[Religious people: ironically, this post is not going to be welcoming to you guys, because it takes atheism as a base-level assumption.]
I pretty fervently believe that effective altruism should make deliberate efforts to reach out to religious people, to the point that my litmus test for whether I take someone seriously in the perennial Effective Altruism PR Wars is whether they agree with me on this point. Many people have strongly disagreed with me about this, but I think it’s mistaken.
(I want to say that ‘religion’ is a very broad category encompassing a wide variety of different things, and unfortunately in this post it is mostly used as a synonym for ‘Christianity and maybe Judaism.’ This is a flaw in my knowledge, and I hope effective altruists who understand other religions better can speak to its relevance in those religions.)
One of the most common objections to the idea of incorporating religious people is the idea of ‘effective evangelism’. The idea of fundamentalist Christians doing randomized controlled trials to see what best spreads the idea that Jesus saves or inventing evidence-based interventions to prevent masturbation strikes fear into the heart of any atheist. But I think this fear is overblown.
Effective altruists, as a whole, tend to have a trait one might call “taking ideas seriously”– that is, when they are presented with a proposition, they will figure out every logical implication of the proposition and behave accordingly, no matter how counterintuitive the implication may be. This tendency goes back to Famine, Affluence, and Morality (cw: scrupulosity), one of the foundational essays of the effective altruism movement, which suggests that an implication of thinking it is wrong to allow babies to drown in front of you is that you should give all your money to charity.
But I don’t think there’s any reason effective altruists necessarily have to take ideas seriously. Most of our core ideas are not, in fact, counterintuitive implications: they’re perfectly intuitive. “You know the powerful techniques we use to figure out life-saving medical technologies? We should use them to figure out how to improve the world better!” “It’s wrong to eat something if beings were tortured to make it.” “It is a bad idea for life on earth to be destroyed.” “People know their own needs better than we do.” The absolute cutting edge of effective altruism– wild-animal suffering, artificial general intelligence, and so on– probably requires a certain amount of the ability, but the average effective altruist is and should be donating to an ordinary charity like Give Directly or the Against Malaria Foundation.
Of course, taking ideas seriously is absolutely necessary to be a utilitarian. But there’s no reason why a person interested in improving the world in the most efficient fashion should be a utilitarian. They might be a deontologist performing supererogatory deeds or a virtue ethicist cultivating the virtue of compassion or an ethical egoist who has decided that the continued existence of malaria is not in their enlightened self-interest. They might feel like they’re very privileged and they have a duty to give back, or that they’ve committed a lot of harm and they want to make up for it. Or they might be someone with the simple, common-sense intuition that it’s sad how much people in this world hurt and they wish that they could do something to help.
The obvious way to prevent the existence of ‘effective evangelism’ is simply to create the norm that effective altruism is secular. You can do whatever you want in the privacy of your own church, synaogogue, mosque, pentacle, or dark blood-splattered temple into which only fools dare enter, but in effective altruism we deal strictly with natural things. This is, of course, a complete special case of the sort that gives people who take ideas seriously hives. But it works pretty well in a lot of contexts, from political activism to science, and in practice no one seems to have any difficulty following the rule.
A second objection is that religious people may make effective altruism less rational and committed to evidence, because they believe something that is obviously untrue. But Insert Your Least Favorite Political Party Here also believes untrue things, and I think most people would agree that people they disagree with politically should be part of effective altruism. Indeed, I have personally been involved in a conversation in which multiple libertarians schemed about how to reach out to Communists.
Furthermore, people have a remarkable ability to compartmentalize. Famous Christians in science include the inventor of Perl; the winners of the 2007, 2012, and 2013 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry; the famous computer scientist Donald Knuth; the winners of the 1978 and 2012 Nobel Prizes in Medicine; the inventor of the MRI; the director of the Human Genome Project; and the winners of the 1974 and 1984 Nobel Prizes in Physics. The irrationality of some eminent people in the sciences is not limited to religion: Ben Carson, the first person to ever separate conjoined twins at the head, is in his spare time Ben Carson. It seems to me that if surgery as a field went “we’re going to exclude people who believe Joseph built the pyramids to store grain“, then the quality of surgeons available to them would go down.
Similarly, effective altruists can maintain their high standards of rationality and evidence and simply expect religious people to compartmentalize. If a person is being irrational and refusing to listen to evidence about charity, of course, they should not be welcome in the effective altruist movement– whether they are religious or atheistic. And, conversely, if someone makes insightful points about whether deworming leads to increased income later in life, then we should welcome them, even if in their free time they’re a young-earth Creationist or whatever.
A third objection is that there’s no point to reaching out to religious people, because they don’t actually give any more to charity. Research suggests that, while religious Americans give more to charity, they give a similar amount if you exclude money given to churches and faith-based organizations. However, it’s a mistake to assume that, because donations are currently going to a faith-based organization, they couldn’t be redirected to effective altruism. Catholic Relief Services works on agriculture, education, and public health in the developing world. World Vision gives money to children in the developing world. The people who give to those organizations are precisely the ones we should be targeting.
And, frankly, a lot of times it feels sort of weird to be saying “you shouldn’t donate to that charity! Our charity is much more effective!”– it’s sad that you’re taking money away from guide dogs for the blind, instead of away from the purchase of a new foosball table. None of those concerns apply to World Vision. My fellow antitheists! Would it not be deeply satisfying for those homophobic fuckwits to go bankrupt? Let’s offer a better product than them, take their donations, and laugh.
A fourth objection is that religious people may change the culture of effective altruism undesirably. My first response to this is that effective altruist outreach to religious people should not start at Bob Jones University. Indeed, probably the easiest way to begin would be by targeting liberal religious people, who behave very similarly to atheists. Unfortunately, liberal religions are hemorrhaging members, which sort of limits their potential for recruitment.
I suspect a lot of our best luck– at least in terms of Christianity, which I’m most familiar with– would be found targeting Catholicism. Catholicism has a rich intellectual tradition that continues to today– First Things is a lot more erudite than, say, Relevant— and more importantly Catholic theology pairs really well with effective altruist values. Catholic social teaching, with its emphasis on the option for the poor and vulnerable and on caring for people across international borders, is a core part of Catholicism even for relatively conservative Catholics. It is true that the church has some fairly regressive opinions about sex and abortion. But there is really no need for that to come up in an effective altruist context, and I suspect we’d quickly develop norms of politeness to deal with it: the Catholics would tolerate me holding hands with my boyfriends, and I would tolerate their prayers; they’d call me the right pronoun, and I’d bite my tongue about the evils of Mother Teresa. I suspect that, approached open-mindedly, a lot of atheist effective altruists would find a lot to like about the Catholics most easily seduced to effective altruism.
But my more fundamental objection is that effective altruism is not a social club. There is already an option for people who want to hang out with the people who are currently attracted to effective altruism. It is called “the rationalist community.” Effective altruism is about making the world a better place. Although of course it is good if you find friends in effective altruism, if your ability to more easily find friends trades off against actual human lives, then the human lives win. And if you disagree, then frankly the person who should be unwelcome in effective altruism is you.
Thing of Things 
I suppose my query, as a religious person, would be: are you hoping to recruit believers to donate to EA in addition to whatever causes they already donate to, or to get them to replace their charitable giving in total by switching it entirely to EA causes?
Because for a start, I’d ask: okay, bed nets for malaria prevention, very good, nice to see the figures. But why should I switch from my charitable donation to anti-malarial drugs campaign run by a denominational charity? Are bed nets better than anti-malarials? Or is there a better result achieved by both in parallel: so you lot provide bed nets, we provide anti-malarial drugs, and the people in receipt of those benefit from twice the prophylactics offered?
