Effective Altruism Is about Getting Rich with a Clean Conscience
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Having read Singer, I'd say that the motivation is to take the sense of "doing good in the world" and apply reason to it. There's a kid drowning in a pond in front of you and there's a kid drowning on the other side of the world. Why do we act differently, Singer asks? From there he goes on to build an ethical case that it's our _obligation_ to give significantly more to charity.
I don't recall Singer ever advocating for earning ever more money, nor certainly doing so at the expense of others. And I'm fairly certain Singer would strongly object to deferring giving to some uncertain future point.
Setting aside this article, where's all the hate for giving to charity coming from? Guilty consciences? Shouldn't we as a society celebrate and encourage giving? It seems the alternative more often then not is to accumulate.
To try to mind read, if everyone's simply saying: "it's wrong for someone to do immoral things and justify them with the promise of future charity" then I suspect there's not much to say except, "Yes, duh."
Because, and this may not come as a shock after the SBF revelations, those people may not be sincere and honest, to others, themselves or both.
With something like EA the interesting part isn't what's being said out loud, it's what philosophic and in particular aesthetic goals aren't literally spelled out. This is the case for almost any form of activism, ideology or lifestyle. The interesting parts are never the banal things people advertise.
For example take an adjacent belief, also practiced by the EA folks. Veganism. Now superficially they will tell you this is all about animal welfare, but what they won't tell, they may not even be aware of it, is also that it's an upper class signal of purity, their own modern recreation of the Brahmin class. When you look at things that way it suddenly becomes less surprising why a 28 year old effective-altruist Potterhead also seems weirdly fascinated with Indian caste systems and imperial Chinese social dynamics.
You're misreading it.
EA, on its own terms, reads something like what you describe. But many people do not believe that it plays out that in the real world, and instead is something like "prosperity gospel for agnostics" - a thin rationalization for gobbling up as much as possible.
The hate isn't directed at "giving to charity", it is directed at rich people advancing their own interests while calling it charity. (For instance, SBF convincing Propublica to burn their reputation publishing weak, politicized studies for $5M.)
Nobody hates giving to charity. Some people are skeptical about the utility of donating millions of dollars to an anti-skynet foundation founded by a guy whose primary accomplishment is writing a Harry Potter fanfic.
First, I call myself rationalist because of the culture around the blog SlateStarCodex (and r/<same name>[1]), by Scott Alexander (now at AstralCodexTen[2] for interesting reasons), and a bit less lesswrong.com , and also a few sources like Julia Galef (which is popular for the Scout Mindset[3]) and some people around this movement. The ideas are fairly tame and simple around encouraging clear thinking and avoiding biases -- but they go fairly deep into promoting an understanding how our brains and minds work (frequently discussed in SSC). I am partly defined by this now, I learned a lot about myself and in some ways improved my writing and why not thinking (yes, thinking more effective in general terms is not as well defined as it seems, and not nearly as effective as it seems either -- but in a certain sense I think it's good). I have not went through EY's extensive work to critique or embrace it. I think this movement is partly a response to the very damaging ideological war environment of the late 2010s and still ongoing that creates divided societies and not bringing us closer to a move charitable, loving, understanding, good future (instead lost in endless culture wars -- that in a way became very real wars with millions of affected). EA is a nice sort of consensus result from (part?) of the community as how one should approach charity and ethics (but none of the original EAs came from rationality I believe, they are largely academic philosophers from Oxford).
I'm an EA and I'm not sure where I stand on the AI debate. I personally have embraced the philosophy (although reluctantly, I try to follow Scout Mindset principles, which is I try to stay open to changing my mind), but I mostly give to GiveWell and to GiveDirectly. I also give to a few local charities in my quite poor country (written about here[4] -- I believe donating locally can be effective), volunteer and to many open source projects (some public seen here[5]). I made a commitment with myself to live frugally and give all that I can reasonably give, without unreasonable excesses (largely consumerism, luxury goods, things I don't need to work, etc.). I really believe in the potential of the movement, and rationality does help, because in the end it invites you to embrace the value of other lives, which I've become convinced with by many angles (from a metaphysical perspective, to a logical, social and economic ones): that's the foundation of my giving. Recently, Scott A. wrote that EAs really believe in the movement/philsophy, and the recently criticisms haven't really shaken my belief in the fundamentals (although I'm saddened by SBF and his statements, which I find deeply misguided and unethical, more here[6]). I also subscribe to Jane Goodall's (and Singer's) observation that we need to make the Head (reason) and the Heart (love and humanity) work in harmony to thrive as a society and as individuals -- most people have good will, but if you don't use reason and solid ethics to guide your good will we often fall short, sometimes tragically and spectacularly.
