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rebecca wilova's avatar

This is so similar to how hearing people treat Deaf people, and have since the Milan “conference” of 1880 that banned speakers of signed languages and Deaf people from that conference and ultimately only admitted one Deaf ASL speaker from the American/Gallaudet University delegation, and the Gallaudet people found themselves the only ones who argued passionately for signed languages, and all the other hearing people decided that Deaf people really needed all signed languages to be banned and an emphasis on spoken speech was what Deaf people needed.

From that time on, language deprivation has been rampant. And when hearing aids exploded in usage in the 1980s, hearings decided that Deaf people, regardless of their audiogram results, really needed heading aids, and double down on speech therapy, to reverse the pervasive language deprivation and inability to speak of most Deaf people up to that point. You do understand what came next? In the early 2000s hearings expanded cochlear implants so that very young Deaf babies could be implanted, and they would benefit the most from the noise machines! Alas, same results, exactly as useless as hearing aids.

If only they listened to Deaf people at any point since 1880, they would hear the same consistent desire that all Deaf children and their families learn ASL, and that Deaf children all attend school together, because it is life altering to not struggle for crumbs of communication or community.

Effective altruism, but for no one. And Bill Clinton’s agreeing with right wingers to make sure that no one got ahead on federal dollars is a pernicious scourge, especially to those on SSI, even now.

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Benjamin Eskilstark's avatar

This is a good takedown of the latest, Tech-centered version of EA. But I remember being turned off of it 10+ years ago when it was "regular" people going "I'm more virtuous than you because I work at a hedge fund and give away 400k per year". Like sure, the people who are helped by that 400k definitely appreciate it, but the whole philosophy of EA rests on the fact that some people will not be helped because others need it more (and, like you pointed out, he with the money chooses). But where did that 400k come from??

There's no possible way that working at a financial institution is doing less than 400k worth of extraction when it provides 400k worth of salary to an I-banker. And that's my problem with the EA-ers: they're just not thinking big enough (or to the extent that they are, it's like you've pointed out, sidetracked by the imagined billions of descendants rather than the real billions of people right here).

Effective Altruism is just one way (of several that I have witnessed -- former FAANG eng here) for people to justify high-status-yet-hopelessly-immoral jobs.

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