Or okay, so now all the kids that would have died from malaria and associated diseases are now alive thanks to bednets, that’s really great. So what happens next? Do you have an education charity to recommend to me? No?
Right, then I think I’ll stick with my parish’s link to the parish in Africa that funds schooling for primary-school age children.
Or maybe I’d rather give money to Guide Dogs for the Blind because my Auntie Jane is blind and her guide dog makes such a difference in her life, but you are telling me “No, unless you give every cent of potential donations to bed nets, you are directly responsible for African children dying, you monster!” Which may be true, but won’t attract anyone.
If you can show that EA [Favourite Cause] really is more effective or does better than [Denominational-Supported Charity], that’s fine. But if you’re trying the equivalent of “Don’t give them your money, give it to us” – why should I listen to you?
LikeLike
General tip: for any global poverty issue, you can google “Givewell [that issue]” and it will almost certainly bring up an article on the subject! For instance, this is Givewell’s page on anti-malaria drugs, which found that the cost per life saved of anti-malaria drugs is worse than the cost per life saved of bednets.
In the event that we have eliminated malaria and schistosomiasis, iodized all salt that everyone in the developing world receives, provided everyone in the developing world with basic health counselling and TV shows that encourage them in good health behaviors, and come up with a stable non-donation-based source of funding for a guaranteed basic income of a thousand dollars a year to everyone in the developing world– which is to say, that there is no room for more funding in any of GiveWell’s top or standout charities– I am pretty sure that GiveWell would have managed to research another charity to donate to, on account of researching new charities is literally their job. It is not like any of those things are about to happen next week. They have plenty of time.
LikeLiked by 7 people
I tend to go for the belt and braces approach: yes, bednets are probably better on that costing basis. But anti-malarials won’t hurt either, you know? Either for people who already have malaria or are at high risk (pregnant or children between ages 3-5).
Bednets + anti-malarials strikes me as better than anti-malarials alone, or bednets alone. I tend to distrust “one size fits all” solutions to things like disease, which have a nasty habit of turning out to be a lot more complicated than we think (e.g. the “magic bullet” view of antibiotics – why, this will completely mean no more sickness! without the realisation that down the road, hello antibiotic resistance!)
So I would wonder if “bednets alone” focus is going to be the single answer that works to completely eradicate malaria. I don’t think it is,and I think if we’re talking about malaria in all its contexts (i.e. treatment rather than prevention alone), then a multiple-pronged approach is probably better.
tl; dr – bednets to prevent contracting malaria very good, no denying. But fear that focus on that alone will ignore the people who have contracted malaria and need treatment for that, and if EA entices people into “if you want to save lives, give to bednet purchasing and distribution” ALONE, and takes their donations from other charities to all go towards THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK STATISTICIANS LOVE, this kind of thing will be neglected, and that enthusiasm for a single simple answer will lead to neglect of lesser but equally vital needs.
LikeLike
@Martha
That feels intuitively appealing but is sort of the problem EA is trying to address.
People have a great tendency to say “well sure, helping 3rd world children is good but we need to spread things around, so lets spend 2 million on this cute little blond child burn victim I saw in the newspaper”
Ignoring that they’re implying that 1 life is more important than ,say, 1000 non-blonde 3rd world kids you could save with the same money.
And the problem with trying to explain why that’s a problem is that people tend to turn around an say some equivalent of “why do you have blonde child burn victims so much!?!”
There will continue to be people investing in malaria drugs. You switching your donation will not change that. But the implication is that at the moment malaria drugs are overvalued vs bednets.
You could express it as a set of markets, each with a dollar value to buy 1 additional saved human life.
On the bednet market 1 additional life costs X dollars. On the malaria drugs market 1 additional life costs 3X dollars. On the cute 1st world child burn victim market 1 additional life costs 1000X dollars.
It’s not claiming that bednets are a magic bullet, it’s claiming that right now each dollar you put into drugs rather than bednets saves less lives.
Yes there may be some mothers who need malaria drugs but if you shift money from the bednet market to the drugs market you’re likely making sure that the future will likely contain more mothers who actually catch malaria in the first place and wouldn’t have needed the drugs if you’d not switched funding.
If tens of thousands of people sank their money into bednets then eventually the cost per life would change until givewell would start telling you that malaria drugs were the most underfunded at which point it would be the best place to move your money up until the point where 1 life is equally expensive in both markets.
Part of what you need to get your head round is how fundamentally tiny any one of us is.
The all-or-nothing approach is a logical implication that falls out from this (unless you’re a billionaire who can personally shift the entire market).
LikeLiked by 1 person
But the implication is that at the moment malaria drugs are overvalued vs bednets.
But are they? Give me an answer on that (“billion every year for anti-malarials, pennies for bednets!”) and I’ll take it.
What I’m seeing, in desultory Googling, is studies where both approaches run in tandem in areas of high malarial infection.
I’m not saying “EAs should not donate to bednets”. I am saying “EAs should get the people who are currently donating to anti-malarial drugs initiatives and convince them to switch to bednets” is only a better thing if (a) there is an examination of the relative effectiveness of anti-malarial drugs versus bednets (b) this comes down heavily on the side of bednets (c) there is still room for people to donate to anti-malarial intiatives in tandem with bednets if they think that is a good approach (d) an avoidance of easy “one size fits all” solutions (I hope that EA, being based on rationality approach, would avoid this but you never know – if all the new recruits to EA know is that “EA recommends GiveWell which recommends bednets”, how is that any different from me putting my donation in the collection box at Mass on Missions Sunday for the collection for the twinned parish in Nigeria?)
LikeLike
Consider: the child you give a bednet to, so they won’t contract malaria from mosquito bites, may have parent(s) who already are infected with malaria. If the parent(s) gets anti-malarial drugs to treat their illness, won’t they be better able to look after their child than if they’re sick with a relapse of the disease?
This is the kind of joined-up thinking I would like to see more of; I don’t want to make sweeping generalisations (she said before going on to do so) but a lot of the enthusiasm I see is of the kind “Bednets save lives! Look at our calculations about the hundreds and thousands of lives and the QALYS and all the rest of it!” “Okay, but what about – ” “Bednets! Or else you are letting people who could be saved die!” “But how do you know – ” “Because GiveWell says bednets are the best!” “But how does GiveWell – ” “Because it has figures! Look at our calculations!”
LikeLike
@Martha
I’m not really seeing how it’s more joined up thinking. Honestly it seems less joined up and more like starting with the answer you’ve already picked and working backwards to find some chain of reasoning that will get you there.
If your goal is to be as effective as possible it’s pure numbers.
From givewells pages:
Anti malarial drugs:
“Depending on drug resistance in an area, switching from existing treatment to ACT could cost approximately $5,450 per death (and ~320 less severe malaria episodes) averted.”
Bednets:
“estimate that the program averted 1 death for every $600 spent.46 As this figure is only per death averted, it does not include other possible benefits such as reduced fever episodes and economic burden (more on malaria’s effects here). We estimate that approximately 320 episodes of malaria (most of them mild) are averted for every death averted.”
So I was wrong with the 3X estimate, it’s actually 9X
So in our drugs market each life costs $5450 (and/or each less-severe malaria episode costs $17) and in our bednet market each life costs $600 (and/or each averted non-lethal case of malaria costs about $1.80)
How many billions are already being spent in either market isn’t so much the issue. If there were 2 markets for saving lives in a famine and one was sending cheap grain and the other was sending expensive caviar the best approach wouldn’t be to split your money 50-50 between grain and caviar even if the caviar provides some vitamins that the grain does not.
Givewell link to the studies that they source their data from. It’s not secret.
http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/insecticide-treated-nets/2009-report
You seem to try to paint it as if having actual data rather than going with your gut feeling is some kind of bad thing and the realities of opportunity cost is that if you have ,say, 11,000 to spend and decide that giving half of it for bed-nets and half for malaria drugs then you’re basically choosing to save 10 people rather than 18.