I believe other people matter, and I'm committed to trying to make the world a better place with whatever tools I find most appropriate (statistics, economics, social sciences, art, philosophy, technology, math ...): It's very simple, very robust, and very necessary for our collective future as well :)
(which is to say: Hack the Planet!!!)
[1] https://reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex
[2] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MYEtQ5Zdn8
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/comments/yrhl3g/l...
[5] https://liberapay.com/gustavonramires/ see also: https://www.reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/comments/v7ma0d/w...
I'm not a huge AI risk guy, but it doesn't seem irrational to me. It doesn't seem unreasonable that you'll have a 5% chance of > than human IQ in the next 100 years. Assuming a 5% risk of it going rogue you end could end up in a pretty terrible situation.
I've never seen seen a survey of AI experts where less than 50% thought we wouldn't have AGI by 2100. Why are you so confident that AI is an order of magnitude less likely in the next 100 years then the vast majority of experts in the field?
Frankly, the “research” in this area all appears to be science fiction that takes itself too seriously.
1. EETN: Members of the Greek Association for Artificial Intelligence (EETN), a professional organization of Greek published researchers in the field, in April 2013. Ca. 250 members. 2. TOP100: The 100 ‘Top authors in artificial intelligence’ by ‘citation’ in ‘all years’ according to Microsoft Academic Search(http://academic.research.microsoft.com) in May 2013. We reduced the list to living authors, added as many as necessary to get back to 100
Other than the person who came up with it, I've not even heard of such people.
I don't doubt they exist — I've met people, people are dumb and believe dumb stuff even when they're smart — but I've never once encountered that.
Yudkowsky took it seriously enough to ban it from discussion on LessWrong as it was an "information hazard," so I think you might be a bit naive about how seriously many rationalists took/take it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140626092902/http://www.reddit...
So no, not naïve.
I agree with your interpretation of Singer, for what it's worth: I don't recall him ever encouraging maximum personal income in any of his books; only observing that someone could do more good (in the Utils sense) with more resources.
> Setting aside this article, where's all the hate for giving to charity coming from? Guilty consciences? Shouldn't we as a society celebrate and encourage giving? It seems the alternative more often then not is to accumulate.
I don't think anybody really hates charity. What people (rightfully) identify is the "hazard" of motive in charitable giving, particularly public giving: when someone is known publicly to donate, it becomes impossible to distinguish truly benevolent motives from self-interested ones (even if those self-interested motives don't "really" matter from a Utils perspective).
Separately: charitable giving on the scale performed by billionaires demonstrates latent injustice. Even if not intended as such, it effectively represents the conversion of a just action (giving to the poor is right) into a whimsical or motive-driven one (I give to the poor because I want to).
Heck, sometimes (see the war in Russia), people are actively doing the opposite and trying to destroy civilization.
> when someone is known publicly to donate, it becomes impossible to distinguish truly benevolent motives from self-interested ones (even if those self-interested motives don't "really" matter from a Utils perspective).
Who cares why someone donates, as long as they donate? Is there some thing called "truly benevolent" donations which keep more people alive longer, or have some other measurable impact? I actively am having trouble parsing this. It seems like you realize how ridiculous this sounds, by adding the bit at the end about how it doesn't matter, but then why even bring it up? Like what is special about "truly benevolent" giving?
It's not as though these motives don't "really" matter, they ... just don't matter at all?
AMF and other top givewell charities seem far more focused on the good they can do than more classic charities like WWF or Plan Parenthood.
It's certainly the scale of impact difference between some of the charities:
Charities can be useless or actively harmful: https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/criteria/im...
vs.
$4500/life saved: https://www.givewell.org/our-giving-funds#Top_Charities_Fund
They also say why it's that high: https://www.givewell.org/impact-estimates
Another example I've heard is hospitals asking people to stop skydiving to raise money for them, as the mean cost of medial care the average skydiver needs due to skydiving injuries exceeds the average money raised by skydiving.
And even this punts on perceptive utility, the kind that Nozick warns us about[1]: it's entirely possible that Johnny in Country X gets more utility out of $100 in charitable giving than 50 others in Country Y. But this seems like a really bad logical consequence, the kind that the Internet Rationalist EA community uses to justify spending money on AGI research instead of donating to AMF.
Overall, it's much easier to live in a world where we can determine that some set of charities are worth giving to, and not try too hard to order between them.
Do you think that some charities are more effective than other ones?
Do you think we should try to measure that to determine which ones are more effective?
Most charitable donations are net good. Sure there exist a small subset of charities that aren't probably doing harm but that's the exception.
Would you argue that charitable giving is neutral or bad?
But I suppose I would say it's neutral; it could be good or bad depending on various characteristics of the charity itself.
But do you at least agree the government does less good with 20 cents than a givewell charity like the AMF does with a dollar?
