Thanks for writing this, I think this topic is worthy of more discussion.

Of course, this does not consider important tradeoffs, such as the potential for alienating other audiences. This will therefore be most useful to people whose primary audience is progressives.

I wonder how much we should even recommend leaning into the progressive/social justice framing when the audience primarily comes from this ideological bent.

• I often find talk about privilege unproductive and used in a hostile/shaming kind of way and feel mixed about suggesting that this is part of the motivation of EA (which I prefer seeing as sth. like „we share the desire to help others and improve the world as much as possible“) and bringing more people with that mindset into EA
• people that are not from the social justice bent might be especially worthy to attract in situations where progressives are the main audience, in order to gain intellectual diversity

If I’d read this testimonial on the local EA website, there’d be a solid chance I‘d have been significantly less interested because it doesn’t connect to my altruistic motivations and (in my head) strongly signals a political ideology.

For me, taking the Giving What We Can pledge was an expression of my commitment to using my class privilege to contributed to a movement towards a more equitable world for current and future generations

I think some points you mention, like highlighting more that aid recipients’ feedback is strongly taken into account, don’t risk turning off non-social justice people while still connecting to their motivation and worries, so maybe I’d wish to see more of that kind.

[I was sympathetic to common progressive/left-wing/social justice views before encountering EA. I'm from Germany, so my experience might not apply as much to the US.]

I'm wondering if another reason why some progressives may not like EA is a much more cynical prior about the intentions of powerful people and institutions, plus an unwillingness to update away from it or inability to identify evidence that would allow for such updates. 

E.g. it strikes me that before I encountered EA the only context in which I ever had heard about the Gates Foundation was in contexts where it was at least implied that obviously we should expect its activities to serve Gates's private interests rather than the common good. It requires some knowledge about the particulars of the Foundation's activities, and context to understand how it differs from the activities of other foundations, to come to a more sympathetic view. 

One explanation based on Haidt's Moral foundations theory would be:

• Progressives tend to be motivated by both the 'Care/Harm' and 'Fairness/Cheating' foundations.
• EAs tend to be motivated almost exclusively by the 'Care/Harm' foundation, or at least by philosophical views that rationalize 'Care/Harm' intuitions but often recommend to disregard 'Fairness/Cheating' intuitions in a way that seems objectionable to progressives.

I don't know much about how solid moral foundations theory is, and haven't thought much about how plausible I find this explanation or how much of the effect I'd guess it explains.

Thank you for this summary!

One thought that struck me is that most of the objections seem most likely to come up in response to 'GiveWell style EA'.

I expect the objections that would be raised to a longtermist-first EA would be pretty different, though with some overlap. I'd be interested in any thoughts on what they would be.

I also (speculatively) wonder if a longtermist-first EA might ultimately do better with this audience. You can do a presentation that starts with climate change, and then point out that the lack of political representation for future generations is a much more general problem.

In addition, longtermist EAs favour hits based giving, and that makes it clear that policy change is among the best interventions, while acknowledging it's very hard to measure effects, which seems more palatable than an approach highly focused on measurement of narrow metrics.

Indeed, IIRC, EAs tend to be more progressive/left-of-center than the general population. I can't find the source for this claim right now.

The 2019 EA Survey says:

"The majority of respondents (72%) reported identifying with the Left or Center Left politically and just over 3% were on the Right or Center Right, very similar to 2018."

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wtQ3XCL35uxjXpwjE/ea-survey-2019-series-community-demographics-and#Politics

Another thought I meant to include with my original post:

These reflections/experiences have also led me to believe that, all else equal, EA groups at colleges are more valuable than ones at grad schools. Anecdotally, One For The World college chapters were much more successful on average than HLS's, despite HLS grads' higher earning potential. My model is that many people adopt the sort of EA-skeptical progressive worldview described here in college, which makes outreach in grad schools harder.

I think making EA a viable alternative or complement to which college students are exposed during their formative years would be very valuable for this.

