I think a lot of these criticisms are very valid. Many of them are stuff I had been thinking about but your post does a really good job of explaining them better than I ever could.
I guess I have a somewhat unique take on the whole EA thing, since I’m one of the few (probably) non-white people here. I’d be happy to elaborate if you wish.
Well, I honestly can’t tell if my perspective is because I’m not white, or if it’s just because I’m an anomaly. But this paragraph is very worrying to me:
Effective altruists are not very humanistically aware either. EA came out of analytic philosophy and spread from there to math and computer science. As such, they are too hasty to dismiss many arguments as moral-relativist postmodernist fluff, e.g. that effective altruists are promoting cultural imperialism by forcing a Westernized conception of “the good” onto people they’re trying to help.
Regardless of the validity of that statement, my concern is that promoting multiculturalism has the danger of backlash i.e. by encouring too much tolerance of other cultures, you alienate a large fraction of people (this goes back to your ‘community problems’ point). I’ve been seeing this go on over the past decade in the West.
It has nothing to do with white people—it has to do with cross cultural misunderstandings in general. People just use the word “white” frequently because of certain implicit assumptions about the racial / cultural background of the audience.
Anyway, let me give you an example of when this sort of thing actually happens: In India, there used to be religious figures called Devadasis. They are analogous to nuns in one sense—they get “married” to divinity, and never take a human spouse. Unlike nuns, they are trained in music and dancing. In medieval India, music, dancing, and sexual services were all lumped under the same general category...as in, there was a large overlap between dancers, musicians, and sex workers, and this was widely recognized. (This is not really true today, but if you watch really old Indian movies you can see remnants of this association). We can presume that many of the Devadasis engaged in sex work. It should be noted that they also had a high social status, which allows us to further infer that the sex work probably didn’t involve intense coercion and probably wasn’t driven by extremely harsh economic pressures.
You can guess where this is going. The actual closest Western analogue to this phenomenon is “Courtesian”. However, the West had left “Courtesians” behind in the Renaissance era, and at the time of occupation they were in the Victorian era and the closest cultural analogue that came to mind was “prostitution”, which implies exploitation of women, low social status, etc.
To quote one of Eliezer’s stories, “it wasn’t prudery. It was a memory of disaster”… well, actually in this case it probably was prudery too… but I’m sure the humanitarian concerns were more salient. The British experience of sex work was negative, and the fact that the devadasi “marriages” were child marriages must have made it even more horrifying.
Of course, despite all the social reforms and laws that would-be humanitarians enacted, Devadasis continued to exist...except now they were primarily prostitutes, low status, criminal, and exploitable...and the whole thing continues to be a horrid affair to this day.
So I’d say the real problem is not the imposition of a Western conception of “good” onto others...in fact, I think humans share the “humanist” values of good and evil across cultures. (Although as far as I can tell, what constitutes conservative / traditional morality does seem to be culturally variable.)
The problem is that without cultural knowledge, you might easily misjudge good and evil because of incomplete information, even when both cultures are using the same basic metrics of good and evil...or you might just pick the wrong way of going about making improvements.
Well, I honestly can’t tell if my perspective is because I’m not white, or if it’s just because I’m an anomaly.
You could also write your perspective without having to worry about why exactly you have it.
I’d appreciate if you wrote more, specifically more details, so I have less to guess about what exactly you wanted to say. And I am curious about it. (In case this is a cultural thing, e.g. you feel it is impolite to express your opinions on a topic unless other people are constantly encouraging you to tell more, then you have my explicit encouragement to express your opinions fully, whether here or anywhere else on LW. And of course that includes the cases where you disagree with me.)
There seems to be this meme that white people are not aware of other cultures and are blinded to the realities of the world because they are rich and coddled and so on. It seems to be fashionable to point this out at any possible opportunity.
My impression is that in this particular community, emphasizing multiculturalism without some obvious instrumental benefit is if anything an anti-applause-light.
my concern is that promoting multiculturalism has the danger of backlash i.e. by encouring too much tolerance of other cultures, you alienate a large fraction of people (this goes back to your ‘community problems’ point). I’ve been seeing this go on over the past decade in the West.
I’d like to echo John Maxwell IV in asking for examples. Specifically if there’s a way you see EA becoming more humanistically aware in a way that is instrumentally useful to the object-level goal of doing good, but harmful to the meta-goal of growing the movement because it alienates a large fraction of their potential audience (and this is worse than their increased capacity to do good). I can’t come up with things that seem plausible to me, though this may be my brain being silly again.