It’s the grim grim numbers.
focusing your mind of one imaginary *struggling* family with parents having trouble coping and imagining how much easier their lives would be if the 2 parents had anti-malaria drugs is exactly the problem that EA is trying to deal with. As humans we’re really really bad at not doing that and going with the raw numbers. When faced with trying to imagine 5760 people simply not getting sick in the first place and comparing that to the mental image of one struggling family trying to get treatment the latter feels more appealing and important. The thousands of other people fade into a mass and become hard to really think about to the point that it’s easy to forget that that group is going to include lots of similar parents and families.
You could drop the money in a random donation box or just throw money out your car window while driving through a poor neighborhood if your goal is just to give to something without much care how effective it is.
LikeLike
I suspect you may seriously underestimate the difficulty of recruiting religious people.
The standard EA arguments are mostly fairly convincing to religious people, and could be made more so. If you could hold your noses (and I’m speaking in the third person here, because, as you noted at the top, this post isn’t aimed at me), you could even come up with very convincing religious arguments, like “Jesus said so”.
But I worry this will likely not result in religious people actually joining the movement in any great numbers, because – not to put too fine a point on it – a whole lot of EAs seem to hate their guts.
Imagine if the EA movement was founded in Romanistan, and was considering branching out into the neighboring country Bolania. Of course, we would need to make sure that they didn’t divert funds to paying off stupid Bolanian money-grubbers, and we all know Bolania is a dictatorship so we’d have to ensure that we didn’t let any of their biased science and political beliefs get in, but surely we could establish a norm that things the Glorious Leader believes aren’t EA things and should be kept separate, right?
It seems obvious to me that any idea, no matter how good, that smacked of Bolanian and proposed by a Bolanian would be laughed at by the Romanstanian EAs.
To collapse the metaphor again: a lot of EAs object to EA “proselytizing” in any kind of effective manner, or study of it, in any fashion. That’s now. Imagine if a Jesuit got up on stage and said “we’ve been doing this for years, guys, and you need to pay attention to the domain experts.”
And religious people know this, so it will be very difficult to get them to join EA as a movement.
LikeLike
I mean, I don’t think “this movement does not do religious shit qua religious shit” is a turnoff to Christians necessarily– many of them seem involved in interfaith organizing and activism, which seems to have an equal issue with regards to “Interfaith Worker Justice has opinions on Wal-Mart, does not have opinions on the prophet status of Mohammad.”
I do agree that a major attitude shift among EAs as a whole is necessary.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Indeed. Religious shit qua religious shit would, of course, be intervening in Bolanian politics, which is quite a different kettle of fish – I’m more worried about hostility to religious people on a more tribal/shibboleth-y level.
I agree that focusing on common ground could potentially have enormous returns, I just … worry.
LikeLike
There is that; some EA altruists may fear contamination or attempts at proselytisation by religious types, but that works both ways: conservative religious believers (if they are the ones that have the weight of numbers you want to get into your net) may equally fear “they’ll try to turn us all atheist”.
I wouldn’t be concerned about that myself, what my beef with EA is, rather, is the attitude towards the “domain experts” that comes across as “You lot are pikers, we’re gonna do charity right – via the power of mathematical analysis and the scientific method!”
Which does come across as a bit arrogant when you’re striding into an area people have been working in for thirty or fifty or longer years and telling them “Okay, I read a blog post on this, I know all about it and how YOU are doing it wrong”.
They may indeed be doing it wrong, but deciding that, say, all missionary charitable endeavour is useless because they want to convert the natives to Jesus is assuming your conclusion has been proven before you start constructing your argument.
LikeLike
>deciding that, say, all missionary charitable endeavour is useless because they want to convert the natives to Jesus
I’m reasonably sure GiveWell don’t do that.
Some EAs definitely do, but thankfully they’re smart enough to listen to GiveWell.
LikeLike
I didn’t anticipate this obstacle, although it just makes things more difficult, though not necessarily not worth trying. In reaching out to the religious, is the hill so steep you think it’s not worth climbing? Assuming *some* resources (e.g., time, money, human/social capital) was going to be dedicated to EA outreach efforts no matter what, to whom would it be more effective to reach out to, in lieu of religious communities?
LikeLike
It’s unquestionably worth climbing. The benefits would be enormous.
The question is whether we can persuade people to climb it. Religious people are, if anything, probably easier to recruit than other groups; but I worry early selection effects may have biased the culture of EA too much, to the point where it’ll be difficult to grow.
Maybe not, though; as discussed downthread, based on the EA survey, I may have been underestimating how many EAs are religious already. Loud dislike of religious people may be overrepresented in my circles.
LikeLike
If you let feminists and utilitarians in, you’re basically already admitting religious people.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Read the flipping Sequences.
LikeLiked by 4 people
https://imgflip.com/i/15afnj
LikeLike
Yes. I’m robust enough to ignore the undercurrent of anti-theism that runs through EA circles, but then I’m the kind of catholic who reads rationalist blogs and hangs out on rationalist-adjacent tumblr.
It makes it much harder to evangelise about EA to my fellow Christians, knowing that there’s a real likelihood that they’ll run into hostility before they get convinced.
LikeLiked by 5 people
I feel like there needs to be more distinction between
“we need money for mosquito nets and religious people have money; let’s go convince them to donate,” versus
“we need to convince religious people that maximizing lives saved per dollar is the gold standard of charitable efficiency before which all other concerns are dust in the wind,” versus
“we need an organized movement of people because we need to have a serious talk about how this whole lives saved per dollar thing is supposed to balance against other concerns like animal well being or AI risk or even just against longer term solutions and surely inviting religious people to the conversation will be fine, they probably take those issues seriously, right?”
In unrelated news, I just finished reading a post by a Christian writer claiming that people’s outrage about the shooting of the gorilla in Cincinnati while allowing abortion to remain legal shows that our society worships animals and hates God. The post stated, among other things, that in the authors view the life of a human was worth so much more than that of an animal that he’d rather see the entire gorilla species eradicated than a single human come to harm.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Are you suggesting that there is an absence of people who believe that animals are utterly morally irrelevant in EA already? Because Eliezer Yudkowsky exists and is on the record as believing that chimpanzees are maybe morally relevant and monkeys are almost certainly not (I do not know his specific position on gorillas).
Speciesism is nearly universal. I do not think religion increases one’s chance of being a speciesist beyond the baseline (extremely high) level.
It does not seem obvious to me that the moral relevance of fetuses is less of concern than, say, the moral relevance of insects.
Do you have some specific reason to believe that this person would be amenable to effective altruism in the first place, or did you just pick a random religious person you don’t like?
LikeLiked by 2 people
No, no. I am FULLY aware that EA already has people who completely reject the moral value of animal lives. I’m fully aware that EA already has people who reject all kinds of moral issues.
I picked this guy because he’s ALREADY AN EFFECTIVE ALTRUIST. And he’s a monster.
I’m the guy who keeps trying to gently point out that EA is full of people who are worried that Clippy is going to tile the universe in paperclips, but who somehow still want a movement that insists on that morality must be judged entirely on a “human lives saved in the short term per dollar” metric that flat out mocks all other possible moral concerns as either frivolous or at least as irrelevant until we’ve freaking solved death or whatever, while ignoring that humans reproduce, effectively meaning that many EAs objection to Clippy isn’t that they’re against tiling the universe, they just want to tile it with something else.