This has been a philosophical commitment since the early days of EA, yet information on how we (or the charities we prioritize) actually confirm with recipients that our programs are having the predicted positive impact on them receives, AFAICT, little attention in EA.

[Within footnote] As an example, after ten minutes of searching I could not find information on GiveWell's overall view on this subject on their website.

FWIW, the most closely related Givewell article I'm aware of is How not to be a "white in shining armor". Relevant excerpts (emphasis in original):

We fundamentally believe that progress on most problems must be locally driven. So we seek to improve people’s abilities to make progress on their own, rather than taking personal responsibility for each of their challenges. How can we best accomplish this?...

A common and intuitively appealing answer is letting locals drive philanthropic projects...At the same time, we have noted some major challenges of doing things this way. Which locals should be put in charge?...

Another approach to “putting locals in the driver’s seat” is quite different. It comes down to acknowledging that as funders, we will always be outsiders, so we should focus on helping with what we’re good at helping with and leave the rest up to locals...

It’s not that we think global health and nutrition are the only important, or even the most important, problems in the developing world. It’s that we’re trying to focus on what we can do well, and thus maximally empower people to make locally-driven progress on other fronts.

Whether this is a ‘good’ answer would depend on your audience, but I think one true answer from a typical EA would be ‘I care about those things too, but I think that the global poor/nonhuman animals/future generations are even more excluded from decision-making (and therefore ignored) than POC/women/LGBT groups are, so that’s where I focus my limited time and money’.

I don’t actually think the cause area challenge is quite what is going on here; I can easily imagine advancing those things being considered cause areas if they had a stronger case.

I think for many it would depend on what the Harvard Law grad actually did as a profession, eg - are you a corporate lawyer (class traitor) or a human rights lawyer (not class traitor).

This is consistent with my experience. But also, I think a lot of people that end up at HLS don't think in those sort of Marxist/socialist class terms, but rather just have a sort of strong Rawslian egalitarianism commitment.

I also think many people at HLS are hilariously unaware of their class privilege. In fact, many of them think of themselves as victims of unfair power structures vis-a-vis being students. This is how you get HLS grads advocating for their student loans to be forgiven by the federal government (this was truly a fashionable position when I was there) or generally spending their time advocating for HLS students getting better treatment. For example, there were at least two student groups [1] [2] advocating for HLS students to get better financial treatment The second one explicitly focuses on how large law firms (starting salary: $180-190k) treat early-career lawyers.

Great post! I think this is an issue worth a lot of exploration. My sense though—both from reacting to your post and from my own reflection—is that there is probably a pretty low ceiling in terms of how much is possible here. I'll speak from my own experience as both a fan of EA and as a leftist.

1. It seems to me that EA, right now, has two areas of congregation (very broadly speaking): university/city groups and professional networking circles. So if you're involved in EA you're probably one of the following: a student, someone with a pretty niche expertise, or someone in between. You might have a graduate degree from a top university, and you might be a serious contender for some pretty "big" jobs at important institutions. Pretty much, you (might be, obviously this is a generalization) a member of the "professional-managerial class" (PMC). This class status—which is distinct from working-class and capital owner—is, I think, always what EA will be and, therefore, will always appear (understandably) as "elitist" to leftists who are sensitive to working-class politics. To many leftists, EA will always appear like a niche intellectual exercise that is being done by members of the PMC, and will never be truly available to members of the working-class, who leftists view as the true source of political power. 

2. Smaller point, but I would distinguish between progressives (say, like Elizabeth Warren or Ezra Klein) and leftists (like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Bruenig). These two groups have similarities but are different in one of the most important ways: their views on capitalism. The former is more likely, it seems, to be interested in EA (especially people like Klein who of course already likes EA), but the latter will never be fully  into EA because EA, generally speaking, does not make fundamental critiques of global capitalism. You can work on things like diversity, equity, and inclusion, but a failure to criticize capital will lead to a dead-end in how many people on the left are interested because that's what the left is.  

