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Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

Like most things: EA as a concept is fine. Finding the "maximal" way to improve the lives of others is great, and finding better ways to contribute than charity and volunteering is honorable.

The issue is when people take it to the extreme (like someone who literally argued that a person doing mere charity or volunteer work is bad, because they are wasting time and effort that they could've spent making money and recruiting to contribute more charity and volunteering), or just sidestepping "altruism" entirely and using the name and community as a stepping stone to push your unrelated scam.

I don't know whether or not SBF genuinely believed in effective altruism, but if he did, he let the "principles" override common sense.

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> like someone who literally argued that a person doing mere charity or volunteer work is bad, because they are wasting time and effort that they could've spent making money

This is the part of EA that triggers a lot of red flags for me. Making money, or rather making significant money, necessitates participation in a system of exploitation that is largely responsible for the ills the charitable donations are meant to alleviate in the first place. Maximizing that money necessitates optimizing the exploitation.

the whole thing just seems like an exercise in morality-washing one's own greed. Lies, damn lies, and statistics perpetrated with "rationality".

> This is the part of EA that triggers a lot of red flags for me. Making money, or rather making significant money, necessitates participation in a system of exploitation that is largely responsible for the ills the charitable donations are meant to alleviate in the first place.

I mean, given that you think that I understand where you're coming from. But just note that many, many people would highly disagree with that characterization.

I don't think our "system", whatever that means, is evil. I think it's pretty good, definitely better than other things people have come up with. And I don't think you need to give to charity to morality-wash greed. I think it's just the right thing to do.

You missed the major point of being the exact capitalists that are the reason for charity to be so necessary. That’s white washing greed and self interest. Get to have a better life selfishly then donate the money to be morally better.

No I didn't miss the point. I disagree with it.

Looking at other countries that don't have capitalism, everyone is worse off. I don't think capitalism is the reason charity is necessary. I think the world starts default-bad for humans, by default we don't have anywhere close to the living we want, and over the years, many technological advanacements, including capitalism, have slowly made most humans far better off.

This is fairly clear in the historical record or in comparing different countries.

(At least to me. Most people seem to disagree with this, but I honestly think they're wrong.)

> Looking at other countries that don't have capitalism, everyone is worse off.

Interesting that all I talked about was a system of exploitation and your mind immediately filled in 'capitalism'.

I think there are many countries that temper capitalism with socialist ideals and people are not worse off than the more unfettered variety practiced in the US.

> Interesting that all I talked about was a system of exploitation and your mind immediately filled in 'capitalism'.

That's not what happened. When I answered you I wrote "the system". I answered skinnymuch's post about capitalism, because they themselves talked about capitalism.

But out of curiosity - what "system" exactly did you have in mind?

> I think there are many countries that temper capitalism with socialist ideals and people are not worse off than the more unfettered variety practiced in the US.

Who said anything about the US?

The point as the OP is saying as well is that people are being unfairly exploited in capitalism. You went along with agreeing with me by arguing about capitalism which is what I called the system of exploitation as said by the OP.

Well, without capitalism everyone would live in subsistence-level poverty, but it would be a social norm, so no charity would be necessary.

The whole thing reminds me of "I, Robot", when the AI realizes that the greater good for humanity can't care for themselves, it is to be ruled by the AI for good.

This is the kind of vibe I get from this writeup, and the level of separation from humanity these people operate.

Why wait for AI to take over when you can have people run the same calculations and come to the same conclusions?

Incidentally, literally every dictator to ever live also has come to that conclusion

Seems more Ends Justify the Means when you start talking about future lives saved

That’s the sense I got too, especially after reading the fellatious piece on SBF from sequoia capital. Trying too hard to justify getting rich, because that would theoretically help the world, in the end, regardless of the means to get there.

It's the modern version of a religious indulgence. Worse, as you point out, all it offers is more undue and unjustified meddling in peoples lives to make up for unfair and injudicious meddling in other peoples financial affairs.

More cynically, you're giving hand outs to people who yet need to learn to be productive, while destroying the lives of people who were trying to leverage their own productivity. I think it has negative value, doubling harming progress for the sake of apology.

You seem to be objecting to alturism not effective alturism.

>The issue is when people take it to the extreme (like someone who literally argued that a person doing mere charity or volunteer work is bad, because they are wasting time and effort that they could've spent making money and recruiting to contribute more charity and volunteering)

I mean, the concern here is that coming off as an asshole can be self-defeating, not that these views are actually incorrect, right? Seems like it's like being an atheist - an "extreme view" for many and it's a topic that may need to be dealt with with caution sometimes but that's really mostly a critique of the sensitivities of others.

