33 - Habiba Islam on the Left and Effective Altruism

The Most Interesting People I Know

[This episode was recorded before the FTX collapse. It contains some discussion of Sam Bankman-Fried. Habiba has asked me to pass on that, to say the least, she no longer endorses what she says about Sam as an example of someone doing good. I've also linked in the show notes to her twitter thread with her thoughts on FTX.]

This episode is a long time in the making. We’re going deep on the intersection of effective altruism (EA) and the left.

When I tell people that I’m a leftist and into effective altruism, they’re often surprised. A lot of the recent criticism of EA from the left may make it seem like the ideas and communities are incompatible, causing people to genuinely ask, can you be an effective altruist and a leftist? I think you can. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t real tensions between the two approaches to improving the world.

This is not meant to be a point by point rebuttal of any criticisms of EA or the left. Instead, I wanted to better understand myself how these ideas interact.

To discuss this, I brought on Habiba Islam. Habiba is a career advisor for 80,000 Hours, an organization that helps people find high-impact careers. 80,000 Hours grew out of the effective altruism movement, but Habiba also identifies as a leftist. As you’ll soon discover, Habiba has given these ideas a lot of thought and helped clarify a lot of longstanding confusions for me.

We go through our backgrounds with the left and EA and attempt to define each. We then go through hidden agreements EA and the left have, misconceptions each has about the other, and the real disagreements between EA in practice and the left.

When I first got into EA and left politics, I had grand plans to try to reconcile the two. I felt like EA’s commitment to prioritization, responding to evidence, and doing whatever works could help make the left better at achieving its goals. And I thought that the left’s ability to build movements, shape narratives, analyze power, and understand history could shore up some major blindspots within EA. Time has tempered my ambitions a bit, and I think there are good reasons why the left and EA will and should remain distinct things. But there is still a lot each can learn from the other.

Left critiques of EA:

• 2015 LRB essay on effective altruism: Stop the Robot Apocalypse
• Jacobin: Against Charity: Rather than creating an individualized “culture of giving,” we should be challenging capitalism’s institutionalized taking.

Show notes:

• Paper: Effective Altruism and Anti-Capitalism: An Attempt at Reconciliation
• Vox: Caring about the future doesn’t mean ignoring the present: Effective altruism hasn’t abandoned its roots.
• Winners of the EA Criticism and Red Teaming Contest
• Jacobin: The Socialist Case for Longtermism
• Book: The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution
• TED Talk: How civilization could destroy itself -- and 4 ways we could prevent it | Nick Bostrom
• Book: Four Futures: Life After Capitalism
• Paper: The Fallacy of Philanthropy by Paul Gomberg
• Wikipedia: TRIPS Agreement
• Effective Altruism Forum: Growth and the case against randomista development
• Effective Altruism Forum: Tax Havens and the case for Tax Justice
• Effective Altruism Forum: Cause area proposal: International Macroeconomic Policy
• How Rich Am I? Find out how rich you are compared to the rest of the world – are you on the global rich list?
• Slow Boring: The rise and importance of Secret Congress