Most effective altruists are on the left; only a small number of effective altruists are on the right (as opposed to identifying as centrist, libertarian, or something else). For this reason, effective altruists often assume that everyone interested in effective altruism is a liberal. However, many conservatives are interested in doing good better, and it seems to me that there’s low-hanging fruit in making the EA community a community in which conservatives feel comfortable.
(To be clear, I myself am a liberal. I’m basing this post partially on my own experiences as a person with minority political beliefs in various communities, and partially on talking with conservative friends. I encourage conservative commenters to offer their advice and opinions.)
There are some compromises we don’t want to make in order to make conservatives feel more welcome. Most obviously, we don’t want to compromise honesty. In certain cause areas such as criminal justice reform, many top charities will have a liberal lean. (Of course, it’s perfectly possible that in other cause areas the top charities will have a conservative lean– and part of the advantage of being inclusive of conservatives is that they might alert us to those charities.) As effective altruists, we must report honestly what we believe the best place to donate is, and not censor ourselves based on political convenience.
There are some ways that effective altruist norms have evolved that may make conservatives uncomfortable but that we wouldn’t necessarily want to change. For example, effective altruist communities typically request that people use trans people’s preferred pronouns. Many conservatives (and some liberals) are uncomfortable using trans people’s preferred pronouns, and this norm may make them feel unwelcome. However, I think that using trans people’s preferred pronouns is in fact a relatively low-cost way to make trans people much happier and I do not think the effective altruist community should shift to a different set of norms in order to welcome conservatives.
Nevertheless, there are certain pieces of low-hanging fruit that I think many effective altruists may want to consider picking up.
Much of the low-hanging fruit actually overlaps with other kinds of low-hanging inclusiveness-related fruit we might want to pick. For example, while effective altruism as a movement is consequentialist, many conservatives (and, for that matter, non-effective-altruist liberals) are not strict consequentialists. Remember that most people have some non-consequentialist beliefs and that it is not a completely baffling and incomprehensible situation if someone objects to a course of action for non-consequentialist reasons.
The key thing is to always consider that a conservative may be in your audience. Many effective altruist speeches and essays assume the entire audience votes Democratic, even when the subject is entirely unrelated to politics. It’s easy to make an off-handed remark about vote-trading to get Clinton to win being a plausible EA cause or the president being the world’s number one Cheeto-related existential risk, but these remarks can hurt conservative listeners or readers. It is often worth rereading your speech or essay, imagining that you are a conservative and flagging passages that would make you feel unwelcome.
Pay particular attention to your jokes. Many jokes hinge on the idea that a group of people (none of whom, obviously, are in the audience) is stupid, not worth listening to, or evil, or on misrepresenting a group’s opinions so that they look dumb. These jokes feel awful if you’re a member of that group, and they’re not good from a truth-seeking perspective either– if you want to claim that a group of people is generally stupid and evil, you should defend it properly and not hide behind humor.
In particular, watch what you say about creationists. I have seen many rationalists and effective altruists say “we should engage with the arguments of people who disagree with us, as long as they’re not incredibly dumb like young-earth creationists.” It’s true that there are likely to be few young-earth creationists in EA. However, since political views run in families, many conservatives have young-earth creationist friends and family, and many used to be young-earth creationists themselves. Having their loved ones or past selves dismissed as incredibly dumb can make many people feel like you’re calling them dumb.
Similarly, think twice before making broad generalizations about Trump supporters. Many conservatives voted for Trump (often very unenthusiastically), and even those who stayed home, voted third-party, or held their noses and voted for Clinton may have loved ones who voted for Trump. Calling all Trump supporters Nazis or racists can make even Never Trump Republicans feel like you’re calling all conservatives Nazis or racists. When it is necessary to talk about Trump supporters, try specifying exactly what you mean: say “Trump’s base in the primaries has above-average levels of ethnocentricism according to polls”, not “Trump supporters are racist.”
Take particular care to avoid characterizing all conservatives as sexist, racist, xenophobic, or homophobic. Again, speaking in specifics can help: “many conservatives support reduced immigration, which I believe is harmful to the global poor,” not “conservatives hate immigrants.” Try engaging with conservatives’ arguments: for example, you might explain that the evidence suggests that immigrants do not actually take our jobs.
Scrutinize every mention of Donald Trump with great care. It is perhaps unrealistic to expect that we should never mention the president, but I think it is best to avoid mentioning him in effective altruist writing unless he is obviously relevant to the topic.
