I was just about to point out several angles this post neglects but it looks like from the edit this post is just intended to address a narrower question. Among the angles outside the intended question: philanthropy by the ultra-wealthy often serves as a tool for reputation laundering and influence building. I guess the same criticism can be made about a lot of conventional philanthropy, but I don't think that should absolve EA.

This post somewhat frames the question as a comparison between EA and conventional philanthropy and foreign aid efforts... which okay, but that is a low bar especially when you look at some of the stuff the US has done with it's foreign aid.

[–] jaschop@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I was going to shitpost that Trump is the least neo-colonial president cuz he cut all foreign aid, but I realized I kinda believe that unironically. I'm in the anti-death-and-suffering camp of course, but a hundred kinda self-serving national aid programs might just not cut it.

(This might be inspired by the Merz government planning to roll the special development aid office into the foreign affairs ministry, partly to tie it more strongly to national interest.)

Maybe we need to bring back the UN bigly.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 6 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah I think long term Trump wrecking US soft power might be good for the world. There is going to be a lot of immediate suffering because a lot of those programs were also doing good things (in addition to strengthening US soft power or pushing a neocolonial agenda or whatever else).

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

I would be more inclined to agree if there was an actual better alternative wait to fill in the gap. Instead we're probably going to see the loss of US soft power be replaced by EU, Russian, and particularly Chinese soft power. I'm not sufficiently propagandized to say that's strictly worse than being under US soft power, especially as practiced by the kinds of people that support EA. But it also isn't really an improvement in terms of enabling autonomous development.

[–] AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 5 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (2 children)

Russia doesn’t really do, or indeed understand, soft power, beyond causing mischief with disinformation operations. In the Russian strategic mindset, winning the hearts and minds of a population is unacceptably inefficient compared to the alternatives, such as bribing local gangsters to become a fake popular movement, cultivating useful idiots among the far left and/or right, flooding the field with disinformation, or just massive invasion.

The world is never going to be listening to R-pop on their Art.Lebedev phone in the queue at the hip new piroshki truck and wishing they were in Moscow where things are happening.

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 2 points 10 hours ago

Russia doesn’t really do, or indeed understand, soft power

counterpoint

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 1 points 10 hours ago

True. I'll admit my primary thought was about the Chinese Belt and Road initiative, but I didn't want to discount other aspiring neocolonialists trying their hands at it.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 7 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 4 points 15 hours ago

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.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 5 points 22 hours ago

Yeah, allowing the framing that blog post uses is already conceding a lot to EA and overlooking the bigger problems they have.