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Comment by ihm | Hacker News Reader

EA is bad because it in practice, as an actually existing movement, assumes capitalism as an immutable reality. The problem is that capitalism actually generates most of the problems they are worried about, so if they can’t address the root cause, they are perpetually spinning their wheels addressing symptoms.

You can see this axiomatic commitment to capitalism in their actual practice and advice they give people: starting non-profit orgs that are integrated with the capitalist economy, recommending getting high earning jobs at capitalist firms, donating huge amounts to capitalist politicians like Joe Biden (see Sam Bankman-Fried), not taking any anti-capitalist political action, etc.

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Some of the weirder EA folks do some of these things but there is no consensus that they’re making the right choices, even within the EA community.

If you want to pick something that pretty much everyone in EA would agree is good, that would be donating to whatever GiveWell recommends. Yes, this uses money to actually accomplish things.

However, if even the people who claim we can use "rationality" to determine where to donate, cannot actually agree on what action is rational (as you say, lack of consensus), then this puts the whole movement into a question. Like, try to put money wisely into charities, duh, as if I didn't know! (Personally, I don't believe in utilitarian rationality. You cannot separate desired outcomes from personal values.)

Socialism or communism are the alternatives? Or do you imagine a different political system? Which do you strive for? And what are the steps from that to the new state performing the actions that an archipelago of effective charities are already taking?

Genuine set of questions, that is an interesting take!

I'll step back a little and say that EA is somewhat anti-political, in that organizationally it doesn't believe in political action (any, really) as effective. It sometimes suggests donating to lobbying groups, but if EA took climate as seriously as they took AI-risk, you'd likely see a concerted effort to move people to Wyoming and push for a single-issue climate change candidate to support democratic climate initiatives.

This isn't really true. OPP has political action as one of its top priorities and is donating millions a year. Bankman-fried just dropped 10 million on a house race in oregon, and I hear that he's only ramping up his political donations. "Move to wyoming" is something you hear about in the EA community often enough.

A billionaire donating to a political race? I don't find that very noteworthy.

I mean, as of the last several years, IMO it is wise to be anti-political - it has been pretty disgusting across the board. But I'll take your point that there is certainly leverage to be had in backing an up-and-coming politician who is focused on some of these important issues.

I would guess that an effective altruist would be very interested in seeing how their "investment" would turn out - i.e. would the politician actually be effective in reaching the goals that they set out to achieve? If yes, then I think that it would be quite inline with EA to support politicians like these.

Anti-political just means pro-status-quo. You can afford to be anti-political because the current state of affairs is convenient for you.

Maybe I need to be more precise: neither party of the political establishment is remotely palatable to me. I rarely see anyone who is running who seems interested in changing that, and even if they were, most people I know are not going to support anyone truly anti-establishment.

The current state of affairs is definitely NOT convenient for me. But I’ve become jaded, and I do not believe that the current gov of the USA, nor attempting to change the current gov of the USA, is a good use of my time.

I’m kinda tired of this facade that you must support a party. I just don’t think it does anything productive, and just makes me exhausted. Maybe I am wrong, and lord knows I would be very happy to be wrong. Until then, I will chug along on a small corner of things that I can actually improve.

I didn't say that you must support a party -- not being from the US myself, I hear pretty awful things about them all the time. But most political causes are not party politics (you'll never hear this from the parties, of course).

As an example, I have never read about EA support for worker unionization, which would be a pretty effective way of increasing worker access to food, shelter and healthcare. It's not even a new, unproven idea! Workers in the US were much more unionized in the past, with a measurable QoL impact. However, since this an issue that can't be solved with monetary donations, plus it requires rocking the political boat, EA advocates are functionally blind to it. These are the types of things I think about when being "anti-politics" is mentioned as a feature.

Ahh gotcha - boy, I wish we had different words for “centralized insane governmental politics” and “politics as in affairs of the city” haha

Yeah sadly it's pretty common (not only in the US) to talk about "politics" and people instantly think you mean "party politics".

> assumes capitalism as an immutable reality

I would reframe this as "in practice, as an actually existing movement, recognizes that capitalism is our current system, and in order to create less exploitative, inequitable, and unsustainable systems, one has to engage with it to a large degree".

How can new, better systems be set up today without funding something in the global capitalist system? The article suggests that anyone with better ways of doing good per-unit-time or per-dollar should be evangelizing those rather than dismissing the efforts of others who have some current answers to those questions, and are probably open to better answers as they come up.

> capitalism actually generates most of the problems they are worried about

I think the reality is that humans create most of the problems they are worried about. This may seem like a cop out, but people are just inherently greedy. While other political systems attempt to shut our nature down capitalism embraces ourselves and aligns our incentives to generally make society better. As long as people are in charge there will be corruption and mistreatment and abuse of power.

> people are just inherently greedy. While other political systems attempt to shut our nature down capitalism embraces ourselves and aligns our incentives to generally make society better.

I understand where you are coming from but I will state unequivocally: people are not _just_ inherently greedy. Each of us has the capacity to be greedy and selfish, but we also each have the capacity to be giving, caring and accountable to others. How might we act if we lived in a society in which wealth hoarding was a cultural taboo rather than a celebrated cultural value? What if we looked towards billionaires with pity rather than envy or resentment?

As the late anthropologist, David Graeber, put it: “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is just something we make, and could just as easily make something different.” Rather than just concede that capitalism is the best we can possibly do, why not consider how we could reform it and/or replace it with something better? (For the record, I consider communism and capitalism two sides of the same coin. We need to be more creative and visionary about the world we want to live in than what these tired ideologies offer.)

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