1. Both of them are concerns. 2. In case you are really lacking that much self awareness, yes, you are coming off as one in this conversation. You may call me "sensitive" and feel better about yourself now.

>In case you are really lacking that much self awareness, yes, you are coming off as one in this conversation. You may call me "sensitive" and feel better about yourself now.

Isn't this just tone policing then?

No there is also something bad about rejecting less quantifiable forms of charity as well. Movements grow out of communities and through solidarity and you build neither by mailing a check across the world and considering your obligation met.

I do think it's good to optimize money spent for these things much of the time but it's also just inhuman to have no place, or respect, for forms of charity that are based on, form and reinforce human connection.

>No there is also something bad about rejecting less quantifiable forms of charity as well.

I don't think EA argues for this. I guess it depends on what you mean by "less quantifiable."

>I do think it's good to optimize money spent for these things much of the time but it's also just inhuman to have no place, or respect, for forms of charity that are based on, form and reinforce human connection.

Describing this as "inhuman" is pretty extreme. In any case I think if you acknowledge that you're indulging in various non-charitable preferences through your donations I don't think EA would offer a serious critique beyond pointing out that you could be doing better. I think a major goal of EA though is to get people to truly wrangle with their biases here. These organizings are pragmatic - they're not trying to chide us into being moral saints, but just "giving what we can" - a popular EA slogan.

The problem is the consequentialist ethics behind the position. Rigid consequentialism leads to all kinds of abhorrent views and is almost universally rejected among ethicists (with a few notable exceptions).

I don't think EA implies adherence to "rigid consequentialism". Like a lot of EA advocates are deeply into animal welfare for these reasons, but they offer advice to those that aren't. I think the weaker unifying argument is just that EA encourages more self-examination regarding whether one's charitable efforts are actually achieving one's values, and to provide advice to help achieve better alignment on this.

The problem is they can't possibly know if they are correct or not, we just don't have enough information about the actual future and what effect actions now might have on it.

Plus it doesn't take into account our individual competencies and nature. It doesn't matter how much I think curing cancer is more important than my current job, I know absolutely zilch about curing cancer. Also I have no idea if I'm actually right about cancer being a top priority, or if curing it is even possible. Meanwhile sick people that doctors and nurses can save using known techniques are dying right now.

Effective Altruism as a principle is fine, it makes a degree of sense. We do need to invest in long term projects, but all this talk of 1% chance of this or that saving humanity is fiddling while Rome burns.

>Plus it doesn't take into account our individual competencies and nature. It doesn't matter how much I think curing cancer is more important than my current job, I know absolutely zilch about curing cancer. Also I have no idea if I'm actually right about cancer being a top priority, or if curing it is even possible.

If curing cancer is a top priority, the EA advice is not that you should quit your job and try to cure cancer. It's probably to keep your job (which you likely have developed a comparative advantage in) and do serious research into which organizations will actually make progress towards curing cancer, and EA orgs will often try to provide advice on this latter front.

Yes, there is a big emphasis in these communities on various sorts of existential risks, but it doesn't imply that you can't be an EA if you have different beliefs on these risks, so long as those beliefs are informed by open-minded criticism and not "only privileged techbros could possibly care about this"-style sneers

Effective altruism (EA) is a philosophical and social movement that advocates "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis". [1]

Seems like a good idea, if only just to have some sort of open-system for rating charities. I suspect the issue is everything that comes around the idea, specially... people. The problem is always people :-). Perhaps a "Michelin Guide to Charities" would be easier to market and explain? :-p

My favorite explanation of how "effective altruism" works is this SMBC comic [2]. :-)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism

2: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13

> if only just to have some sort of open-system for rating charities

While the following examples aren't exactly _open_ systems, some organizations address the niche you highlight. Examples: https://www.givewell.org/, https://animalcharityevaluators.org/

I think _open_ is the important part:

Would make sense if anyone could come up with the score, following some "standard". That way one could make sure that no specific grader has incentives to give good scores speculatively (or even maliciously).

I encourage you to explore givewell's site. They are very transparent about their ratings and processes.

The problem with EA and other utilitarian systems of thought is two-fold. Firstly, you can't predict the future so really you're working off your biases. Secondly, unfettered by principles other than the end justifying the means, you can easily turn those aforementioned biases into justifications for committing horrible acts. Mass murder, or evidently, theft on a massive scale.

For instance:

"The technological revolution was a disaster for the human race... so I'm going to murder a few people to draw attention to my manifesto against technology."

"Social inequality is a disaster for the majority of my countrymen, so I'm going to murder the Bourgeoisie"

"My altruism is more effective than anybody else's, so I'm going to steal everybody else's money so that I can put it to better use."

How do you stop this shit? Deontological ethics. Don't murder, because murder is wrong. Don't steal, because stealing is wrong. Damn the consequences, stick to simple principles such as these.

