!?). That's silly. The relevant question is counterfactual. When co-ordinating with others, you might want to assess a collective counterfactual rather than an individual counterfactual, to avoid double-counting (I take it that something along these lines is your intended steelman?); but that seems pretty distant from Wenar's confused reasoning about the impact of philanthropic donations.
I agree that Wenar's reasoning on this is confused, and that he doesn't have a clear idea of how it's supposed to work.
I do think that he's in some reasonable way gesturing at the core issue, even if he doesn't say very sensible things about how to address that issue.
And yeah, that's the rough shape of the steelman position I have in mind. I wrote a little about my takes here; sorry I've not got anything more comprehensive: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rWoT7mABXTfkCdHvr/jp-s-shortform?commentId=ArPTtZQbngqJ6KSMo
Thanks for the link. (I'd much rather people read that than Wenar's confused thoughts.)
Here's the bit I take to represent the "core issue":
Can you point to textual evidence that Wenar is actually gesturing at anything remotely in this vicinity? The alternative interpretation (which I think is better supported by the actual text) is that he's (i) conceptually confused about moral credit in a way that is deeply unreasonable, (ii) thinking about how to discredit EA, not how to optimize coordination, and (iii) simply happened to say something that vaguely reminds you of your own, much more reasonable, take.
If I'm right about (i)-(iii), then I don't think it's accurate to characterize him as "in some reasonable way gesturing at the core issue."
I guess I think it's likely some middle ground? I don't think he has a clear conceptual understanding of moral credit, but I do think he's tuning in to ways in which EA claims may be exaggerating the impact people can have. I find it quite easy to believe that's motivated by some desire to make EA look bad -- but so what? If people who want to make EA look bad make for good researchers hunting for (potentially-substantive) issues, so much the better.
Thanks for the useful exchange.
It may be useful to consider whether you think your comment would pass a reversal test: if the roles were reversed and it was an EA criticizing another movement, but the criticism was otherwise comparable (e.g. in tone and content), would you also have expressed a broadly positive opinion about it? If yes, that would suggest we are disagreeing about the merits of the letter. If no, it seems it’s primarily a disagreement about the standards we should adopt when evaluating external criticism.
Yes, I'd be broadly positive about it. I might say something like "I know you're trying to break through so people can hear you, but I think you're being a little unnecessarily antagonistic. Also I think you're making a number of mistakes about their movement (or about what's actually good). I sort of wish you'd been careful to avoid more of those. But despite all that I think this contains a number of pretty insightful takes, and you will be making a gift to them in offering it if they can get past the tone and the errors to appreciate it. I hope they do.
Update: I think I'd actually be less positive on it than this if I thought their antagonism might splash back on other people.
I took that not to be a relevant part of the hypothetical, but actually I'm not so sure. I think for people in the community, it's creating a public good (for the community) to police their mistakes, so I'm not inclined to let error-filled things slide for the sake of the positives. For people outside the community, I'm not so invested in building up the social fabric, so it doesn't seem worth trying to punish the errors, so the right move seems to be something like more straightforwardly looking for the good bits.
This seems strange to me. Jason is literally right that - especially at the near-zero level of karma - voting is mechanically a mechanism for deciding how much the post should be promoted or whether it should be hidden entirely. One could argue that there are second order social effects of taking that into account, but that's a much more speculative argument.
I have no strong view on how much this post should be favoured by the sorting algorithm, but I am strongly against it being hidden. If nothing else, people might want to refer to it later whether they like or dislike it, as an extended piece of criticism from a prominent source.
Hi Leif, I appreciate your sharing this here, and hope that it reflects a willingness to engage in two-way communication (i.e., considering and engaging with our criticisms, as we have considered and engaged with yours). As I replied on twitter:
Something I found puzzling about the WIRED article was that it combined extreme omission bias (urging readers to vividly imagine possible harms from action, but not more likely harms from inaction) with an apparent complete lack of concern for the moral risks posed by your act of publicly discouraging life-saving philanthropy. For example, it's likely that more children will die of malaria as a result of anti-EA advocacy (if it persuades some readers), and I don't understand why you aren't more concerned about that potential harm.