I think a lot of these criticisms are very valid. Many of them are stuff I had been thinking about but your post does a really good job of explaining them better than I ever could.
I guess I have a somewhat unique take on the whole EA thing, since I’m one of the few (probably) non-white people here. I’d be happy to elaborate if you wish.
Yes, I’d love to hear you elaborate. More perspectives are great! (I’d also be happy to talk 1:1 if you’d prefer that to a public forum.)
Well, I honestly can’t tell if my perspective is because I’m not white, or if it’s just because I’m an anomaly. But this paragraph is very worrying to me:
There seems to be this meme that white people are not aware of other cultures and are blinded to the realities of the world because they are rich and coddled and so on. It seems to be fashionable to point this out at any possible opportunity..
Regardless of the validity of that statement, my concern is that promoting multiculturalism has the danger of backlash i.e. by encouring too much tolerance of other cultures, you alienate a large fraction of people (this goes back to your ‘community problems’ point). I’ve been seeing this go on over the past decade in the West.
It has nothing to do with white people—it has to do with cross cultural misunderstandings in general. People just use the word “white” frequently because of certain implicit assumptions about the racial / cultural background of the audience.
Anyway, let me give you an example of when this sort of thing actually happens: In India, there used to be religious figures called Devadasis. They are analogous to nuns in one sense—they get “married” to divinity, and never take a human spouse. Unlike nuns, they are trained in music and dancing. In medieval India, music, dancing, and sexual services were all lumped under the same general category...as in, there was a large overlap between dancers, musicians, and sex workers, and this was widely recognized. (This is not really true today, but if you watch really old Indian movies you can see remnants of this association). We can presume that many of the Devadasis engaged in sex work. It should be noted that they also had a high social status, which allows us to further infer that the sex work probably didn’t involve intense coercion and probably wasn’t driven by extremely harsh economic pressures.
You can guess where this is going. The actual closest Western analogue to this phenomenon is “Courtesian”. However, the West had left “Courtesians” behind in the Renaissance era, and at the time of occupation they were in the Victorian era and the closest cultural analogue that came to mind was “prostitution”, which implies exploitation of women, low social status, etc.
To quote one of Eliezer’s stories, “it wasn’t prudery. It was a memory of disaster”… well, actually in this case it probably was prudery too… but I’m sure the humanitarian concerns were more salient. The British experience of sex work was negative, and the fact that the devadasi “marriages” were child marriages must have made it even more horrifying.
Of course, despite all the social reforms and laws that would-be humanitarians enacted, Devadasis continued to exist...except now they were primarily prostitutes, low status, criminal, and exploitable...and the whole thing continues to be a horrid affair to this day.
So I’d say the real problem is not the imposition of a Western conception of “good” onto others...in fact, I think humans share the “humanist” values of good and evil across cultures. (Although as far as I can tell, what constitutes conservative / traditional morality does seem to be culturally variable.)
The problem is that without cultural knowledge, you might easily misjudge good and evil because of incomplete information, even when both cultures are using the same basic metrics of good and evil...or you might just pick the wrong way of going about making improvements.
Misjudging “the good” was essentially what I think the postmodernist-fluffy critics mean when they raise this objection. Thanks for the example!
You could also write your perspective without having to worry about why exactly you have it.
I’d appreciate if you wrote more, specifically more details, so I have less to guess about what exactly you wanted to say. And I am curious about it. (In case this is a cultural thing, e.g. you feel it is impolite to express your opinions on a topic unless other people are constantly encouraging you to tell more, then you have my explicit encouragement to express your opinions fully, whether here or anywhere else on LW. And of course that includes the cases where you disagree with me.)
My impression is that in this particular community, emphasizing multiculturalism without some obvious instrumental benefit is if anything an anti-applause-light.
I’d like to echo John Maxwell IV in asking for examples. Specifically if there’s a way you see EA becoming more humanistically aware in a way that is instrumentally useful to the object-level goal of doing good, but harmful to the meta-goal of growing the movement because it alienates a large fraction of their potential audience (and this is worse than their increased capacity to do good). I can’t come up with things that seem plausible to me, though this may be my brain being silly again.
Could you give an example or two?