The Christian author was mentioned as a way of highlighting the consequences of this “maximizing X is the sum total of morality” mentality, using someone with whom self identified EAs would not be likely to sympathize. And I kind of hoped that the mention of him, coupled with the prior paragraph, would illustrate the thrust of my critique- that “efficiency” only makes sense in the context of a goal, that “efficiency” cannot tell you what your goals ought to be in absence of other larger goals, that narrowly defined goals and a focus on efficiency excludes other considerations, and that if you’re going to have a conversation about how to balance competing concerns, which has to happen unless you’re willing to throw out a lot of issues you apparently aren’t, who you invite to the table really matters.
And just because it has to be noted sooner or later and I’m already on a tear- effective altruist discourse is virtually identical in certain pertinent ways to evangelical apologetic discourse. A lot of those guys were also effective altruists- they just wanted to maximize saved souls. And as a result, well- recognize this dynamic? EA- “this is lost efficient at saving lives, donate to it or you admit you care less about human life than just feeling good,” critic- “you’re drinking an expensive latte right now, doesn’t that mean you care more about lattes than human life?” EA- “well, I don’t want to burn out,” all if that, is flat out plagiarism from Christian “soul winners” discussing sharing the gospel.
Even this post! This is the old “we might not agree with that denomination on everything but if they’re bringing people to Jesus we have to work with them to maximize soul winning and if you’re not on board you obviously don’t care about saving souls” trope.
That… Doesn’t make EA a religion or exactly the same or anything. If you ignore everything I wrote, please see that I’m acknowledging that what goals you pursue is incredibly important.
LikeLike
“I am FULLY aware that EA already has people who completely reject the moral value of animal lives. […] I picked this guy because he’s ALREADY AN EFFECTIVE ALTRUIST. And he’s a monster.”
Then I don’t really see the relevance – are Christians unusually likely not to care about animals?
“a movement that insists on that morality must be judged entirely on a “human lives saved in the short term per dollar” metric that flat out mocks all other possible moral concerns as either frivolous or at least as irrelevant until we’ve freaking solved death or whatever, while ignoring that humans reproduce, effectively meaning that many EAs objection to Clippy isn’t that they’re against tiling the universe, they just want to tile it with something else.”
If you’re seriously suggesting that we allow X amount of people to die – who we could save right now – because of extreme long-term concerns about overpopulation “tiling the universe” with humans, then I don’t think you get to call other people monsters because they don’t know much about gorillas.
LikeLike
Ozzie’s post is LITERALLY an argument that certain people should not be welcome in EA, even if they donate properly, if they wish to exclude from joining other people who might donate properly, because excluding people who might donate properly (the thing Ozzie wants to do) would thwart the goals of EA. So such exclusion minded people (like… Ozzie) should be excluded from EA in turn.
This eats itself. There’s nothing to misunderstand.
It can only be understood on the rhetorical level. Ozzie is leveraging the moral norms of the EA community to tell a particular faction within that community to get back in like or else face the accusation of hypocrisy and an attack on their identity as members of the group.
I attempted to illustrate that by dividing the functions of EA as an organization into several categories, highlighting an area in which Ozzie holds a position (animal suffering isnt utterly without even the most minimal shred of value) that is at odds with a meaningful faction within EA, pointing out that questions of this nature are extremely important because what you choose to optimize for determines so much more than how you optimize, and showing how “who you bring into the conversation” determines the results of important group functions like agenda setting. In other words, showing that the people xie is criticizing are making arguments that Ozzie supports in other contexts. Including this post.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think there are all sorts of people who shouldn’t be welcome in EA! For instance, I would generally frown on the presence of unrepentant rapists, people who don’t care about evidence, and Nazis in EA. My objection is solely to “we should exclude these people because it would make my social life more enjoyable.”
Also my name is spelled ‘Ozy’.
LikeLike
Patrick, I’m not entirely sure what your argument is here.
Is it that animals and humans should be held as equally morally relevant, and the life of an animal (no matter what animal) is of the same moral weight as the life of a human?
Pushing that to its extreme, then EAs should not be donating to bed nets, as the insecticide treatment means they are implements of torture and genocide: given that there are probably vastly greater populations of mosquitoes than humans, and if the cumulative suffering of insects is weighed, then it outweighs the suffering of humans – and you have no right to kill mosquitoes to prevent humans possibly becoming sick.
If your argument is “have nothing to do with filthy believers, they will only contaminate the pure movement” – well, that’s an argument you are entitled to make, but it has little to do with EA or charity donation and more to do with “religion is bunk, and poisonous hateful bunk at that, and it destroys everything, and its adherents freely make themselves into sub-humans”.
If you want EA to decide why it values human life and continuing human existence, that’s probably a very good question to ask. Why should we be concerned about AI risk? Why shouldn’t humans go extinct as many other species have done – indeed, it seems that at regular intervals in the history of Earth, mass extinction events are the norm and if AI is going to be what takes us out, so be it?
LikeLike
Does my follow up post to Ozzie clarify?
For the record, no, I do not believe that every individual mosquitoes life is of equal worth to a human’s. I think maybe we can find some ground in between that and “you must agree we should be willing to eradicate the entire gorilla species to save a single human from harm or else you’re an animal worshipping idolater.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
The strongest anti-environmental rhetoric (not anti-environmentalist, anti-environment) that I’ve seen has come from rationalists, not religious people. As in, “destroy an infinite number of biospheres to save a single person” level of anti-environment rhetoric. I’ve never seen anything even remotely as strong come from religious people. Should we therefore ban rationalists from EA? Good luck doing that.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Considering the previous post, it would seem better to try to make the vast charity networks that christianity already has more effective than to convince the marginal christian to join the weird UK college group featuring vegans and AI guys.
LikeLiked by 4 people
I realize this post isn’t actually directed at me, but as other religious people have already commented, I hope this won’t be seen as off-topic or irrelevant.
As a Catholic who’s been casually lurking in this general corner of the internet and passively absorbing some relevant ideas for several months, I definitely think EA’s emphasis on measurement and trying to save and improve people’s lives as effectively as possible is A Good Thing. It’s one of the major reasons I’m trying to get a part-time job right now; I’ve been doing volunteer work to help tutor ELL children in my community, and while I think that’s been a very positive thing for both me and them (and I intend to continue next school year), I’ve realized that getting a job and donating to the Against Malaria Foundation or a similar organization would probably be a better use of time than looking for other volunteer opportunities. I’m genuinely grateful to the EA movement, and to you in particular, for bringing these things to my attention—both because I do want to help people, and because knowing how much good money does makes it easier to appreciate the daily grind of life, and realize that the non-volunteering things I’m doing may not be as insignificant as I sometimes think they are. I am taking steps towards helping people, just not in highly visible ways.
I agree with you that a lot of devout Catholics (even ones who strongly identify as political conservatives) would be similarly interested. I used to spend a lot of time on a large Catholic forum, and there was never any shortage of Catholics there who were extremely dismayed about global poverty, and who felt like we weren’t making enough progress on that front. I think those people would love to know how to combat child mortality in a way that has been shown to do real, measurable good. In the future, I’ll certainly try to link interested people to Givewell and try to encourage them to think about what sorts of donations and activities will do the most good, not just make them feel morally superior.
That said, I’m unclear about whether you want religious people to identify themselves as a part of EA and participate in discussions, or whether you’re only saying that convincing religious people to donate to effective charities should be a goal of the EA movement. The latter is relatively straightforward, though likely not something atheists will be able to do themselves with very much success. The former, if successful, would definitely lead to a major shift in the topics of discussion within EA circles. “Talk about saving souls in your spaces, not this one” seems like a reasonable request. “We’re going to ignore the lives of fetuses, because you only care about them for religious reasons” does not, especialy when animal welfare is considered an acceptable (if divisive) subject of discussion. Bringing religious people into the EA movement will necessarily involve engaging with people who believe that decreasing abortions is an extremely pressing concern.
