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Reviewing |
Reviewer: Xx78900 ( talk · contribs) 09:16, 23 August 2022 (UTC)
Hey, I'm gonna review this for you. I was only just thinking yesterday I was going to buy a book on this topic, so this seems like a nice intro for me.
Xx78900 (
talk)
09:16, 23 August 2022 (UTC)
Firstly, I'm going to take a quick look at the two failed noms, and check for unresolved issues.
Prominent effective altruists include Peter Singer, Toby Ord, and William MacAskill.
Prominent philosophers influential to the movement include Peter Singer, Toby Ord, and William MacAskill.
Effective altruist organizations such as Open Philanthropy prioritize evaluate causes by following the importance, tractability, and neglectedness framework (ITN framework).
Effective altruist organizations prioritize cause areas by following the importance, tractability, and neglectedness framework.
Having now read the article in its entirety and having checked with the previous reviews and their comments, I'm going to be honest and say that I am extremely skeptical that this article can be brought up to standard within the next week, and as a result I am quickfailing it. There is simply too much missing/wrong here.
GA review – see WP:WIAGA for criteria
Thanks for the GA review! I feel vindicated in my disapproval of the direction this article has taken in recent revisions. I agree with the reviewer that there is not nearly enough [emphasis] on its philosophical backing
. The philosophy section was trimmed to the bone in recent revisions. Previous versions of the philosophy section may not have been adequate enough, but at least they had more content. The reviewer noted: "Anti-capitalist and institutional critiques" was mentioned by the second reviewer as warranting its own third level sub-heading, but all reference to such has been removed from the article, with no equivalent to replace it.
This may have been part of the trend in recent revisions to strip out as much philosophy as possible.
Biogeographist (
talk)
20:54, 23 August 2022 (UTC)
Hey Xx78900 thanks for the review! Really appreciate your time, and the feedback is super helpful. I do intend to keep working on this and will definitely take you up on your offer to tag you in for a more detailed review once we've addressed the current issues. Hope you don't mind me asking for a few clarifications to guide us as we continue to improve the article.
1. You said the donation section is badly in need of a rewrite. Can you explain what needs to be better? Is it difficult to read? Does it have the wrong content?
2. It seemed to me that the history section in previous versions was inaccurate and made it sound like effective altruism was started by Will MacAskill and CEA, ignoring other history such as the contributions of Singer, and I spent some time trying to fix this before going up for good article review again. What should be done to make it less "highly questionable"? Should parts of it be removed?
3. Can you explain a little more about what you think is wrong with the lede? Are there parts of the lede that should be cut? Parts of the article that should appear in the lede?
4. Can you give some examples of the kind of philosophical content that you think the article is missing?
5. Can you give some examples of parts of the article that are "extremely lacking" and "brimming with filler"?
6. Can you provide some sort of guideline or example to give us a better sense of what people and organizations should be mentioned and what shouldn't?
Finally, I want to note that I moved the anti-capitalist and institutional critiques (the subsection you mentioned was missing from Philosophy) to the end of the cost-effectiveness section, following WP:CRIT by folding it into where I thought it was the most relevant.
Thanks again! Ruthgrace ( talk) 07:02, 16 September 2022 (UTC)
This isn't true. I'm unsure what evidence is admissable here, but I can provide 10s of millions of dollars of funding towards institutional and structural change:
- pandemic preparedness candidates. https://puck.news/inside-s-b-f-s-12-million-long-shot/
- shifting philanthropy to focus on outcomes
- givedirectly pushing cash transfers
- the uptake of antimalarials and deworming worldwide. Nathan PM Young ( talk) 17:28, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
I have some miscellaneous ideas for restructuring and improving the article, although I don't have time to implement all of them right now.
I've already implemented the following changes:
General feedback:
Others include people who don't exist yet as possible beneficiaries and try to promote the long-term well-being of humanity by, for example, reducing risks to civilization, humans, and planet Earth.
Those who subscribe to longtermism include future generations as possible beneficiaries and try to improve the moral value of the long-term future by, for example, reducing existential risks.
"long-term well-being of humanity"to
"moral value of the long-term future"to reflect this.