“If you’re religious, then the most effectively altruist thing is to convert everyone because of the infinite utility of Heaven” is not nearly as clever as you think it is. Every religious effective altruist has heard this argument from a hundred different atheists, including ones whose religion does not actually include a concept of Heaven. No religious effective altruist is doing this. Stop bringing it up.
Don’t schedule all your events on Sunday mornings.
When it is necessary to give political examples, try to give an equal number from both sides of the aisle. I find pro-life causes to be a particularly fertile source of examples. Pro-life advocacy is similar to effective altruism in many ways: its advocates believe that they’re fighting against an ongoing moral atrocity and it involves expanding the circle of concern. There’s a lot of opportunity to prioritize pro-life charities or start new charities based on reason and evidence. For example, as far as I’m aware, few pro-life advocates are exploring provision of long-acting reversible contraception, uterine replicators, or early miscarriage prevention.
When it is relevant, make a point of highlighting the altruistic achievements of conservative politicians. For example, Senator Mike Lee, a Republican, has been one of the strongest voices in favor of allowing animal-product-free alternatives to be labeled “mayonnaise,” “soy milk,” and so on. Not only is understandable labeling important in the short run, it establishes a good precedent for clean meat being labeled as meat, which could help customers accept it as an alternative to animal-grown meat. Similarly, PEPFAR– a program championed by George W. Bush– has saved the lives of at least a million people for only $2,500 a life, competitive with GiveWell top charities.
Aapje said:
Is long-acting reversible contraception a good target for effective altruism? It seems to me that healthcare companies invest a decent amount to come up with new solutions, being hindered mostly by it being a really, really hard problem. I doubt that it is a particularly effective way to spend money.
As for artificial wombs, a lot of people believe in serious second or third order negative consequences. For more conservative people, that could be single motherhood, which is correlated with negative outcomes for children. However, some feminists are against it for fear that it will devalue women or such.
As for early miscarriages, many of these seem to be a natural way for the human body to prevent severely handicapped babies from being born, which may be far more humane than to have them be born and then die or otherwise often live a wretched life. If the goal is to have more healthy babies be born, is the issue not primarily to get fewer women to drink/smoke/whatever during pregnancy? This seems like it gets a decent amount of attention and that getting the people to change who ignore the current messaging is a very hard problem, where the current solutions are probably not a very effective way to spend money/effort.
Let me just say that this kind of labeling seems quite manipulative. If people have false beliefs about the tastiness of alternatives, is the honest and rationalist solution not to change their mind, rather than to lie to them that your non-meat/dairy/etc is something it is not?
Also, if you want to convince people to consciously adopt a more vegetarian/vegan lifestyle, is it not important that they actually know when they are eating nice vegetarian/vegan food? Or is the idea to get them hooked and then to make them look like a fool when you reveal that they’ve been eating vegetarian/vegan products all along without noticing. Because doing so surely creates resentment.
Keep in mind that the left has a pretty strong reputation for deception and manipulation already, among substantial parts of the right (and disillusioned moderates and left-wingers). Do you really want to feed that even more?
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TK-421 said:
I would say it depends on the foodstuff. I would probably accept mayonnaise made with soy lecithin rather than egg yolk, for example; the egg is only there incidentally as an emulsifier, not a significant part of the flavor of the final product. And as much as I dislike “clean meat” as a term, cultured meat really is animal tissue, not just a substitute like TVP or soy protein.
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Aapje said:
Sure, although cultured meat is not yet being sold, I think. As long as it’s still muscle, it’s meat to me, even if it doesn’t come from an animal (directly).
In my country there is a push to sell soy- or dairy-based products as meat products. I think that goes too far.
I think that the brand “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” has found a genius solution by framing it that way, while quite honest.
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ozymandias said:
We already have very good long-acting reversible contraception, it’s just that in many countries people cannot access LARC or are not aware that it is a superior choice to the birth-control pill.
Pro-life people think that embryos are people and think that it is bad for embryos to die, so from their perspective your paragraph about early miscarriages is like saying “it is a good thing when people die of cancer because it’s nature’s way of preventing them from being disabled in the future, we should stop providing cancer treatment.”
I expect that people will feel about as resentful about Just Mayo mayo as they do about Oreos, store-brand buttercream frosting, Ritz crackers, or other surprisingly vegan products. If a person is purchasing soy milk under the impression that it comes from a cow, that sounds like a personal problem that is not best solved by legally requiring soy milk to be renamed liquid soy product.
I prefer that people eat fewer animal products. If we do so by providing better products that cause ten people to reduce their animal product consumption by 1/10th, that is as good as one vegan. (Perhaps better, because presumably the vegan is making more sacrifices than the people who just prefer the taste of Just Mayo.)
