Leif Wenar thoughtfully critiqued EA in "Poverty is No Pond" (2011) & just wrote a critique in WIRED. He is a philosophy professor at Stanford & author of Blood Oil.
Edit:
My initial thoughts (which are very raw & will likely change & I will accordingly regret having indelibly inscribed on the Internet):
Initially, after a quick read-through, my take is he does a great job critiquing EA as a whole & showing the shortfalls are not isolated incidents. But none of the incidents were news to me. I think there's value in having these incidents/critique (well) written in a single article.
But, really, I'm interested in the follow-up piece / how to reform EA or else the alternative to EA / what’s next for the many talented young people who care, want to do good, & are drawn to EA. I'd love to hear y'all's thoughts on this.
Edit: Share your Qs for Leif here.
Edit: Archive link to article.
Edit (4.5.24): See also GiveWell's comment and On Leif Wenar's Absurdly Unconvincing Critique Of Effective Altruism.
I've updated toward thinking there's probably not much reason to read the article.
My impression is that Leif has a strong understanding of EA and thoughtful critiques of it, both as a set of tools and a question (and of course specific actions / people). I feel there's a significant difference between the WIRED article and my conversations with him. In conversation, I think he has many thoughtful comments, which I'd hoped the WIRED article would capture. I shared the article out of this hope, though in reality it's heavy on snark and light on substance, plus (I agree with many of you) contains strawmanning and misrepresentations. I wish for his substantive thoughts to be shared and engaged with in the future. But, in the meantime, thank you to everyone who shared your responses below, and I'm sorry it was likely a frustrating and unfruitful read and use of time.
Thank you, M, for sharing this with me & encouraging me to connect.
I found it a bit hard to discern what constructive points he was trying to make amidst all the snark. But the following seemed like a key passage in the overall argument:
Putting aside the implicit status games and weird psychological projection, I don't understand what practical point Wenar is trying to make here. If the aid is indeed net good, as he seems to grant, then "pills improve lives" seems like the most important insight not to lose sight of. And if someone starts "haranguing" you for affirming this important insight, it does seem like it could come across as trying to prevent that net good from happening. (I don't see any reason to personalize the concern, as about "stopping me" -- that just seems blatantly uncharitable.)
It sounds like Wenar just wants more public affirmations of causal complexity to precede any claim about our potential to do good? But it surely depends on context whether that's a good idea. Too much detail, especially extraneous detail that doesn't affect the bottom line recommendation, could easily prove distracting and cause people (like, seemingly, Wenar himself) to lose sight of the bottom line of what matters most here.
So that section just seemed kind of silly. There was a more reasonable point mixed in with the unreasonable in the next section:
The initial complaint here seems fine: presumably GiveWell could (marginally) improve their cost-effectiveness models by trying to incorporate various risks or costs that it sounds like they currently don't consider. Mind you, if nobody else has any better estimates, then complaining that the best-grounded estimates in the world aren't yet perfect seems a bit precious. Then the closing suggestion that they prominently highlight expected deaths (from indirect causes like bandits killing people while trying to steal charity money) is just dopey. Ordinary readers would surely misread that as suggesting that the interventions were somehow directly killing people. Obviously the better-justified display is the net effect in lives saved. But we're not given any reason to expect that GiveWell's current estimates here are far off.
Q: Does Wenar endorse inaction?
Wenar's "most important [point] to make to EAs" (skipping over his weird projection about egotism) is that "If we decide to intervene in poor people's lives, we should do so responsibly—ideally by shifting our power to them and being accountable for our actions."
The overwhelmingly thrust of Wenar's article -- from the opening jab about asking EAs "how many people they’ve killed", to the conditional I bolded above -- seems to be to frame charitable giving as a morally risky endeavor, in contrast to the implicit safety of just doing nothing and letting people die.
