Many anti-racists are rightfully leery of intervention in the developing world. Historically, the consequences of white people lifting up the white man’s burden have not exactly been great. Slavery was justified on the grounds that it civilized black people. Europeans inflamed racial tensions, sometimes tragically leading to genocide. Boundaries were drawn more for colonialists’ convenience than based on the actual tribes that lived there, causing conflict even today. And of course all that colonization began with wars with the people of color who impertinently seemed to feel no need to be saved.
In the modern day, the developed world has mostly managed to avoid conquering places. Instead, our current hobbies include screwing up the developing world’s economies with the International Monetary Fund, propping up dictators and training their militaries in torture, encouraging people to imprison gay people, and committing war crimes that involve the murder of children.
I think effective altruism, however, is not white-saviorist or neocolonialist. Indeed, its success in avoiding these failure modes is striking, given that its membership is overwhelmingly white and from the developed world and has a collective racial politics that can be best described as ’embarrassing.’
I think effective altruist thought has two key points that keep it from becoming colonialist.
First, effective altruists tend to emphasize evidence. It’s all too easy to make assumptions that people in developing countries really want what you think they ought to want, regardless of their stated preferences. It’s all too easy to blunder into some complex system you don’t understand and mess everything up, because you have a PhD and none of these people have a fourth-grade education and how could they possibly know more than you do? It’s all too easy to tell yourself a beautiful story about the grateful natives and ignore the facts on the ground. It’s all too easy to decide that clearly what would really benefit people in the developing world is whatever benefits you.
The corrective to these tendencies is a radical insistence on figuring out what things work and doing them. Not what things sound nice to rich white people half a world away, not what things make you feel warm and fuzzy inside, not what those smart people in very good suits said totally ought to work, but what things actually work. And then you keep tracking what things work and when the situation on the ground changes or it turns out you’ve made a mistake, you don’t double down. You do a different thing that works.
The other corrective, frankly, is a hefty dose of humility. There’s a reason that a lot of recommended effective altruist charities are in public health. Economic development involves a host of assumptions about how economies work and how to trade off different values and so on, any of which can be mistaken and then you have an utter disaster on your hands. Deworming only requires the assumptions that deworming medicine works the same in Africa as it does in Europe and that most people do not like being infested with worms, both of which seem to be on fairly firm ground.
Second, effective altruists care a lot about autonomy. Give Directly does what it says on the tin: it gives poor people in Africa unconditional cash transfers. Much to the surprise of burden-carrying white men everywhere, it turns out that if you give people money they make basically reasonable decisions about what to spend it on: they buy livestock, furniture, and iron roofs. It turns out that people generally know their own needs better than you do, and you should generally trust them instead of assuming that you know better. Consider the effective altruist proverb: if your intervention cannot outperform giving poor people cash, you should just give them the cash. This sort of essential respect for the preferences of people in the developing world speaks well for our ability to actually improve things, instead of just making ourselves feel better.
Thing of Things 
You can also definitely frame aspects of EA as being about reversing some of the lasting harms and inequalities brought by colonialism (ie: a lack of focus on third world diseases in scientific research and global public health efforts, income inequality between the rich and poor worlds). It’s like taking a chunk of your privilege (which is basically what money is in a capitalist world economy) and sacrificing it to help reverse past horrors.
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I’m not sure that’s a good way to describe it. If tomorrow a secret island was discovered which had never seen any foreigners and on it was a giant pit of suffering that could be alleviated more cheaply than suffering in Africa then part of the point of EA is that people would switch to donating to reducing that pit of suffering instead and ignore history. So it isn’t really about atoning for past sins.
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I’d agree with you– I also support effective altruism for utilitarian reasons. I just think that the argument that I outlined above would be useful for engaging with people who prioritize anti-colonialism or other concepts of justice-as-fairness over utilitarianism.
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Not disagreeing witht he overall point, but this:
“Boundaries were drawn more for colonialists’ convenience than based on the actual tribes that lived there, causing conflict even today.”
While there are probably instances where this is true, it’s questionable whether it can be made as a general claim, in spite of its popularity in western analysis of non-western conflicts.
