'The Effective Ventures Foundation (EVF), which defines effective altruism as “using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible”, decided £14.9m of its cash would be best spent buying Wytham Abbey, a 15th-century Grade-I listed manor house near Oxford.'
There were a lot of explanations about why that was the most effective use of funds, but every single one reads like motivated reasoning to me.
Examples like this abound.
1. Take no action -- but if they're right, you cede the moral high ground
2. Imitate them -- which also cedes the moral high ground, since they got there first
3. Undermine their claim; prove they're actually acting in self-interest.
I believe this is why so many people love(d) to hate on vegans.
I think this is an unhealthy belief. More likely, people don't know what is or is not moral, because their decisions are plagued by self-interest, limited knowledge, and the influence of peer pressure and tradition that may or may not have gotten things right.
So it is more about people taking calculated bets, say on a share price. They don't know for sure if they think the price will go up or down, they are guessing, but not randomly guessing. There is an underlying investment thesis that may or may not be correct.
So a contrarian investor, may be a genius or a fool. Time will tell. Most people, when they see a contrarian investor, decide the prudent approach is "wait and see", because they have their own thesis about a different set of stocks.
Everyone is trying to figure this out as best as they can. To think that you have the moral high ground by holding some niche beliefs is a foolish way of living.
Second, EA is a small movement with an above average amount of crazy people (IE someone who does think you should make as much money as possible at any cost), who then basically monopolize the media attention. This then feeds into the first component.
EA is in a fairly bad spot where nobody seems to be really attempting to understand it or meaningfully engage with it's ideas, instead just parroting the same few talking points (SBF anyone?)
However, there's some who predict an existential future risk such as an AI apocalypse. If that's the case, why save a child's life today when we'll all be killed by AI tomorrow? Critics would call this funding pet projects rather than altruism.
But you can even further down this line of thinking. If you're a billionaire and see yourself as the only hope of saving humanity from extinction, why donate any of your wealth? You should be doing the opposite, gathering as much wealth and power as possible. Taxes and laws that get in your way are impediments to the salvation of humanity.
I'm pretty sure most of the criticism is for folks in the latter groups. I wish there were different words to distinguish them better, because I like the idea of encouraging charity but somehow a handful of billionaires have poisoned the word altruism.
(I donate 50%, and quit a high-paying tech job to work at a biosecurity nonprofit)
Cause somehow their idea of best altruism ends up amounting to "earn as much money and power with little regard to how, because so that you can use them for good in the future in a very top down way".
Effectively, it is very swlf serving.
Edit: Also weird nerds.
Can you give an example of this kind of person?