Here's a hopefully intuitive framing: actions are built on outcomes, while institutions are built on motives. It's hard to imagine a consequential derivation of fundamental and inviolable human rights, for example: there will always be cases and circumstances where a consequential view of morality enables you to engage in casuistry to suit the occasion. I'd much rather build (and live under) practical moral systems where things stay right and wrong.
(To be clear: motive itself is not the moral object, in my view. Motive is merely the thing being questioned. The moral object is the moral law.)
Why do you think all charities are equally good?
There are good charities, and there are bad charities. One of the things that can make a charity bad is having a bad mission. Another thing that can make a charity bad is being corrupt or inefficient. But I don’t presume to order charities based on how bad or good they are, and I don’t think there’s anything particularly good about giving to one good charity versus another good charity.
Also, “insensible” does not mean “insane.” I meant that it does not make sense, in my moral system.
You're happy to assign a number of 1 or 0, but would never want to rank them any more than that? That doesn't make sense to me.
There are lots of ethical theories (a majority, in fact!) that don't require (but may admit) grading actions on a sliding scale from "morally worst" to "morally best." Moral systems all boil down to a Theory of Right, and it's possible to have a Theory of Right rooted in virtue or autonomy rather than Good (i.e., greatest consequence).
This is probably far more obvious at small units like families, where we are all well aware of the existence of absolutely miserable rich kids who might live short, drug-addicted lives that end in suicide, in spite of their parents giving them all the money in the world.
You can see the contempt he has for people in this report: https://www.gawker.com/money/sam-bankman-fried-is-so-stupid-...
People don't hate when people give to charity.
People hate when people earn money in ways that have negative side-effects and justifying it by: promising to (at some point in the distant future) give (some portion of) their money to (select) charities.
I'm confident that there are lots of people who are part of EA for the reasons the EA community advocates. My expectation is that the dollar weighted average of participants motivations would be more cynical. I think the parallel to religious participation kind of writes itself.
Really, the person you should be preaching Peter Singer to are the people inside of EA who might be misguided with promises of fat stacks of cash. Criticizing atheists for not knowing "the true teachings of Jesus" really doesn't do you much good, just makes you look defensive and responsibility-avoiding.
2) As far as I understand it, EA actually is a very, very simple concept that ultimately states that 'doing good in some ways is better than others' aka some things make us 'feel good' but may not be effective. Literally 'be effective'.
3) EA in practice can be a secular kind of moral signalling and personal brand washing. You can't use religion to be huckster anymore so much (FYI I support religion, it's just that it can be easily appropriated), or rather, the 'My Pillow Guy' does but that's to a more limited audience, so 'EA' can be used for the same purposes among the white collar culturally secular masses. Which is how it was used at FTX.
Like anything we should be thoughtful and skeptical about all of it, try to put things in context, don't accept wild claims at face value and be perennially wary of people who just 'talk' about things as opposed to 'doing' them.
Narratives, idol making, lack of skepticism are the problem here.
Incidentally, there's an individual who brought evidence to Bloomberg about FTX months ago and they avoided it partly due to fear of lack of access - and - a conflict of interest with advertising. Such is the power of money with tentacles. Same thing for major geopolitical powers with money and leverage.
When Effective Altruism started gaining traction in the early 2010s, Earning to Give was a poster child of EA recommendations, hailed as a counterintuitive yet rational outcome of utilitarian analysis. It has long been considered mainstream in Effective Altruism and was advocated heavily by the organization 80,000 Hours, which provides career advice for people wanting to do good in the world.
It's not a bad thing to earn money in ethical ways and then also donate money to good causes. Unfortunately, one of the specific examples that gets the most attention is to go into high-frequency trading (instead of another career) so you can earn money to donate.
https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/trading-in-quantitativ...
Although 80,000 Hours no longer emphasizes Earning to Give, it has never taken public responsibility for the damage it has done by steering young people toward career decisions that prioritize Earning to Give and for broadly legitimizing Earning to Give in EA circles.
Earning to Give as a specific strategy for college-age students isn't terrible either. Of course one can pervert it by going to maximize earnings for a tobacco company, but people aiming to do good would most-likely steer away from these types of things anyway.
I think the reason 80,000 Hours moved away from the Earning to Give strategy was because of the numerous new (and better) opportunities they were able to find as they put in more research time and as the movement grew in its size.
ETG encourages people to think of the positive side of what they're doing (donating money) without considering the negatives (harmful careers). Being rich, and focusing on getting rich as a goal, distorts your thinking.
BigTech ads are instead non-consensually forced upon people and steal their attention (best case) or manipulate their thoughts/desires (worst case)
Those who make the ads and those who view them are voluntarily exchanging their time and attention with each other. They're traders in the same way high-frequency traders are.