The main problem is that it assumes a pre-colonial non-western world with already well defined and solidly entrenched national identities — a thesis often defended by proponents of nationalism in general, but rejected by many historians, who instead considered that national identities, in the west or not, had to effectively be created, and nation-states built from the ground up.
In that perspective, borders in western countries are no less arbitrary than borders in post-colonial countries; the apparent national unity of western countries was not a starting point, it had to be achieved through either granting equal rights and autonomy to different local groups (UK, Switzerland), through more or less forceful assimilation of local groups (France, Italy), through exclusion of minor groups from the public sphere (Germany, Russia) or through ethnic cleansing (the Balkans) (or some mixture of the above; Turkish nationalism conceived itself ideally as assimilationist, but in practice involved a lot of ethnic cleansing due to historical circumstances).
The same processes occured in pre- or newly independent colonial countries, and it’s not clear that modern conflicts originate in these historical occurences. For instance, in Syria, a lot of people like to claim the conflict we see today originated in the Sykes-Picot agreements; but in fact, a majority of the groups making up the French mandate of Syria *wanted* a united Syria, in spite of their differences, *and* in spite of french attempts to exacerbate these differences by instillating each local group with its own nationalist feeling of distinctness (so as to keep the independent movements divided). The current conflict in Syria thus seems to have more to do with the weakness of Syria’s institutions and with questionable recent western intervention in the region than with a border that was drawn a century ago and that most locals were perfectly content with at the time.
If anything, the border that did cause conflict was actually the creation of Lebanon as a separate state from Syria, which most of the people of Lebanon were actually against — in spite of the ethno-religious patchwork that is Lebanon, they too originally wanted to be part of Syria, even though they would have ended up in a much more minoritary position had this been accomplished — Lebanon was an attempt to create a majority Christian state in the middle-east, and yet in spite of being more in touch with the local divisions, it backfired spectacularly.
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Interesting! Thank you.
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I believe the traditional examples of this problem are places like Sudan, Nigeria, and Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia forms the prototypical case, despite being European: a wide variety of ethnicities and cultures were welded together into a large nation-state based on external ideas about the region, resulting in conflicts between locals who had hated each other for generations. Nigeria does the best, but if I recall corectly it does have ethnic/regional issues between the four (?) major tribes/cultures within its borders. Sudan, and again I might be misremembering, had problems resulting from a religious minority’s persecution.
Rwanda and Israel/Palestine are notable examples of a different problem that is easily mistakable for this one: in those cases, the colonial powers exacerbated existing tensions between groups already in conflict (roughly speaking). In Rwanda they did this by favoring one of the major local ethnic groups over the other; in Israel/Palestine they made conflicting promises regarding the results of emancipation.
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This seems more non-colonialist than anti-colonialist?
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Meh, “non-colonialist” feels like it includes developed-world people not interfering in the developing world, and while that’s better than causing harm, I want to emphasize that EA involves actually improving the lives of people in the developing world.
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Maybe un-colonialist would work? I think sniffnoy has a point in that anti-colonialist has a connotation of specifically fighting colonialism.
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> screwing up the developing world’s economies with the International Monetary Fund
I see people complaining about the IMF a lot. Is it a general economy-screwer-upper? Does it give mostly bad advice? Is it mostly good advice but also some bad advice, like a doctor? What’s the counterfactual – are its advised policies better or worse than what countries were going to follow anyway? I notice the most screwed-up economies, like North Korea and Venezuela, weren’t following IMF advice; maybe they’d have been better off if they did.
Seems like macro-economics is hard, prosperity is unusual, so maybe it’s expected to make mistakes. (Similarly, libertarians sometimes accuse governments of having some terrible policies, which is fine, but “therefore governments are terrible in general and shouldn’t do anything” doesn’t quite follow. It’s extremely hard to get everything right.) What level of performance were we expecting? “No bad advice ever” might be too much to ask. But maybe it’s much worse than that – hopefully someone will let me know.