It's unfortunate that you dismiss criticism as "extreme" rather than engaging with the serious philosophical points that were made. (Again, I'd especially highlight the status quo bias implicit in your "tests" that imagine harms from action while ignoring harms from inaction.)
The point of my anti-vax analogy is not name-calling, but to make clear how it can be irresponsible to discourage ex ante helpful actions by highlighting rare risks of harmful unintended side-effects. Your argument seemed to share this problematic structure.
These are substantive philosophical criticisms that are worth engaging with, not just dismissing as "extreme".
I'll add: something I appreciated about your (Leif's) letter is the section setting out your views on 'good judgment'. I agree that that's an important topic, and I think it's helpful for people to set out their views on how to develop it.
In case you're not aware of it, I recently wrote a second post critiquing an aspect of your WIRED article - Good Judgment with Numbers - this time critiquing what I took to be an excessively dismissive attitude towards quantitative tools in your writing. (I agree, of course, that people should not blindly follow EV calculations.)
As before, I'd welcome substantive engagement with this critique, if you have any further thoughts on the topic.
I agree with the omission bias point, but the second half of the paragraph seems unfair.
Leif never discourages people from doing philanthropy (or, aid as he calls it). Perhaps he might make people unduly skeptical of bednets in particular - which I think is reasonable to critique him on.
But overall, he seems to just be advocating for people to be more critical of possible side effects from aid. From the article (bold mine)
Did you read my linked article on moral misdirection? Disavowing full-blown aid skepticism is compatible with discouraging life-saving aid, in the same way that someone who disavows xenophobia but then spends all their time writing sensationalist screeds about immigrant crime and other "harms" caused by immigrants is very obviously discouraging immigration whatever else they might have said.
ETA: I just re-read the WIRED article. He's clearly discouraging people from donating to GiveWell's recommendations. This will predictably result in more people dying. I don't see how you can deny this. Do you really think that general audiences reading his WIRED article will be no less likely to donate to effective charities as a result?
I didn't read the article you linked, I think it's plausible. (see more in my last para)
I'd like to address your second paragraph in more depth though:
I don't think GW recommendations are the only effective charities out there, so I don't think this is an open-and-shut case.
FWIW if helpful what my own views here are - I think I'm a lot more risk neutral than GW, and much more keen to expand beyond GW's scope of GH&D interventions. GW is ultimately 1 org with it's own priorities, perspectives and, biases. I'd love to see more work in this space taking different perspectives (e.g. The case of the missing cause prioritisation research).
I'm sympathetic to this point (where i interpret effective charities as a superset of GW charities). I think it's plausible he's contributed to a new "overhead myth" re negative impacts of aid (although, keep in mind that this is a pre-existing narrative). I would have liked Wenar to talk more about what kinds of trade offs he would endorse making, examples of good trade-offs in practice, examples of actually bad trade-offs (rather than potentially bad ones), and, if he's very skeptical of aid, what he sees as other effective ways to help people in LMICs. It's possible he covers some of this in his other article.
I'm happy for people to argue that there are even better options than GW out there. (I'd agree!) But that's very emphatically not what Wenar was doing in that article.
I agree he's not offering alternatives, as I mentioned previously. It would be good if Leif gave examples of better tradeoffs.
I still think your claim is too strongly stated. I don't think Leif criticizing GW orgs means he is discouraging life saving aid as a whole, or that people will predictably die as a result. The counterfactual is not clear (and it's very difficult to measure).
More defensible claims would be :
My claim is not "too strongly stated": it accurately states my view, which you haven't even shown to be incorrect (let alone "unfair" or not "defensible" -- both significantly higher bars to establish than merely being incorrect!)
It's always easier to make weaker claims, but that raises the risk of failing to make an important true claim that was worth making. Cf. epistemic cheems mindset.
