In a since deleted thread on another site, I wrote
For the OG effective altruists, it’s imperative to rebrand the kooky ultra-utilitarianists as something else. TESCREAL is the term adopted by their opponents.
Looks like great minds think alike! The EA’s need to up their google juice so people searching for the term find malaria nets, not FTX. Good luck on that, Scott!
The HN comments are ok, with this hilarious sentence
I go to LessWrong, ACX, and sometimes EA meetups. Why? Mainly because it’s like the HackerNews comment section but in person.
What’s the German term for a recommendation that’s the exact opposite?
Wrote this right on the SSC reddit:
Couldn’t a very similar argument be made in favor of the Catholic Church though? After all they’ve founded thousands of hospitals and such. They’re very big on charitable giving. Are people unfair by judging the Catholic Church mostly on its religious doctrine and political activism instead of its charitable works?
And like the Catholic Church, they have sexual assault scandals
The real draw of EA/utilitarianism is abstracting away the need to make difficult ethical decisions by just throwing money at things and feeling good about it.
For example, to paraphrase the article: “I don’t want to grapple with the structural issues facing the US that lead to gun violence. Instead, if I look at the number of people killed by guns and save the same amount of people from dying from malaria, that’s equivalent and I can stop thinking about it, right?”
This whole article is a tactical blunder. He keeps bringing up the 200000 lives saved from malaria. That’s good! If you proved to me that an organization saved 200k lives, I wouldn’t have any animosity towards them unless you gave me a reason. Cue the rest of the commentary.
The irony in all this is that if they just dropped the utilitarianism and were just honest about feelings guiding their decision making, they could be tolerable. “I’m not terribly versed in the details of the gun violence issue, but I did care about malaria enough to donate to some functional causes.” Ok, fine, you’re now instantly just a normal person.
