In Continued Defense of Right-Wing Effective Altruism

Not all EAs lean left. EA is not communism or socialism. Some of us think the global left is one of the greatest threats long-term to civilizational functioning and cohesion. Some of us think the State tends to screw up most jobs you give to it, that Islam doesn’t belong in the Americas or Europe, that feminism is cancer, like that type of cancer that grows eyes and hair, and that Trump, Bukele, Milei, Geert, Bolsonaro were all phenomenal choices, as was Brexit and as would be building a big, beautiful wall on the southern border. Some of us don’t think immigrants should vote, hell, some of us don’t think it was a great idea that ladies got the vote.

You can be a good, upstanding man, brave, courageous, meat-eating, gun-abiding, God-loving, and still think that saving more lives than were taken by terrorism and melanoma is a good thing. You can think there is a global agenda of depopulation of whites, and still think that human extinction would be an utterly, bewilderingly terrible outcome, and that putting safety precautions is desirable. You can be a localist, who cares about things up to 1 mile away from where you live and work, and nothing else, and still want to prevent the world from being destroyed by nukes.
In theory, you can be a literal nazi, and want to make sure that the ubermensch reigns long and hard, and spreads lebensraun across the galaxies.
You can be a monarchist, and think cognitively improving the king via artificial means is the way to go.

In short, every sub-branch of the right-wing is fully compatible with at least some of the Effective Altruism movement and actions.

Effective Altruism has started as a bunch of libertarian-leaning, computer science, and philosopher weirdos who thought it was better to do the actual good ourselves than let the government do it, or than signal that we were doing good without measuring how much good we were doing, like, in fact.

You don’t need to be aligned with the whole agenda. For example, I care a lot about animal welfare of future animals (which numerically exceed current animals) and I’m an Anti-Vegan advocate Carnivore. I think EAs are profoundly mistaken about what is a good way of causing happy animals, and I’m vocal about it.

So, if you’re interested and keen on making the world a better place by the most effective means possible, even if you are further right from me, you should still be wholly open to being an Effective Altruist.

Gratitude is the connecting point between the right-wing and Effective Altruism.

The Left is often moved by spite and envy, and The Right is often moved by gratitude.
The Critics and counters of Effective Altruism are often moved by spite and envy, whereas EA is moved by gratitude.

d/accs, like me, who think differential technological progress is conducive to better outcomes, as Vitalik suggested yesterday, can advocate for some things in common with EAs, like careful research into AI safety, while speeding up technologies that bear less risk to humanity as a whole.

Come thee of the right-wing, to our wonderful world of EA, not only you will be able to do more good than you would otherwise, but you might also change the minds of some younger EAs who still are grasped by the teeth of the Academia Left Agenda, not because they are not smart people, but because they never heard why you believe what you believe. Give them a chance to abandon the evil side, and join the fight for the good.

As someone who has made that very transition, 6 years ago, I can tell you it does not change our ability to be Effective Altruists. I was an EA for 12 years, 6, naively, on the center-left, 6, wisely, on the right and center.

You can be an Effective Altruist and be right-wing. That’s a fact.

@willmacaskill

@tobyordoxford

1 thought on “In Continued Defense of Right-Wing Effective Altruism”

Roko said:

Hard disagree with this.

You cannot in fact think that “there is a global agenda to replace European populations with third worlders”, and also be an Effective Altruist. For some this will be a modus ponens, for others a modus tollens. I make no comment here as to whether that is true or false.

But either way it’s a fundamental impedence mismatch with the EA thinking style.

EA epistemology forbids you from thinking about conflict. If you think about conflict you’re a bad person, you get downvoted and kicked out of EA. In the EA world there is no conflict because conflict is a bad, unproductive, un-photogenic vibe. There are only pareto improvements, and your job as an EA is to evaluate which pareto improvement of the world is most efficient at maximizing some vaguely utilitarian goal. Things are simpler that way, everyone is nice and corporate-friendly and we can enter our efficiency estimates into a Google doc and then clock out and go to the weekly office orgy with clean consciences.

I don’t really bother interacting with EA much because I know that the limitations of their worldview make basically everything I am good at thinking through into a kind of thoughtcrime.

I Replied: Thanks for your critique. I agree that EA is, possibly due to being a protected elite, partly due to vegan and vegetarian diets making EAs literally physically weak and psychologically anxious, less likely to be willing to engage in dialogue about large scale conflict.

Not all. My entire PhD, “Altruism: Past, Present, Propagation” deals with the possibility of expanding the scope of cooperation and altruism beyond the corporate and into the biological, Darwinian, Game Theoretic world.

I also agree that you get kicked out of EA, or used to, for having some points of view to the right, because many EAs who came more from the A than the E, are more about harmony than about other things. I have, as you know, also been kicked out of some EA circles, exactly like you, just a couple years later.

You claim you cannot be concerned about the depopulation of whites and be an EA. Well, I am both. So let me expose how:
1) I believe there is some tentative not conclusive evidence, exemplified in the latest Argentina election as well as voting patterns in the UK and the USA that white people are far, far more likely to vote for libertarian parties than any other ethnic group.
2) I believe freedom, within and between countries, is long-term conducive to good norms of discourse and economic prosperity, and thus should only be restricted in extraordinary cases, like Nukes and AGI.
3) I believe white people have been the greatest promoters of both freedom and Effective Altruism, so far, in history.
4) Therefore, I am against anyone who would like to reduce the fraction of the world population of whites, whether that be feminists, the woke, Jihadis or any other anti-white group, like, say, the legacy media, or the environmentalist movement.

Thus, for EA, utilitarian reasons, of wanting to reduce existential risk, and prevent civilizational collapse, I share the based concerns of my gun abiding white brothers, who fear the world might become hostile to their children merely because of the color of their skin being white.

To me, that is not a convoluted, contrite thought process, but flows naturally from utilitarianism. I think utilitarians of all races should be heavily interested in the protection of whites from depopulation. As should right-wingers like, say, Jayant Bhandari.

Elon, who clearly thinks in an effective altruist manner, and said so on many occasions, is also a big advocate of a classic right-wing cause, which I also advocate, the cause of fertility.

For these reasons, among others, I believe your critique fails.

I am open to further dialogue, as you know since we’ve been friends for like a decade :p