As I pointed out in the post, Mike Lee is a libertarian who opposes crony-capitalist attempts to get the government to shut down competing products; he is a stronger supporter of animal welfare in this particular area than any other senator. If anything, it seems like this is a right-wing cause, and you should be complaining about how it is making people think libertarians are deceptive and manipulative.
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Sophia Kovaleva said:
Humans have a rather long and, so far as I can tell, cross-cultural tradition of calling any white liquid, even if it’s inedible, “milk”, so “soy milk” is extremely fair and in line with cultural naming conventions. That said, it continues to baffle me that people keep presenting it as a cow milk substitute, because as far as I’m concerned, it tastes nothing at all like cow milk. It’s a good drink, just completely separate one. But then again, IMO, lactose-free milk tastes nothing at all like whole milk, making them non-fungible, so I’m clearly in the minority here.
That said, I’d be very enthused if someone used gene editing to make yeast produce actual cow milk, and I think it would be very reasonable to sell it as just “milk”, just like it’s reasonable to market GMO-yeast-generated human insulin as “human insulin” – it’s the same compound.
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sansdomino said:
Even just skim milk is already non-fungible with whole milk. A few cultures do not even consider skim milk a variety of “milk”, and rather use a different term entirely. English does not do this; but in a language that did, I’d think there would be good reasons to calling it then “soy skim_milk” and not “soy milk”.
(Cf. also “cream” and “whey” as additional grades that very consistently get their its own terms entirely, instead of being something like “top milk” and “milk plasma”.)
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Sophia Kovaleva said:
Whoops, wrong thread.
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Aapje said:
@Ozy
Quite a few of the alternative contraceptive methods that were released to market turned out to have serious problems for a fraction of users. Most recently, we had the Essure problems. Let me quote from the Essure website:
Some patients implanted with the Essure System for Permanent Birth Control have experienced and/or reported adverse events, including perforation of the uterus and/or fallopian tubes, identification of inserts in the abdominal or pelvic cavity, persistent pain, and suspected allergic or hypersensitivity reactions.
This is incomplete, because it doesn’t talk about calcification of the implants that happened to many women.
Anyway, there has recently been a lot of attention paid in my country to the poor healthcare system practices surrounding medical devices, being far inferior to those for pills and such. I am very wary of implant-based solutions, given all these issues and problems.
I think that you may misunderstand them. I think that many are motivated by a belief system (perhaps based on religion) where human intervention is treated differently from what is attributed to nature or God.
For people who make this distinction, human interventions are more easily judged as evil than non-intervention to stop things that happen if one doesn’t intervene.
Remember that God tested Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his son? The lesson was that he was good to trust God by being willing and that God didn’t abuse this trust, but did what was good for Abraham. It was a rather more serious trust exercise than the common one where people have to fall back and trust others to catch them.
In my case, this belief does not come from the delusion that God has a plan and that what seems evil to us is actually often better as God considers second or third order effects, but from the rather well-supported belief that humans are extremely fallible and ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions.’ The worst mass killing in world history were not based on mere hatred, but on the belief that these were beneficial interventions for mankind.
—
As for vegan/vegetarian alternatives, I’m fine with it if there is a clear modifier, like ‘soy.’ This is a very traditional way of naming, so it can’t be considered more deceptive than common practice.
Interestingly, a member of Wilders’ anti-Muslim political party is strongly in favor of animal rights. However, given how he treats his partners, he might have an strong emotional connection with animals because of his problems with humans.
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Sophia Kovaleva said:
For that matter, I don’t think that having the norm of essentially *requiring* to use trans’ people’s preferred pronouns is particularly consequentialist on the part of EA communities: I haven’t seen anyone presenting analysis of the net financial gain/loss from instituting this rule, but I at least wouldn’t be surprised if some effect along the lines of “very wealthy people are more conservative than simply well-off and educated people” existed and resulted in the net loss of donations – not even necessarily due to the loss of people who particularly wanted to misgender others, but, for example, due to the loss of free-speech absolutists, who object to any speech being banned, even if they didn’t want to say it – while being trans is (1) rare, and (2) correlated with being poor. Or maybe this is not the case, but at least I haven’t seen this analysis being done rigorously. In all likelihood, it seems to me that EA communities converged on this norm because many EAs are trans or have trans friends or are just liberal and have a deontological belief that it’s the right thing to do (deontological because I seriously doubt that a non-trivial portion of people who believe that fighting transphobia is the right thing to do would abandon this belief even if it were conclusively shown that [unhappiness from being misgendered] times 0.3 is smaller than [unhappiness from not being allowed to misgender people] times 99.7). Which can hopefully provide some insight into objecting to courses of action on non-consequentialist grounds.
