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Comment by didibus | Hacker News Reader

I've always found EA to be the most capitalist way of trying to do good. Instead of like being humble, not accumulating wealth for yourself, not thinking of yourself as better, etc. EA is pushing for this weird self-centered egotistical philanthropic avenue.

That's literally the least efficient way to help anyone.

This also always felt very American. I'll get rich by paying workers poorly, finding any advantageous loophole I can, screwing customers, but once I'm rich I'll donate some of that money to do good...

How does this make any sense?

If you want to do good, just work for others from the get go. Be nice, be kind, be humble, offer mentoring and encouragement, don't hord things for yourself to redistribute it later, instead work to create sustainable opportunities for others.

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> This also always felt very American. I'll get rich by paying workers poorly, finding any advantageous loophole I can, screwing customers, but once I'm rich I'll donate some of that money to do good...

That also feels very inaccurate and misrepresentative of the philosophy.

Rather, I'd say: live mindfully in a broken system. Pick a job that meets your needs with minimal intentional side-effects, donate some surplus to bettering the world. Do not be a paperclip maximizer or "ends justify the means".

That is a good and fair philosophy, except in my personal experience EAs have been very much a "paperclip maximizer" towards their (self-defined) goals of "bringing the most good to the world". From my point of view, claiming that the self-serving class of consultants and cryptobros donating 10% of their is not "true EA" sounds very much like a no true scotsman fallacy.

> Rather, I'd say: live mindfully in a broken system. Pick a job that meets your needs with minimal intentional side-effects, donate some surplus to bettering the world. Do not be a paperclip maximizer or "ends justify the means".

I think that is a very valid philosophy and one I would agree with.

However, EA has a large overlap with longtermism, which has some very paperclip maximizer like features:

> Providing we are capable of colonising the rest of our galaxy and nearby ones, a 1% reduction in the risk of extinction on such a time horizon would be the equivalent of saving 1032 lives. In such a perspective, nothing else matters.

> That year, Bostrom founded the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, dedicated to mitigating risk. He elaborated on his theory of longtermism in a book in 2008, urging people to be “good ancestors” by practising “altruism toward our descendants”. He didn’t mean composting or stopping driving, but mitigating existential risks to humanity – “x-risks” in community parlance – from hazards such as advanced artificial intelligence and bio-hacking, that could potentially wipe out or severely deplete humankind.

(from the linked article).

I think this a very problematic view, because (as noted) almost everything is justifiable if you think you are avoiding extinction of the human race.

> That also feels very inaccurate and misrepresentative of the philosophy.

I admit, I don't want to generalize, I'm sure there are many interpretation of the ideas of EA and different people practice it differently.

That said, in practice, at least the prominent figures and their prominent groups, my impression is that they fall into what I described.

Seems there's an appealing aspect to it that's about being able to be the most cut throat, dirty capitalist where ends justify the means, and where you can feel good about being filthy rich off the back of everyone else, because you'll be efficiently altruistic in donating some of it back.

Feels there's a dimension to it that seems to justify taking from the poor to give to the poorer, while keeping a cut for yourself.

>Instead of like being humble, not accumulating wealth for yourself, not thinking of yourself as better, etc.

The EA advice is that if you're good at something valuable, then the best strategy for being charitable is to do that valuable thing and then donate your money. Do you think it's incompatible with humility to believe that you're good at something valuable? I don't think there's any notion of "thinking of yourself as better" baked in here.

While I definitely think you have a point, I'm still not sure I have a better idea of how to do good. Perhaps you have though? (genuinely asking)

I work in tech and definitely make more than I need. I work for a small company (and don't even have any employees under me) so I'd at least like to think that I'm not that involved in exploiting people in order to make money.

Now the question that I have is what do I do with the excess money I'm making, especially since I do actually agree with you about the not accumulating wealth part. One option is of course spending a lot of time analysing charities to figure out which one I think would be the best to donate to, but while I'm still not completely ruling it out, I feel like that would make analysing charities almost a part time job. Since at least at the moment i don't want to do that, I still settled on donating based on GiveWell's recommendations, essentially outsourcing the charities analysis. I am aware that GiveWell and I probably don't share 100% of our values, but I truly don't see a better option.

