In many ways, most EAs are extraordinarily smart, but in one way EAs are naive. The most well known EAs have stated that the goal of EA is to minimize suffering. I can't explain this well at all, but I'm certain that is not the cause or effect of altruism as I understand it.
Consider The Giver. Consider a world where everyone was high on opiates all the time. There is no suffering or beauty. Would you disturb it?
Considering this, my immediate reaction is to restate the goal of EA as maximizing the difference between happiness and suffering. This still seems naive. Happiness and suffering are so interwoven, I'm not sure this can be done. The disappointment from being rejected by a girl may help you come to terms with reality. The empty feeling in the pit of your stomach when your fantasy world crumbles motivates you to find something more fulfilling.
It's difficult to say. Maybe one of you can restate it more plainly. This isn't an argument against EA. This is an argument that while we probably do agree on what actions are altruistic--the criteria used to explain it are overly simplified.
I don't know if there is much to be gained by having criteria to explain altruism, but I am tired of "reducing suffering." I like to think about it more as doing what I can to positively impact the world--and using EA to maximize that positivity where possible. Because altruism isn't always as simple as where to send your money.
I agree that it's dangerous to generalize from fictional evidence, BUT I think it's important not to fall into the opposite extreme, which I will now explain...
Some people, usually philosophers or scientists, invent or find a simple, neat collection of principles that seems to more or less capture/explain all of our intuitive judgments about morality. They triumphantly declare "This is what morality is!" and go on to promote it. Then, they realize that there are some edge cases where their principles endorse something intuitively abhorrent, or prohibit something intuitively good. Usually these edge cases are described via science-fiction (or perhaps normal fiction).
The danger, which I think is the opposite danger to the one you identified, is that people "bite the bullet" and say "I'm sticking with my principles. I guess what seems abhorrent isn't abhorrent after all; I guess what seems good isn't good after all."
In my mind, this is almost always a mistake. In situations like this, we should revise or extend our principles to accommodate the new evidence, so to speak. Even if this makes our total set of principles more complicated.
In science, simpler theories are believed to be better. Fine. But why should that be true in ethics? Maybe if you believe that the Laws of Morality are inscribed in the heavens somewhere, then it makes sense to think they are more likely to be simple. But if you think that morality is the way it is as a result of biology and culture, then it's almost certainly not simple enough to fit on a t-shirt.
A final, separate point: Generalizing from fictional evidence is different from using fictional evidence to reject a generalization. The former makes you subject to various biases and vulnerable to propaganda, whereas the latter is precisely the opposite. Generalizations often seem plausible only because of biases and propaganda that prevent us from noticing the cases in which they don't hold. Sometimes it takes a powerful piece of fiction to call our attention to such a case.
[Edit: Oh, and if you look at what the OP was doing with the Giver example, it wasn't generalizing based on fictional evidence, it was rejecting a generalization.]
I disagree that biting the bullet is "almost always a mistake". In my view, it often occurs after people have reflected on their moral intuitions more closely than they otherwise would have. Our moral intuitions can be flawed. Cognitive biases can get in the way of thinking clearly about an issue.
Scientists have shown, for instance, that for many people, their intuitive rejection of entering the Experience Machine is due to the status quo bias. If people's current lives were being lived inside an Experience Machine, 50% of people would want to st... (read more)