Effective Altruism Has a Toxic Culture of Sexual Harassment and Abuse

Re:Effective Altruism Has a Toxic Culture of Sexual Harassme... by astrange on Friday February 03, 2023 @06:05PM (#34649093)

> Effective Altruism is just a modern iteration of a thing that's been around for a very long time. The fundamental idea is sound.

It's largely a reinvention of a philosophical program called logical positivism, which the philosophers gave up on because it didn't work, so it's not sound. They just brought it back because it's the most STEMy kind of philosophy and they think anything with enough math must be right.

(Example of them not reading the literature is their invented term "steelman", which academia already had and called "reconstructing arguments".)

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Re:Effective Altruism Has a Toxic Culture of Sexual Harassme... by twblalock on Friday February 03, 2023 @06:10PM (#34649147)

It's really just utilitarianism, all over again.

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Re:Effective Altruism Has a Toxic Culture of Sexual Harassme... by seanhunter on Saturday February 04, 2023 @05:26AM (#34653349)

Yes it's definitely utilitarianism. William McAskill (co-founder of the center for effective altrurism) for example wrote Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical Way to Make a Difference and also is a co-author of https://www.utilitarianism.net/ (an introductory online textbook on utilitarianism).

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Re:Effective Altruism Has a Toxic Culture of Sexual Harassme... by gjm11 on Friday February 03, 2023 @08:45PM (#34650465)

Effective Altruism is not a reinvention of logical positivism.

Perhaps you mean rationalism (in the internet-rationalist sense; there are others) which is closely associated with EA but not at all the same thing, and is somewhat like logical positivism.

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Re:Effective Altruism Has a Toxic Culture of Sexual Harassme... by astrange on Friday February 03, 2023 @10:28PM (#34651117)

I will believe people claiming these are different things when the EAs stop talking about AI ending the world and other things they read in SF novels and go back to malaria nets.

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Re:Effective Altruism Has a Toxic Culture of Sexual Harassme... by gjm11 on Sunday February 05, 2023 @10:15AM (#34665520)

GiveWell's recommended charities are all doing health interventions in poor countries. The largest category in Good Ventures's grants, by more than 2x, is "global health and development". Malaria nets and the like are, in fact, most of what EAs are doing.

Those things are less controversial and exciting to talk about than (say) whether there's a real danger of AI wrecking the world, so if you focus on what's talked about in the EA Forum or something then you will get a misleading impression.

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