EA - The Bulwark's Article On Effective Altruism Is a Short Circuit by Omnizoid

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: The Bulwark's Article On Effective Altruism Is a Short Circuit, published by Omnizoid on September 27, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Crosspost of this on my blog.I really like the Bulwark. Their articles are consistently funny, well-written, and sensible. But recently, Mary Townsend wrote a critique of effective altruism titled "Effective Altruism Is a Short Circuit," that seems deeply confused. In fact, I will go further and make a stronger claim - there is not a single argument made in the entire article that should cause anyone to be less sympathetic to effective altruism at all! Every claim in the article is either true but irrelevant to the content of effective altruism or false. The article is crafted in many ways to mislead, confuse and induce negative affect in the reader but is light on anything of substance.For instance, the article begins with a foreboding picture of the notorious EA fraudster Sam Bankman Fried. This is not an explicit argument given, of course - it's just a picture. If it were forced to be an argument, it would not succeed - even if Bernie Madoff gave a lot of money to the Red Cross and has some role in planning operations, that would do nothing to discredit the Red Cross; the same principle is true of EA. But when one is writing a smear piece, they don't need to include real objections - they can just include things that induce disdain in the reader that they come to associate with the object of the author's criticism. Such is reminiscent of the flashing red letters that are ubiquitous in attack ads - good if one's aim is propaganda, bad if one's aim is truth.The article spends the first few paragraphs on mostly unremarkable philosophical musings about how we often have an urge to do good and we can choose what we do, filled with sophisticated-sounding references to philosophers and literature. Such musings help build the author's ethos as a Very Serious Person, but does little to provide an argument. However, after a few paragraphs of this, the author gets to the first real criticism:That one could become good through monetary transactions should raise our post-Reformation suspicions, obviously. As a simple response to the stipulation of a dreadful but equally simple freedom, it seems almost designed to hit us at the weakest spots of our human frailty, with disconcerting effects.Effective altruism doesn't claim, like those who endorsed indulgences, that one can become good through donating. It claims that one can do good through donating and that one should do good. The second half of that claim is a trivially obvious moral claim - we should help people more rather than less - and the first half of the claim is backed by quite overwhelming empirical evidence. While one can dispute the details somewhat, the claim that we can save the lives of faraway people for a few thousand dollars is incontrovertible given the weight of the available evidence - there's a reason that critics of EA never have specific criticisms of the empirical claims made by effective altruists.Once one acknowledges that those who give to effective charities can save hundreds of lives over the course of their lives by fairly modest donations, a claim that even critics of such giving generally do not dispute, the claim that one should donate significant amounts to charities in order to save the lives of lots of people who would otherwise have died of horrifying diseases ceases to be something that "raises our post-reformation suspicions." One imagines the following dialogue (between Townsend and a starving child):Child: Please, could I have five dollars. This would allow me to afford food today so I wouldn't be hungry.Townsend: Sorry, I'd love to help, but that one could become good through monetary transactions should raise our post-Reformation suspici...