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Is Effective Altruism Neocolonial?
(bobjacobs.substack.com)
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.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
See our twin at Reddit
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. I don't think you need the full ideological framework and all its baggage to get to "medical interventions and direct cash transfers are consistently shown to have strong positive impacts relative to the resources invested." That framework prevents you from adding on "they also avoid some of the negative impact that foreign aid can have on domestic institution-building processes" which is a really important consideration. Of course, that assumes the goal is to mitigate and remediate the damage done by colonialism and imperialism rather than perpetuting the same structures in a way that the imperialists at the top can feel good about. And for a lot of the donor class that EA orgs are chasing I don't think that's actually the case.