The first criticism feels pretty odd to me. Clearly what Singer, MacAskill, GiveWell, etc. are talking about is the counterfactual impact of your donation, since that is the thing that should be guiding your decision-making. And that seems totally fine and in accordance with ordinary English: it is fine to say that I saved the life of the choking person by performing the Heimlich maneuver, that Henry Heimlich saved X number of lives by inventing the Heimlich maneuver, that my instructor saved Y number of lives by teaching people the Heimlich maneuver, and that a government program to promote knowledge of the Heimlich maneuver saved Z lives, even if X + Y + Z + 1 is greater than the overall number of lives saved by the Heimlich maneuver. And if I were, say, arguing for increased funding of the government program by saying it would save a certain number of lives, it would be completely beside the point to start arguing that I should actually divide the marginal impact of increased funding to account for the contribution of Henry Heimlich, etc.
This is a key point, and EJT helpfully shared on twitter an excerpt from Reasons and Persons in which Parfit clearly explains the fallacy behind the "share of the total view" that Wenar seems to be uncritically assuming here. (ETA: this the first of Parfit's famous "Five mistakes in moral mathematics"; one of the most important parts of arguably the most important work of 20th century moral philosophy.)
This is foundational stuff for the philosophical tradition upon which EA draws, and casts an ironic light on Wenar's later criticism: "The crucial-but-absent Socratic meta-question is, ‘Do I know enough about what I’m talking about to make recommendations that will be high stakes for other people’s lives?’"
I agree that when it comes to decision making, Leifs objection doesn't work very well.
However, when it comes to communication, I think there is a point here (although I'm not sure it was the one Leif was making). If Givewell communicates about the donation and how many lives you saved, and don't mention the aid workers and mothers who put up nets, aren't they selling them short here, and dismissing their importance?
In Parfits experiment, obviously you should go on the four person mission and help save the hundred lives. But if you then went on to do a book tour and touted what a hero you are for saving the hundred lives, and don't mention the other three people, you are being a jerk.
I could imagine an aid worker in Uganda being kind of annoyed that they spent weeks working full time in sweltering heat handing out malaria nets for low pay, and then watching some tech guy in america take all the credit for the lifesaving work. It could hurt EA's ability to connect with the third world.
I think there is a valuable concern about Triple counting impact in EA and I agree that there is a case for Shapley values being better than counterfactuals[1].
What I really don't agree with is that we should let someone choke and die, just because otherwise Henry Heimlich would get the credit anyway. The goal is not to get the most credit or Shapley values, but to help others, I don't see what prof. Wenar proposes as a better alternative to GiveWell.
I disagree that Shapley values are better than counterfactual in most cases, but I think it's a reasonable stance to have.
Different ways of calculating impact make sense in different contexts. What I want to say is that the way Singer, MacAskill, GiveWell are doing it (i) is the one you should be using in deciding whether/where to donate (at the very least assuming you aren't in some special collective action problem, etc.) and (ii) one that is totally fine by ordinary standards of speech--it isn't deceptive, misleading, excessively imprecise, etc. Maybe we agree.
Yes I think we agree, but I also think that it's not a crux of the argument.
As Neel Nanda noted, whatever vaguely reasonable method you use to calculate impact will result in attributing a lot of impact to life-saving interventions.
This conclusion from the first half of the letter seems unjustified by the prior text?
You seem to be arguing that there's a credit allocation problem, where there's actually many actors who contribute to a bednet saving a life, but Givewell style calculations ignore this, and give all the credit to the donor, which leads to over counting. I would describe this as GiveWell computing the marginal impact, which I think is somewhat reasonable (how is the world different if I donate vs don't donate), but agree this has issues and there are arguments for better credit allocation methods. I think this is a fair critique.