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aristides11 said:
Thank you for writing this. Considering my hispanic mother is a strong Trump supporter, I appreciate a decrease in the number of times she is referred to as a stupid bigot. I keep flirting with effective altruism, but it has always felt unwelcoming to conservatives or anyone else that has moral foundations besides harm and fairness. I’ve been very interested in biosecurity as a cause area, but am too intimated to show up to an EA event when I’m worried that I’ll be criticized for voting Republican and focusing primarily on the US. I know the focus mainly on US is essentially against one if EAs primary tenants, but with a cause area like biosecurity, there should be plenty of common ground as long as I don’t proselytize pro America.
Another suggestion, this is a federal government norm I picked up, always refer to the sitting president simply by their title, “The President”. It takes the focus off the person and on to the office, which is probably all that really matters in EA conversation.
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Carl Shulman said:
““If you’re religious, then the most effectively altruist thing is to convert everyone because of the infinite utility of Heaven” is not nearly as clever as you think it is. Every religious effective altruist has heard this argument from a hundred different atheists, including ones whose religion does not actually include a concept of Heaven. No religious effective altruist is doing this. Stop bringing it up.”
I support the general spirit of the OP, but there already was a site that promoted GiveWell charities and online Christian evangelism (with ludicrously low ‘cost per soul saved’ figures) as effective altruism:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160301022355/http://www.payitforward.foundation/
Brian Tomasik was interested in hell-containing religions based on Pascal’s Wager at one point.
Here is a recent top-level post in r/EffectiveAltruism where a Christian EA advocates for Christian evangelism as top EA priority, and against x-risk (because Revelations indicates the world doesn’t have long to go, and it’s end won’t be prevented by x-risk work):
It really would follow from most major religions being true that EAs should radically revise their focus, and value religious evangelism more highly than much of what they currently work on (e.g. factory farming).
That issue doesn’t arise if one merely participates in the religion without really believing it’s truth claims, or compartmentalizes it sufficiently to not interact with one’s other beliefs about the world, but it matters for EA purposes whether the truth claims are true or false, and that evidence indicates they are false.
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Carl Shulman said:
Admittedly, the Reddit post really sets off a lot of troll alarms, but I have seen other Christians pushing similar lines regarding EA (Revelations renders x-risk moot, souls matter more than material prosperity) in clearly non-joke contexts.
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ozymandias said:
I think that “this movement is a secular movement” is a useful piece of social tech that effective altruists should take advantage of– we designate the movement as not an appropriate place for evangelism or religion-based arguments and can welcome religious people without having to become a religious movement.
I think it is actually false that most of the major religions being true implies religious evangelism: of the ten largest world religions, only four (Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Spiritism) appear to have any sort of evangelistic focus, and I’m not sure on Spiritism.
Several different religious effective altruists have complained to me about people bringing up the “isn’t the most effective thing saving souls?” thing. I think it is profoundly irritating and unwelcoming to many religious effective altruists and is not at all to the benefit of atheistic effective altruists, who would presumably prefer that religious EAs not devote themselves to saving souls. The only benefit from an atheistic perspective, as far as I can tell, is signalling how much one absolutely adores the taste of bullets. So I think atheists dropping that topic is a win for everyone (even the people who are trying to save souls can presumably bring it up on their own).
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sullyj3 said:
> I think it is actually false that most of the major religions being true implies religious evangelism: of the ten largest world religions, only four (Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Spiritism) appear to have any sort of evangelistic focus, and I’m not sure on Spiritism.
I mean this is technically true but I don’t think number of world religions is the metric you want so much as number of adherents. Those definitely evangelistic religions, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, make up 3.6 billion people, nearly half the population of the earth. They’re definitely by far the majority of religious people.
So it think that it’s only a little lossy to say that religion implies evangelism, and it’s on the whole fair to treat it that way.
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Füdlibürger said:
The Reddit link does not work for me. Could you post a working link?
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Carl Shulman said:
I’d say that religions accounting for the vast majority of believers have ‘saving souls’ functions, particularly when including ‘liberation from the cycle of reincarnation’ and ‘eons of bliss.’ And even religions that don’t make a point of outreach to other groups still imply cosmic implications of practice within their communities.
