Comments
I haven't seen such a resource. It would be nice.
My pet criticism of EA (forums) is that EAs seem a bit unkind, and that LWers seem a bit more unkind and often not very rationalist. I think I'm one of the most hardcore EA/rationalists you'll ever meet, but I often feel unwelcome when I dare to speak.
Like:
- I see somebody has a comment with -69 karma. An obvious outsider asking a question with some unfair assumptions about EA. Yes, it was brash and rude, but no one but me actually answered him.
- I write an article (that is not critical of any EA ideas) and, after many revisions, ask for feedback. The first two people who come along downvote it, without giving any feedback. If you downvote an article with 104 points and leave, it means you dislike it or disagree. If you downvote an article with 4 points and leave, it means you dislike it, you want the algorithm to hide it from others, you want the author to feel bad, and you don't want them to know why. If you are not aware that it makes people feel bad, you're demonstrating my point.
- I always say what I think is true and I always try to say it reasonably. But if it's critical of something, I often get downvote instead of a disagree (often without comment).
- I describe a pet idea that I've been working on for several years on LW (I built multiple web sites for it with hundreds of pages, published NuGet packages, the works). I think it works toward solving an important problem, but when I share it on LW the only people who comment say they don't like it, and sound dismissive. To their credit, they do try to explain to me why they don't like it, but they also downvote me, so I become far too distraught to try to figure out what they were trying to communicate.
- I write a critical comment (hypocrisy on my part? Maybe, but it was in response to a critical article that simply assumes the worst interpretation of what a certain community leader said, and then spends many pages discussing the implications of the obvious trueness of that assumption.) This one is weird: I get voted down to -12 with no replies, then after a few hours it's up to 16 or so. I understand this one―it was part of a battle between two factions of EA―but man that whole drama was scary. I guess that's just reflective of Bay Area or American culture, but it's scary! I don't want scary!
Look, I know I'm too thin-skinned. I was once unable to work for an entire day due to a single downvote (I asked my boss to take it from my vacation days). But wouldn't you expect an altruist to be sensitive? So, I would like us to work on being nicer, or something. Now if you'll excuse me... I don't know I'll get back into a working mood so I can get Friday's work done by Monday.
The EA forum has tags. The one for criticisms of effective altruism is here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/criticism-of-effective-altruism
Beyond that, here are some criticisms I've heard or made. Hope it helps:
Preliminaries:
Criticism outlines:
Finally, for global health, something which keeps me up at night is the possiblity that subsaharan Africa is trapped in a malthusian equilibrium, where further aid only increases the population which increases suffering.
Here are some caveats/counterpoints:
Another important caveat is that the criticisms you mention are not common from people evaluating the effective altruism framework from the outside when allocating their donations or orienting their careers.
The criticisms you mention come from people who have spent a lot of time in the community, and usually (but not exclusively) from those of us who have been rejected from job applications, denied funding, or had bad social experiences/cultural fit with the social community.
This doesn't necessarily make them less valid, but seems to be a meaningfully different topic from what this post is about. Someone altruistically deciding how much money to give to which charity is unlikely to be worried about whether they will be seduced into believing that they would be cherished members of a community.
People evaluating effective altruism "from the outside" instead mention things like the paternalism and unintended consequences, that it doesn't care about biodiversity, that quantification is perilous, that socialism is better, or that capitalism is better.
Note that I do agree with many of your criticisms of the community[1], but I believe it's important to remember that the vast majority of people evaluating effective altruism are not in the EA social community and don't care much about it, and we should probably flag our potential bias when criticizing an organization after being denied funding or rejected from it (while still expressing that useful criticism.)
I would also add Ben Kuhn's "pretending to try" critique from 11 years ago, which I assume shares some points with your unpublished "My experience with a Potemkin Effective Altruism group"
I found 1 unpopular EA post discussing your last point of the malthusian risk involved with global health aid in subsaharan Africa, and I'm unsure why this topic isn't discussed more frequently on this forum. The post also mentions a study that found that East Africa may currently be in a malthusian trap such that a charity contributing to population growth in this region could have negative utility and be doing more harm than good.
Seems like a pretty niche worry, I wouldn't read too much into it not being discussed much. It's just that if true it does provide a reason to discount global health and development deeply.