I think ETG basically advocates for a kind of central planning - replacing a large bureaucracy with a class donors who believe they have special knowledge about what would help the lives of others.
Wait, what? That's just not true. You can be very highly productive without exploiting anyone. Even if you happen to be in an industry where exploiting others is the status quo, you can do outsized amounts of good (rivaling the best outcomes of charity) by being even a bit less exploitive. Stated another way, social responsibility - even in profit-seeking enterprises - is quite compatible with EA.
That's what corporations are — large, complex machines under steady selective pressure to maximize efficiency and externalities. If you're lucky, they will go the efficiency route. But if it's easier, or they're already pretty efficient, they will tend to maximize negative externalities instead.
So guardrails are needed. Reasonable people disagree about where the guardrails should be. One thing that is hard to dispute, though, is that seeking profit, and continuing to focus your attention on increasing profit, will bias your thinking about where the guardrails should be.
I think a better argument is that earning to give emphasizes careers that produce the "most" value as measured by the market. But there are plenty of valuable careers that the market probably undervalues, like teaching.
This is completely untrue. Let's say you choose the rather extreme example of corporate executive who outsources jobs to Asia for purely selfish motivations. They are still undeniably injecting wealth to a poorer economy that otherwise would not have happened , and this wealth allows people purchase goods that dramatically increase their livelihoods like antibiotics, electricity, or cleaner burning stoves.
Even if you want to approach this from a "capitalism bad" angle, this still doesn't make sense. It's not like EA is a primary motivation of people wanting to work lucrative jobs. On the internet, you can see endless number of comments about wanting to work a FAANG job, and none of them have anything to do with EA.
EA was never recommending "Open up a sweat shop and violate as many labor practices as possible to maximize income", "become a successful drug dealer" or "market for tobacco companies"
It was "Go work at Google, in finance, high frequency trading, or become a corporate lawyer and donate a large portion of your income to the world." All jobs where the impact is close to neutral.
You may be helping plutocrats syphon resources and public funds away from developing countries.
You may be promoting the inequality of arms in access to justice, given that regulators and citizens cannot pay for the best legal advice, therefore enabling corporate regulatory capture over the long term.
Given the ubiquity of offshore vehicles in many international legal transactions, you may enable companies to evade contributing fairly to the countries in which they operate, thereby fuelling a decline in funding available for public services, and increasing the tax burden on wage-earning citizens.
And you may even have little awareness you are even doing these things because of the relative opacity and abstraction of the ownership of the corporate vehicles that make up your client base.
This is debatable. If they are renting out the houses this could reduce rents which would improve the lives of the poor who rent much more often than own. If they are sitting on them it's much more likely to be negative.
> You may be helping plutocrats syphon resources and public funds away from developing countries.
I'll give you that you shouldn't earn to give by working for Gaddafi. I think the vast majority of EA would agree.
The third rule at 80,000 hours the biggest proponent of earn to give is
3. Doesn’t cause harm
And their actual recommendations given are
Tech startup founder
Quantitative trading
Software engineering
Startup early employee
Data science
Management consulting
Marketing
Actuarial science
Executive search
Nursing
Allied health
Large investors don't tend to be drawn to projects offering affordable housing to local residents because they are not as profitable as the alternatives. Many large European cities are currently suffering a housing affordability crisis driven in part by properties increasingly catering to tourists (esp. Air B&Bs) and luxury properties for investment for international high-net worth individuals.
> I'll give you that you shouldn't earn to give by working for Gaddafi. I think the vast majority of EA would agree.
It usually wouldn't be as clear cut and easy to spot a case as that. But for example, until the war in Ukraine, European law firms were happy to act for any number of Russian businesses or oligarchs, provided they don't figure on any anti-money laundering lists (themselves, often relatively simple to circumvent). Or say, an African business person who has acquired their huge wealth in domestic assets and infrastructure through nepotism and is salting away the wealth offshore or into Europe via various direct or opaque investments, all legally facilitated by big law firms.
>The third rule at 80,000 hours the biggest proponent of earn to give is
3. Doesn’t cause harm
Not causing harm is much harder to tease out than one might think. The first order effects might appear harmless, but what about the second and third order effects? Is one often even in a position to know given the levels of abstraction in global financial markets? Are you lifting up developing countries by investment, or unwittingly enabling more to be extracted from them than is being put in?
> Startup early employee
Plenty of these have caused harm. Many modern startups have the explicit goal of "disrupting" traditional labor rights or unions.
> Marketing
There's so much variability here, ranging from pretty benign activities to outright lying to people's faces about health outcomes of dangerous products.
My larger point is not that marketers or tech founders are inherently evil people, but that the system is rotten. For example, despite all the charities and philanthropy going to undeveloped countries, the net flow of resource is out of these countries and into more developed ones[1]. Nothing about ETG seems to contradict these tendencies, if you work in actuarial science and help a company minimize the taxes they pay in South Africa, but then donate 50% of your paycheque back to charitable causes in the country, your actions have not been a net benefit to the people of that country.
