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Is Effective Altruism Neocolonial?
(bobjacobs.substack.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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SneerClub
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
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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.
My perspective is that EA and the upper-class philanthropy it inherits from are consumerist, a system that rests on top of colonialism. It's basically selling spiritual consumer goods, much like the medieval Catholic Church selling indulgences (and look what that provoked!). Once we get beyond the public health interventions, into longtermist EA's "trillions of simulated minds in our future lightcone" bullshit, it's clearly selling an unhealthily narcissistic spirituality, though its adherents would never call it that. The product, in this case, is the warm fuzzy self-aggrandizing feeling that one can extend one's (over)privileged position in our relatively fragile 21st century society into influence over sci-fi-scale expanses of time and space.
Yeah, allowing the framing that blog post uses is already conceding a lot to EA and overlooking the bigger problems they have.