15h ago

Is Effective Altruism Neocolonial?

bobjacobs.substack.com

3 comments

I was just about to point out several angles this post neglects but it looks like from the edit this post is just intended to address a narrower question. Among the angles outside the intended question: philanthropy by the ultra-wealthy often serves as a tool for reputation laundering and influence building. I guess the same criticism can be made about a lot of conventional philanthropy, but I don't think that should absolve EA.
This post somewhat frames the question as a comparison between EA and conventional philanthropy and foreign aid efforts... which okay, but that is a low bar especially when you look at some of the stuff the US has done with it's foreign aid.
- I was going to shitpost that Trump is the least neo-colonial president cuz he cut all foreign aid, but I realized I kinda believe that unironically. I'm in the anti-death-and-suffering camp of course, but a hundred kinda self-serving national aid programs might just not cut it.
  (This might be inspired by the Merz government planning to roll the special development aid office into the foreign affairs ministry, partly to tie it more strongly to national interest.)
  Maybe we need to bring back the UN bigly.
- I also think that some of the long-termism criticisms are not so easily severable from the questions he does address about epistemology and listening to the local people receiving aid. The long-termist nutjobs aren't an aberration of EA-type utilitarianism. They are it's logical conclusion. Even if this chapter ends with common sense prevailing over sci-fi nonsense it's worth noting that this kind of absurdity can't arise if you define effectiveness as listening to people and helping them get what they need rather than creating your own metrics that may or may not correlate outside of the most extreme cases.