[1] https://www.howwemadeitinafrica.com/actual-flow-resources-de...
I've had a long, albeit shallow, exposure to EA, and my model of altruism has roughly matched up with it for even longer. Most of the formulations of Earn-to-Give I've encountered don't fit your description here, of maximizing profit blindly, at any expense[1]. The formulation I'm familiar with is ceterus-paribus: choosing between two jobs as with much of EA, a gentle pushback against intuitive notion that you should privilege doing good with your own two hands over doing good with money. The exemplar here is not "sell meth to kids to buy mosquito nets", it's "be an accountant for a widget firm to donate enough to hire two Peace Corp workers instead of working directly as a PC worker".
For a more explicit but more recent example, 80k Hrs published, 5 years ago, an explicit rejection of what you're describing:
> We believe that in the vast majority of cases, it’s a mistake to pursue a career in which the direct effects of the work are seriously harmful, even if the overall benefits of that work seem greater than the harms.
https://80000hours.org/articles/harmful-career/
> ETG basically advocates for a kind of central planning - replacing a large bureaucracy with a class donors who believe they have special knowledge about what would help the lives of others.
Tangential, but I don't follow this. How does ETG give donors more control than working in an altruistic career, or than donors with a more traditional mindset?
I'll admit it's tricky to figure out when this really matters. On the margins, it is clearly the case for plenty of people, maybe even most people, that they can do more good by earning to give than they can by directly providing charitable services. But by earning to give, you're relying on and presupposing the existence of other people doing the direct service provision. If everyone becomes a stock broker and no one becomes a nurse, the world does not end up better off. And the line where that happens is nebulous and not necessarily at the 100% mark or even at a majority mark. A world with more stock brokers and fewer nurses gradually gets worse. I don't know where that point is, but maybe at least when a charitable organizations reaches some threshold where the bottleneck to providing more service is labor rather than money? "Pay more" to solve the labor problem doesn't necessarily work, either, because if you pay your employees a high salary, then Givewell will rank you as less efficient and all those charitable people will stop giving you money. This isn't true of all non-profits, of course. Employees of the University of Alabama Athletic Department and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art can earn 7 and even 8 figures and still receive massive donations, but real charities usually can't do that.
To be clear, I'm sympathetic to the marginal focus. I don't vote. Why? Because obviously, one vote has never made a difference in any voting precinct I've ever lived in for any election. The vast majority of the time, a single vote will never make a difference in any election. But obviously, someone has to vote. And we're probably at a level of civic engagement in the US where the percentage of people who vote arguably leaves the country worse off, with an unrepresentative government and citizens who feel disconnected and ineffective and don't identify with or agree with the goals and mission of the their nation.
For all those reason, even though I don't vote, I'm not going to start a campaign trying to convince people in general that they also shouldn't vote. Earning to give seems in a similar category. Go ahead and do it, but it feels dangerous to advocate for it in a general way implying that it is what all sufficiently intelligent and high-skill people should do. You're creating a class-divided society where anyone who directly cares for others is looked down on as low status and ineffective. This is unfortunately much harder to quantify than "how many malaria cases can I prevent in the next ten years," but we know at some point it becomes a real problem. Inability to quantify doesn't make it go away.
My understanding of ETG is that people have the goal to earn as much money as possible so they can donate more. But if you take the idea of rationally deciding how to do most god, of course you have to balance the good you do with your donations against the bad you do in your job. And you are the worst person to evaluate that rationally.
If this is the argument, then the criticism should focus on HFT, not on EA.
Most HFT employees aren't earning to give, and donate little to none of their income to effective charities. If HFT is harmful, then those non-EA HFT employees deserve at least as much criticism as EA HFT employees. So if you're worried about HFT, you should start with criticism of HFT, and if someone tries to defend HFT by bringing up EA, _then_ you can debate whether the benefits of earning-to-give outweigh the damage done by HFT.
But this article, and your comment, are doing the exact opposite -- you're _starting_ with criticism of the EA movement, and only mentioning HFT in passing! It comes across as looking for an excuse to criticize EA, rather than being genuinely concerned about harm caused by HFT.
The criticism here is of the claim that _earning to give_ is charitable, not a claim that HFT is charitable.
* Finance professionals who gave less to charity?
* altruistic folks who gave to poorly validated charities?
* Changemakers who decided instead to go for the money and thereby reify the social structures of their lives?
* Regular people who thought less hard about ethics, e.g. giving vegetarianism or veganism a go?
* Regular people who never considered becoming megalomaniac crypto scammers?
