If helping people is something you're interested in, please read about Effective Altruism and consider joining in!
This takes a tangent from the article, but it surprised me “Privacy” was absent from the primary paths[1], though the inverse “Surveillance” made the list and might be related. Likewise, Facebook and Google (along with Open AI and many others) are recommended for careers[2]. One might argue that the progress these giants already have means that’s the best place for folks should plug in and have an impact. I’m skeptical that centralizing all our efforts into giants that seem to run on ad revenue will continue to have good outcomes for humanity.
[1] https://80000hours.org/key-ideas/#priority-paths [2] https://80000hours.org/job-board/
https://www.businessinsider.com/nick-bostrom-mass-surveillan...
A lot of EA messaging tries to work around this by trying to avoid guilt trips or demanding that you do everything you possibly can, since asking too much is a good way to end up with nothing. See Giving What We Can and similar.
But a lot of the justifications for this kind of approach can very easily imply a much higher bar than anyone can meet. Taking global health as an example- millions of preventable deaths a year, and if you work yourself to the bone for years, you can only hope to partially mitigate it.
Even if the messaging says, "hey, just do what you can sustainably and don't worry about being perfect, because that's way better than nothing," the logic behind it is based on nothing more than observations of actions and their consequences. There's not a specific threshold where your job is actually done, and 'failure' to meet the impossible bar generally means mass death.
For someone outside EA, it is very easy to go from that observation to "these people are telling me I am basically a mass murderer for not helping, and even if I help, I'll still in practice be a mass murderer because I'll help suboptimally, gee thanks."
Even if very few identifying with the EA community would endorse that phrasing or the implied moral judgment, I can see how people could end up feeling that way. Not sure what to do about it.
I do think that the implied burden is still alienating in a sense and that's what motivated my post (the philosophy can just feel really bad in some ways when you get into the nitty gritty, and many people don't respond well to that), but you were clearly talking about a different kind of alienation.
(Edit: reading my first post, it's definitely the case that I did not make the connection here explicit- the rejection isn't merely 'oh no I can't handle the TRUTH', but more like, 'ugh, these guys'. A big part of it is social in nature, stacked on top of the underlying problem of asking too much.)
A huge part of EA is driven by analysis of effectiveness. If I want to be effective, I have to figure out how to be effective. If someone provides a valuable insight on how to be more effective, it's not a rejection of my ethical outlook, but rather useful information.
Now you are alienated from your charity: your work in finance indirectly helps other people, but you have no way of experiencing or connecting to that other than looking at statistics and numbers; the lifeworld of your charitable work is just some numbers that you get every quarter from the various charities that you donate to. You have no direct involvement in them.
It can be more effective sure, especially if the physical participation is flying long haul to offer considerably less skilled construction labour than locally-based hungry people. But a division of labour between smart, driven people working outside the third sector to fund it and only people incapable of securing well paid jobs left inside the sector to spend it is also unlikely to lead to better resource allocation. There are certainly initiatives that could use a good software lead more than they could use a generous portion of a software lead's FAANG salary to hire some mediocre contractors, for example.
Do you have proof? Because whether it “feels good” (or rather, feels like you are actually doing something, rather than trying to motivate yourself by convincing yourself that the numbers are correct and you are (indirectly) doing something) will influence how much good you can do.
Some things—like only eating Soylent or maximizing your goodiness-output by working on Wall Street (or wherever else)—might only work well on paper.
In any case my point all along was the alienation factor. That’s the point, to me. Raise whatever other point you would like. (Of course an EA-enthusiast would only care about the supposed numbers.)
In many (perhaps most?) cases the feeling and motivation people have is the intuitive desire to feel good about helping others in their society personally, which is in many ways different from "true altruism". And it makes some sense (from e.g. evolutionary psychology perspective) to consider that our innate desire to "do good" is closely related to building social ties and status, and by helping people close to us in various ways (kinship, common "tribe-in-the-wide-sense-of-that-word", previous relationship history, expected future interactions) as opposed to simply helping abstract people as much as you can. True altruism is the exception (IMHO) rather than the norm, it certainly exists in some cases, but most helping others and charity and doing good is driven by "ordinary goodwill" that includes a mix of other motivations.
