"Effective Altruism" is Rubbish, Innit? (Veganism / Ecology / Animal Rights)

it's a very difficult thing to make a
youtube video about an academic essay especially if the point of your video is to encourage people to take the time to click on the link below the video and actually read that essay be much easier for me to actually make a video criticizing the essay finding fault with it or making a riposte do it or response to it or just presenting my own argument in another direction this is an essay that evaluates what's been going on in the so called effective altruism discourse effective altruism effective activism these different agencies within veganism animal rights and ecology that claim to put a number that claim to bring science and mathematical clarity to the question of what is and what is not effective in the promotion of veganism animal rights and ecology quite a few of the book reviews of posted on this channel in the last few months have tackled this topic because the books I was reviewing variously have chapters dealing with it perhaps most famously Gary francais own a I have a great discussion about his latest book on this channel will for an hour long Gary Fred Sione just frothing at the mouth says it's a scam the whole field is garbage and worthless and it's very hard for an outsider to accept that claim right it's kind of like just the the title the title of black lives matter no matter how disgraceful whatever that agency's been doing lately he happens to be no matter how bad the latest headlines in the newspapers are the fact that their name is black lives matter kind of makes them difficult to criticize who could possibly oppose an organization called black lives matter in the same way animal charity evaluator zay siiii the flag they're waving is the flag of effective activism doesn't everyone want activism to be effective in the same sense doesn't everyone want black lives to matter doesn't everyone want less police brutality doesn't anyone want activism and altruism to be effective these seem like ideas that are so simple they cannot possibly be bad and misleading and false and what this essay shows you step-by-step blow by blow is just how cancerous the effective activism movement is within veganism animal rights and ecology all right it's mind-blowing now here's the caveat I would say the first thirty percent of this essay does require some background in the social sciences to really understand now if you read it without that background the main thing that you're just not going to pick up on is how outrageous the examples being given are so this analysis when it presents the math it just in an understated way tells you what the numbers are and then tells you how these highly politicized charities or agencies misrepresent those numbers so if you don't get what's going on it's jaw-dropping it's shocking but he does not throw in the kind of the kind of adjectives that you need leave it at that this essay easily could have took it on a much more kind of animated tone and said to you you know this is unbelievable this is mind-blowing and it should have because this is an essay that supposed to mean er this isn't a peer-review dry academic essay so for the first thirty percent you may not if you don't have that background if you can't see just what is wrong with the math as it's being broken down for you there are some paragraphs here you probably want to skim or you want to skip over if you're not getting the point but i would say seventy percent of this article anybody can understand I mean you like to give you an example of something that does require any knowledge of math or you know mathematics and the social science and social science physics at one point this essay gets into the horrifying facts surrounding so-called cage-free hens and the excuses and lies that are made for the promotion of cage free chicken production and free-range chicken production and the horrible brutal reality of how there is a really good argument that cage free is actually worse for the chicken they suffer more and again it's written in this very dry factual way it doesn't say this stuff is mind-blowing as it's unbelievable but it is mind-blowing is unbelievable and that section of the essay you don't none of the statistics matter none of the math matters it's giving you a persuasive another section the essay that's just dealing with the fact that these are supposedly scientific these mostly social scientists helping veganism find its footing in the future and the reality is they're really in a very corrupt way promoting charities that are friends of friends there in a dishonest way promoting some charities and not promoting others and they're not following their you know their supposed methodology that again you don't need a background in math to appreciate in some if you read this essay from beginning to end you're going to see that even though effective altruism sounds like a cause sounds like an idea we all can support and we all must support this is another shocking and horrifying example of how within veganism good intentions have paved the road to hell and we're a little bit of money was put together and donated to these agencies there was a little bit of potential do something positive and it has been squandered in the worst way imaginable largely for ideological reasons one of the most hilarious parts the essay deals with this crackpot theory that vegans ought to care about the welfare not just of actual animals but of virtual animals of digital animals that only exist in video games I'm not kidding you it's in there and the completely insane belief from my perspective that vegans ought to get involved with providing health care to wild animals like to a bears and elephants in the wild and and even the idea it's included in this essay it's an important idea for us to be able to refute that because vegans should try to eliminate animal suffering they should actually try to eliminate the wilderness itself because life in the wild inevitably both suffer animals there is a lot of content in this essay and all I can do in this video is give a big shout into it give you the link below and beg you to take the time because this shines a flashlight I can't even say it's on the dirty little secret within veganism in the last five years because a lot of guys like France iana have been screaming about this what this does is let you know that this this tree is rotten from root to branch and even though I'd done a lot of reading about this problem before and about the particular charities and agencies involved in this essay before I always assume that I was only looking at the worst of the worst a few little problems here and there I assumed that somewhere there was some kind of silver lining in the cloud and this essay for me kind of closes the door on that and makes me think wow we have to learn from this mistake but we definitely have to look at this chapter of what happened within the vegan movement as a mistake