But, I feel like at best this dilutes the impact by a factor of 10, maybe 100 at an absolute stretch. If we take rough estimates like 200,000 lives saved via GiveWell (rough estimate justified in footnote 1 of this post), that's still 20,000 or 2,000 lives saved. I don't see how you could get to "small or even zero" from this argument
'small or even zero' refers to two different conclusions using two different accounting methods.
'small': from the method which spreads out 'lives saved' across all contributors in the chain of causality
'zero': from the method which only attributes 'lives saved' to the final actor in the chain of causality.
Leif provides both accounts, which is why he provides 'small or even zero' as his description of the impact.
I agree that it is a little unclear. I think Leif's argument would be clearer if he omitted the 'zero' accounting method, which I don't think he places much credence in but nonetheless included to illustrate the potential range of accounts of attribution.
Overall, I think that it is accurate of Leif to characterise the impact as 'small' if we ought to decrease impact by multiple orders of magnitude is correct.
Sure, I agree that under the (in my opinion ridiculous and unserious) accounting method of looking at the last actor, zero is a valid conclusion.
I disagree that small is accurate - I feel like even if I'm being incredibly charitable and say that the donor is only 1% of the overall ecosystem saving the life, we still get to 2000 lives saved, which seems highly unreasonable to call small - to me small is at best <100
If you publish a bad pieces and share them with millions of people, I don't really feel obliged to talk or listen to other things you write until you correct the inaccurate piece. I don't think any other community would and I think it's a bad use of our time to extend this absurd level of charity.
People are free to tell me the wired article wasn't inaccurate or lazy, but scanning it, it looks that way.
Here are quote I could find in 15 minutes from your first article that leave the reader with an inaccurate impression. I have not read this new article.
I could go on.
Leif, we do not owe you our time. You had the same social credit that all critics have and a large platform. You could have come here and argued your case. I am sure people would have engaged. But for me, you have burned that credit, sharing inaccuracies to millions of people. Your piece started a news cycle about the harms of bednets based on inaccurate information. That has real harms. So I don't care to read your piece.
I don't know whether I am the hero in my own story - I have done many things I regret - but I do know a thing or two about dealing with those I disagree with. I would not publish a piece with this amount of errors and if I did I wouldn't expect people to engage with me again. I do not understand why you think we would.
I hope you are well, genuinely.
The criticism of the concept of "effective altruism," and the second main criticism to the extent that it's related to it, also feels odd to me. Altruism in the sense of only producing good is not realistically possible. By writing your Wired article, say, it is overwhelmingly likely that you set off a chain of events that will cause a different sperm to fertilize a different egg, which will set off all sorts of other chains of events meaning that in hundreds of years we will have different people, different weather patterns, different all sorts of stuff. So writing this will cause untold deaths, untold suffering, that wouldn't have occurred otherwise. So too for your friend Aaron in the Wired article helping the people on the island, and so too for anything else you or anyone might do.
So either altruism is something other than doing only good, or altruism is impossible and the most we can hope for is some kind of approximation. It wouldn't follow that maximizing EV is the best way to be (or approximate being) altruistic, but the mere fact that the actions EAs take are like all other actions in that they have some negative consequences is not in itself much of a criticism.
Yes, of course she's right. Even if she's the weakest member of the team. They don't give Olympic relay teams 1/4 of a medal each.
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For the record I don't describe myself as an EA and don't really hang out in EA circles. I'm far too old to be susceptible to arguments that I'm going to save the world with the power of my intellect and good intentions. If the founding fathers of EA's bios are accurate I discovered Peter Singer's solution to world poverty slightly before them, thought he had a [somewhat overstated] point and haven't done anywhere near enough to suggest I absorbed the lesson. I think utilitarianism's utility is limited but don't have the academic pedigree to argue about it for any length of time, and I think a lot of EA utilitarian maths is a bit shoddy.[1] So I don't think I'm making a particularly partisan argument here.
