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Comment by rthomas6 | Hacker News Reader

I'm too dumb to understand what this article is talking about. I thought Effective Altruism was about maximizing goodness/dollar when donating to charity. I assumed the measure of goodness was treated as an axiom, and up for critique. Number of lives saved per dollar seems to be a common metric, and one can argue why or why not that's a good measure.

The article, as far as I can follow it, seems to be trying to discredit the idea that we can know what a good measure is, objectively. Okay, I guess I can see that. But who cares? Lives/dollar seems like a good measure to me, and I like it. No more reasoning required. It's my money and I decide what to do with it. And I can still think people who disagree with me are wrong.

Moral realism, metaethics, what is all this crap? Is there more to Effective Altruism that I am unaware of? What are they even trying to argue? On either side?

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> Is there more to Effective Altruism that I am unaware of?

You've got the concepts right.

However, Effective Altruism (with capital letters) has evolved into a collection of organizations, communities, bloggers, and personalities who exist adjacent to the "rationalist" community and spend a lot of time debating about things. There's also a large sect of the EA community that believes the risk of artificial intelligence becoming sentient and taking over the world in the future is the biggest risk to the world and therefore deserving of a lot of EA funding. Different people will give you different answers about how relevant this group is to the broader EA movement.

The more I read about Effective Altruism, the more I think it's best to stick to the high-level concepts and not get involved with all of the drama that surrounds self-labeled Effective Altruist communities or "movements". It gets weird, quickly.

> best to stick to the high-level concepts and not get involved with all of the drama that surrounds

In my experience this is true of most things.

Without moral realism, why should I care about your personal moral preferences?

With moral realism, why should I care about your personal moral preferences? Whether moral statements are facts says nothing about whether your preferences are the right ones. And either way, moral statements being fact isn't actually a reason to act morally since the universe only punishes you for being immoral if religion is real. What's stopping anyone from rejecting the True moral statements in favor of ones they personally prefer?

You don't have to care about that. You just look at the metrics for goodness I'm using, and the assumptions underlying that, and see if you agree with them. Some of them are pretty common, such as human life having value in itself. I guess I see the point of the article now, if EA people are saying their way of measuring goodness is the only way. That does deserve skepticism and requests for proof.

Don't worry. They are not saying any such thing.

You don't need moral realism to arrive at a set of mutually agreed upon moral values. You don't have to agree with your friends on what's the best food in the world is in order to choose a place to have dinner.

There is an argument that you don't like the process by which the moral values were arrived to, but that's hardly a reason to indulge in moral nihilism.

Nothing can make you care about anything. Caring is always a personal, subjective decision.

Eg, I could decide that:

1. God exists.

2. God wants me to do/not do these particular things.

3. God will punish me for disobeying.

4. I still don't care and will do whatever I want.

You can't prevent #4 by any means whatsoever. "I don't care" is always an option.

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