And whether EA is good or bad as a whole depends on the characteristics and composition of this counterfactual group. IMO, that's pretty hard to get a good grip on.
In general, for hard questions like this, I take a “know them by their fruit“ approach, I.e. seeing how folks do on easier-to-evaluate ethics tests, like whether someone is vegetarian or vegan. By that light, the movement comes out looking pretty good. If you apply a more anti-capitalist test, the movement does not look so good.
But let's say people do get rich and donate to charities to have a clean conscience... is this a bad thing? EA is not a reason to do outright immoral actions to donate to charity but out-competing a colleague for a promotion? Leaving a job after 6 months to take double the salary elsewhere? I think these are all decisions I've personally taken for EA-based reasons and donate a fixed 10% per month so yes ultimately I've ended up richer but I fund more charities and that seems like a good thing.
Building ponzi schemes to redirect money from investors to charities is never okay.
The idea of doing bad to do some good seems to be a theoretical concept, but not likely to hold up in reality.
https://www.effectivealtruism.org/faqs-criticism-objections has a small paragraph on the differences. Having been involved with EA since 2017 in my own small way I can absolutely say with confidence it is not the same. Ends do not justify the means. It is simply meant to be a guiding philosophy to how you donate; treat all lives equally and donate focusing on lives saved per dollar. This should be backed by research proving it's effectiveness and can be unintuitive. There is a vocal longtermist view point that lives in the future should be valued the same resulting in some pretty weird ideas but I ignore most of that.
Any sources on this? Or do you mean things like reducing energy usage to tackle climate change?
> Directing money away from developing world medical charities in order to fund wealthy people riding bikes while thinking about AI seems apposite though.
I dislike the whole longtermism stuff and am very vocal about that when I can be. Lives now matter more than hypothetical lives in the future. I've written about this on the EA forums before. However, if EA was to die today, I strongly believe the number of funds to developing world medical charities would decrease! Why? Because people normally think local when it comes to charity, especially larger donations, such as the mantra "charity starts at home". EA has led many people to really think about this and review the charities they donate to, drank the koolaid of being "Effective" with their charitable donations, and now 'regular' people (like me) are donating a good chunk of their pay checks to world medical charities (based on which ones are doing the better job, such as those suggested by givewell).
Overall even if EA has some bad actors (like SBF), and some stupid research goals (imo), and some money that seems fairly... circular if you know what I mean (EA Infrastructure Funds), I believe the general message is strong.
But then there's this whole weird Scientology side to it, and, worse, that side of it seems to have swallowed up all the highest-profile people in EA.
The argument I've seen for why this happens, which I think is probably accurate, is that EA itself is a solid idea and currently solved (charities have been evaluated, winners are "boring" like malaria nets and deworming), and people are just happily chugging away donating money to those effective organisations. Givewell and other organisations review their work, they agree it's still doing really great work, and the overall group is silent because there's nothing to talk about :)
Longtermism, on the other hand, is hotly debated and highly theoretical. People write arguments for and against, people put out funding requests and speak to billionaires such as Musk to fund them, they get press coverage to try and gain traction for their arguments... It's a minority of EA, it really is, but it's the majority of the noise. This is why there's a disconnect between people both in EA and between EA and those outside of the group. And I agree it's an issue, it's just never been so public as since FTX blew up. It doesn't help a lot of the key 'leaders' of EA are pro-longtermist views. I say 'leaders' because you have central organisations but it's not like you're a member with a card or anything, it's a philosophical view you subscribe to when you donate your money to charity.
Personally I'd like to see the two orgs split so one can focus on saving lives on Mars from AI in 10,000 years time while others can focus on arguing why $10 a month to vaccine work in Ethiopia is probably better than going to the local donkey sanctuary.
For this reason it isn't completely unimpeachable.
It'd be great if it could be done without harming workers, but it would harm workers, and disproportionately.
Meh, that's a weird take. If it was, it would ask people to act only to maximize outcome and ignore other constraints, because they would be less secondary. As far as I'm aware, it doesn't, it only suggests that, if you want to do something altruistic, you might want to look at what's most effective and not just do anything that vaguely feels or sounds like it might be helpful.
But that's besides the point, because it obviously isn't. It feels like that's a hot take that neither cares to understand EA, nor understands utilitarianism and just operates on simplified versions of both. Much like people who understand the categorical imperative to be equivalent to the golden rule.
Effective Altruism is a large movement, just because some behave a certain way, doesn't mean all subscribe to those ideas.
In my experience there are a lot of Christians who are utilitarians, a lot who are consequentialists, a lot who are deontologists. Groups like this exist because there are people struggling to integrate new ideas or new combinations of old ideas into their existing belief structures. This is how all religion works.
