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Comment by abhv | Hacker News Reader

(1) Any theory that encourages people to suspect working directly on important local causes that are meaningful to them, but instead, seek out the highest paying jobs in order to donate to EA causes is just hiding a special kind of ponzi scheme ("get more people in to fund the good work of the current people").

(2) EA creates an excuse to act outrageously evil "for the good of the longterm"

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1. The underlying logic behind earning to give is sound. You flying over to Africa or whatever to do charitable activities (digging a well?) is obviously going to be less impactful than you working at some high paid white collar job and then donating the money to pay some local laborers to do the same job.

2. Contrary to what you think, there's nothing about effective altruism that requires/wants you to donate to effective altruism organizations. Yes, there are effective altruism funds that effectively collect money and donate them to the most impactful causes, but there are also sites like givewell that tells you which charities are doing the most impactful work. I don't see how the latter is ponzi-like in any way. Even the former isn't really ponzi-like unless there's high administrative overhead (ie. most of the money isn't getting disbursed to charities and is instead spent on admin expenses).

3. This whole comment feels like an attack on a strawman on effective altruism and/or earning to give. The EA people I know of definitely do not give me the impression that they're willing to commit crimes so they can divert more money to EA/charities. I'll admit that I'm not deep into EA, so it's possible that I didn't witness their secret meetings where they they do discuss this. What you're doing feels like attacking utilitarians (eg. Peter Singer or John Stuart Mill) by saying that the logical conclusion to their ideology "creates an excuse to act outrageously evil "for the good of the longterm""

> 1. The underlying logic behind earning to give is sound. You flying over to Africa or whatever to do charitable activities (digging a well?) is obviously going to be less impactful than you working at some high paid white collar job and then donating the money to pay some local laborers to do the same job.

It isn't obvious, and I'm skeptical both by cases like this and by the lack of domain expertise of a white-collar worker to be able to judge the veracity of charitable activities.

I mean, maybe if we had flush teams of water quality experts in every state with the time and expertise to judge whether water supplies are safe. But as it is, a team from Virginia Tech had to high tail it to Flint during their water crisis based on the reports they heard about lead levels there.

If there are too few domain experts or even too weak a web of trust to connect them to white collar donors, what you describe doesn't sound like an effective strategy. (Not to mention whatever it is that causes you to think that the approach is obviously superior to drilling down in some domain.)

>It isn't obvious, and I'm skeptical both by cases like this and by the lack of domain expertise of a white-collar worker to be able to judge the veracity of charitable activities.

I don't get what you're arguing here. The white collar worker lacks the expertise to "judge the veracity of charitable activities" therefore we should...

* fly over to africa so hey can dig a well and find out first hand whether it's actually doing good? Leaving aside the massive amounts of resources needed for this endeavor, there's no evidence that the same unqualified white collar worker would be qualified to judge what's happening on the ground

* not practice effective altruism, and donate to whichever feels the cutest and/or is in vogue?

* when we're 18, choose a random field and hope 18 year old self is qualified to figure out which field would do the most good?

>I mean, maybe if we had flush teams of water quality experts in every state with the time and expertise to judge whether water supplies are safe. But as it is, a team from Virginia Tech had to high tail it to Flint during their water crisis based on the reports they heard about lead levels there.

I'm baffled as to why you think sending a team from virginia tech was the best course of action here. Google maps says that such a trip would take over 8 hours. Assuming the "team" had at least 2 people, then that's at least 32 man-hours for such an excursion. At median college graduate wages that translates to $880 in travel time alone. They couldn't have crowdsourced water collection and had it delivered via courier (maybe $20/package) to their campus?

the lack of domain expertise of a white-collar worker to be able to judge the veracity of charitable activities

That's why the first thing EA did is evaluate which charities are most effective. In a few seconds you can find things like https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/donate/organizations

Bill Gates has been trying to do this ever since the year 2000. Transfering quality of life from Seattle or Pasadena to a slum in Lagos or Nairobi is the hardest thing you could possibly do.

Humans are selfish so the moment the decision is made to allocate an X amount of money Piranhas start to attack the loot, both at home and abroad.

The dynamics of negotiations, pricing power, elasticity of supply and demand don't go out of the window just because a sum of money is destined to Africa or has "philantropy" stamped across.

At the end of the day you need people who do it for their own satisfaction, not for the money

But is the underlying logic behind earning to give actually sound? Because it sounds to me like ideological cover for plain old earning. It also strikes me as deliberately blind to the ethical externalities of working certain high paying jobs.

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