The elitist philanthropy of so-called effective altruism (2013)

The value of "a book in the local school library" is basically as a consumption good for local students. It's something entirely different from funding socially beneficial causes even locally (such as funding scientific research) - which many EA's would support BTW. There are good arguments for both.

EA accepts that there will be differences among people wrt. issues such as how much of our income should pay for broad causes, and whether we should prefer local causes even when they are somewhat less effective. They argue that the advice they can provide as to effectiveness makes a big difference regardless.

The mission statement of GiveWell is "We search for the charities that save or improve lives the most per dollar." That's a part of effective altruism, but not anywhere close to all of it.

Open Philanthropy is a better example:

In 2017, they spent:

    $118 million (42%) on global health and development

    $43 million (15%) on potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence

    $36 million (13%) on scientific research (which cuts across other causes)

    $28 million (10%) on biosecurity and pandemic preparedness

    $27 million (10%) on farm animal welfare

    $10 million (4%) on criminal justice reform

    $9 million (3%) on other global catastrophic risks

    $10 million (4%) on other cause areas, including land use reform, macroeconomic policy, immigration policy, promotion of effective altruism and improving decision-making

https://80000hours.org/2020/08/misconceptions-effective-altr...

This is an extremely uncharitable take. If people are starving in your hometown, donating food to them will be very effective. If they're not, donating food to some other town where people are starving will be more effective. That's not moralistic, that's just efficient.

Separately, once people start thinking about effectiveness, most of them are forced to face some level of cognitive dissonance. If your beliefs say "Medicine for malaria victims in Indonesia is more important than sheltering homeless dogs and cats in Portland" but your actions say the opposite, yes, that is painful to face. But that's not EA's fault; cognitive dissonance is inherently unpleasant to examine, that's why people avoid examining it.

Re: food bank to UN aid camps.

Just had a conversation with a nurse about healthy young people in US not willing to work and living off unemployment and food stamps simply because they can. I assure you at those UN camps there are thousands of people who do not have that attitude, and who would resume being productive members of society with a little help.

So in that context my answer would be "yes", I'd rather my taxes went there.

This defense of the essay reads like a generalized defense of nationalism.

> Because the inevitable result of this logic is that we accept that the vast majority of things we give our money to charitably should cease, diverted to one very specific group of problems.

And this isn't a defense of anything. Maybe we should be doing that.

GiveWell & alike are our only hope against greedy pseudo-charities and the article hates that someone is trying to shine light on the pseudo-charity hustle.

Small-scale charity generally functions well. Many different people with good intentions have visibility into the inputs and outputs and can ensure it more or less stays on task.

Large-scale charity is very different. It's too big for ad-hoc accountability, so it needs to use market accountability, but by its very nature market accountability is completely broken in this sector. The people who receive the product are not the people who pay for the product. You've seen this dynamic play out before -- enterprise software, kids and toys, government projects -- but charity is even worse on account of having even more separation between the two groups. Employees can complain to management, kids can complain to their parents, local associations can throw a stink about wasteful projects, but are the starving African children going to compare the price of the meals they received to the amount you donated and and give you a phone call when the numbers don't add up? No, they are not.

The market feedback loop is broken in the charity sector, so the optimal strategy for a self-interested pseudo-charity is to plow most of its donations back into marketing and executive compensation (if people complain just put on a TED talk and repeatedly assert that it's fine) and as a distant third priority do a little bit of what they are supposed to be doing. This gets them a photo album for the landing page and forces accountability arguments to use numbers rather than absolutes. Then, if anyone tries to come after them, they can accuse those people of being nerds -- or, when that ceases to be rhetorically effective, accuse them of being technocrats.

Accountability is boring at best and confrontational at worst, but it's extremely important because if we don't do it the parasitic load on the charity ecosystem gobbles up all the money. Accountability doesn't have to mean spreadsheets and numbers, small local charities can absolutely get away with doing it ad-hoc, but it's important to do it one way or another.

I'm someone else, but I'll bite. The article starts out by begging a question, ie. by skipping over an argument, and then bases most of the rest on the validity of the part it doesn't argue.

The second to fourth sentences read: «It is sadly thus that the very human impulse to help others and the mantra of Charity Navigator since its inception—that people should become informed donors and give with their heads as well as their hearts—have been infused with logic so cold that even Mr. Spock would cringe upon hearing it. One iteration of this tendency is in the idea of “effective altruism.” We believe a more accurate phrase for this concept is “defective altruism” and will therefore use that term for the remainder of this article.»

I restate that: Choosing altruistic action as a result intellectual deliberation instead of on an impulse renders the altruism defective.