I think that's a terrible frame. It's philosophically mistaken: letting people die from preventable causes is not a morally safe or innocent alternative (as is precisely the central lesson of Singer's famous article). And it seems practically dangerous to publicly promote this bad moral frame, as he is doing here. The most predictable consequence is to discourage people from doing "riskily good" things like giving to charity. Since he seems to grant that aid is overall good and admirable, it seems like by his own lights he should regard his own article as harmful. It's weird.
(If he just wants to advocate for more GiveDirectly-style anti-paternalistic interventions that "shift our power to them", that seems fine but obviously doesn't justify the other 95% of the article.)
I was disappointed GiveDirectly wasn't mentioned given that seems to be more what he would favour. The closing anecdote about the surfer-philosopher donating money to Bali seems like a proto-GiveDirectly approach but presumably a lot less efficient without the infrastructure to do it at scale.
I think his take on GiveDirectly is likely to be very similar—he would point to the fraud and note that neither them or any of their evaluators took into account the harms caused by the beneficiaries of that fraud in their calculations. And I don’t think that that would be an unfair criticism (if delivered with a bit less snark).
1)I think it is pretty unclear how much harm was actually done here, other than the loss of money for the people who would otherwise have received it, who would also have gotten 0 money if GiveDirectly didn't exist. (That doesn't mean zero harm, since it's worse to think you'll get money and not receive it.) As far as I can tell from the link, the money was stolen by local GiveDirectly staff, not armed militias or governments that might have spent on it buying guns or improving their ability to extort more money from others. (There might even have been some indirect gain for locals in having the money reach the Congo at all, also. It could easily have been spent locally Harmful things also have secondary effects that don't necessarily have the same sign as the primary thing.) It's possible that if they'd given more details of how the fraud was carried out, more harms would be evident though. (Which is why I say "unclear" not "it seems like there wasn't that much").
2) It seems like it was a tiny fraction of GD's giving that year, so the bad effects would have to be super-large in order for it to make much difference to the overall value of GD's work. (I guess one possible response is that where you find one bad unintended consequence there might be others.)
I agree with both your points. I think the thrust of Leif’s argument, rather, is that no work was done to clarify the extent of those harms. They just say “we apologise to people counting on this” and quote statistics on how bad the militias in the area are.
On (2), I hope it was clear to anyone reading the article that Leif would like EAs to think in a negative-utilitarian way. I sincerely doubt he cares what proportion of the overall value of GiveDirectly’s work it was if a harm was done.
"Negative utilitarian" isn't the right term here. Negative utilitarianism is the view that you should minimize total suffering. It doesn't say your not allowed to cause some suffering in doing so, so long as you take the action that reduces suffering the most on net. The "benefits" of Give Directly's work are a mixture of suffering reduction and positive stuff, and the harms of the theft are also a mixture of suffering and positive benefits blocked. NU is the view that you should only care about suffering and not the positive benefits in assessing whether GD does more good than harm .It's not a view about not doing harm instrumentally. (And in fact, any sensible negative utilitarian will recognize that increasing positive happiness actually usually also decreases suffering for that person, since it helps prevent boredom etc.)
Insofar as Wenar is claiming that you should never do anything that is even an indirect cause of harms committed by other people, even if it's a net benefit, I think that is just not at all convincing, for reasons both I and Richard Y Chappell have given elsewhere: it would paralyze all action by anyone ever, and it doesn't have the common sense support of "don't do evil things, even to achieve good outcomes". I suppose someone could argue the harm was direct here though, since it was GD's own staff who stole the money?
On the other hand, if his claim is just that GD might be doing more harm than good, then the specifics of how much money was stolen v. how much money GD gives out are relevant. If his claim is that GiveWell should incorporate harms more into the stuff they right up about the charities, again, the actual importance of the harms is relevant, since GiveWell can't write up everything, and should include/exclude stuff from right-ups on the basis of how important that stuff is. If his claim is just that GiveWell needs to take the caveats about indirect harms they already include in long detailed reports and display them prominently in summaries, again, the level of the harms seems important, because the summary should be giving the most important stuff.
Same, Oscar! I hope to ask him about this