A lot of EA is just straight-up utilitarianism, and appears in practice to suffer from the same problems as that framework. Christianity works similarly. There are a lot of high-minded ideals (that may conflict with each other), some people argue over which ones are "true", but in practice many people choose for themselves a subset that allows them to make sense of the world, or end up rejecting the label because they cannot make sense of their lives under that umbrella of ideas.
(It says nothing about the believers sacrificing for the greater good; that's a moral good in and of itself).
[0] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/P9XEtnHFQF24HCC8v/...
Similarly, if SBF claimed to follow EA that would not be as big of an issue. The problem happens when you consider that he was also championed by EA as the poster boy, and now everyone is realizing he has been a scammer all along.
Moreover, the way I saw the value proposition of EA is that "we are better at doing math to calculate the effectiveness of charities, finding out which ones are scammy, and also to assess risks to humanity, so you should trust us to do that." That value proposition really blows up when top-line EA couldn't do their due diligence and figure out an eight billion dollar hole in the ground even when their whole existence depended on it.
I might note that EA makes logical sense to me, and I pretty much ignored SBF because, as I've often noted in this forum, the entire crypto space is filled with scammers and suckers.
My (logical) conclusion is that since other EAs couldn't recognize SBF as a scammer, we should double- and triple-check all of their math about risk and effectiveness, instead of trusting them. Not saying the idea of charitable giving has lost merit, rather its primary champions in the last decade have lost a ton of credibility.
Saying this, people were skeptical of SBF in EA, worried about so many eggs in one basket, and didn't like crypto as a source of funding. It's a large group with many views!
I agree with double- and triple-checking all the math about risk and effectiveness. I'm interested in donating to effective charities that use my dollar in the best way and if you correctly find better ones to do so I'd donate :)
Sure, but… how? How does one magic up a backup multibillionaire just in case the first surprise super-donor turned out to be less than half as smart as he thought he was?
(Definitely triple check their maths. And the assumptions too: in my experience, a lot of things are lost in the unstated assumptions of groups and individuals).
youre really going to get mad at the EA movement for not realizing FTX was a fraud when literally, and i actually mean literally, no one knew it until a couple weeks ago. He bamboozled every government and financial institution in the world, but the humble EA movement should have known.
Why?
Effective Altruism can't be fully effective if it can't spot scammers.
Yes this is hard, yes extra hard when the first encounter is them parachuting a promise of a billion dollars into your lap… but while I have no solutions and absolutely don't blame anyone who took that money, it's not dumb to criticise.
In fact, I'd say that failures you couldn't spot in advance are the learning opportunities; failures you did spot in advance would make you a co-conspirator in my view, even if not by law.
its a fairly decentralized movement, its just a random collection of people donating money.
If you skip the learning opportunity, then I will blame, given the association with big-R Rationality causes an expectation.
It feels like someone optimizing for "power"
To a first approximation, everyone on this site regularly participates in threads talking about how to maximize their compensation, without anyone feeling a particular need for a fig leaf.
Is there anything bad about wanting to be wealthy or having power? I dont think so.
I think the actual problem is when you are already rich enougg and still want more and more.
That is the cancer that is ruining our society.
If someone does hassle you about your justifications for your wealth, it seems really easy to write that off as jealousy.
I am sure that somewhere in the world, there is someone so simultaneously ambitious yet wracked with guilt about their ambition that they need an excuse to satisfy their ambition. I just doubt that there are enough such people that Effective Altruism can use such people as a foundation for its existence.
It's like trying to defend against criticisms of religious fundamentalism by saying "What about the teachings of Love and Kindness by Jesus? Have you ever read the Bible?"
The literal words of the Bible doesn't matter as much when people who claim to follow it in the earnest are also doing the most harm. You need to have a conversation internally first to figure out what your ideology is, otherwise it just looks like avoiding responsibility to the "outsiders".
Without getting into a flame war not fit for HN, the same cannot be said for the supernatural foundations and epistemic claims of religions - the foundational ideas of EA are not the problem in this case.
I think Sam Harris breaks it down decently here: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/303... though that's a little out of date with how fast news on the topic is moving.
It's also another reminder why it's good to keep your identity small [0] and deal with the ideas directly.
Said another way:
"Go three-quarters of the way from deontology to utilitarianism and then stop. You are now in the right place. Stay there at least until you have become a god."[1]
[0]: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
[1]: https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1497157447219232768?s...
[0] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/
[1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WdeiPrwgqW2wHAxgT/...
I didn’t say “bad”. But they are trying to convince people to work in AI risk who otherwise wouldn’t have chosen to.
Pressure? Perhaps not. But then again, pressure can be an irregular verb: “I encourage, you persuade, he pressures” ;)
- Own your name
- Excommunicate those who claim to be of your movement that you don't like
Otherwise you will lose control over the term you invented and it goes to hell. Witness Buddhism (Pure Land is basically anti-buddhism), Christianity (where to even begin with all the splitting?), Islam (two big sects trying to murder eachother), communism (pol pot, mao, stalin).
