Why Are They So Bad?
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Peter Singer
15 min read
Singer is the philosopher behind the drowning child argument that Jobling critiques in the article. Understanding Singer's broader philosophical work on effective altruism, animal liberation, and utilitarian ethics provides essential context for this debate.
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Effective altruism
14 min read
The entire article is a defense of effective altruism against critics. Wikipedia's article covers the movement's history, key figures, cause areas, controversies, and philosophical foundations in depth.
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Hedonism
14 min read
The article discusses Verdon's conflation of philosophical hedonism with pursuit of cheap pleasure, and the distinction between these concepts is central to understanding why the wireheading criticism fails.
The two most recent criticisms of effective altruism that I came across were unusual in that one was also an argument for child-murdering cannibalism, and the other for blowing up Earth with a supernova.
I get irritated by the constant barrage of criticisms of effective altruism. Everyone on the internet wants to criticize a movement that’s saved 50,000 lives annually, improved conditions for billions of animals, and reduced existential risks, based on confused, tendentious, and ill-informed philosophical judgments that usually make little reference to the actual things EAs do. I’ve heard two such criticisms recently that made me want to pull my hair out. In place of doing so, I thought I’d write about why they were wrong.
Effective altruism, for those unfamiliar, is a social movement built around trying to do good effectively. The core argument for EA is that it’s good to do good things, actions differ radically in how much good they do, so we should aim to do as much good as we can. If making the world a better place is important—which it is almost by definition—then we should strive to see how we can do it most effectively.
Normally we think that there’s an obligation to do more good rather than less when the costs are similar. Imagine there were two buttons, but you could only press one. The first would save ten lives. The second would save two lives. Surely you’d be obligated to press the first. But if we apply similar logic to charity, we get the result that we ought to donate to the most effective charities. I have a longer FAQ if you want to read more about EA—really I think the core idea is quite commonsensical.
So why do the critics not like it?
The first criticism I stumbled across came from a fellow named Guillaume Verdon in his interview with Lex Fridman. Verdon is a prominent AI accelerationist who thinks we should speed up AI progress without much concern for AI safety and alignment. Verdon’s argued that EAs are focused on trying to promote well-being and minimize suffering which:
Leads to focus on “spurious” things like reducing shrimp pain.
Leads to wireheading where you get addicted to TikTok and are constantly having your desires fulfilled but not ultimately happy—this causes decay and death.
Instead, he suggests we try to maximize energy because it is “very objective.”
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