Right now, while I do want to cooperate by donating to effective charities, I don’t have any reason to join the surrounding community or take part in discussions. Everything I care about is already either being discussed at a level high enough that I don’t think I have anything useful to contribute, or seems to have been dismissed. I don’t want to barge into your spaces and start arguing that people should be talking about abortion instead of AI or the suffering of chickens. If you want to discuss helping chickens, that seems like a good thing to me. Not the most useful thing in the world, from my perspective, but I’m sure I can find plenty of religious people to discuss abortion with, and I’m perfectly content to argue with them about whether or not political action is a waste of time compared to providing economic relief for young unwed mothers, in terms of how many lives it’ll actually save. We’re perfectly capable of having such discussions within our existing communities, though I hope that we can do more good by using a few concepts from EA’s toolkit.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I don’t have an objection to anti-abortion EAs who believe that preventing abortion is one of the most pressing things to do to help people. (I have sympathies in a pro-life direction myself, and would not personally choose to have an abortion.) Of course it’d have to be justified in a secular way, but I see no reason why fetuses should be the one category of being we don’t worry about whether they have moral worth.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I see! I’m not very sure where the line between a religious and secular idea is for something like this (the distinction seems clear when discussing science, for example, but it’s much fuzzier with regard to ethics), so that could be more difficult than you’re anticipating. I don’t think I could justify my concern for very young unborn children in strictly utilitarian terms, but then, you did say in the original blog post that EA should be open to non-utilitarians. And there are obvious arguments about pain responses and subjective experiences for older unborn children, so I suppose I could at least advocate for protecting them? It’s just such a large number of deaths (significantly more than malaria), and they seem like they should be preventable, though I don’t actually know how to go about preventing them without also leading to significant adverse consequences in other areas.
I think the issue is that the utilitarian EA’s I’ve seen seem to think of suffering and happiness like opposing weights on a scale, and want to maximize the amount of happiness in the world while minimizing the amount of suffering. I’m sort of unclear about whether a strict “happiness good, misery bad” approach leads to unsettling conclusions like painlessly killing chronically depressed people in their sleep without their consent, but since nobody seems to actually be advocating that, I’m going to assume that’s been dealt with and I just haven’t seen it. I guess it’s unlikely to come up in the context of EA, as assassinating miserable people is probably much more expensive than buying bed nets.
Since we both want to prevent the deaths of people with an active wish to live, our goals are aligned with regard to global poverty. Life issues are more complicated, since most utilitarians seem to believe that an individual being without the current capacity for happiness is not a being that should be protected or respected. I don’t agree, but I can’t clearly explain why. It seems obvious to me, just as human happiness as the highest possible good seems to be obvious to utilitarians. It seems to be an intuitive difference, and I have no idea how to address such a fundamental disconnect without bringing up obviously religious concepts, like the Imago Dei. Without them, I’m left with “killing children is bad, because, well, obviously,” which isn’t going to convince anyone.
Anyway, though, I really do want to help people! And since at the moment I have absolutely no idea how to help the unborn in a way that’s remotely effective or even somewhat useful (existing forms of activism are mostly political, and I don’t know that they actually improve things; I know the number of abortions per year has been going down for a while, but I haven’t seen a lot of evidence that the political activism is a significant reason for that), fighting global poverty seems like a good thing to work on for now. I just don’t know how much I could contribute to a movement where everyone else is working with a very different set of basic assumptions than my own.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Apprenticebard, I’m glad you’ve been borrowing some of the EA research and ideas for your own charitable giving. It sounds like you’ve done a lot of good in the world, and that you’ll do even more with the help of folks like GiveWell.
In the EA community as it stands, I think there are already a lot of conflicts about the objects we ought to value- it’s not always as easy as ‘happiness good, suffering bad’. And that’s fine! Where we come together is in our approach to solving these problems- analytically, quantitatively, and kind of obsessively. For example, the conversation about chickens involves just such a conflict ( do we care about animals in general or humans in particular, do we care about the reduction of pain or the amplification of civilization, etc.). In itself, that’s not much different from the way that you start from the idea that living human bodies are equally valuable with or without an active consciousness. So even though your values start from a religious place, I don’t think that assumptions about ‘what is to be valued’ would automatically cause problems for you as a card-carrying effective altruist.
I don’t (yet) agree with you that abortion ought to be a concern for EA, but I’d absolutely love to hear a good argument for it within that analytical approach. Constructing your argument would involve a few things, I think. First, you’d make more headway if you identified material benefits that both religious and irreligious people care about, because that would expand the pool of people that might share values enough to cooperate on the problem. For example, you could point out that “progress” in civilization exists because, over all human history, the average human life has done more good than harm. You could even quantify that fetus’ expected benefit across several measures, to see what makes sense. Second, you would want to spend a lot of time thinking about the most tractable, efficient ways to prevent the death of developing fetuses- without letting pro-life work collapse in to ‘mere tribalism’ that shows off one’s membership in a particular religious community. Think about the kind of help you could offer that nobody cares about, because it’s not a front-page political fight with winners and losers. Like, you might note that there are more than 23 million unexpected (natural) miscarriages per year. This is comparable to the number of abortions, but very few people would notice or oppose scientific interventions on this front. A dollar spent preventing miscarriages would avoid political stonewalling, and I’ll bet that would save many unborn lives compared to a dollar spent opposing medical abortion.
I should point out that I don’t know if these are actually fruitful avenues or not! They’re just the ones that seem like they might convince me as an outsider, if they were developed. But if you can build a convincing argument, and trust the equations when they say which interventions are best, then I think you’ll find a natural friend in effective altruism.
LikeLiked by 3 people
[I don’t endorse being mean to people in order to exclude them. Being nice is usually a good policy.]
I think having more religious people in EA would be bad. I am very confident of this if, like me, you think that global poverty is a much less effective cause area than others promoted by EA. If you think global poverty is the most important cause area by far, this argument won’t be as convincing.
The only advantage of having religious people is that religious people might give more to Givewell-recommended global poverty charities. Given I think that these charities are probably orders of magnitude worse than charities which work on x-risk or animal rights. So this is a very small advantage.
There are many disadvantages.
Firstly, religious people have very different values from most of us. If you believe that Christianity (or Catholicism) is true, the most effective thing to do is probably evangelism (or very possibly trying to reduce abortions). I am somewhat glad that there are not many extremely effectiveness-minded anti-abortion activists, even though such people are probably doing the right thing by their own values.
Even if you’re focused on global poverty, I think you should be concerned about dilution of the values which led you to care about global poverty. There are lots of interventions which seem like a plausibly good intervention to reduce global poverty and also seem like I can image religious people opposing them for religious reasons. (Examples: birth control, CRISPR on mosquitos, advocacy for certain values which are not particularly popular among religious people, cooperation with explicitly anti-religious groups who are worth working with anyway.)
The religious people who were willing to spend time with us are probably the not-taking-things-too-literally type. I think that that kind of person has a bad effect on the quality of discussion, especially when we need to be able to talk about lots of things that sound weird. In particular, I think that EAs who give 10% of their income to global poverty and don’t think much about other cause areas are probably net harmful for the world. This is because they reduce the prominence of openness to other causes in EA, and because they make it seem more normal among EAs to not do more unusual and valuable things like doing direct work.
If we conservatively estimate that money to Givewell charities is 10x worse than money to Mercy for Animals, and if we think that there’s some amount of consensus effect which means that more people focused on global poverty now increases the chance that new people will end up focusing on global poverty later, then I think that it’s pretty plausible that religious people joining would be bad for this reason alone.
I think that an EA movement with more religious people would be more hostile to animals, which would be damaging.
