Effective Altruism from XYZ perspective

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.

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.

They seem to operate from the notion that giving away some of their money to charity is taken for granted, so they just need to find the best charity out of those that are possible to evaluate.

To me that seems like you object to EA because you stereotype it and then find that the stereotype produces problems. 80,000 hours lately wrote a post indicating that they don't believe that a majority should do earning-to-give: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/80000-hours-thinks-that-only-a-small-proportion-of-people-should-earn-to-give-long-term/

A lot of the post seems to confuse complex strategic moves like GiveWell's move to start by focusing on life saved by proven interventions with the belief that life saved by proven interventions is the most important thing.

It is possible that some of a group doesn't believe the logical consequences of its own positions. That doesn't make them immune from criticism based on those logical consequences.

0Journeyman11y

I do believe that my comment accurately characterizes the large EA organizations like GiveWell and philosophers like Peter Singer. I do realize that EAs are smart people, and many individual EAs have other beliefs and engage in all sorts of research. For example, some EA are concerned about nuclear war with Russia, and today I discovered the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute and the Global Priorities Project, which are outside of my critique. However, for now, Peter Singer, Give Well, Giving What We Can, and similar approaches are the most emblematic of EA, and it is towards this style of EA that my critique is directed, which I indicated in my previous comment when I said I was addressing "typical" or "median" EA. I believe it is fair to judge EA (as it currently exists) by these dominant approaches. I disagree with you that I am stereotyping, but I think it's good for me to clarify the scope of my critique, so I am adding a note to my previous comment that links to this comment. That 80,000 Hours post doesn't contradict my argument at all, and in fact reinforces it. My comment never argued that EAs believe that everyone earned to give, only that they are very confident about their moral claims about what people should do with their money. That post still shows that 80,000 Hours believes that at least 10% of people should earn to give, which is still an incredibly strong ethical claim. [...] Obviously GiveWell cannot show that their interventions are the "most important thing." But GiveWell does claim that that its proven interventions are a sufficiently good thing to justify you spending money on them, and this is an immense moral claim. It's not like GiveWell is a purely informational website. In the context of the larger EA movement, Peter Singer's philosophy and EA pledges argue with incredible confidence that people should be giving. EA is extremely evangelical, and Singer's philosophy is incredibly flawed and emotionally manipulative. The problem is th