Okay, a summary of my attitude towards EA is that EA rationally follows from a set of weird premises that are not shared by most people and certainly not by me. I do not have any desire to maximize utility in a way that considers utility for every human being equally. I prefer increasing utility for myself, my family, friends, countrymen, and people like me. Every time I pay for electricity for my computer rather than sending the money to a third world peasant is, according to EA, a failure to maximize utility.
Also, I believe that most cases of EA producing very counterintuitive results are just examples of cases where the weirdness of EA becomes obvious.
Every time I pay for electricity for my computer rather than sending the money to a third world peasant is, according to EA, a failure to maximize utility.
I'm sad that people still think EAers endorse such a naive and short-time-horizon type of optimizing utility. It would obviously not optimize any reasonable utility function over a reasonable timeframe for you to stop paying for electricity for your computer.
More generally, I think most EAers have a much more sophisticated understanding of their values, and the psychology of optimizing them, than you ...
In this thread, I would like to invite people to summarize their attitude to Effective Altruism and to summarise their justification for their attitude while identifying the framework or perspective their using.
Initially I prepared an article for a discussion post (that got rather long) and I realised it was from a starkly utilitarian value system with capitalistic economic assumptions. I'm interested in exploring the possibility that I'm unjustly mindkilling EA.
I've posted my write-up as a comment to this thread so it doesn't get more air time than anyone else's summarise and they can be benefit equally from the contrasting views.
I encourage anyone who participates to write up their summary and identify their perspective BEFORE they read the others, so that the contrast can be most plain.