[JohnFen]

EA (the philosophy) is simple and reasonable: the idea is to engage in altruism that has the greatest impact possible. Essentially, getting the most bang for your buck.

EA (the movement) takes that simple and reasonable idea and extrapolates it out to support some truly crazy and/or questionable efforts, some of which seem very harmful. In my view, the movement is uncomfortably cultish.

Here's a non-paywalled link to the article: https://archive.is/paC4K

[mrandish]

> (the philosophy) is simple and reasonable

> (the movement) takes that simple and reasonable idea and extrapolates it out to support some truly crazy and/or questionable efforts

You've perfectly described the fundamental problem with many recently popular philosophical propositions. The starting premise sounds reasonable because it is reasonable. Yet that basic premise is then extended to include much more controversial things. These initially reasonable things range from "It would be good to incorporate some safety measures as we implement AI" to "Racism is bad." Obviously, reasonable propositions it's hard to disagree with. Yet somehow we end up with influential social movements LARPing Terminator II scenarios and serious people arguing the police should be defunded.

I'm starting to suspect this repeating dark pattern isn't happening by accident. If your movement has some pretty extreme ideas most people wouldn't agree with, it's more effective to start with ideas almost no one will disagree with. Then, after a lot of reasonable people have bought-in to that, slowly increment toward justifying increasingly extreme measures to achieve "justice". It's essentially bait-and-switch. The unfortunate side effect is now I've learned to be leery of agreeing with even seemingly agreeable things because it's unclear what other things might later be included.

This puts me in the kind of bizarre conversations where someone says "I'm an anti-racist, are you?" and I have to craft a weirdly qualified response like, "Well, I'm certainly opposed to racism but I need to understand what 'anti-racism' includes in this context because some people include policies under that term which have net effects that seem to get uncomfortably close to racism."

[ViktorRay]

I think what you described is something that happens inherently in movements that become echo chambers. As the movement gets more extreme more and more of the reasonable people are driven out or silenced. Eventually the movement is controlled by a tiny minority of extremists and the majority of reasonable people feel compelled to agree with them or leave. Then the movement collapses.

This phenomenon has taken place many times in history. Look at how the ideas of socialism became extreme in China during the cultural revolution or in The USSR during the peak of Stalinism.

Anyway eventually the ultra Maoists in China lost control and China went in a different direction. Russia too. So at the most extreme things do seem to collapse and move in the opposite direction…

[theGnuMe]

There is no greater impact than government action, that is taxation and redistribution. It will reduce inequality and raise the standard of living precisely because the government is cost effective.

[zozbot234]

> There is no greater impact than government action, that is taxation and redistribution.

The issue is not which has the "greater impact" in the absolute (where government action may win) but which has the greater impact for spending extra money/resources. It's quite clear that EA's are getting a lot more bang for the buck there than, e.g. government foreign aid ever did.

[8note]

The measurement is kinda off with EAs though.

First, the effective altruists did a bunch of harm to get all the money, then put it on something focused that not everyone agrees is the best thing to do with it.

They can measure the results of the spending as being higher, but don't account for the harm they needed to do to accumulate the money.

[matthewdgreen]

How do you measure spending that will only affect people living in the distant future? This is the problem with the longtermist end of the EA movement.

[robocat]

I can think of counter-examples - so your this-is-fact style of writing is wrong to start with.

What's you're best example of a government that is following your advice?

Do trolls have a right to food? I probably shouldn't be feeding you on off-topic subjects. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html