So, I guess my point is that although I think this is important, unless you can make EA look more like a working-class movement (or at least less like a movement created by and ran by the PMC) then there will never be much overlap between leftists and EAs. 

As both an EA and a leftist myself, this is of course very troubling to me if true! 

Discussion of progressive ordinal speciesism on the latest 80,000 Hours podcast:

Robert Wiblin: What’s something important that your political fellow travelers get really wrong, in your view?

Ezra Klein: Animal rights. Maybe since I’ve already said that, you want me to do a different one. But I do first want to say just animal rights.

Ezra Klein: I think this is just a tremendous quantity of suffering that a political movement that thinks of itself as concerned with suffering ignores. Not only ignores, but mocks and dismisses. A lot of people who think of themselves as good on all these issues, you say, “Well, how about we don’t torture so many chickens?” They’re like, “Oh, you crazy vegan.”

Robert Wiblin: Yeah.

Ezra Klein: I really don’t like it. I think it’s a way we teach ourselves to be less compassionate.

Thanks for writing! This definitely helped clarify some of the push-back I often get when trying to explain these ideas to friends.

For reasons that elude my comprehension, many progressives do not seem to conceptualize the current assortment of economic and legal policies that cause some countries to be ~100x richer than others to be a relevant form of oppression. If they do, they are unlikely to give it as high a priority as, e.g., within-country racial disparities or within-country economic inequality. 

This will definitely stick with me. It seems the only way to get around this contradiction is to just not think about it, but maybe I'm missing something?

EAs tend to reject person-affecting views of population ethics. This, however, has uncomfortable implications for some hot-button issues on the left, like reproductive rights and environmental ethics.

I can see why left wing views on abortion would biased people against totalist views, because they do not want to accept the implication that someone's desire to abort their child could be 'outweighed' by the interests of a possible-person. And I guess totalism would also imply we should have more children, in contradiction to the idea that we should have fewer to protect the environment. But it would naively seem that being concerned about the environment would make you more amenable to longtermist views (as distinct from totalism), because if you don't care about future people then most of the damage from climate change can be ignored.

Perhaps overlooked take? (Somewhat echoing other commenters, though)

US politics is supremely polarised. Those self-identifying as progressive are mainly motivated by opposing the right, and vice versa.

EA doesn’t particularly focus on labelling the biggest issues as problems that are the “fault” of the right (or left).

Thus our reasoned and goal-driven approach will leave people on each side cold.

But conversely, I think some of the steps suggested, could, at the very least, make outreach to people to the right of center or (‘anti-woke’) more difficult.

E.g., “ commitment to using my class privilege…” narratives.

I think of the intersectionality/social justice/anti-oppression cluster as being a bit more specific than just 'progressive' so I will only discuss the specific cluster. Through activism, I met many people in this cluster. I myself am quite sympathetic to the ideology. 

But I have to ask: How do you hold this ideology while attending Harvard Law? From this perspective, Harvard law is a seat of the existing oppressive power structure and you are choosing to become part of this power structure by attending. The privileges that come from attending Harvard Law are enormous. Harvard law graduates earn extremely high salaries (even the starting salaries are high)and often end up with very high net worths. Harvard law is also obviously strongly connected to many parts of the neoliberal capitalist system. 

From a certain perspective being a leftist at Harvard law can be viewed as trying to become some sort of 'class traitor' to the neoliberal elite. This does not seem like the obvious thing to do from a leftist perspective. Much leftist analysis would suggest that it's much more likely you just end up part of the neo-liberal power structure instead of subverting it. 

In your experience how do these people resolve the contradiction?

Also, I wanted to ask for more evidence for “EAs tend to reject person-affecting views of population ethics”.

I am personally fairy sympathetic to this view, at least in a common sense moderated version as suggested by Michael st Jules. I know some prominent voices (Wiblin) seem to favor the totalist view, but my impression is that they typically they moderate this with “but even if you have other views of population ethics we think the recommendations are similar”.