Just in general, inviting a massively larger group with hostile values into your own group, because they seem powerful and sort of agree with you on some things, seems reckless. EA is weird–even liberal atheists who are very culturally similar to me have enormous objections to it lots of the time. It seems really unlikely that religious people will be able to harmoniously coexist with the most useful EAs.
All these disadvantages seem to massively outweigh the small advantage.
LikeLike
Gah, previous comment was posted as a reply; it should have been posted as a top level comment. What do?
LikeLike
Sidestepping the premise that animal welfare >> global poverty,
I don’t think I agree with you on what’s likely to happen as a result of EA gaining members who are less rigorous-utilitarianism-oriented than the current average. In principle the following are some of the possible scenarios:
A. (this is what you hypothesize) The global poverty focus of the new recruits induces existing EAs to stop focusing on better causes and switch to global poverty instead, or induces potential new rigorous-utilitarian recruits to not consider areas other than global poverty, at a rate of at least 10%.
B. The global poverty focus of the new recruits does not significantly change the behavior of existing EAs or new rigorous-utilitarian EAs.
C. The global poverty focus of the new recruits does not significantly change the behavior of existing EAs; it does change the behavior of new rigorous-utilitarian EAs, but the increase in total EAs as a result of the broader recruiting push is more than 10x the number of EAs whose focus was changed to global poverty as a result of it. (In most cases, being a global poverty EA funges not against being an animal welfare EA but against not being an EA at all.)
D. The global poverty focus of the new recruits is in many cases temporary, as coming into contact with the ideas of EA leads many of them to consider types of giving they would not have previously considered.
I basically think that some combination of C and D is correct. Given this, I would focus much more on the total good done by EA than the average good done per EA member, and I think that’s most maximized by getting more people into it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Also, I don’t think massively increasing the amount of effective donations is just a “small advantage”! Of course if the increase was small the advantage would be small, but then the culture change would be small as well?
(Also I should say that this sort of comes from a place at feeling kind of attacked and indignant in response to your comment, as I am a person for whom global-poverty-EA plays the role of a good solution to a lifetime of an intuitive feeling of it’s-terrible-that-there’s-so-much-suffering-it’s-not-fair-I’m-so-globally-privileged-must-do-something, and although you should definitely feel free to make this argument, I do feel quite taken aback by the notion that by participating I am making the world worse?! which also just seems to me to be false (though perhaps since I almost never talk about EA your point doesn’t apply to me) so anyway maybe I’m being uncharitable)
LikeLike
All the effectiveness minded anti-abortion activists I know are focused on improving access to birth-control and sex education, so increasing their numbers as a fraction of anti-abortion activists seems like an obvious win.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I am attempting to reply to tcheasdfjkl here; apologies if this is unclear due to the threading.
I don’t think that global poverty EAs are overall damaging to the world; that seems reasonably unlikely. What I think is probably damaging is global poverty focused EAs who don’t think much about cause prioritization and normalize just donating 10% instead of thinking really hard about whether they can do more good than that. I didn’t mean to cause offense.
(FWIW, I’m uncomfortable trying to recruit many animal rights activists for the same reasons.)
Wildeabandon: Your point about effectiveness minded anti-abortion activists sort of makes sense but also requires them to have population ethics views which they might not have.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I agree with wildeabandon, though I’ve also seen people (devout Catholics, people morally opposed to contraception) discussing universal basic income or generally broader safety nets for young mothers in order to limit the financial pressures involved. I am unsure why political liberals would be opposed opposed to this. Supporting poor mothers seems obviously less controversial than displaying pictures of aborted fetuses and calling people murderers. People whose goal is to save lives will be more likely to look at underlying causes, while people who only want to feel righteous and persecuted will focus on upsetting people in very showy ways.
LikeLike
bshlegeris, what I take from your comment/post is that for you, animal rights are the predominant area of concern (you mention Mercy for Animals and “I think that an EA movement with more religious people would be more hostile to animals, which would be damaging”, which is what inclines me to this reading).
But have you considered that global poverty may impinge upon, or be an important part when considering, animal rights? People at a subsistence level are much more likely to be exploiting/dependent upon animals for food, labour, providing cash crops such as wool and leather, etc. It’s relatively easy for someone in a job that does not depend on animal input (e.g. office work as against farming) that is good-paying and leaves them with enough disposable income to choose “Well, I’ll become vegetarian or even vegan” and be able to get enough information on how to do this effecively, how to avoid nutritional concerns, have shops and businesses providing them with “Vegan Society approved” and “No animal testing” products, etc.
Not everyone has that range of choices. Tackling systemic global poverty may enable people not to rely on donkeys and oxen as beasts of burden, or cheap animal protein as food (which is what factory farming is predicated upon) and many other things.
LikeLike
It seems like there’s a contradiction between :
and
You respond to a lot of these objections by saying ‘we can solve this by setting some community norm [x]’. This is explicitly relying on a stable culture of effective altruism, and on your (our?) ability to make choices about what that culture is. But then, in the final paragraph, you dismiss cultural concerns as ‘social club’ thinking. So you’re dismissing the importance of a ‘rationalist culture’ while simultaneously depending on that culture to maintain the goals of effective altruism!
It’s even deeper than that, really- the “high standards of evidence and rationality” that define effective altruism are, themselves, cultural factors. EA is a community, first, and a persistent institution as a distant second if at all. The persistence of cultural values within that community is what keeps the mosquito nets coming. If your plan is to laugh at/spurn people who work to preserve that culture, and reach out to people who don’t like to count QALYs but think that doing nice things is nice, then it’s not clear to me why you expect effective altruism to actually have any distinct qualities after [n] years. What mechanism exists to keep the focus on Malaria and away from art exhibits and bake sales, if not the shared expectations and value system of effective altruists?
LikeLiked by 2 people
I think that mechanism is GiveWell and other organizations like it. I think it would be just fine to have those guiding organizations continue to selectively hire people who will promote the organization’s existing values and thereby keep recommending charities based on the same kinds of reasoning, even as the membership of the overall movement expands and becomes more diverse.
LikeLike
From Ozy’s advice above, it seems hard to keep ‘opinions about GiveWell’ from rapidly becoming one of the sources of diversity in effective altruism (to put it euphemistically). Given this post, it’s easy for me to imagine a future conversation that goes something like this:
“Well, I don’t think that anyone has to agree with GiveWell to consider themselves an effective altruist. After all, even in the first couple of years, people in the MIRI and animal welfare camps had already decided not to just maximize GiveWell’s stated utility curve or whatever. There are a lot of intangibles that they don’t consider, like the value of beauty and the importance of community, things that matter to me a lot! And anyway, the kids in the high school marching band can really use my donation, and you should have seen their faces when they saw the new uniforms. Effective Altruism isn’t about any one charity or any one cause, it’s about making the world a better place- and that’s what I did. If that’s not effective, what is?”
LikeLike
I’ve been coming up and down this thread commenting on how Ozy’s conclusion is totally obvious and that the known willingness of the religious to give to charity anyway, particularly poverty alleviation, makes not reaching out to them the equivalent of not taking free money. This is the first comment in the thread that’s given me pause, and made me rethink that position some. Kudos for causing me to update away from my original position.
I think the risk of the culture contributing to (relatively) high epistemic hygiene in effective altruism might be at risk by diluting it too much, and promoting the idea that a diverse array of moral frameworks, secular or religious, are all equally valid in determining which causes are worth the most. I think I can square the discrepancy between my (and, if I may be bold, Ozy’s) perspective, and yours.
