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The motivated reasoning critique of effective altruism — EA Forum

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I have often been skeptical of the value of a) critiques against effective altruism and b) fully general arguments that seem like they can apply to almost anything. However, as I am also a staunch defender of hypocrisy, I will now hypocritically attempt to make the case for applying a fully general critique to effective altruism. In this post, I will claim that: I will use the example of cost-effectiveness analyses as a jumping board for this argument. (I understand that effective altruism, especially outside of global health and development, has largely moved away from explicit expected value calculations and cost-effectiveness analyses. However, I do not believe this change invalidates my argument (see Appendix B)). I also list a number of tentative ways to counteract motivated reasoning and selection bias in effective altruism: By motivated reasoning, I roughly mean what Julia Galef calls “soldier mindset” (H/T Rob Bensinger): In directionally motivated reasoning, often shortened to

catehall 4y 91 0 0 1 I’ve been on the EA periphery for a number of years but have been engaging with it more deeply for about 6 months. My half-in, half-out perspective, which might be the product of missing knowledge, missing arguments, all the usual caveats but stronger: Motivated reasoning feels like a huge concern for longtermism. First, a story: I eagerly adopted consequentialism when I first encountered it for the usual reasons; it seemed, and seems, obviously correct. At some point, however, I began to see the ways I was using consequentialism to let myself off the hook, ethically. I st

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