This is a personal essay about my failed attempt to convince effective altruists to become socialists. I started as a convinced socialist who thought EA ignored the 'root causes' of poverty by focusing on charity instead of structural change. After studying sociology and economics to build a rigorous case for socialism, the project completely backfired as I realized my political beliefs were largely psychological coping mechanisms.
Here are the key points:
- Understanding the "root cause" of a problem doesn't necessarily lead to better solutions - Even if capitalism causes poverty, understanding "dynamics of capitalism" won't necessarily help you solve it
- Abstract sociological theories are mostly obscurantist bullshit - Academic sociology suffers from either unrealistic mathematical models or vague, unfalsifiable claims that don't help you understand or change the world
- The world is better understood as misaligned incentives rather than coordinated oppression - Most social problems stem from coordination failures and competing interests, not a capitalist class conspiring against everyone else
- Individual variation undermines class-based politics - People within the same "class" have wildly different cognitive traits, interests, and beliefs, making collective action nearly impossible
- Political beliefs serve important psychological functions - They help us cope with personal limitations and maintain self-esteem, often at the expense of accuracy
- Evolution shaped us for competition, not truth - Our brains prioritize survival, status, and reproduction over understanding reality or being happy
- Marx's insights, properly applied, undermine the Marxist political project - His theory of ideological formation aligns with evolutionary psychology, but when applied to individuals rather than classes, it explains why the working class will not overthrow capitalism.
In terms of ideas, I don’t think there’s anything too groundbreaking in this essay. A lot of these ideas have been in the EA/rationalist water supply for a long time, but hopefully this might serve as a cautionary tale for anyone else who might be tempted by a similar intellectual project. Or, perhaps an interesting case study about the formation of ideological beliefs at the intersection of leftist politics and effective altruism.
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It is helpful to distinguish between each set of ideas in theory and in practice. I don’t think EA and socialism claim a lot of common territory; the former is a set of individualist ideas on how wealthy people should donate their money, while the latter operates much more in the political and economic spheres. While I wouldn’t encourage someone to try and come up with a totalising socialist theory of EA as you’ve tried, I also wouldn’t discourage EAs from being curious about socialist and anti-capitalist ideas.
EA is increasingly moving toward policy and advocacy, but I don’t regularly see conflicts here. In fact, a lot of global health policy feels very internationalist in a way that socialists would encourage; and animal welfare and GCRs are both essentially identifying the failures of market-based systems to account for large negative externalities, and using statist or social means to oppose that economic power.
The remaining fundamental difference, for now, is the wealthy donors on the EA side, which seems to have large downstream effects on the ways EAs tend to think about and approach problems (“the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” etc.). But I think it would be possible for most of EA to be funded by governments raising higher taxes, or by a larger number of smaller, distributed donations; where this happens in EA today, I see those organisations start to think more optimistically about state and social power.
(Also, the comments on your post are unusually good, and I’d encourage people to go read more there. There’s a good reply from @Bob Jacobs, who has some good critiques of EA-in-practice that I agree with)
EA is a very good idea for cultural innovation precisely because it challenges socialism. It wasn't class struggle that enabled humanitarian advances in an increasingly technological society, but the moral evolution of citizens (usually upper-class) who gradually rejected the "systemic violence" of class society. The social improvements of the disadvantaged classes were merely concessions by the oppressor class, rather than "conquests of the oppressed" (Spartacus gained nothing by rebelling).
EA doesn't require "class consciousness"... but rather "awareness" of its own value as a moral innovation and its significance.
Isn't economic growth the main driver of improvements since the industrial revolution, rather than either better morals or class struggle?
For what it's worth though, I am not a social scientist, but when I once had a quick look at the social scientific literature on the growth of democracy specifically, I got the impression that most people writing in that literature modeled the rise of democracy as being about elite actors balancing competing interests, one of which was "don't have the working class literally stage a revolution", rather than about expanding moral circles or anything like that. I actually am fairly skeptical of social science, but I think this is at least moderate evidence that class struggle (amongst other things) was important to the growth of democracy. It was certainly important to the French Revolution, which is to some degree where modern democracy and human rights begin. (I don't think the work I was looking at was by Marxists, mostly mainstream US liberals was my impression.)
This is a nicely written piece of personal reflection that gives me a good impression of the author as a human being, but I don't think it actually provides much evidence for the evaluations of social science or evolutionary psychology or EA that it is putting forward.