But you aren't half leading with your weakest arguments[2] GiveWell's estimation that if x bednets are distributed, on average about y% Malawian mothers receiving the nets will succeed in using them to protect their kids, so z% fewer kids will die isn't stealing credit from Malawian mothers or Chinese manufacturers in a zero sum karmic accounting game, it's a simple counterfactual (with or without appropriate sized error bars). Or put another way, if a Malawian kid thanks her mother for going hungry for two days to pay for a malaria net herself,[3] the mother shouldn't feel obliged to say "no, don't thank me, thank the Chinese people that manufactured it and the supply chain that brought it all the way here, and the white Westerners for doing enough research into malaria nets to convince vendors in my village to stock it." The argument that installing a few more stakeholders in the way introduces a qualtitative difference between donating and diving into a pond might make Peter Singer's thought experiment a little bit trite, but it isn't an argument against the quantitative outcomes of donating at all.
in particular, the tendency to confuse marginal and average costs and wild speculative guesses with robust expected value estimation. I don't actually think this is bad per se: people overestimating how much their next fiver can help a chicken or prevent Armageddon certainly isn't worse than people overestimating how much they want the next beer. I just think it looks a lot like the "donor illusion" certain leading EAs used to chastise mainstream charity for; actually the average "child sponsorship" scheme is probably more accurate, in accounting terms, about how much your recurring contribution to the charity pool is helping Jaime from Honduras than many EA causes. (I guess not liking that type of charity either is where you and the median EA agree and I differ :))
Judging by your book reviews, you've researched sufficiently to be able to offer more nuanced criticisms of development aid. So I'm not sure why you'd lead with this, or in other articles with anecdotes how about profoundly the whinging of a single drunk teenage voluntourist crushed your dreams of changing the world. It's not even like there aren't much better glib criticisms of EA or charity in general....
maybe because donations dried up...
Disclaimer: My comment is less concise, pondered, and polished than I'd hope for under normal circumstances (for personal/family reasons) but I think the pros of substantive engagement outweigh the cons (and there hasn't been a ton of substantive engagement).
In short:
On Moral Credit and Counterfactuals
On Non-Exceptionalism
At least in global health, I think much of what EAs are doing is broadly in line with the broader global health movement. For instance, the IFRC explains:
If the list of actors who don't know enough to be doing anything in this field include the Global Fund, the US Government, and UNICEF too, then the problem goes way deeper than EA!
Likewise, looking at Vitamin A supplementation, my first Google hit was Nutrition International, an organization whose work (in general) is sponsored by Gates, UNICEF, the governments of France, Australia, Canada, and the UK, and others.
So my looking for sources outside EA (as the Open Letter suggests) produced reasons to believe these are not things EAs are doing on half-baked EA theories. In contrast, I've read enough about the (copyrighted yet publicly available) Scientology scriptures to know that there are relatively few things in life that can be fairly compared to Scientology.
Grand Unified Theories vs. Plays on the Margin
I think there's a difference between EA as something like a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) of altruism, or even a GUT of global health/wellbeing altruism, and EA on the margins (a belief that more of the charitable pie should be distributed in general accord with EA principles than is currently the case).
Baskets and Tools
I think there may be something here but would put a somewhat different spin on it. Flaws are something I expect to see in the EA paradigm and in every other altruistic paradigm. I suggest that putting all of the world's altruistic eggs into one basket would be an inherently perilous exercise, and so the question is more "are we putting too many / too few eggs in this altruistic paradigm's basket"?
There's a tension here -- on the one hand, I think we want to have specialist communities rather than having everyone who seeks to do altruism with a shallow knowledge of how to use three dozen types of tools. I want my urologist to have taken a deep dive into urology, but I also want him to know enough about other ways of practicing medicine to know when they don't have the right tools for the job. They also need to know enough about other ways of practicing medicine to be a good urologist.
Technicians
In American medicine, we have physicians who have very broad general training plus years of onerous training in their specialty, as well as "midlevels" (like nurse practitioners) who have much less education and training. From what I hear,[2] midlevels can be very good when operating in their comfort zone (especially if narrowly specialized) but often lack the ability to respond well to curveballs. I do worry that the current recommended "education" of EAs veers too much toward creating narrow technicians rather than the equivalent of residency or even fellowship trained physicians. Cf. the Open Letter's discussion of "good judgment."