Gleb Tsipursky runs Intentional Insights (InIn), an organization which raises awareness of effective altruism. In particular, though, InIn specializes in raising awareness of effective charities and evidence-based charity evaluation, using a variety of techniques and styles (gleaned from ‘modern marketing’, according to Gleb) in its writing, without bringing along the whole baggage of effective altruism and its tenets. InIn calls this pioneering approach ‘Effective Giving’, an idea distinct from effective altruism. He lays out why and how spreading effective altruism to grow the movement, and spreading the idea of merely donating to effective charities, can be made distinct for greater success.
http://effective-altruism.com/ea/qv/effective_giving_vs_effective_altruism/
Some people find Gleb’s writing style to be quite garish. However, as far as I can tell, InIn gets results indicating success, and I don’t know anyone with evidence to the contrary, so what he’s doing works. Also, the idea of keeping effective giving, i.e., merely donating to effective charities, and effective altruism, i.e., the community which evaluates and determines what causes/charities are effective, remain distinct was well-received by many people I trust.
Anyway, what I’m thinking is that Effective Giving might be an idea which is spread among everyone, including the religious, while the movement of effective altruism, i.e., the culture which produces recommendations, remains separated and upstream from effective giving. This would mitigate a change in EA’s epistemic culture while still getting most of the potential monetary value of reaching out to a plethora of communities, both religious and secular. Of course, this strategy is likely contentious. While some of us might endorse us, others might feel we’re drawing a line where there is an elite caste of ‘evaluators’, and a larger group of mere donors whose rational agency we’re undermining and or neglecting.
Personally, I won’t be concerned with this, though I imagine if EA is to to make the choice to more explicitly reach out to religious people, or at least countering open hostility to the religious, it will take much longer than the discussion here to sort that out. Contentious schisms within EA never get sorted very quickly. However, none of this is a reason not to think about jumpstarting outreach on merely Effective Giving to the religious. I was thinking about talking to Gleb about this anyway, so I’ll get on it.
LikeLike
You should try reaching out to Zoroastrians:
LikeLiked by 2 people
In the continued spirit of taking everything seriously, there are apparently so few Zoroastrians that reaching out to them isn’t competitive with reaching out to other religions, unless the probability of a given Zoroastrian joining effective altruism and donating to effective charity is at least an order of magnitude likelier than a given adherent of another religion. However, maybe Zoroastrians really would be that likely to embrace effective giving, and EA. Do you have any estimates on how likely Zoroastrians would be to join EA, relative to the proportion of adherents to other religions who’d do so?
I’d also be interested in any estimates you have for Jains as well.
LikeLike
I suppose making an effort to get religious people (or any other group of people, really) has compounding effects, in that the ‘first wave’ religious people, recruited by current EA members, would both directly reach out to other religious people as well as make the culture more welcoming of the religious. If we can do this for enough groups without compromising the core values of EA, perhaps the movement would go mainstream.
LikeLike
That link goes to a comment where I explain that Giving What We Can and The Life You Can Save already have a head start in reaching out to religious people (at least, Christians and Jews in the U.K. and U.S.), even without being explicit about it, and those organizations have probably learned what draws the religious to effective giving and altruism simply through the course of receiving feedback from and engaging their members. This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned this, but I figure the rest of EA isn’t paying attention to GWWC and/or TLYCS on how to specifically reach out to religious people because:
1) we’re overconfident in our ability to reach out to the religious, especially as a primarily non-religious demographic.
2) we’re not cognizant of what extra care we’d need to take in tailoring tone and message to folks of various religions to draw them to EA.
3) we’re substantially underestimating the value and/or tractability or outreach to the religious.
4) we’re too proud and/or hostile to reach out to the religious, as is the gist of Ozy’s above post.
LikeLike
I actually think Islam would be a good religion to target. Some reasons:
* One of the fundamental pillars of Islam is Zakat, which is giving a minimum fixed percentage of your income over a basic minimum level to charity.
* The required percentage is 2.5%, but a lot of Muslims give more. British Muslims, for instance, report higher charitable donations than Christians or Athiests.
* There is already some separation of types of charity built in. While Muslims are likely to consider organisations with religious goals worth donating to, which EA probably wouldn’t, Zakat is specifically paid to separate categories of people, the first of which is the poor and needy. Most interpretations suggest that some money should go to each, which means a Muslim should be buying her religious-message charity and her help-the-poor charity separately.
So basically what we’d need to do is convince individual Muslims and/or Imams who advise people on where to pay Zakat that, for instance, AMF or Give Directly is the best option to help ‘those who cannot fulfil their basic needs’ (like not dying of malaria).
A huge amount of Zakat is paid globally – US Muslims give more than the US gives in humanitarian aid, for instance – part of which is earmarked for the poor. But, at present, it is being spent very ineffectively. If someone was able to bridge the gap between EA and Islam and make Zakat spending more effective, there would be a huge amount of money that could be funnelled toward effective causes.
LikeLiked by 6 people
Just a thought inspired by this post and the end of your “abuse vs dysfunctional” post – whenever I read something like that, I’m struck by how often quite lengthy examinations and descriptions of ideas could be effectively replaced with “be nice” or “don’t be a tool”.
Which isn’t to imply that the long version is without value – some cases are complicated, and a stronger understanding of the dynamics at play is usually of value. But still something I find interesting.
LikeLike
IMHO, the main point of the long version is to make sure everyone agrees on what, exactly, makes you nice, and what makes you a tool.
Usually, there is some rough agreement, but the details differ. Also, people tend to rationalize the sh*t they do, and describing the problematic action precisely makes it a lot harder to rationalize as “still kinda ok, if you squint a little”.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I didn’t actually realise before reading this post that EA *was* hostile to religious people.
(I realise the rationalist community skews strongly atheist, but rationalist isn’t the same as EA, and skew isn’t the same as hostility.)
I identify as Christian and EA. The person who first introduced me to the concept of EA is a Christian. I thought the choice of 10% as a proportion of income was inspired by the biblical tithe. So I thought of EA as being as much a Christian movement as an atheist one.
LikeLiked by 2 people
The 10% figure was inspired by tithing, but I remember rhetoric along the lines of “if we can’t give at least as much as religious people, what good are we?” around the time it was established.
I do think that EAs underestimate the number of religious people in the movement. Look at the number of comments on this post from religious people! However, LessWrong is the single biggest source of EAs, and Rationalists are mostly atheists.
Checking, the EA Survey says 70% of EAs are agnostic/atheist, which is high but a good deal lower than I think most EAs would have guessed.
LikeLike
@Rachael
I’ve never been religious, and I’ve been in effective altruism for years, and I’ve never believed effective altruism should be hostile to religious people. I mean, not being religious, I’d be on edge if effective altruism became dominated by something along the lines of the ‘effective evangelism’ fear Ozy laid out above. However, I don’t have special reason to think that would happen even if a majority of the effective altruism movement were Christians, or another religion. For one, effective altruism draws people who are at heart cosmopolitan, and I expect the same is true of Christians in effective altruism. I figure you and the rest respect the tenets effective altruism is based on, how it drawing people from many walks of life is what has made EA what it is, and not many who’ve learned from effective altruism want to undo that. Second, plenty of Christians in other domains of life aren’t constantly trying to monopolize the space or the discourse in the name of their faith, and they’re sometimes uncomfortable when people even of their own faith do that to an extreme degree. If Catholics and Protestants and Reform Jews and Orthodox Jews and Shi’a and Sunni Muslims all joined effective altruism, they wouldn’t agree on what ‘effective evangelism’ is, so they wouldn’t try too hard to make it central to the movement. I don’t think we have much to worry about.
As a long-time member of this community, I want you to know I don’t begrudge you or your religion, or how it’s brought you to effective giving and altruism. However Christianity has brought you to this end as a fellow traveler in trying to do good is fine by me. Moreover, I haven’t heard or read a lot of non-religious people in effective altruism being hostile to entrance by people of any religion. I think Ozy might be (rightly) responding to a vocal minority of atheists in effective altruism who want a certain culture to persist in the community, when it’s about helping the most in need as much we can regardless of what culture each of us comes from as individuals.
