EA - On Philosophy Tube's Video on Effective Altruism by Jessica Wen

Link to original articleWelcome 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 Philosophy Tube's Video on Effective Altruism, published by Jessica Wen on February 24, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.tl;dr:I found Philosophy Tube's new video on EA enjoyable and the criticisms fair. I wrote out some thoughts on her criticisms. I would recommend a watch.BackgroundI’ve been into Abigail Thorn's channel Philosophy Tube for about as long as I’ve been into Effective Altruism. I currently co-direct High Impact Engineers, but this post is written from a personal standpoint and does not represent the views of High Impact Engineers. Philosophy Tube creates content explaining philosophy (and many aspects of Western culture) with a dramatic streak (think fantastic lighting and flashy outfits - yes please!). So when I found out that Philosophy Tube would be creating a video on Effective Altruism, I got very excited.I have written this almost chronologically and in a very short amount of time, so the quality and format may not be up to the normal standards of the EA Forum. I wanted to hash out my thoughts for my own understanding and to see what others thought.Content, Criticisms, and ContemplationsEA and SBFFirstly, Thorn outlines what EA is, and what’s happened over the past 6 months (FTX, a mention of the Time article, and other critical pieces) and essentially says that the leaders of the movement ignored what was happening on the ground in the community and didn’t listen to criticisms. Although I don’t think this was the only cause of the above scandals, I think there is some truth in Thorn’s analysis. I also disagree with the insinuation that Earning to Give is a bad strategy because it leads to SBF-type disasters: 80,000 Hours explicitly tells people to not take work that does harm even if you expect the positive outcome to outweigh the harmful means.EA and LongtermismIn the next section, Thorn discusses Longtermism, What We Owe the Future (WWOTF), and The Precipice. She mentions that there is no discussion of reproductive rights in a book about our duties to future people (which I see as an oversight – and not one that a woman would have made); she prefers The Precipice, which I agree is more detailed, considers more points of view, and is more persuasive. However, I think The Precipice is drier and less easy to read than WWOTF, the latter of which is aimed at a broader audience.There is a brief (and entertaining) illustration of Expected Value (EV) and the resulting extreme case of Pascal’s Mugging. Although MacAskill puts this to the side, Thorn goes deeper into the consequences of basing decisions on EV and the measurability bias that results – and she is right that although there is thinking done on how to overcome this in EA (she gives the example of Peter Singer’s The Most Good You Can Do, but also see this, this and this for examples of EAs thinking about tackling measurability bias), she mentions that this issue is never tackled by MacAskill. (She generalises this to EA philosophers, but isn't Singer one of the OG EA philosophers?)EA and ~The System~The last section is the most important criticism of EA. I think this section is most worth watching. Thorn mentions the classic leftist criticism of EA: it reinforces the 19th-century idea of philanthropy where people get rich and donate their money to avoid criticisms of how they got their money and doesn’t directly tackle the unfair system that privileges some people over others.Thorn brings Mr Beast into the discussion, and although she doesn’t explicitly say that he’s an EA, she uses Mr Beast as an example of how EA might see this as: “1000 people were blind yesterday and can see today – isn’t that a fact worth celebrating?”. The question that neither Mr Beast nor the hypothetical EA ask is: “how do we change the world?”. Changing the world, she implies, necessitates chang...