The article avoids arguing that core point, and instead just bases a lot of secondary points on its being true. For example, below, it says one effect of effective altruism is that «experts decide where the money goes», and that's bad because… I don't get that part. Because experts do rational deliberation, I think, and because an EA proponent says it's «not necessarily morally superior».

I'd love to hear a thorough argument of why rational deliberation renders the resulting action bad or defective. Partly because IMO people who want to make that argument should try to make a rational argument to support their opinions, and someone has to listen.

> Eric Friedman’s new book Reinventing Philanthropy: A Framework for More Effective Giving presents a similar take. In the book, Friedman goes even further than Singer by contrasting the work of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospitals with Malaje Provincial Hospital in Angola. After contrasting two patients served at the different hospitals for life-threatening medical conditions, he concludes, “I’d probably also be very angry at the donors who are continuously funding St. Jude and leaving Malanje Provincial woefully under-resourced. Why are [the patients of St. Jude] so much more worthy of life…?” This seems to us an absurd contrast and presumes a callousness by St. Jude donors that bears no resemblance to reality. Of course it is worthwhile to support both institutions if they both provide life-saving results; but Friedman and others indicate that one should support Malanje and not St. Jude as the “best” choice, and support that claim with nothing other than a decidedly skewed morality.

Not OP, but this passage is representative. The authors' claims here are:

(a) the contrast between patients at Malanje Provincial and St Jude is "absurd". The authors don't explain what in particular is absurd about it. This is basically the style of argument employed in the article, which mostly amounts to "EA is self-evidently wrong" without elaboration.

(b) Friedman presumes that St. Jude donors are "callous". This is clearly unfounded, since the quoted passage is consistent with the idea that St. Jude donors are (say) well-intentioned but culpably ignorant. This is another thread in the authors' arguments - roughly, "EA takes issues with X; X is obviously good; therefore EA is wrong". This is a generic argument that could be employed against any position that isn't a bland endorsement of totally conventional morality, and is another version of "EA is just wrong".

(c) Friedman supports his claim with "nothing other than a decidedly skewed morality." This is overtly false, since Friedman's argument is almost certainly defended via some sort of EA premise, like, "saving more lives/alleviating more suffering (per dollar donated) is better than fewer/less." Not an unassailable argument by any means, but the author's don't assail the argument so much as deny that it exists at all, except as a morality that they flatly assert is "skewed".

> If everyone gave what they could to their neighbors, then people in poorer neighborhoods would still be worse off.

Depends on whether your neighborhood gives charity to its neighboring neighborhoods.

> set up of foreign aid programs in pursuit of goals that are entirely unrelated to effectiveness.

Mostly true, but the side-effect are quite positive. I'd argue that in the long run, foreign aid between 1990 and 2012-ish was more effective than any charity donation. They set up vaccine and OMS programs, they created ports and infrastructure and pressured some government into being a bit more republican (not democratic sadly, but since a third of the third world country was colonized by Bonapartists, and a half by a parlementary monarchy, i'll settle for republic). Yes, Foreign aid do have some undercover agents, but most charity have them too, and the one pushed by GiveWell the most (the Malaria one) is too.

A Kantian approach would be to imagine a world where everyone is following this strategy.

The usual argument though is that giving money to "save lives" by improving health in poor regions, also helps bootstrap development in those regions by boosting their income generating capacity. So even improving productivity is something that might be a lot easier in poor countries.

Creating value via seeking work at effective charities strikes me as harder than earning-to-give and then donating the proceeds. So GiveWell's advice might be relevant to those who are already doing things in effective altruism, but not very much to the average charity donor (who would be most reliant on GiveWell's and others' advice).

One general counter is that groups like the Gates Foundation that work in countries with sub-functioning governments do a certain amount of good in the short term by bypassing the government... But they are complicit in keeping governments sub-functioning, corrupt, not accountable to people, etc.

Specifically, profit made selling goods at their equilibrium price is made by exploiting workers. If you introduce a new good, you will have a monopoly on it for a time, meaning you could turn a profit selling it without exploiting your workers, theoretically. That's my understanding, at least.

Considering how little funding local journalism non-profits tend to have (even in big cities!), donating to a high-impact local journalist org is a great way to make a considerable impact to your communities.

I like that better than charity.

The profit motive motivates Boeing to make the 777, motivates Microsoft to make Windows, etc.

In non-profits, frequently, money works its mischief unopposed, but the motive of "you can make a huge amount of money for yourself and your investors by satisfying a need" is a force for good.

Absolutely true, but I don't think they would be making this argument. They'd more likely be making specific claims about their own effectiveness.