Qzekrom (she/her • talk) 16:32, 16 September 2022 (UTC)
We should explain in greater detail why AI safety and biosecurity are considered top priorities by longtermistsRuthgrace ( talk) 19:07, 24 September 2022 (UTC)
My understanding is that Meuhlhauser, 2013, "Four Focus Areas of Effective Altruism" is a very important essay in the field of effective altruism. It was recently removed from the page by Biogeographist and Greyfell as an Internet Forum. The guideline says, "Content from websites whose content is largely user-generated is generally unacceptable." The Effective Altruism Forum is a place where users generate content, but it is where many of the most important essays in the field are published. It seems odd to remove the content for a topic because the leading thinkers on that topic choose to publish their works on a certain venue, and there is still much user-generated content, such as Tweets, cited on Wikipedia. I think this should be an exception to the "generally" rule-of-thumb. What do others think, ideally those with subject matter expertise? Jmill1806 ( talk) 12:52, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
News related to the above discussion: Earlier this month, Google Scholar has started to return some EA Forum posts for some searches. This is relatively unusual, as Google Scholar only very rarely returns results from any fora. While this does strongly support that some articles on the EA Forum don't fall into the same category as other forum posts, this does not necessarily mean that we may use EA Forum posts that are listed on Google Scholar as a proper reliable source. According to WP:SCHOLARSHIP, EA Forum posts might still fail in terms of citation counts (although articles with no citation counts may still count as a reliable source in some situations). They may also count as WP:PREPRINT, which makes them generally unsuitable — but, in some cases, WP:SPS does apply, meaning isolated EA Forum posts may arguably be considered reliable. If we honestly can't cite something except by going through the EA Forum, and if the EA Forum article is listed by Google Scholar, and if the author has other articles listed by Google Scholar, then I think there may be a good argument for citing the EA Forum in that specific case. — Eric Herboso 15:36, 10 November 2022 (UTC)
Long-form Effective Altruism posts should be citable. They're much more similar to academic papers than to Reddit posts, often coming with their own citations and peer review. Papers published in scientific journals are also "user-edited", so clearly discretion is intended with regards to this Wikipedia guideline. I agree that the Effective Altruism forum *looks* like a traditional internet forum, but what matters is the content and the process used to generate that content, not the aesthetics. KingSupernova ( talk) 05:32, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
Papers published in scientific journals are also "user-edited". No, they're not; they are edited by selected experts. And nobody is claiming that
the aestheticsof the EA Forum is the problem! The process is the problem. EA Forum posts, long-form or not, are not automatically reliable sources. Biogeographist ( talk) 16:44, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
This article seems unduly slanted towards more theoretical and academic aspects of its subject. At this point in time, effective altruism is most notable for its association with FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried. Relegating discussion of that association to a criticism section seems to give undue weight to other less notable aspects of effective altruism. Discussing a philosophy that is primarily known for its real world impact and associations should give due and substantial weight to that impact and those associations.
Just Nogburt ( talk) 15:24, 19 March 2023 (UTC)
the millions of lives the movement ruined? {{ Citation needed}}, my friend. Also, the comment to which you are responding is outdated; it refers to an older version of the article, and the article has been restructured since then. Biogeographist ( talk) 22:33, 7 June 2023 (UTC)
Can the Point Of View maintenance template at the top of the article now be removed ? Alenoach ( talk) 04:09, 24 July 2023 (UTC)
An edit to the lead section that I reverted equated effective altruism with utilitarianism. This is not correct; for example:
Many take effective altruism to be synonymous with utilitarianism, the normative theory according to which an act is right if and only if it produces no less well‐being than any available act (see UTILITARIANISM; WELL‐BEING). This is a category mistake. Effective altruism is not utilitarianism, nor is it any other normative theory or claim. Instead, effective altruism is the project of using evidence and reason to try to find out how to do the most good, and on this basis trying to do the most good [...] Since effective altruism is a project rather than a normative claim, it is possible for one to both adopt this project as well as accept a nonwelfarist conception of the good (or indeed to adopt multiple projects, some of which involve promoting welfarist good and some of which involve promoting nonwelfarist good).
— Pummer, Theron; MacAskill, William (June 2020). "Effective altruism". In LaFollette, Hugh (ed.). International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. pp. 1–9. doi: 10.1002/9781444367072.wbiee883. ISBN 9781444367072. OCLC 829259960. S2CID 241220220.
Biogeographist ( talk) 22:54, 29 November 2023 (UTC)
@
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)
Asto77 added the following sentence, which I removed:
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)
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
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)
As seen in the "criticism" section above on this talk page, the "criticism" section of the article appears to have been added not due to any particular criticism that was noteworthy enough to address, but simply because an editor felt that the article "needed" a criticism section, and then went looking for criticisms to support it. This is an... odd approach to editing, to say the least. Many articles on Wikipedia about various philosophies and social movements do not include any particular "criticism" section, so there is no a-priori need for one here.