Secularism is good and useful, but on its own terms EA will address questions that have religious implications, e.g. ‘what is the most effective intervention (considering all options’ or ‘which practices of reasoning reliably lead to accurate beliefs’ or ‘what is the evolutionary history of nervous systems?’ This is similar to science being a secular practice that nonetheless assesses the truth of many religious claims as it goes about its business. That sort of secularism is great, and goes well with being polite and not assuming that people want to mix their religion with their giving.
“I think it is profoundly irritating and unwelcoming to many religious effective altruists and is not at all to the benefit of atheistic effective altruists, who would presumably prefer that religious EAs not devote themselves to saving souls.
I agree about this, and it’s something people should watch out for impoliteness on.
“The only benefit from an atheistic perspective, as far as I can tell, is signalling how much one absolutely adores the taste of bullets.”
I wouldn’t go that far. A lot of people, including many in the EA community, have become atheists by looking at their religious beliefs and morality using the same sort of rigor as the community tries to apply to do-gooding. And religious people attracted to EA disproportionately are the bullet-biting sort who were engaged in aggressive evangelical and missionary work previously (often being moved by the supposedly enormous welfare consequences).
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Carl Shulman said:
To clarify my bottom line:
1. It seem firmly net bad for the community to bother people with snide comments, or apply religious tests or pressure, and I support people coordinating to reduce such behavior, and be more welcoming of religious EAs.
2. But while doing that I want to remain careful with the facts and avoid things like denying that the EA=evangelism conclusion is a thing that occasionally happens, or that being questioned about religious beliefs sometimes affects them. That’s compatible with #1.
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Ashe said:
Would you like to be waterboarded? Would you like your friends and family to be waterboarded? No? Then maybe you shouldn’t omit all criticism of a man who went on a stage and yelled “Waterboarding is absolutely fine!”. Or his supporters who actively cheered him on for that exact sentence.
Not every conservative is a torturer. Not every Trump supporter is a torture glorifier. But a number of them clearly are, and pretending that this has no consequence is hypocritical and absurd.
And this isn’t some Sam Harris or Peter Singer debate where they discuss torture in the hypothetical, as a thought experiment to gauge how much it should be traded off against other considerations. This was open glorification. Remember, “absolutely fine” means just that: No problem at all. No trade-offs involved. They didn’t just tolerate the statement, they *gleefully cheered him on*.
But I guess as long as you can simply display your fake-tolerance as a fake-altruist, the consequences don’t matter. After all, it’s not like the effective altruism community is known for its intellectual honesty and tolerance of criticism. Or this blog for that matter.
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aristides11 said:
As a conservative, I don’t mind listening to criticism of the President, what I don’t like is blanket criticism of his supporters or snarky jokes that are are not intended to persuade. I think that’s all Ozy was trying to say in their post.
Advice to both you and @Carl Shulman above, make some estimates on the CBA of insulting conservatives or Christians. Carl seemed to think bringing up these points might convince some people to abandon Christianity, but does that outweigh the suffering caused by scaring away potential EA? @Ashe your comment brought up a good point, but in a way so snarky, it makes me support Trump more. Do you expect anti-Trump jokes are really going to swing the 2020 election?
One more thing for @Carl Shulman, most Abrahamic religious followes are deontological. We can spend 10% of our resources on EA causes and 10% on missionary and believe we are doing the right thing. I know in my case, the closer I feel to consequentialism, the more I consider abandoning EA causes to work on missions. From your moral point of view, convincing me that consequentialism is right, is more likely to make me leave EA than join it.
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ozymandias said:
Two comments have been deleted for containing personal attacks.
A third comment has been deleted for arguing that we should have more civil conversations based on mutual understanding while substantially decreasing the chance of civil conversation based on mutual understanding. (Normally, I wouldn’t do that, but I felt in this case the author’s best self would approve.)
[Edit: a fourth comment has been deleted for containing personal attacks.]
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Some guy said:
There is low-hanging fruit that you are neglecting to mention here. For example, a friend of mine (from a foreign country that doesn’t have a lot of EAs) engaged in polite disagreement with a Berkeley feminist at EA Global. She threw a fit and successfully petitioned Julia Wise to get him banned from future EA Globals. I’m not even very conservative (probably closer to being one of those centrist/libertarian type people), but hearing about this made both me and my friend want to quit EA. I already don’t really attend EA events anymore, partially to avoid dealing with people like this Berkeley feminist. It’s really frustrating how they can enforce their own Berkeley intellectual monoculture while claiming to be acting in the name of diversity and inclusiveness… If you want more conservatives in EA, complaining to Julia Wise about decisions like this one is the low hanging fruit.
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Alia D. said:
As a data point, this post did result in me making a first time contribution via GiveWell
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