Making the Cages Bigger: The Peter Singer-Alice Crary Debate

Resolved: Effective Altruism is a Defense of the Status Quo

Alice Crary of the New School for Social Research (Left) and Peter Singer (Right)

I was quite honored recently to be invited to the preview taping of a debate on Effective Altruism organized by Open To Debate, between EA godfather Peter Singer and EA critic Alice Crary. The debate will be released to the public before too long here, but I thought Dark Markets supporters would be interested in a summary. I also want to thank Open To Debate for apparently noticing my work – I was one of only about a dozen previewers of the taping.

The discussion between Singer and Crary was illuminating on one point in particular. Crary is a professor at the New School, who across a journal article and now an edited volume has articulated a much more focused and grounded critique of Effective Altruism than the often theoretical threads I’ve been pulling at here. Her overriding and to my mind irrefutable argument, both in writing and very well articulated in her debate with Singer, is that Effective Altruism is fundamentally a philosophy that defends the status quo, particularly the economic status quo. EA, she argues, “places moral agency in the hands of the wealthy, and encourages them to see themselves as saviors to the poor.”

It’s a well-worn point to some, but Crary has fleshed it out and solidified it. Specifically, and through points I’ll detail below, Crary made the very strong point that Effective Altruism has no systematic or historical analysis of the problems it is trying to address. This is why an EA sees every problem as solvable by money – they take the money-dominated social dynamics of the present as an eternal given. It is in this sense little more than a repackaging of the neoliberal end-of-history thesis, which believes at its core that a combination of markets, technology, and “objective science” can determine the solution to all human problems.

Crary’s second well-articulated critique was leveled against this ‘scientistic’ worldview, which I’ve previously written about in its guise of Yudkowskyite Rationalism, and as part of the larger “TESCREAL” ideological bundle. Crary’s much more grounded critique was that EAs specifically believe that randomized controlled trials can predict where the most effective interventions are.

Her point was not that this is wrong, but that EAs hubristically ignore existing results-oriented work by development experts. EAs implicitly believe, she argued, that some methods aren’t being used in philanthropy, so “we’re going to do it better.” But in fact, development experts and non-EA social change groups already believe in measuring outcomes. (Again we see how EA attracts and cultivates conceited egotists.)

What these groups also know, and EAs seemingly don’t know or can’t accept, is that experimental results are not always actually good predictors of outcomes in reality. According to Crary, randomized trials can form starting points for good interventions, but unexpected consequences are frequent and, well, unpredictable. This requires an iterative, engaged, boots-on-the-ground approach to helping people. At a high level, Crary argued, EA posits instead that experimental results constitute reliable proof that X amount of money will always produce Y outcome when pushed through Z program.

Singer argued in response that the failures of initial experimental results to hold up in the field are used to make adjustments to EA-backed programs. Crary, in response, argued that if that’s the case, Effective Altruism offers nothing new of substance: after all, if they too sometimes spend money without getting the result they predicted, how exactly are they more effective than anyone else?