[enord]

These are technicalities IMO. There is nothing else to EA than the current institutions, people and praxis. If they become unfashionable or dishonored their moment will pass.

It’s not some special new kind of cause, it’s just charity with an almost intolerably smug self-image.

[Jeff_Brown]

EA was a philosophy before it was a culture. Sure, the culture has wankers. And unfortunately the wankers are loud, which can make you think everyone who does EA is smug and unrealistic.

But the idea of bringing statistical rigor to charity is an important one, and it really was a development -- it came shockingly late. Statistics came late to baseball too, and plenty of people fought the idea, but it won pretty fast, because people in baseball care about winning. If* people doing charity really care about achieving the most good, it will win there, too.

* This is a nontrivial assumption.

[enord]

I just really feel… you didn’t, like at all, read what I wrote, you know?

[Jeff_Brown]

How could you think I didn't read what you wrote when I disagreed so specifically with it? EA is something new -- not as a goal, clearly (Bentham had already gotten there) but as a method. And it is more than the people who identify with it, just like mathematics can be distinguished from mathematicians.

[enord]

If there is something new about EA it is, as a matter of public record, not the use of statistically rigorous cost-/benefit analysis. The hubris!

Anyhow, I will admit that the (putative) indifference to specific causes, so long as they are E and A, and (ostensibly) apolitical posture is original.

They are ofcourse transparently performative. Animal welfare cannot be measured but only assumed, and should therefore by their own “philosophy” rank lower than the lowest net positive measurable utility at any price.

Whatever else “effective” implies, it must include some change in society to be materially meaningfull. While this is not a standard the Longtermist arm adheres to, the rest of EA and the “philosophy” demand it. It doesn’t take all that much imagination to see which political project EA is most aligned with…