So really, if you, or anyone else, has a better idea of what I can do with the excess money I'm making, I'd be more than happy to listen.

> EA is pushing for this weird self-centered egotistical philanthropic avenue. That's literally the least efficient way to help anyone.

What.

The stereotypical EA person is a banker who makes $150k/year after tax and donates $100k/year to the against malaria foundation. As opposed to the lawyer who quits working for corporate and becomes a gardner, which seems to be what you're advocating.

The former seems to do far more good in the world, saving hundreds of young lives.

This is starting to feel like Motte and Bailey fallacy to me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

Either that or just confusion about what and/or who we are talking about.

EA is not a well defined set of concepts or ideas. I do know a lot of people who identify as EA and have argued for "earn-to-give" where the giving part is deferred far into the future.

I won't spur the confusion further but my own personal experience is that there are several people I have personally met who more closely match the parents description than the description you give.

I'm all for earn-to-give if you are doing the giving soon and to causes where the outcomes are easier to measure, like what you mentioned. This is very commendable.

Where EA-style thinking runs into trouble is where it places excess confidence in future predictions

either A) I will eventually donate this money B) This cause I'm donating to has no obvious impact now, but it will have immense impact in the future or C) Even though I can't see all the negative impacts my work is having, my prediction/inference is that the negative impacts will be smaller than the positive impacts of my altruism.

So I have nothing against the idea of trying to maximize good, I just think that I frequently see it used in conjunction with excessively high-confidence predictions or inferences.

In your case, I think it's important that the banker do some sort of accounting of whether he is having a negative impact on their current project/firm etc. There are bankers who have had a huge negative impact in the past and so this does need to be part of the accounting.

> The former seems to do far more good in the world, saving hundreds of young lives

I guess the example is incomplete, the banker also contributes to some system in a way, is the work harmful to others?

And if the work is beneficial, they're still part of a system where, why are they taking such a large salary in the first place?

Now, I'm actually not opposed to this form of EA. Like the other commenter said, donating money is fine, it's choosing to become a banker and trying to become the highest paid banker in history, so that you can then go and donate a larger sum of that income that I find problematic.

The latter form of EA seems wrong to me, because the idea that you'll take more money from people, to then personally decide who else you'll give it back too and how much of it you'll keep for yourself or not, that does not seem altruistic.

Instead I wish that people adopted a moral where making excessively more than others, or owning excessively more things than others was just seen as wrong to begin with. If you don't need more than 100k, then just charge less for your services, or pay your employees and staff more, or heck accept higher tax brackets and give more back to fund social institutions and infrastructure.

> heck accept higher tax brackets and give more back to fund social institutions and infrastructure.

Am I reading this wrong or are you saying that the government is the most efficient form of charity?

It’s because we threw away Christianity as a moral compass which many interpret similarly and the hole was filled with EA, woke, etc. These people just totally missed the point of why we ditched Christianity/religion in the first place. It wasn’t so we could replace it with a different socio-political hegemony or otherwise moralizing institution.

This pretty much hits it on the nose for me. I think with a little extra spice of thinking you know best and experts in the field are dumb, aka, white savior complex.

> I've always found EA to be the most capitalist way of trying to do good.

If by "capitalist", you mean the system that incentivized the most selfish assholes on the planet to accidentally lift billions of people out of poverty, then I agree.

> This also always felt very American. I'll get rich by paying workers poorly...

The median American gets paid more than their counterparts in all but a couple countries. When you account for the population size and diversity of America, it's a statistical miracle how well Americans get paid.

EA and capitalism focus on efficiency and not virtue. You can't substitute being unvirtuous with being hyper-efficient, and I don't think anyone is going to argue otherwise. There's an argument to be made that efficiency is crowding out virtue, especially when it comes to capitalism, but even then I think you're significantly overestimating this effect. I don't think this same argument can be applied to EA. Overall, I think it inspires rationalist-obsessing nerds to be more interested in virtuous behavior. One of them happens to be me. Another, happens to be a billionaire scam artist.

Mostly it's a method of assuaging the guilt and resolving the cognitive dissonance that comes with having left-wing values but also wanting to be very rich.

This seems correct. Thanks for putting it so succinctly.

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