>Firstly, you can't predict the future so really you're working off your biases.

Um, are you saying that this implies that people should just throw up their hands and donate to whatever causes since who knows? Surely not. Once we acknowledge that these questions can be tackled empirically, that's what EA tries to do. Is there room for bias in this process? Absolutely. Does that justify embracing some sort of epistemic nihilism? Absolutely not.

> > Firstly, you can't predict the future so really you're working off your biases.

> Um, are you saying that this implies that people should just throw up their hands and donate to whatever causes since who knows?

No, it implies that you shouldn't lecture others that you have the one true answer as to the best path forwards. You are free to (and in fact should) use your best judgment in your own personal choices, just don't confuse that with absolute truth.

I don't think EA institutions argue that they have the One True Answer. They just often give recommendations - "eg. if you care about maximizing QALY overall, we recommend charities X, Y, and Z." If I don't care about QALY maximization, fine. But if I do, why would I not listen to the recommendations?

Longtermism and QALY do not seem compatible.

EA and Longtermism are not the same thing.

However the linked article makes a pretty strong case that the two are increasingly interlinked, especially in the EA institutions.

They do if you legitimately think the long-term thing will kill everyone.

I don't think that myself, but it's internally consistent.

Peter Singer, one of the "founders" of effective altruism, argues pretty vehemently in his book "Effective Altruism" that the ends do NOT justify the means. Like you've said, doing that has lead some people to go off the deep end and do some horrifying stuff, so just because you think you can improve the world better than the guy next to you doesn't mean you should take the guy's money.

(Although, I've googled a bit and found a "counter"-example, where Singer argues that in a case where six innocent people could be wrongly accused of murder and killed, you should point at one as the perpetrator if it means only they get killed and the other five ones get let go, therefore saving five lives: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/866768837)

So yes, killing is morally wrong and should never be the mean to your end, but the rest is really muddy. Is stealing from the rich in order to feed the poor a justified mean? Is donating most of your money you make trading off the stock market, where other people have lost that money, a justified mean? Is lobbying against climate-unfriendly companies a justified mean?

> Peter Singer, one of the "founders" of effective altruism, argues pretty vehemently in his book "Effective Altruism" that the ends do NOT justify the means.

Even without such an argument, “the ends justify the means” isn’t a reason to do something in the real world, because there are no “ends” in the real world. Everything just keeps happening.

> "My altruism is more effective than anybody else's, so I'm going to steal everybody else's money so that I can put it to better use."

> How do you stop this shit?

If you ask yourself why you think "this shit" is bad, at root there will be a consequentialist reason. Deontological ethics is consequentialism by heuristics.

But if you ever try to put any consequentialist theories into practice, at root there will just be a set of deontological heuristics guiding your behavior. Consequentialism is just deontology in drag.

You're right. We are unable to be full consequentialist because the computational cost of seeing all ends is infinite, and unable to be full deontologist because competing heuristics are arbitrarily instantiated and mutually contradictory. Even if we're stuck in the middle forever, I know which way I'd strive.

Real heuristics, of course, are not arbitrary, they are the result of trial and error processes where societies and people with differing moral systems compete with each other, proving the fitness of their heuristic by surviving while less fit heuristics fail.

I'll go with the results of trial and error over long time horizons rather than blank slate theoretical calculations any day.

Heuristic selection as you describe is evolutionary. So the meme that survives may not have any bearing on human flourishing, just on its own viral ability to spread. Fitness of the heuristic is orthogonal to human benefit.

Further, when multiple heuristics are directly in conflict, it is up to the individual to make the final moral decision. The choice to reject one heuristic over another must be based in some moral calculus.

Finally, who said anything about blank slate? That's a clear straw man, as it's only logical for consequentialists to take current heuristics and their adherents into account.

Deontological ethics is worse than useless as aguide to doing good.

It only tells you what not to do, rather than what to do.

And it's full of exceptions and edge cases. Is stealing a loaf of bread from scrooge to stop a family from starving wrong? What if you call it "taxes" and the community voted on it? Is it murder to blow up a bridge in wartime? Is unplugging someone's life support murder? What if they're going to die in hours any way and you're out of life support machines for the patient who just came in and has good prospects?

Also, while we can't predict the future we all need to decide what to do. Sure, if you donate antimosquito nets to save kids from malaria one of them might grow up to become the next Hitler, but you should try and figure out on the balance of probability what the most likely outcomes are.

> Firstly, you can't predict the future so really you're working off your biases

Obviously. That is the human condition.

Do you not take actions in normal life because you don't have full knowledge of everything? Don't order breakfast because you don't know which menu item is for sure going to be the best.

