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Of Marx and Moloch: How My Attempt to Convince Effective Altruists to Become Socialists Backfired Completely

honestsignals.substack.com · 5,969 words · saved by 1 readers

You can read my follow up post: Pragmatic Socialists Should Support Effective Altruism: Or How a Marxist Sociologist Undermined My Socialist Beliefs here. I'm a socialist at heart. Even as a teenager I was drawn to angry leftist political rhetoric for reasons I couldn't really explain. I'm also one of those people who will completely change their life based on an abstract philosophical argument. These two traits collided in 2018 when I discovered effective altruism (EA) through Peter Singer's The Most Good You Can Do. I was already familiar with Singer at the time. His writing had convinced me to become vegetarian a couple years earlier. He also has a knack for building philosophical arguments that start with premises which are hard to deny and lead you kicking and screaming to conclusions you don't want to accept. So perhaps I should have seen all of this coming. In this case, he makes a compelling argument that we have a moral obligation to devote a significant amount of our money o

I was already familiar with Singer at the time. His writing had convinced me to become vegetarian a couple years earlier. He also has a knack for building philosophical arguments that start with premises which are hard to deny and lead you kicking and screaming to conclusions you don't want to accept. So perhaps I should have seen all of this coming. In this case, he makes a compelling argument that we have a moral obligation to devote a significant amount of our money or resources to effective global charities. It dawned on me pretty quickly, as I started reading, that I was fucked. While…

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