Great discussion of Econ Aversion from Julia Wise here: https://juliawise.net/economics-not-as-bad-as-i-thought/

Thanks for the article, interesting and well-written. I'm sure will be useful as a reference for me in some future conversations.

With reference to your section titled Incompatibility Between Intersectionality and Prioritization - how do you see worldview diversification fitting in?

To me, this perspective incorporates the value of diversification of causes (which intersectionality protects) whilst still being realistic about actually getting things done (which prioritization protects).  Under a worldview diversification lens, prioritization is less about one thing to the exclusion of all others, whilst still not going as far as to say all causes are equal and should have an equal place at the table.

Thanks for this great post. I'm closer to left-libertarian or classical liberal myself, but I have many friends and family (mostly in the US) who are more traditional progressives and much more sympathetic to typical social justice concerns than to EA. I agree with many of the issues identified here (including in the comments); my own experience has been that it is largely that they want to be able to "walk and chew gum at the same time". As an economist, I'm imbued with notions like opportunity cost and only being able to optimize one goal at a time (potentially itself an aggregation of course), but this is very foreign and off-putting to them. Either they don't understand the size of the actual disparities between issues, or... well actually I'm not sure, it's hard for me to wrap my head around.

However I particularly wanted to mention an illuminating recent post by Matt Yglesias (who came up elsewhere in the comments) on his substack:  https://www.slowboring.com/p/slate-star-codex 

The main topic is distinct, but from "The radicalism of effective altruism" onward it is very relevant and informative. On the one hand Yglesias is criticizing the journalist's progressive critique of EA, SSC, Silicon Valley, etc. On the other hand Yglesias (who is definitely on the left, and who likes evidence and reason a lot) doesn't end up very sympathetic to EA himself. He thinks of it as purely consequentialist, extreme, etc. Even if it's hard to attract some full-on progressives, someone like him should be exactly the type of person who  supports EA. Something has gone wrong with the messaging if that isn't the case, and we are missing out.

I found this helpful, I'm in a similar situation of moving from "social justice" (mainly concerned with homelessness in my own city) to Effective Altruism, and so am trying to think of good ways to engage people/slightly concerned that if we don't phrase things in the correct way the left may try to destroy us.

I wonder if talking about the causes of international economic inequality makes it seem more like an issue of injustice to be addressed from a progressive/social justice framework? That's one way I'd frame the issue when talking about EA principles to a left-of-centre audience.  I don't subscribe to a zero-sum view of development in which all wealth is taken from someone else, but it's undeniable that most currently wealthy nations benefitted from colonialism at the expense of the rest of the world, and we all continue to participate in an economic system that is pretty clearly constructed to benefit multinational corporations rather than individual producers. I'd  also argue that donating to effective charity should at least be part of living an ethical lifestyle, and that many of the other issues people may find more emotionally compelling, like human trafficking and exploitative employment, are primarily rooted in poverty. 

I also point out how basically everyone in the audience is in the top 10% globally, although I feel like this is probably less effective when talking to students since their wealth is mostly in the future. I've also found that the very progressive idea that everyone should be treated equally is one argument in favour of international aid, that x100 multiplier goes a long way! However, it is difficult to convince people that life for the poorest 10% of people in the world really is a lot worse than life for the poorest 10% of people in a wealthy country, although access to food, medicine and housing is probably the area that makes this clearest.

Also, use emotional appeals, although that's just good advice when trying to persuade humans generally, although ideally use this to support  rather than instead of facts and evidence, because we probably can't win solely based on emotional appeals. This is obviously easiest in the context of global health, AMF has loads of pictures of smiling children holding mosquito nets, and GiveDirectly has loads of personal stories of how people actually spent the money.

Helpful post!

What makes you say rejecting person-affecting views has uncomfortable (for progressive) and environmental ethics, out of curiosity? I would have thought the opposite: person-affecting views struggle not to treat environmental collapse as morally neutral if it leads to a different set of people existing than would have otherwise.

From this perspective, a corporate lawyer who went to Harvard is not a class traitor. They are just acting in their own class interests.