Of course if there are noteworthy criticisms of the movement, then they should be mentioned, and indeed there are quite a few mentioned in the "controversies", "criticisms of impartiality", "notable publications and media", "criticisms of cause prioritization", "cost-effectiveness", "incremental versus systemic change", "long-term future and global catastrophic risks", "founding effective organizations", and "other prominent people" sections, along with the last paragraph of the introduction. In fact, out of 28 total sections and subsections of the article, 13 of them contain criticism of Effective Altruism. This is a substantially larger fraction than in comparable articles.
Many of those criticisms are reasonable and well-cited. In contrast, three out of the four criticisms in the standalone "criticisms" section are nonsensical.
These criticisms are embarrassing. At best they fail a cursory check for basic logical validity, at worst they are actively deceptive. I have removed them.
(The accusation of hypocrisy for high spending and the purchase of Wytham Abbey actually makes sense, so I left it alone.)
KingSupernova ( talk) 06:49, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
"Using math to justify actions" describes every technical field, everis as biased a misinterpretation of that sentence as anything that was in the criticism section. The point of that poorly written sentence (and it was even more poorly written before I edited it, although clearly it wasn't edited enough if it could be misinterpreted so badly) is the "being used to justify self-serving spending" part, not the "math" part. There may be something worth salvaging there, but as I didn't add that sentence myself I'm not very motivated to try to fix it. I haven't critically examined the other objections above, which I hope are not as wrongheaded as the
"Using math to justify actions"misinterpretation. Biogeographist ( talk) 17:16, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
Asto77 added the following text under the heading "EA differences from utilitarianism":
Some argue that utilitarianism "commands" people to do good, [1] whereas under EA some people have a "duty" or "obligation" to do good. [2] [3]
Toby Ord has contrasted utilitarians as "number-crunching" with most effective altruists being "guided by conventional wisdom tempered by an eye to the numbers". [4]
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)
I hesitate to remove "With approximately 7,000 people active in the effective altruism community" from the introduction. Not that the source is unreliable, but I just don't think these approximations can be very precise, notably given that it's unclear how to determine if someone is active in the community. On the other hand, even an imprecise approximation may be considered relevant information for readers. Alenoach ( talk) 22:34, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
![]() | Effective altruism was a Philosophy and religion good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake. | |||||||||||||||
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Current status: Former good article nominee |
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GA toolbox |
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Reviewing |
Reviewer: Xx78900 ( talk · contribs) 09:16, 23 August 2022 (UTC)
Hey, I'm gonna review this for you. I was only just thinking yesterday I was going to buy a book on this topic, so this seems like a nice intro for me.
Xx78900 (
talk)
09:16, 23 August 2022 (UTC)
Firstly, I'm going to take a quick look at the two failed noms, and check for unresolved issues.
Prominent effective altruists include Peter Singer, Toby Ord, and William MacAskill.
Prominent philosophers influential to the movement include Peter Singer, Toby Ord, and William MacAskill.
Effective altruist organizations such as Open Philanthropy prioritize evaluate causes by following the importance, tractability, and neglectedness framework (ITN framework).
Effective altruist organizations prioritize cause areas by following the importance, tractability, and neglectedness framework.
Having now read the article in its entirety and having checked with the previous reviews and their comments, I'm going to be honest and say that I am extremely skeptical that this article can be brought up to standard within the next week, and as a result I am quickfailing it. There is simply too much missing/wrong here.
GA review – see WP:WIAGA for criteria
Thanks for the GA review! I feel vindicated in my disapproval of the direction this article has taken in recent revisions. I agree with the reviewer that there is not nearly enough [emphasis] on its philosophical backing
. The philosophy section was trimmed to the bone in recent revisions. Previous versions of the philosophy section may not have been adequate enough, but at least they had more content. The reviewer noted: "Anti-capitalist and institutional critiques" was mentioned by the second reviewer as warranting its own third level sub-heading, but all reference to such has been removed from the article, with no equivalent to replace it.
This may have been part of the trend in recent revisions to strip out as much philosophy as possible.
Biogeographist (
talk)
20:54, 23 August 2022 (UTC)
Hey Xx78900 thanks for the review! Really appreciate your time, and the feedback is super helpful. I do intend to keep working on this and will definitely take you up on your offer to tag you in for a more detailed review once we've addressed the current issues. Hope you don't mind me asking for a few clarifications to guide us as we continue to improve the article.
1. You said the donation section is badly in need of a rewrite. Can you explain what needs to be better? Is it difficult to read? Does it have the wrong content?