And, of course, if someone's goal is not really altruism, then doing more effective altruism won't help them achieve their goals. If we ("abstract we") want to optimize effective altruism, then instead we should help optimize people's efforts witin the area where true altruism overlaps with their actual goals to "do good" (whatever they mean by "do good" since that likely isn't exactly the same thing as true altruism); since once we get to the proposals which are more altruistic but contrary to their true personal goals/values, people are just going to reject the whole thing (as most do).
Another problem I have with EA is how incredibly fragile it is: because it is so reductive and narrowly-focused, you are likely to optimize for the wrong thing (the map is never the territory) and might even do more harm than good. In the best case scenario you might do a lot of good, though.
I mean, IMHO framing "effective altruism" as "true altruism" isn't that inaccurate as far as philosophy and definitions are concerned - my main criticism of EA is that actual altruism (according to a strict definition of altruism) is quite rare, so for most people effective altruism isn't personally relevant because most people (including me) simply aren't truly altruistic; it provides a guide on how to maximize something that most people (myself included) don't really want to maximize, they want to maximize other things which may have some overlap with altruism but diverge from it as you leave commonly accepted charity practices and approach various maximums.
I do concede that it's definitely good according to most value systems (including purely selfish ones) to have everyone else in your society to be a bit more altruistic, everything just works better that way, so facilitating various nudges towards altruism is generally a Good Thing no matter how altruistic you or I personally are.
Over time you will likely figure out a good life-work-philanthropy balance. Much of the conversation within EA is about self-care and long-term planning. If giving 70% of your income to charity works for you, that's magnificent. But if you realize you need to give less and take more care of yourself so you don't burn out, that's the appropriate decision.
I gave 50% one year but it didn't work out long term. I've been giving 10% for almost a decade and intend to ramp up to 20% in the future. My wife does 10% too - it works out well for us.
I could have just as well have written that they made a million a year and only donated 5%—that’s besides (my/the) point.
I guess we are all so alienated these days that we don’t find working on Wall Street—or Main Street—in order to indirectly help other people with our money instead of helping directly not the least bit weird at all. Or to help people by working as a programmer and donating a lot of your salary to some school instead of just working there as a teacher, helping people directly (to use another example). (Oh, that reminds me. I need to take my vitamin D supplements right about now. I calculated that being in the Sun is not worth my time so I have to compensate a bit, you see.)
You have a point about working in a net-negative occupations. You might be doing more harm over all.
If it's connection to people you want, why not "Purchase Fuzzes and Utilons Separately"? [0] Give enough to charities that make you not feel alienated, and then donate the rest to charities that are making a greater positive impact on the lives of others.
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3p3CYauiX8oLjmwRF/purchase-f...
> Give enough to charities that make you not feel alienated, and then donate the rest to charities that are making a greater positive impact on the lives of others.
You see? Both of these things are still indirect do-gooding. Donating to charity? How about being good, doing good? Or are you only able to assess the moral weight of something if you can read about them in some spreadsheet?
It almost seems like you're arguing against examining the problem at all. What would the world look like if everybody just quit their jobs so they could do good "directly"? They'd realize pretty quick they needs planes and ships to move people and things, and farmers to grow food. Not to mention doctors and chemists to develop and administer medicine. If they were smart about it, they'd end up allocating their own time to the things they were best at, and then liquidate and donate any excess they produce.
If you just follow your heart, in the most basal sense, you will probably do some good and you will likely feel very good about it. Which is great for you, and good for those you help. There's nothing wrong with that. But that approach will never help those afflicted with malaria, because your heart doesn't know about them. Your head has to hear about them. And then your head has to tell you not to fly down there yourself, because if everybody did that then there'd be nobody back here running air traffic control or formulating medicine.
(As an example: a socialist will probably not think that making the most money possible and then giving a lot of it away is the most ethical thing to do.)