To be clear, midlevels have an important role to play in the US healthcare system; producing residency-trained physicians is extremely expensive. I didn't need an MD when I went in this week for a suspected sinus infection. The problems often come in when midlevels forget that they are midlevels and lack the broad training and experience of residency-trained physicians, so they take on workloads beyond their capacities.
I would guess that, in this analogy, Leif thinks most EA leaders are midlevels who are think they are fellowship-trained physicians. This response is already long, so I'm not going to evaluate that possibility further here.
Finally, I do think that both EA and broader Western society tend to undervalue diverse life experience. I also think the tech industry as an exemplar has some of the pitfalls that the Open Letter alludes to. I would generally endorse Leif's recommendations about good judgment insofar as they are not particularly costly. If I knew that someone had been preselected to be a philosopher-king, I'd be more inclined to endorse the more costly parts too. But I feel a bit of unease with globally recommending that young people pour a lot of time and energy into stuff that the broader society doesn't seem to value that much.
The Costs of Inaction
This is an important question, but I don't think it can be asked without considering other actors and the costs of inaction. If we could enforce a global norm that no one should be doing anything in AI without being able to answer this question in the affirmative (and have their answer verified by disinterested outside experts), that would be simply amazing. In fact, one can view the idea of AI policy as directed significantly toward that goal.
One problem is that other actors aren't asking this question. Tyson Foods (the meat conglomerate) is going to do factory-farm-conglomerate things like their executives' paychecks depend on it (and they do). Even laying aside EA-type AI safety worries completely, the financial interests of big AI companies and their employees are a powerful incentive to moving fast even though they don't know nearly enough about the civilization disrupting and defining functions AGI would bring. So recommendations and actions will happen whether we are making them or not.
EA often works in neglected fields, and I think that can play into the calculus as well. A recommendation based on sketchy information isn't necessarily inappropriate if that's the information that is on the table.
So I would phrase the question differently: In light of both the possibilities and opportunity costs of gaining better knowledge, and the effects of other actors who would occupy the field in my absence, do I know enough about what I'm talking about to make high-stakes recommendations?
For instance, touting impact on an organization's most effective program even though it can only absorb a portion of the funding obtained as a result of the appeal.
This is a simplified example, and I've heard about this mostly from the physician standpoint rather than the midlevel one.
This comment is mostly about the letter, not the wired article. I don't think this letter is particularly well argued (see end of article for areas of disagreement), but I'm surprised by the lack of substantive engagement with it.
This is fairly rough, i'm sure i've made mistakes in here, but figured it's better to share than not.
Here’s some stuff i think is reasonable (but would love for folks to chime in if i'm missing something)
Things I'm not very sympathetic to in his argument:
Two separate points:
I was surprised to kind of like this letter (I've not read the Wired article people complained about). I disagreed with a good amount of it, including the overall conclusions, but:
I felt it was earnest, and I appreciated that.
I think it's asking a number of good questions. EA as a frame doesn't naturally generate some of these questions, but it's generally healthy to look at things from lots of angles -- and I suspect that in particular that in places it's managing to highlight what may be relative blindspots of EA: and it's great to have attention on what the blindspots may be, even if on net you don't think they're necessarily worth correcting.
I'd feel kind of good if this was included in some reading lists for people exploring EA? (Probably along with a good reply that I expect someone will write.)
Leif - thanks for sharing this! I appreciate your explanation of the Wired article, which frankly did convey the impression, for example, that you were arguing for a certain method of aid delivery.
In the letter, you provide some 'false objections' to watch out for.
Could you please provide what you think would be the strongest objections to your arguments, and what your response in turn to those would be?
Would you be up for making your "deaths of effective altruism" article available in a way that isn't paywalled?
Thanks for being willing to share criticism!