2. It seemed to me that the history section in previous versions was inaccurate and made it sound like effective altruism was started by Will MacAskill and CEA, ignoring other history such as the contributions of Singer, and I spent some time trying to fix this before going up for good article review again. What should be done to make it less "highly questionable"? Should parts of it be removed?
3. Can you explain a little more about what you think is wrong with the lede? Are there parts of the lede that should be cut? Parts of the article that should appear in the lede?
4. Can you give some examples of the kind of philosophical content that you think the article is missing?
5. Can you give some examples of parts of the article that are "extremely lacking" and "brimming with filler"?
6. Can you provide some sort of guideline or example to give us a better sense of what people and organizations should be mentioned and what shouldn't?
Finally, I want to note that I moved the anti-capitalist and institutional critiques (the subsection you mentioned was missing from Philosophy) to the end of the cost-effectiveness section, following WP:CRIT by folding it into where I thought it was the most relevant.
Thanks again! Ruthgrace ( talk) 07:02, 16 September 2022 (UTC)
This isn't true. I'm unsure what evidence is admissable here, but I can provide 10s of millions of dollars of funding towards institutional and structural change:
- pandemic preparedness candidates. https://puck.news/inside-s-b-f-s-12-million-long-shot/
- shifting philanthropy to focus on outcomes
- givedirectly pushing cash transfers
- the uptake of antimalarials and deworming worldwide. Nathan PM Young ( talk) 17:28, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
I have some miscellaneous ideas for restructuring and improving the article, although I don't have time to implement all of them right now.
I've already implemented the following changes:
General feedback:
Others include people who don't exist yet as possible beneficiaries and try to promote the long-term well-being of humanity by, for example, reducing risks to civilization, humans, and planet Earth.
Those who subscribe to longtermism include future generations as possible beneficiaries and try to improve the moral value of the long-term future by, for example, reducing existential risks.
"long-term well-being of humanity"to
"moral value of the long-term future"to reflect this.
Qzekrom (she/her • talk) 16:32, 16 September 2022 (UTC)
We should explain in greater detail why AI safety and biosecurity are considered top priorities by longtermistsRuthgrace ( talk) 19:07, 24 September 2022 (UTC)
My understanding is that Meuhlhauser, 2013, "Four Focus Areas of Effective Altruism" is a very important essay in the field of effective altruism. It was recently removed from the page by Biogeographist and Greyfell as an Internet Forum. The guideline says, "Content from websites whose content is largely user-generated is generally unacceptable." The Effective Altruism Forum is a place where users generate content, but it is where many of the most important essays in the field are published. It seems odd to remove the content for a topic because the leading thinkers on that topic choose to publish their works on a certain venue, and there is still much user-generated content, such as Tweets, cited on Wikipedia. I think this should be an exception to the "generally" rule-of-thumb. What do others think, ideally those with subject matter expertise? Jmill1806 ( talk) 12:52, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
News related to the above discussion: Earlier this month, Google Scholar has started to return some EA Forum posts for some searches. This is relatively unusual, as Google Scholar only very rarely returns results from any fora. While this does strongly support that some articles on the EA Forum don't fall into the same category as other forum posts, this does not necessarily mean that we may use EA Forum posts that are listed on Google Scholar as a proper reliable source. According to WP:SCHOLARSHIP, EA Forum posts might still fail in terms of citation counts (although articles with no citation counts may still count as a reliable source in some situations). They may also count as WP:PREPRINT, which makes them generally unsuitable — but, in some cases, WP:SPS does apply, meaning isolated EA Forum posts may arguably be considered reliable. If we honestly can't cite something except by going through the EA Forum, and if the EA Forum article is listed by Google Scholar, and if the author has other articles listed by Google Scholar, then I think there may be a good argument for citing the EA Forum in that specific case. — Eric Herboso 15:36, 10 November 2022 (UTC)
Long-form Effective Altruism posts should be citable. They're much more similar to academic papers than to Reddit posts, often coming with their own citations and peer review. Papers published in scientific journals are also "user-edited", so clearly discretion is intended with regards to this Wikipedia guideline. I agree that the Effective Altruism forum *looks* like a traditional internet forum, but what matters is the content and the process used to generate that content, not the aesthetics. KingSupernova ( talk) 05:32, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
Papers published in scientific journals are also "user-edited". No, they're not; they are edited by selected experts. And nobody is claiming that
the aestheticsof the EA Forum is the problem! The process is the problem. EA Forum posts, long-form or not, are not automatically reliable sources. Biogeographist ( talk) 16:44, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
This article seems unduly slanted towards more theoretical and academic aspects of its subject. At this point in time, effective altruism is most notable for its association with FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried. Relegating discussion of that association to a criticism section seems to give undue weight to other less notable aspects of effective altruism. Discussing a philosophy that is primarily known for its real world impact and associations should give due and substantial weight to that impact and those associations.
