Talk:Effective altruism/Archive 3

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Effective altruists (term)

@Recursing: Welcome to Wikipedia! In your edit summary for this edit, you wrote: ‎Usage of "effective altruist" as a noun is not very common for most people pursuing the goals of effective altruism. I don't know what is your verifiable evidence for that claim, but ample evidence that the usage of the term effective altruists (plural) as described is common enough in the published literature in general can be seen, for example, in the Google Scholar search results for the term. I have found many examples in other bibliographic databases as well over the past few years. More importantly, the term effective altruists is used repeatedly in this Wikipedia article, so it needs to be succinctly defined at the start to avoid confusion. Biogeographist (talk) 01:47, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Biogeographist thank you so much for all your work on Wikipedia!

I definitely agree that it's sometimes used, and it seems I was wrong in thinking its usage is "not very common".

But it still seems to me that not everyone uses that term, and I would keep "sometimes". I really don't know how to prove the negative that it's not always used, besides quoting internet forums and other non-reliable sources.

E.g. It seems to me that https://www.effectivealtruism.org, incl. https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-effective-altruism, and https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/ don't use the term, also I think this Google Scholar search result has articles using "effective altruism" but not "effective altruist(s)"

I'll leave it to you to consider if "sometimes" is an accurate characterization Recursing (talk) 10:30, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

"Such criticism has been described as not intellectual, but visceral"

Asto77 added the following sentence, which I removed:

Such criticism has been described as not intellectual, but visceral.

What the cited source says is: "Effective altruism has many enemies, and while there are certainly philosophical arguments against it, much of the opposition is not intellectual but visceral." I find it difficult to accept this as worthy of an encyclopedia article, because it's just a claim in an opinion column in a student newspaper and is unsupported by evidence. The author fails to provide examples of opposition that "is not intellectual but visceral". Perhaps there's a Wikipedia guideline that's relevant, but my memory fails me at the moment. Biogeographist (talk) 03:23, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. You are right. It's an interesting and probably a true point, but there are not enough good refs. to include. Asto77 (talk) 09:52, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

Now my brain is more awake and I realize that WP:RS is basically the relevant guideline. Biogeographist (talk) 16:13, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

References

Heading "EA choices sometimes unpalatable"

I removed the "EA choices sometimes unpalatable" heading that Asto77 recently added. It doesn't strike me as a good summary because it's very WP:POV: Whose choices? Unpalatable to whom? And the subheading was at the beginning of the "Impartiality" section, and I'm not sure that the introduction to the section needs a subheading at all. For now, I moved all the relevant content under the "Criticism of impartiality" subheading. By the way, MacAskill's response to the Picasso scenario in 2015, recounted in that section, was obviously very utilitarian, but I'm not sure that he would give such a (dogmatically?) utilitarian response today about how effective altruists should behave in that scenario, judging based on how he has been more assiduous about differentiating EA from utilitarianism in more recent writings, e.g. in the International Encyclopedia of Ethics article on EA. Biogeographist (talk) 18:31, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

I am not the only one who has noticed the discrepancy between MacAskill's response to the Picasso scenario and his later writings on EA: see this comment in the EA Forum. If MacAskill has somewhere explicitly responded to this discrepancy, it would be great to add a sentence about it to the relevant paragraph in this Wikipedia article. Biogeographist (talk) 22:30, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

"Differences from utilitarianism" section

Asto77 added the following text under the heading "EA differences from utilitarianism":

Some argue that utilitarianism "commands" people to do good, whereas under EA some people have a "duty" or "obligation" to do good.

Toby Ord has contrasted utilitarians as "number-crunching" with most effective altruists being "guided by conventional wisdom tempered by an eye to the numbers".

References

I removed this because I don't think it says anything clear and important about the difference between EA and utilitarianism. But I agree it would be useful to have a subsection about this under "Impartiality". I don't have time to rewrite this now but will try to get to it soon. If you have other suggestions about such a section before I return, feel free to provide them here. I haven't yet read MacAskill's chapter in the Norton Introduction to Ethics that is cited, but I have read his chapters in the International Encyclopedia of Ethics and in Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues, which were published around the same time. With all these sources (and perhaps others), we can write something better. Biogeographist (talk) 02:55, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

OK, I read MacAskill's chapter in the Norton Introduction to Ethics, and actually I didn't find it helpful on this issue, because in that chapter he's just arguing for obligations that could motivate people to pursue the goals of effective altruism, even though he notes at the beginning: "As defined by the leaders of the movement [...] effective altruism is a project, rather than a set of normative commitments." So it's like he's saying that EA as prominently defined doesn't make claims about obligations, but he's going to argue for claims about obligations that would make one want to engage in the project of EA. In contrast, there are (at least) a couple of other publications by MacAskill that I mentioned above that explicitly address the issue of differences from utilitarianism. I added a sentence in this edit that may satisfactorily address the issue based on those sources. Biogeographist (talk) 20:57, 1 January 2024 (UTC)