Was in a grumpy mood and rebelling against self-censorship so I did an unpopular opinions thread.
Effective altruism is the worst byproduct of the rationalist movement considered broadly, because it is both successful and based on one of the most pernicious premises in that memeplex. Your values *should* center around you and your (physical or value-space) local region.
Can you go into further detail on this one, and in particular what sense of “should” you mean?
I mean “should” in the moral sense. You will live a better life and be a better person if you focus on what actually matters to you and adds value to your life, and that is not distance-invariant.
“Actually” is doing a lot of work there. Let’s set aside, for the moment, the fact that almost all effective altruists do focus their lives on the near-at-hand, and that their charitable donations are a small part of their finances and their lives in general.
Many people find that what matters to them is treating people equally, taking the long view, systematizing their actions, and doing good for the world, broadly defined. And when they think about it, they find that to be true to themselves and their natures, they want to know that their charity is in fact doing the most it can, given those values. Who are you to say that this is not what actually matters to them, and they would be better off donating to their local library rather than trying to fight malaria?
Effective Altruism is difficult for me to call bad but it encourages and stems from a certain kind of “partitioned” view of life and politics.
“Bowling Alone” really hit me, it’s almost like it gave me permission to kvetch about things that are really hard for me.
In that book, Putnam details how, over the second half of the 20th century, people’s relationships with charitable orgs became more and more monetary. Instead of, I don’t know, going door to door, you pay a charity money, which they invest in professional marketing.
Basically, Effective Altruism relies on Utilitarian views of effectiveness which means that, for a first-world person, local problems are never going to be pressing or effective enough to be worth adding your effective dollar to.
EA people aren’t paperclip maximizers, I’ve never seen one who would argue that local concerns are unimportant, but because of the way EA is conceived of they will inherently be outside that framework.
And my experience is that because they are outside of that framework they are generally, in my experience, conceived of as things that don’t require much systemic thinking and really just take care of themselves, which leaves you in a bit of a lurch when they don’t.
Like, my stereotype of rationalists is still,
“See, the mid-century was bad because bowling leagues and fraternal organizations that are too strong and embedded inhibit social movement and freedom, and atomized individualism is way better!
“Anyway, if you’ll excuse me I have to get back to my group home because my polycule and the other one I live with are having a board game night. Boy, I don’t know what I’d do without them helping with my mental illness!”
And the thing is, when you don’t spontaneously find one of those close-knit groups, the question of how you would can only be answered with vague aphorisms about hard work, because systemic thinking is for the objectively important problems. And actually, there’s an undertone of “If we thought about cultivating this kind of thing on a larger or systemic level, it would automatically become coercive, and the only way to keep it from being so is to not do so.”
Local problems like “I only have a few friends and a very low paying job and I can’t figure out how to change” ought to be handled intuitively, privately and locally, which often means that they simply aren’t handled at all.
I also think that this is a major unrecognized problem with the broad American left.
Like, my stereotype of rationalists is still,
“See, the mid-century was bad because bowling leagues and fraternal organizations that are too strong and embedded inhibit social movement and freedom, and atomized individualism is way better!
"Anyway, if you’ll excuse me I have to get back to my group home because my polycule and the other one I live with are having a board game night. Boy, I don’t know what I’d do without them helping with my mental illness!”
This is a pretty flattering stereotype, suggesting that they have their priorities in order.
…you don’t get mental-illness-ameliorating setups like the one you describe in environments without a lot of atomization, freedom-of-movement, and suchlike. Not if you’re weird, anyway. There are plenty of far-end-of-the-bell-curve neurobizarre folk who live in actual inherited obligatory thick supportive interpersonal networks – which is to say, they live with their families – and on average they’re not doing so great. Being able to find a setup that works for you, if “works for you” is at all an issue, is dependent on not being trapped within a setup that doesn’t work for you. Atomized individualism may not be sufficient but it sure is necessary.
(One is put in mind of the trad types who wax rhapsodic about the days of arranged marriages. Presumably they are, for the most part, legitimately very lonely; presumably they are suffering greatly because of what they lack in their lives. But, like, an arranged marriage would not make things better, odds are it would be so much worse you can’t even imagine, and this would be obvious if you weren’t drowning in your own fantasies of what not-being-miserable might look like.)
Anyway.
The claim about “systemic thinking is only for EA” (or even “systemic thinking is for nonlocal issues”) strikes me as odd, as far as stereotypes go. Aren’t rationalists the people who come out with a new pronouncement every month about how they’re going to live their lives in a completely different way henceforth, in accordance with these awesome theoretical ideas that they’ve been developing?
It is, of course, not hugely surprising that their effort is not going into problems that they view as solved, and to the extent that they’re living blissfully in supportive group houses, one presumes that “how do you find friends?” doesn’t seem like a very pressing problem.
One presumes further that their answer, if pressed, would be “move to the Bay area and attend rationalist events.” For all sorts of reasons this is not useful for many people, even for many people who are basically rationalist-oid in their outlook. But –
The actual answer has to start with “find your people.” Humans are not fungible, and if you’re unusual, selection effects are going to outweigh any kind of community-building technology to an overwhelming degree. People generally don’t like talking about this, because it comes across as elitist and weird. And yet. There’s your systemic thinking right there, and unfortunately it obliterates any hope of a one-size-fits-all universalist answer.