Just Nogburt ( talk) 15:24, 19 March 2023 (UTC)
the millions of lives the movement ruined? {{ Citation needed}}, my friend. Also, the comment to which you are responding is outdated; it refers to an older version of the article, and the article has been restructured since then. Biogeographist ( talk) 22:33, 7 June 2023 (UTC)
Can the Point Of View maintenance template at the top of the article now be removed ? Alenoach ( talk) 04:09, 24 July 2023 (UTC)
An edit to the lead section that I reverted equated effective altruism with utilitarianism. This is not correct; for example:
Many take effective altruism to be synonymous with utilitarianism, the normative theory according to which an act is right if and only if it produces no less well‐being than any available act (see UTILITARIANISM; WELL‐BEING). This is a category mistake. Effective altruism is not utilitarianism, nor is it any other normative theory or claim. Instead, effective altruism is the project of using evidence and reason to try to find out how to do the most good, and on this basis trying to do the most good [...] Since effective altruism is a project rather than a normative claim, it is possible for one to both adopt this project as well as accept a nonwelfarist conception of the good (or indeed to adopt multiple projects, some of which involve promoting welfarist good and some of which involve promoting nonwelfarist good).
— Pummer, Theron; MacAskill, William (June 2020). "Effective altruism". In LaFollette, Hugh (ed.). International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. pp. 1–9. doi: 10.1002/9781444367072.wbiee883. ISBN 9781444367072. OCLC 829259960. S2CID 241220220.
Biogeographist ( talk) 22:54, 29 November 2023 (UTC)
@
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)
Asto77 added the following sentence, which I removed:
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)
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
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)
As seen in the "criticism" section above on this talk page, the "criticism" section of the article appears to have been added not due to any particular criticism that was noteworthy enough to address, but simply because an editor felt that the article "needed" a criticism section, and then went looking for criticisms to support it. This is an... odd approach to editing, to say the least. Many articles on Wikipedia about various philosophies and social movements do not include any particular "criticism" section, so there is no a-priori need for one here.
Of course if there are noteworthy criticisms of the movement, then they should be mentioned, and indeed there are quite a few mentioned in the "controversies", "criticisms of impartiality", "notable publications and media", "criticisms of cause prioritization", "cost-effectiveness", "incremental versus systemic change", "long-term future and global catastrophic risks", "founding effective organizations", and "other prominent people" sections, along with the last paragraph of the introduction. In fact, out of 28 total sections and subsections of the article, 13 of them contain criticism of Effective Altruism. This is a substantially larger fraction than in comparable articles.
Many of those criticisms are reasonable and well-cited. In contrast, three out of the four criticisms in the standalone "criticisms" section are nonsensical.
These criticisms are embarrassing. At best they fail a cursory check for basic logical validity, at worst they are actively deceptive. I have removed them.
(The accusation of hypocrisy for high spending and the purchase of Wytham Abbey actually makes sense, so I left it alone.)
KingSupernova ( talk) 06:49, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
"Using math to justify actions" describes every technical field, everis as biased a misinterpretation of that sentence as anything that was in the criticism section. The point of that poorly written sentence (and it was even more poorly written before I edited it, although clearly it wasn't edited enough if it could be misinterpreted so badly) is the "being used to justify self-serving spending" part, not the "math" part. There may be something worth salvaging there, but as I didn't add that sentence myself I'm not very motivated to try to fix it. I haven't critically examined the other objections above, which I hope are not as wrongheaded as the
"Using math to justify actions"misinterpretation. Biogeographist ( talk) 17:16, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
Asto77 added the following text under the heading "EA differences from utilitarianism":
Some argue that utilitarianism "commands" people to do good, [1] whereas under EA some people have a "duty" or "obligation" to do good. [2] [3]
Toby Ord has contrasted utilitarians as "number-crunching" with most effective altruists being "guided by conventional wisdom tempered by an eye to the numbers". [4]
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)
I hesitate to remove "With approximately 7,000 people active in the effective altruism community" from the introduction. Not that the source is unreliable, but I just don't think these approximations can be very precise, notably given that it's unclear how to determine if someone is active in the community. On the other hand, even an imprecise approximation may be considered relevant information for readers. Alenoach ( talk) 22:34, 16 May 2024 (UTC)