LikeLike
Note: Yeah, I noticed I accidentally responded to you instead of Rachael with my last comment. I wasn’t aware of how the threaded comments here worked. I’ve fixed this, and responded to Rachael properly.
Anyway, yeah, I think many atheists underestimate the proportion of religious people in effective altruism who are religious, because they’re thinking about the impact of LessWrong, and underrating the impact of organizations which project a tone of amenability to religion in effective altruism, like Giving What We Can and The Life You Can Save, both of which have at least several hundred members. Even if only a small portion of religious members of those communities expose themselves to the broader EA movement, that is going to be lots of religious people.
LikeLike
Rachael, I want you to know, speaking as a non-religious person in effective altruism, that the movement as a whole is not hostile to religious people, that it’s not standard for even most atheists in the movement to not welcome religious people to effective altruism, and that Ozy is responding to a perhaps a vocal minority of atheists in effective altruism.
I’ve never been religious, and I’ve been in effective altruism for years, and I’ve never believed effective altruism should be hostile to religious people. I mean, not being religious, I’d be on edge if effective altruism became dominated by something along the lines of the ‘effective evangelism’ fear Ozy laid out above. However, I don’t have special reason to think that would happen even if a majority of the effective altruism movement were Christians, or another religion. For one, effective altruism draws people who are at heart cosmopolitan, and I expect the same is true of Christians in effective altruism. I figure you and the rest respect the tenets effective altruism is based on, how it drawing people from many walks of life is what has made EA what it is, and not many who’ve learned from effective altruism want to undo that. Second, plenty of Christians in other domains of life aren’t constantly trying to monopolize the space or the discourse in the name of their faith, and they’re sometimes uncomfortable when people even of their own faith do that to an extreme degree. If Catholics and Protestants and Reform Jews and Orthodox Jews and Shi’a and Sunni Muslims all joined effective altruism, they wouldn’t agree on what ‘effective evangelism’ is, so they wouldn’t try too hard to make it central to the movement. I don’t think we have much to worry about.
I think atheists in EA afraid of the entrance of more religious people into the movement either haven’t thought through counterpoints assuaging their phobias as Ozy and I have laid out above, or feel religious people are encroaching on a space that, frankly, we atheists were never entitled to in the first place. However Christianity has brought you to this end as a fellow traveler in trying to do good is fine by me. Moreover, I haven’t heard or read a lot of non-religious people in effective altruism being hostile to entrance by people of any religion. I think Ozy might be (rightly) responding to a vocal minority of atheists in effective altruism who want a certain culture to persist in the community, when it’s about helping the most in need as much we can regardless of what culture each of us comes from as individuals.
LikeLike
Pingback: On Welcomingness in EA | Thing of Things
Someone brought up the point about Zakat and how Islam would totally be a great religion to target for EA outreach. I think it’s a great idea, but objections from others I can imagine coming up before effective altruism blitzes[1] the Muslim world, and that we’d need to contend with:
1) Millions of Muslims are in developing/undeveloped countries, so they don’t have as much money to donate.
2) At least in the Near/Middle East, the Muslim world is in a great deal of turmoil, and outreach across cultures would be difficult, as EA as still mostly a Western thing.
My response to both of these is that EA outreach targeted at Muslims will also take into account other factors, such as affluence. If EA currently reaches out to Christians, they’re affluent Christians in countries like the United States and Britain, not Christian refugees from Syria. Likewise, EA outreach to Muslims would rightly be targeted at (relatively) affluent Muslims, of which there are several million, not Muslim refugees from Syria.
Every year or so, some billionaire from the U.A.E. says they want to donate the majority of their money. When this happens, there’s a discussion in the EA Facebook group about how we could convince that person to donate to effective charities, or at least take the GWWC Pledge to Give, and/or the Giving Pledge, Bill Gates-style. I recall this happening at least once, maybe twice. I’m foggy on whether Zakat was a major factor in the decision to give all their money away. Nothing came of the discussion at the time, but the precedent and will to reach out to them is there if the community ever finds the wherewithal to do so. I’m sure whatever billionaire we’d hope to convince to give money to effective charities will have plenty of money left over, as giving away hundreds of millions of dollars takes a long time.
[1] by “blitz”, I mean ‘massive outreach’, not ‘bombardment’, obviously.
LikeLike
I mean, even with the relative wealth thing, we’re still talking an enormous amount of charitable donations that could be better directed. As I said, US Muslims – a tiny minority – give more to charity than the US gives in foreign aid.
LikeLike
Yeah, if effective altruism were going to make outreach to the religious a priority, Islam could be the next religion after Christianity.
LikeLike
One could argue that effective altruism as it currently exists, even as a community in practice mostly composed of non-religious people, to reach out to religious people. This would be because the expected millions of dollars to effective charity just lying on the table, to be transferred from less effective charities, secular or not, to more effective ones, is too great to pass up. Atheists and antitheists in might be forced to swallow a bitter pill here.
LikeLike
The implicit assumption seems to be EA would primarily be reaching out to those of Abrahamic religions, Christians, Muslims, and Jews, to donate to effective poverty alleviation, based on the precedent each of their own religions set for easing the burden of poverty for the downtrodden. However, reaching out to these religions, and doing so effectively, might set a precedent for future outreach. Convincing people to go veg-n, or to value animals more, or at all, has always been an uphill battle. I don’t expect this to get easier in reaching out to Muslims, Christians, or Jews.
However, there are hundreds of millions of people in the world who have expanded their circle of moral concern to animals because of their religion, and not because of exposure to effective altruism or any other secular framework, but because of their religions. Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists constitute millions of people who might be primed to get on board with animal advocacy, ending factory farming, veg-n conversion, or even reducing wild-animal suffering.
I don’t know if one could reach out on existential risk reduction (x-risk) on religious grounds. A door-in-the-face tactic, i.e., x-risk is the first EA cause religious people are exposed to, wouldn’t go well. I’d guess lots would be upset we’re playing up the eschatology angle. Maybe those of Abrahamic religions would be upset we’re shoehorning on their own Apocalypse. I imagine most would just think we’re being weirdly insensitive.
Anyway, this is all very speculative, but food for thought. I find the idea stimulating that outreach for effective poverty alleviation across all religions could be used to inform outreach to specific religions on animal welfare/altruism.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Buddhist ethics has a lot of similarities with consequentialism too.
http://www.jstor.org.sci-hub.cc/stable/20109445
LikeLike
If I’m not mistaken, Giving What We Can (GWWC) has in its membership a much higher proportion of religious people than the general EA population. I believe the same is true of The Life You Can Save (TLYCS) membership. In particular, members of both communities are much more likely to be Christian than EA in general. I don’t think I need to explain why this is the case. Anyway, I don’t think GWWC has ever explicitly reached out on its own to religious people, although they’ve greatly benefited from word-of-mouth from one religious GWWC member to their religious peers.
Anyway, if effective altruism were to start making outreach to religious persons a bigger priority in outreach, the first organizations we’d want to talk to about how to avoid possible failure modes would be GWWC and TLYCS. Gleb Tsipursky of Intentional Insights also seems adept at spreading the message of effective giving without coming across as insensitive in general, though I don’t think he’s reached out to religious communities. In fact, he’s targeted secular humanist groups for effective altruism outreach. However, he might have some general pointers of what to say or not say to come across good instead of bad to religious folk when it comes to EA outreach. Anyway, let me know if you have more questions in this line of inquiry, and I can put any of you in touch with Gleb, or a representative of GWWC or TLYCS.
LikeLike
Pingback: Should Christians be Effective Altruists? | All of it again