I’m in the Crimson!

In lieu of my semi-weekly post, today I have an article in the Harvard Crimson. I’m writing, as usual (sorry), about effective altruism.

The Crimson is notable for the poor quality of its commenters. Perhaps it’ll be time for another Washington Post—style postmortem analysis once things quiet down.

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Effective altruism and quantitative estimates

A while ago (because I’m slow at blogging) Zach Groff attempted a quantitative estimate of the impact of participating in collective action on the Effective Altruism Forum. The comments there did a good job of criticizing Zach’s specific quantitative estimate, but I want to make a broader point—I’m actually having a hard time imagining a quantitative cost-benefit argument that I would find very convincing here. The problem is that the causality is so hard to assess that the best thing you can do is get really wide bounds via cheesy counterfactuals (a la Carl Shulman’s point that even if the Black Lives Matter protests eliminated every police shooting death for a decade, this would only save ~10k lives, and that’s assuming an implausibly large effect.

The Slippery Utilitarian

The Boston Review recently held a forum on The Logic of Effective Altruism, with an initial piece by Singer, responses by a bunch of people, and a final counter-response by Singer. Reading the responses was pretty interesting, as this is perhaps the most thorough, cogent, and intellectually solid set of criticisms that effective altruism has received. In his counter-rebuttal, Peter Singer pulls a rhetorical move that I like to call the “slippery utilitarian:”

[Link] Scott Aaronson sums up my thoughts on environmentalism and divestment

Original post here. I’m sensitive to the charge that divestment petitions are just meaningless sanctimony, a way for activists to feel morally pure without either making serious sacrifices or engaging the real complexities of an issue. In the end, though, that kind of meta-level judgment can’t absolve us of the need to consider each petition on its merits: if we think of a previous crisis for civilization (say, in the late 1930s), then it seems obvious that even symbolic divestment gestures were better than nothing.

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