The link you provided talks about capital account liberalization being risky and generally not worth prioritizing. I’ve read a bit about that, and that seems probably right. How does the IMF’s promotion of capital account liberalization balance against stuff it’s done?
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“…effective altruism… has a collective racial politics that can be best described as ’embarrassing.’”
Hmm? Can you elaborate more on this?
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Yes, please; for me too. I found that sentence very surprising and I can’t think of anything that would substantiate it.
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“Boundaries were drawn more for colonialists’ convenience than based on the actual tribes that lived there, causing conflict even today”
And of course immigration policies based on political convenience rather than taking stock of where tribes to live shall cause conflict for centuries to come as well.
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This has got to be the most delusional and hypocritical post I have ever seen in my life.
If you really believe this about the Effective Altruism movement, you don’t know your own movement.
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If one wishes a person to change their behavior, it is often considered useful to explain clearly what they have done wrong and provide evidence about why it is wrong. Unless your actual intent is not to provide information but simply to express your feelings? In which case I see you are angry and validate your anger!
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Stop supporting the Effective Altruism(tm) meme and the people who use it to extract money and status from society.
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Can you explain why you think this is a good idea? You see, people generally do not do things simply because a random stranger tells them to! Instead, you must explain why they would want to. Unless, again, you are simply expressing your feelings and desires, in which case I understand that you dislike effective altruism and don’t want people to be effective altruists.
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Humans are vulnerable to parasitic memes that have undergone selection pressure to be effective psychological manipulators. These memes are selected to spread to their own gain, they are not selected to help humans accomplish a better life, or suffer less, or anything like that. Most of religion follows this pattern. Communism and many other political ideologies follow it. Effective Altruism(tm) also follows it.
When you look at the discussions, they are mostly meta and self-referential. People gain status within the social network by creating tokens of allegiance to it. Donations are costly signals by which followers gain status. But for high-status members, donations are also a source of financial extraction from low-status members. Sound familiar?
The “causes” are diverse and the “values” vague, which fosters group coherence. The biggest (overt) points of conflict arise from disagreements in those “causes” and “values”, which is why large part of the “community” cannot coordinate in any meaningful way except for feeding the self-referential EA meme in the most superficial and meaningless way. Without these meta memes, the “community” doesn’t have coherence. Just like religions only have coherence through meta rituals surrounding fictional entites that cannot pragmatically be accessed.
There will come a time of crisis in your own life when you wish you still had the money you gave them, and a time of disillusionment with Effective Altruism(tm) when you wish they didn’t have it, either.
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Thank you for explaining!
It seems to me like a lot of the emotional weight of your argument comes from the EA/religion comparison, which does not move me (I am a naturally religious person forced to atheism by the evidence). We do agree about the overemphasis on meta in the community, but I think that you consider it more important than I do: I tend to find the number of nets bought to mean that the community is net positive, even given its flaws.
I find the diversity of EA thought to be refreshing! It would be much worse if we all agreed.
This is a fairly significant conflict of expectations between us! Would you like to make a bet?
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“Would you like to make a bet?”
Of course not. Are you just regurgitating memes now?
I don’t know you personally and we’re talking about a time when your mind may have changed and you may regret giving money away; how does that even make sense for a bet?
You can do whatever you want, but you’re not helping anyone by supporting the EA meme.
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> If you really believe *this* about the Effective Altruism movement
It’s not clear what the pronoun ‘this’ refers to. Ozy brought up a lot of things about EAs, like that they emphasize evidence, and that they care about autonomy. But it’s probably not those that you’re referring to? It might help if you quote the most objectionable passage. (Paul Graham has a great short essay about how that’s helpful.)
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I like this post, but I have one nit to pick:
I don’t think that prefer cash transfers unless they are outperformed by the alternatives is a strong stance for autonomy. In the alternate universe where the recipients spend it all on booze, GiveDirectly would not be considered effective altruism (and it probably wouldn’t exist for very long). Or do you mean that trying unconditional cash transfers already requires valuing autonomy?
Also, can you elaborate on the racial politics of EA part? Or do you think that might spark a flame war?
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