> How do you stop this shit? Deontological ethics. Don't murder, because murder is wrong. Don't steal, because stealing is wrong. Damn the consequences, stick to simple principles such as these.

Simple rules like: dont hoard your money but find a worthy cause for it?

I agree with your second point that having deontological boundaries is important. Interestingly, people like Eliezer Yudkowsky (generally respected in the EA movement, I'm pretty sure?) also agree with you about that. He's been reiterating the point recently on twitter, though this post [1] says pretty much the same thing and it's from 2008. Generally, I'd attribute your examples of "utilitarianism gone wrong" to mental illness or sociopathy rather than to holding a utilitarian philosophy. For the average person, moral philosophy is much more of a way to explain the choices we make after the fact than a thing that actually determines the choices.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB/ends-don-t...

Sorry, it is not a "fine" concept.

It is just utilitarianism with modern marketing and pure utilitarianism has problems.

See one example below where utilitarianism's suggestion goes against what almost everyone considers ethical:

You can take 10 healthy organs from one person without any social connections and use the organs to save 10 terminal patients who would otherwise die.

EA effectively sanctions robbing a million people to help a million people + 1

EA doesn't do that - it's a much smaller concept than utilitarianism. (Which also wouldn't always support that conclusion.)

But it has very noticeably begun falling into the same traps long discovered and recognized by utilitarianism. EA now has a significant contingent that is most focused on very unlikely far future outcomes because they would be incredibly bad for an unimaginably vast number of people if they did occur eg unbounded utility. That's pascal's mugging!

The movement is based on the same ideas and values and it's running into the same problems. These similarities don't inherently discredit the movement, but not having a clear awareness of these faults in their framework and a plan for avoiding them is very worrying.

> EA now has a significant contingent that is most focused on very unlikely far future outcomes because they would be incredibly bad for an unimaginably vast number of people if they did occur eg unbounded utility. That's pascal's mugging!

Indeed! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging

(Although the term itself comes from the EA community)

I am very confused about why the rationalists, who first identified the concept of pascal's mugging seem to have a huge number of initiatives which seem to be examples of falling directly into the pascal's mugging trap.

With all of these examples, and pascal's mugging itself, there is an obvious error: there should be a practical upper bound on the adverse outcome you're concerned about, at which all higher values are effectively the same to you.

> I am very confused about why the rationalists, who first identified the concept of pascal's mugging seem to have a huge number of initiatives which seem to be examples of falling directly into the pascal's mugging trap.

The original rationalists were true rationalist. And the recent ones? I am not so sure.

> Which also wouldn't always support that conclusion

This is a well known issue:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/

https://blog.apaonline.org/2021/03/29/is-effective-altruism-...

> As such, Effective Altruism is inherently Utilitarian in character, even if the views are themselves distinct. Criticisms of Effective Altruism on the basis of critiques to Utilitarianism are not only expected, but fair.

That example is a bad one. There are many serious risks in trying to do that in practice, which is why our intuitions are against it. E.g. you might be found out and people might mistrust doctors, you might be wrong about the person having to connections, those patients might not live long anyway, etc etc

> EA effectively sanctions robbing a million people to help a million people + 1

Yes, EA people often think taxes are a good idea. This is not a rare thing.

> That example is a bad one.

No, just saying that it is a bad example doesn't make it.

I wish EA folks looked at the literature that discusses this very example.

> There are many serious risks in trying to do that in practice, which is why our intuitions are against it. E.g. you might be found out and people might mistrust doctors, you might be wrong about the person having to connections, those patients might not live long anyway, etc etc

Yes, that has been discussed thousands of times in the literature.

To answer, you can always have the person confirm they are ok with it (e.g. Switzerland allows physician-assisted suicide in some case).

> Yes, that has been discussed thousands of times in the literature.

Yes, and that's why the strawman is bad.

EA folks don't in practice follow or advocate for any form of ethical system that leads to doctors killing people for their organs.

> Yes, and that's why the strawman is bad.

No, thats why it is good. It is discussed thousands of times *because* none of the solutions are satisfactory.

> EA folks don't in practice follow or advocate for any form of ethical system that leads to doctors killing people for their organs.

But the axioms they evangelize imply that. And this is essentially what Bankman has done financially.

I think that longtermism (mentioned in the article) is bad though, both as a concept and in practice.

What counts as longtermism though? Preserving archaeological sites rather than bulldozing them? Fighting CO2 emissions? Trying to avoid AGI risk you think will happen in less than a century?

The longtermism as thought of by Bostrom etc is a view that (potential) future lives are as valuable as lives now.

Part of the danger is the name. I support long term thinking! I love things like the Long Now project! But this specific viewpoint is very wrong.

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