EA - 21 criticisms of EA I'm thinking about by Peter Wildeford

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: 21 criticisms of EA I'm thinking about, published by Peter Wildeford on September 1, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Note — I’m writing this in a personal capacity, and am not representing the views of either of my employers (Rethink Priorities and EA Funds). This post was also not reviewed in advance by anyone. I really like all the engagement with criticism of EA as a part of the criticism and red-teaming contest and I hope our movement becomes much stronger as a result. Here's some criticism I've recently found myself thinking about. Similar to Abraham's style I'm going to write these out in bullet points because while I'd love to have spent more time to make this a longer post, you can tell by the fact that I'm rushing it out on the last day that this plan didn't come together. So consider these more of starting points for conversation than decisive critiques. Also apologies if someone else has already articulated these critiques - I'm happy to be pointed to resources and would be happy to edit my post to include them. I'd be very excited also for others to expand upon any of these points. Also, if there's particular interest, I might be able to personally expand on a particular point at a later date. Furthermore, apologies if any of these criticisms are wrongheaded or lack nuance - some nuance can't be included given the format, but I'd be happy to remove or alter criticism I no longer stand by or link to discussion threads where more nuance is discussed. Lastly I concede that these aren't necessarily the most important criticisms of EA. These are criticisms I am listing with the intention of producing novelty[1] and articulating some things I've been thinking about rather than producing a prioritized list of the most important criticisms. In many cases, I think the correct response to a criticism I list here could be to ignore it and keep going. With those caveats in mind, here it goes: 1.) I think criticizing EA is kinda hard and slippery. I agree that EA is a tower of assumptions but I think it is pretty hard to attack this tower as it can instead operate as a motte and bailey. I think a lot of my criticisms are of the form of attacks on specific projects / tactics rather than EA as a philosophy/strategy/approach. And usually these criticisms are met with "Yeah but that doesn't undermine EA [as a philosophy/strategy/approach] and we can just change X". But then X doesn't actually change. So I think the criticism is still important, assuming EA-with-X is indeed worse than EA-without-X or EA-with-different-X. It's still important to criticize things as they are actually are implemented. Though of course this isn't necessarily EA's fault as driving change in institutions - especially more diffuse leaderless institutions - is very hard. 2.) I think criticism of EA may be more discouraging than it is intended to be and we don't think about this enough. I really like this contest and the participatory spirit and associated scout mindset. EA is a unique and valuable approach and being willing to take criticism is a big part of that. (Though the changing may be harder, as mentioned.) But I think filling up the EA Forum with tons of criticism may not be a good experience for newcomers and may be particularly poorly timed with Will's big "What We Owe the Future" media launch bringing EA into the public eye for the first time. I think as self-aggrandizing as it might appear, I should probably make it clear to everyone that I actually think the EA community is pretty great and dramatically much better than every other movement I've been a part of. I think it's human nature to see people focus on the criticisms and think that there are serious problems and get demotivated, so perhaps we ought to balance that out with more positives[^though of course I don't think a ...