I think it's essentially a grift. An excuse to do nothing while looking like you care and reaping rewards.
If they wanted to help, they should be focused on the now. Global poverty, climate change, despotic world leaders. They should be aligning themselves against such things.
But instead what we see is essentially not that. Effective altruism is a lot like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, a bit of a misnomer.
They have aligned themselves in favor of global poverty, climate change and despotic world leaders.
A lot of them argue that poor countries essentially don't matter. Climate change is not an extinction event and there should an authoritarian world government to prevent nuclear conflict to minimize the risk of nuclear extinction.
>In his dissertation On the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future (2013), supposedly “one of the best texts on existential risks,”[9] Nicholas Beckstead meditates on the “ripple effects” a human life might have for future generations and concludes “that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country” due to the higher level of innovation and economic productivity attained in these countries.[10]
The site you reference quotes Beckstead out of context, and either reading the context or looking at what he spent the next decade of his life working on would make it clear that he thinks the marginal dollar is better spent on saving lives in poor countries than rich ones. He well understands that his "other things being equal" in his dissertation essentially never holds in practice, and was writing for a philosophy audience where this kind of hypothetical is expected.
To be pedantic, DPRK is run via the will of the people to a degree comparable to any country. A bigger misnomer is the west calling liberal “democracy”, just democracy.
My point is that most people who see that think a country like America or Europe are democracies and that is partly why it would be a misnomer. When it is arguable that DPRK state is more a will of the people than the west.
The elite letting the people choose between a few candidates is not a democracy. There are no “democratic” countries in that way.
What do people like you use to prove the DPRK is auth, a dictatorship, and so bad while so smugly believing they have “freedom” and “democracy” better than the Global South? Western state depts and western state directed media manufacturing consent - ba da ching
Don’t forget — the enemies of the west are all bad and evil. And the west is free and fair and democratic and not a scourge on the rest of the world.
> When it is arguable that DPRK state is more a will of the people than the west.
It's not arguable, it's simply wrong. But to understand that you would have to understand much more about the DPRK.
> The elite letting the people choose between a few candidates is not a democracy.
It is, but more importantly, your framing is wrong. Every democracy has several levels of democratic institutions (local, state, federal etc.), there are often 'surprise' election winners; there are also non-elective ways for non-elite people to influence policy. DPRK has none of this.
If they wanted to help, they should be focused on the now. Global poverty, climate change, despotic world leaders. They should be aligning themselves against such things.
But instead what we see is essentially not that. Effective altruism is a lot like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, a bit of a misnomer.