And yes, of course my obvious point is that everyone should just quit their jobs and travel to Africa.
I'd like to hear more specifically how you think people should approach charity. Surely some people actually should travel to Africa? And some should not.
I'm not sure why you're being sarcastic about quitting one's job and traveling to Africa in a conversation about charity. It's not an insane thing to do. The point I was trying to make was that not everybody can do it, and that some people can actually do more good by just being excellent at their current job.
The strategy of "help those around you" results in rich people who live in rich areas with multi-million-dollar-homes helping those that live in merely million dollar homes (because that's what's around). And if they venture too far geographically, they end up feeling alienated, apparently. Furthermore, these people, rather than taking the tremendous power of their wealth, do something "with their own minds and hands" - which is presumably serving some soup in a soup kitchen.
My observation is that it's really unfortunate that many people feel the need for a personal connection, and therefore do less good than they could otherwise. My response is to ignore the ill-fitting kluge that is the evolution-installed software I have.
When you know that a $3 donation protects 2 people from malaria for about 3 years, can you really think you can do more good with your hands and mind than to just protect those people with $3 you have?
You can get your warm feeling of having done good through doing something, and then use your money to give to cost-effective charities regardless of how "alienated" that makes you feel.
Your argument here and EA arguments in general are based on an axiomatic assumption that good done to anyone is equally valuable, that all people worldwide now (and in some analyses, all hypothetical future people) have an equal claim on your help.
IMHO this axiom does not match the "built-in moral system" of most people. To start with an illustrative example (obviously you can imagine many less extreme comparisons), for most people, the welfare of their child is unquestionably much, much more important than the welfare of some other child across the globe. For most people saving the life of another child across the globe at the cost of the life of their child would not be a neutral exchange of things of equal value, it would be a horrifically unbalanced "trade". This is completely understandable even for undeniably good people doing lots of good. So this extreme establishes a baseline that the axiom of "saving every life is equally valuable" can not be accepted by most people (and accepting that axiom is not a requirement for "being good" or "doing good"), there is some difference, and the only question is about the scale and of that difference, what factors apply, etc.
And coming from an (incompatible) axiomatic assumption that it's plausible that helping someone in your community can be more valuable than protecting two people with no connection to you, all these other strategies start making some sense.
Looking at this from a Kantian 'moral duty' perspective, some people (perhaps including you) have an implied moral duty to care about everyone, equally. And some people have an implied moral duty to care about their community more than "strangers". Obviously those two approaches are incompatible, but IMHO both are frequently encountered, and I don't believe that "good people" and "people who do lots of good" always subscribe to the first concept of moral duty, there seems to be a lot of good works done based on the latter understanding.
I humbly try to encourage everyone (if the conversation strays this way) to reflect on the built-in moral system, and how wildly unprepared it is for dealing with the modern world. Given how much the world has changed (I can literally help people across the globe; people are interconnected deeply with others on the other side of the planet through everyday objects they use, etc) it is important to use reason and careful thinking when it comes to morality, not just our gut feelings.
The best writeup of all this comes from Moral Tribes by Joshua Greene - where he uses the photo camera analogy for morality: the automatic setting (gut feelings - great for usual scenarios evolution prepared us - like day to day courtesy with others), and the manual setting (slow and deliberate reasoning - essential for our complex world - anything to do with society beyond what our evolution prepared us for - I'm thinking like technology [mechanical and social] invented after 1500s).
How? I live in North America. The people need the most help in the world don't live in North America. How do I help them directly "with my own mind and hands"?
I could help those in my city/state/country, which isn't unreasonable by any means, and definitely commendable. But this will leave the global poor in just as bad as state as they are right now. Who will do good directly for them?
As a side note, maybe this is an issue of framing. We've been calling EA charity, but another way to view it is wealth distribution from rich countries to poor countries. I think from that lens, it becomes obvious (to me) that this is not only good, but necessary, because I don't think the current global inequality in wealth is fair at all. Telling people to stop donating to EA charities is effectively telling them to keep the wealth in rich countries, rather than having it flow to poor countries (who really need it).