The Nonlinear Library EA - On Leif Wenar's Absurdly Unconvincing Critique Of Effective Altruism by Omnizoid
Apr 5, 2024
22:25
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: On Leif Wenar's Absurdly Unconvincing Critique Of Effective Altruism, published by Omnizoid on April 5, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Leif Wenar recently
published a critique of effective altruism that seems to be getting a lot of hype. I don't know why. There were a few different arguments in the piece, none of which were remotely convincing. Yet more strangely, he doesn't object much to EA as a whole - he just points to random downsides of EA and is snarky.
If I accepted every claim in his piece, I'd come away with the belief that some EA charities are bad in a bunch of random ways, but believe nothing that imperils my core belief in the goodness of the effective altruism movement or, indeed, in the charities that Wenar critiques.
I'm not going to quote Wenar's entire article, as it's quite long and mostly irrelevant. It contains, at various points, bizarre evidence-free speculation about the motivations of effective altruists. He writes, for instance, "Ord, it seemed, wanted to be the hero - the hero by being smart - just as I had. Behind his glazed eyes, the hero is thinking, "They're trying to stop me.""
I'm sure this is rooted in Ord's poor relationship with his mother!
At another point, he mistakes MacAskill's statement that there's been a lot of aid in poor countries and that things have gotten better for the claim that aid is responsible for the entirety of the improvement. These strange status games about credit and reward and heroism demonstrate a surprising moral shallowness, caring more about whether people take credit for doing things than what is done.
He says, for instance, after quoting MacAskill saying it's possible to save a life for a few thousand dollars:
But let's picture that person you've supposedly rescued from death in MacAskill's account - say it's a young Malawian boy. Do you really deserve all the credit for "saving his life"? Didn't the people who first developed the bed nets also "make a difference" in preventing his malaria?
Well, as a philosopher, Wenar should know that two things can both cause something else. If there's a 9-judge panel evaluating an issue, and one side wins on a 5-4, each judge caused the victory, in the relevant, counterfactual sense - had they not acted, the victory wouldn't have occurred. MacAskill wasn't talking about apportioning blame or brownie points - just describing one's opportunity to do enormous amounts of good.
Would Wenar object to the claim that it would be important to vote if you knew your candidate would be better and that your vote would change the election, on the grounds that you don't deserve all the credit for it - other voters get some too?
Wenar's objection also repeats the old objection that Sam Bankman Fried used EA principles to do fraud, so EA must be bad, ignoring, of course, the myriad responses that have been given to this objection. Alex Strasser has
addressed this at length, as
have I (albeit at less length than Strasser). Pointing that people have done fraud in the name of EA is no more an objection to EA than it would an objection to some charity to note that it happened to receive funds from Al Capone. Obviously one should not carry out fraud, should take common-sense norms seriously,
as EA leaders have implored repeatedly for years.
The article takes random stabs at specific claims that have been made by EAs. Yet strangely, despite the obvious cherry-picking, where Wenar is attempting to target the most errant claims ever made by EAs, every one of his objections to those random out-of-context quotes ends up being wrong.
For instance, he claims that MacAskill's source for the claim that by "giving $3,000 to a lobbying group called Clean Air Task Force (CATF)," "you can reduce carbon emissions by a massive 3,000 metric tons per year," is "one of Ord's
research assistants ...
Leif Wenar recently
published a critique of effective altruism that seems to be getting a lot of hype. I don't know why. There were a few different arguments in the piece, none of which were remotely convincing. Yet more strangely, he doesn't object much to EA as a whole - he just points to random downsides of EA and is snarky.
If I accepted every claim in his piece, I'd come away with the belief that some EA charities are bad in a bunch of random ways, but believe nothing that imperils my core belief in the goodness of the effective altruism movement or, indeed, in the charities that Wenar critiques.
I'm not going to quote Wenar's entire article, as it's quite long and mostly irrelevant. It contains, at various points, bizarre evidence-free speculation about the motivations of effective altruists. He writes, for instance, "Ord, it seemed, wanted to be the hero - the hero by being smart - just as I had. Behind his glazed eyes, the hero is thinking, "They're trying to stop me.""
I'm sure this is rooted in Ord's poor relationship with his mother!
At another point, he mistakes MacAskill's statement that there's been a lot of aid in poor countries and that things have gotten better for the claim that aid is responsible for the entirety of the improvement. These strange status games about credit and reward and heroism demonstrate a surprising moral shallowness, caring more about whether people take credit for doing things than what is done.
He says, for instance, after quoting MacAskill saying it's possible to save a life for a few thousand dollars:
But let's picture that person you've supposedly rescued from death in MacAskill's account - say it's a young Malawian boy. Do you really deserve all the credit for "saving his life"? Didn't the people who first developed the bed nets also "make a difference" in preventing his malaria?
Well, as a philosopher, Wenar should know that two things can both cause something else. If there's a 9-judge panel evaluating an issue, and one side wins on a 5-4, each judge caused the victory, in the relevant, counterfactual sense - had they not acted, the victory wouldn't have occurred. MacAskill wasn't talking about apportioning blame or brownie points - just describing one's opportunity to do enormous amounts of good.
Would Wenar object to the claim that it would be important to vote if you knew your candidate would be better and that your vote would change the election, on the grounds that you don't deserve all the credit for it - other voters get some too?
Wenar's objection also repeats the old objection that Sam Bankman Fried used EA principles to do fraud, so EA must be bad, ignoring, of course, the myriad responses that have been given to this objection. Alex Strasser has
addressed this at length, as
have I (albeit at less length than Strasser). Pointing that people have done fraud in the name of EA is no more an objection to EA than it would an objection to some charity to note that it happened to receive funds from Al Capone. Obviously one should not carry out fraud, should take common-sense norms seriously,
as EA leaders have implored repeatedly for years.
The article takes random stabs at specific claims that have been made by EAs. Yet strangely, despite the obvious cherry-picking, where Wenar is attempting to target the most errant claims ever made by EAs, every one of his objections to those random out-of-context quotes ends up being wrong.
For instance, he claims that MacAskill's source for the claim that by "giving $3,000 to a lobbying group called Clean Air Task Force (CATF)," "you can reduce carbon emissions by a massive 3,000 metric tons per year," is "one of Ord's
research assistants ...