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Comment by martopix | Hacker News Reader

Please do not forget that you can disapprove of all the longtermism stuff and of the alleged cult-like structure, and still think it's important to pledge your money to charity.

Please don't let the bad publicity around EA stop you from donating what you can, to charities that you trust and have a proven record of efficacy, whether from EA-related organization or other research. The original message still stands and should keep standing.

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If anything, EA seems like an obstacle to that kind of common-sense thinking. I could donate to charity. But: if holding on to the money made it more likely that I'd earn more money later, I could donate even more money to charity. I'm thus ethically obligated not to donate. See, for this, William MacAskill's conversation with Sam Bankman-Fried where he urged him to take a job at Jane Street to maximize his income.

If you have an idea which cause to spend on and you have enough savings to live for 6 months in case of problems, EA generally recommends to donate:

https://80000hours.org/articles/should-you-wait/

... so does Catholicism. It's the rest of what EA (and Catholicism) has to say that gets us into trouble. (I'm Catholic, fwiw).

I'm not very close to the core of EA, so maybe my perspective is not the most accurate, but one thing that I feel sets EA apart from other movements is that EA people generally are happy to disagree and change their mind based on good ideas/arguments/evidence from anyone inside our outside EA. For example:

https://80000hours.org/about/credibility/evaluations/mistake... https://80000hours.org/2020/02/anonymous-answers-flaws-80000...

I expect and hope that people within EA will keep learning from mistakes and changing their views.

Well, right today there's an article on the economist, one on the guardian, two things on the front page of hacker news, etc. This is a debate, with clear criticism of their current views. Let's see.

I see billionaire individuals and organised charities as polar extremes of the same policy failure. Neither should exist, and when they do it should be as an ephemeral anomaly.

Any charity which fails to prioritise putting itself out of business is functionally a grift.

If society truly valued what charities do, their activities would be intrinsically valuable, and not require a special economic status to be conjured for them to be viable.

Or they are considered valuable but we have a captive market… Many people would like charities to become institutional features instead of charities but then there are other interests who are against such things because then “muh capital”

Charities, as they exist today, serve as a void into which corporations and governments can abdicate their respective responsibilities. Continuing to tolerate charities, at least in their current form, is complicity.

People have this idea that you can just solve problems like world hunger by waving a magic wand, but you can’t. There are probably South Sentinelese starving right now, we can’t do anything about that because they won’t let us. The little world hunger that is left today after the advancements of the 20th century is almost entirely in war-torn messes, and you can’t eliminate war unless you eliminate human free will

> charities that you trust and have a proven record of efficacy

Yet to find one since I started googling their financials.

Against malaria foundation (you know they are good because their website looks like it was made in the last century)

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