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Comment by neilparikh | Hacker News Reader

> Effective Altruism

The practical version of Effective Altruism for most people is essentially "if you're well off, you should donate a chunk of your income to buying anti-malaria bed nets/deworming medicine/direct cash transfers for the global poor". I don't see how that could "sour" in your mind, seems like a fairly unreservedly good thing.

I want to point out that there are real people [1] being helped by Effective Altruism right now. Telling them "sorry, can't help you any more, some rich asshole in the US just committed a scam, and he claimed he wanted to help you too" just seems incredibly petty and cruel to me.

[1] - This is also a group that traditionally doesn't receive much attention either.

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This is why so many people find EA annoying. People donated to malaria causes well before EA was a thing, but of course now, without EA, there's nothing.

I find it very annoying. Why I’ rely on the benevolence of a few rich people when you can do the same much more effectively with proper taxation and wealth redistribution.

> proper taxation and wealth redistribution

All the mainstream political suggestions for taxation/wealth distribution focus on correcting wealth inequalities within a rich nation. Very few (if any) suggest redistributing from wealthy western nations to the global poor.

Neither does EA, they just suggest rich people donate sometimes...

I don’t think upper-middle class programmers were donating much before EA.

Obviously AMF has been around before EA, the big difference is the additional amount of money it’s been able to deploy. I personally know many people (including me!) who started donating significantly because of EA.

"if you're well off, you should donate a chunk of your income to buying anti-malaria bed nets/deworming medicine/direct cash transfers for the global poor" (c)

Isn't it against EA ethos? Helping some people right now, right here? I read some posts about this movement, and from them it seemed like EAs are more interested in the far off stuff - developing benevolent AI, transumanism, space travel, gene vaults, terraforming, Mars colonisation etc. (there is nothing wrong with these activities). Because helping people right now is "just" altruism, not effective altruism.

The longtermist EAs do suggest that, but by dollar donated, the more traditional global health stuff is still a large chunk of what EA do.

> I read some posts about this movement, and from them it seemed like EAs are more interested in the far off stuff

You can’t really use that as a metric to judge the movement, since there’s only so much one can write about “donate money to AMF”, but you can write pages and pages about the far off stuff.

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