EA - A socialist view on liberal progressive criticisms of EA by freedomandutility

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A socialist view on liberal progressive criticisms of EA, published by freedomandutility on November 21, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.As someone who identifies as a socialist, politically to the left of many progressive critics of EA, I wanted to outline where I disagree with some liberal progressives criticisms of EA.Obviously, I am just one socialist and my views probably differ a fair amount from the average socialist.My view of "liberal progressive criticisms of EA" is mostly based on tweets, but I think this article is a good example of what I categorise as a liberal progressive criticism of EA:/.Explicit and Implicit PrioritisationSome liberal progressive criticisms of EA treat opportunity costs and prioritisation as things that EA has created which unfairly pit good causes against one another.All political movements have limited resources and must prioritise certain issues. Often, individuals aligned with political movements do not realise that they are prioritising certain issues over others, or do not want to recognise this reality, because deeming some good causes less worthy than other good causes is deeply emotionally uncomfortable for most people.EAs are less uncomfortable with this because they are used to prioritisation, and prioritise between causes explicitly rather than implicitly.I think many liberal progressives focused on issues like student loan in Western countries do not recognise, or do not want to recognise, that they are prioritising this issue over vaccinating the world's poorest children against disease. However, EAs prioritising existential risks generally explicitly recognise and state that they are prioritising this over global health.This leads some critics to a double standard of criticising those who explicitly prioritise issues over global health in favour of those who implicitly prioritise other issues over global health, despite the impacts on global health being the same.Scope InsensitivityEAs are generally aware of scope insensitivity.If asked to compare issues, it is likely that liberal progressives would at least agree that global health should in theory be prioritised over issues such as student loans or better healthcare for poorer Westerners. However, liberal progressives will likely still not prioritise pandemic preparedness and global health sufficiently because of scope insensitivity and failures to understand the gulf in impact between initiatives focused on poorer Westerners vs the global poor.Differences in Priorities and NeglectednessLiberal progressivism is a much more successful ideology / movement than EA, in terms of reach and influence. EA claims to do the most good, but adherents of many ideologies and movements expect that they are doing the most good too, and are likely surprised when EA's cause priorities do not reflect their own. They may also simply critique EA out of disagreement between their priorities and EA's priorities.But EA priorities differing from the priorities of mainstream political movements is a systematic feature of EA, because EA focuses on neglected issues. If liberal progressivism or conservatism sufficiently prioritised AI safety, pandemic preparedness, global health or factory farming, there is a good chance that EA would switch to new priorities.EA does not focus on the "most important" issues - it focuses on the issues where additional time or money will have the largest social impact.Localism, Internationalism and XenophobiaMy view of liberal progressivism is that it largely embraces localism with a preference for local actors solving local problems using local resources.However, the world is very unequal. The areas with the best resources and the most skilled actors to deploy them are also the areas with the least severe problems. The areas with the most...