‘Effective Altruism’ Is Neither
wsj.com
wsj.com
> Actually, when you work, you already give to society, but that is too complex for some to understand.
Charitable giving is obviously in addition to whatever output is produced from one's work. It is also directed more purposefully towards altruistic aims than random consumption.
> I did a little digging, and I’m not so sure they’re effective at all. ... they also supply supplements for vitamin A deficiency, though genetically modified “golden” rice already provides vitamin A more effectively.
Does he really think that an organization devoted full-time to researching charities has somehow overlooked something basic found by a random WSJ columnist from a quick google search?
> That’s a bit like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted
Future pandemics are inevitable, and there's no guarantee they won't be more severe than Covid-19.
There's lots of room for criticism in the EA movement - in fact that theres an entire contest currently devoted to it (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8hvmvrgcxJJ2pYR4X/...), but this is a poor attempt.
>> Actually, when you work, you already give to society, but that is too complex for some to understand.
Given the classic free-enterprise position[1] is exactly that “giving to society” should be accomplished through separate charitable organizations funded by business owners or employees, not by grafting secondary objectives onto unrelated businesses, I’m not sure which into which partisan divide it’s supposed to drive a wedge, exactly, in the WSJ of all places.
(Yes, that position has pretty low-hanging caveats, but it also has a point.)
[1] Friedman (1970), “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits”, https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...
> In a free‐enterprise, private‐property system, a corporate executive is an employe of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.
The body of the article makes a careful distinction between “social responsibility of business” [nonsensical per the argument as I read it], “social responsibility of a business” [dubiously meaningful, more of a category error—same one as “corporations are afforded human rights”, funnily enough], “social responsibility of a business executive” [as far as their employment is concerned, advancing the aims of the owners, generically profit], and “social responsibility of a business owner” [same as for any other natural person, might entail establishing or funding a business to advance their goals].
ETA: Anyhow, my point was not whether or to which extent I agree with Friedman’s headline or article, it was that the quoted sentence seems like a generic argument against charities, which is neither economic-progressive (“left”) nor WSJ’s traditional economic-liberal (“right”), it’s just bizarre.
I quoted the bit where he added legal and moral qualifiers onto that profit motive for the owners.
Which renders his clickbait headline and his now quaint sounding red-scare intro totally empty of meaning. The whole thing just disappears in a puff of logic.
He even admits that himself.
"Don't do what's best for society. Why not? Because that's bad for society" is a paradox that he points out himself, though apparently he thinks writing an Op-ed in the WSJ telling people they shouldn't do something doesn't count, which means it's not hypocrisy when he does it.
> It’s the classic progressive playbook: Raise taxes to fund their pet projects but not yours or mine. I don’t care if altruists spend their own money trying to prevent future risks from robot invasions or green nanotech goo, but they should stop asking American taxpayers to waste money on their quirky concerns.
I hoped that after Covid, pandemic preparedness would stop being seen as a "quirky concern", but it seems like we are incapable of learning from our mistakes.
we should have mature discussions about what we should pay for with our taxes, and i think majority of people would support a rational above board tax policy to prevent COVID type disasters the practical numbers of tax should be left to legislature AFTER a public consensus is reached
> Yes, they direct money toward malaria nets and treatments for parasitic worms, but they also supply supplements for vitamin A deficiency, though genetically modified “golden” rice already provides vitamin A more effectively. Hmmm, seems like a move backward. GiveWell also suggests direct cash transfers to solve extreme poverty, similar to universal basic income.
A thread on golden rice on the EA forum: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AF8hvNXFqhZsDmrTc/...
It's banned in many countries so it seems like supplements are the most "effective" way forwards.
If his best criticism of direct cash transfers is that it's similar to UBI, I'm okay with that.
This does gradually seem to be improving over time so I have hope for the future, but for now it's a movement worth engaging with, but with a massive pinch of salt rather than swallowing their claims wholesale.
This would have been a much shorter article without losing substance.
The rest of the article is really ... well all opinion. "I don't like this, this is bad".
And yes, I realize that I did the same thing with crypto on my first paragraph. But I would have provided credible sources to sustain my claims if I was writing a piece on wsj.
It is more difficult to quantify how crypto is affecting people's lives overall.
I know some people who invested in crypto and "now their savings are worth 2/3rd of what they were worth before". There's also the fact that a lot of crypto is used to money launder or evading taxes. It's difficult to know exactly how many people were negatively affected by this, and that is one of the criticisms.
Also let's not forget that one of the tenets of crypto, especially on the more shady rug pulls, has always been excessive complexity - making things difficult to estimate or quantify is a feature.
You call it "aesthetic sensibilities". I call it "selective number picking".
every. single. item. discussed by this PG&E exec was at a minimum of ten years away.. many of the replies, it was more years.. so many ways of saying "we are moving towards this" ... and "integrating these systems" .. and "new regulations in progress now" .. etc
within six months, the explosion and fire in San Bruno, California [0] and subsequent investigation, showed that PG&E had falsified inspection documents to avoid detecting existing pipeline maintenance, because of course it costs money to fix pipelines. The executive was repeatedly asked about what to do now, and repeatedly every answer was at least ten years away for "reasons".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion
As per usual, the hypercapitalist WSJ suddenly becomes Stalinist when people the WSJ doesn't like decide to do what they want with their money, time, or speech.
All this intellectual bloat probably ends up doing more harm than good, because as one famous contemporary philosopher says, all ideology is harmful.
Let everyone just "do good" their own way independently. Maybe that is in some ways less effective, but it also avoids the formation of cults, that will inevitable be taken over and abused by sociopaths.