Protect your brand or see your name be dragged through the mud.
With EA I'd cite longtermerism, the rhetoric around coin flips and risk, and in particular how all of this becomes a normative standard: if you aren't maximizing your earning potential you are a moral failure!
As I said, many of these beliefs and behaviors functionally serve to give the believer an all purpose source of moral righteousness. No one has a problem with Jesus saying you should not just do no harm but have a burden to help those in need. The problem comes exactly in that institutionalization that adopts this as a banner while behaving in the complete opposite way in practice.
Seems like you're falling for the exact fallacy I pointed out upthread.
These people think Planned Parenthood is literally murdering babies. You're free to politely disagree with that characterization of course, but it only takes a tiny bit of empathy to understand what the screaming and cursing is all about.
Perhaps early Christianity was like that too, before it became mandatory, but it’s certainly not what I remember from my Catholic childhood.
Are they? Because I am meeting a lot of (admittedly self proclaimed) EAs that are busy evangelizing about what "True EA" is and is not, and how SBF was never "True EA". Maybe they are contemplating a lot in their free time, but on a broad stroke it looks like attempting to avoid responsibility to me.
What I’m seeing is mostly online rather than in person meetings; these discussions are “could we have spotted this nonsense sooner?” (general consensus: “probably not, his investors and auditors didn’t and that’s not our skillset”), and “hang on, wasn’t this[0] a red flag?” (which generally gets left unresolved as they get nerd-sniped on the actual discussion rather than staying focused on if it should’ve been a warning sign).
[0] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mdbSL9o8H2Z5mjKaj/...
"You have been quoted as saying: "Killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all." Is that quote accurate?"
"I did write that, in the 1979 edition of Practical Ethics. Today the term “defective infant” is considered offensive, and I no longer use it, but it was standard usage then. The quote is misleading if read without an understanding of what I mean by the term “person” (which is discussed in Practical Ethics). I use the term "person" to refer to a being who is capable of anticipating the future, of having wants and desires for the future. As I have said in answer to the previous question, I think that it is generally a greater wrong to kill such a being than it is to kill a being that has no sense of existing over time. Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living. That doesn’t mean that it is not almost always a terrible thing to do. It is, but that is because most infants are loved and cherished by their parents, and to kill an infant is usually to do a great wrong to her or his parents."
"Sometimes, perhaps because the baby has a serious disability, parents think it better that their newborn infant should die. Many doctors will accept their wishes, to the extent of not giving the baby life-supporting medical treatment. That will often ensure that the baby dies. My view is different from this, but only to the extent that if a decision is taken, by the parents and doctors, that it is better that a baby should die, I believe it should be possible to carry out that decision, not only by withholding or withdrawing life-support — which can lead to the baby dying slowly from dehydration or from an infection — but also by taking active steps to end the baby’s life swiftly and humanely."
You can't assess a philosphy by its worst adherents. However, you could attempt to quantify the net good/bad done by its adherents and make an argument about the effect the philosophy has on human personality. But then you'd be doing science and statistics in pursuit of understanding how to make humanity the best it can be, and you'd find yourself in trouble: You don't want to be associated with EA, but they keep emailing you to hear about your findings. :)
Earning to Give is to EA like Copyleft is to Free Software. It's on the more radical side of the philosphy, and it definitely leads to some internal contradictions. It is, at times, contentious within the movement. There are a lot of people who care more about harm minimization who may oppose Copyleft and Earning to Give, and there are people who are more focused on net-good-maximization who may argue in favor of both. There's no getting around those arguments because there's no getting around complexity when it comes to broad new philosophies.
But it doesn't require that other code in the project be released under the MIT license (or even released at all), which is what copyleft would do.
It's pretty close to releasing it to the public domain, and the point of that is that it's actually really hard to release something to the public domain worldwide. Just saying something like "I release this code to the public domain" doesn't have the same effect in every country.
If you want to include an MIT licensed work in your project, your obligation is to say “I am using $foo, here is a copy of the MIT licence: $text”, and that’s it.
If you want to include a GPL licensed work in your project, your project is now also GPL licensed, and you are obliged to make the source available.
(I’m not a lawyer etc.)
Having any license requirements at all, e.g. attribution, inclusion of license alongside distributed copies, etc. does not make the license Copyleft.
I can not possibly imagine an idea which has done more harm to humanity than that one.
Three of the most iconically evil world leaders of the previous century tried (if I’m feeling generous) to make humanity better by their own definition, but without allowing the science and the statistics tell them they were wrong about the basics.
"... the boy began to delight in his daring flight, and abandoning his guide, drawn by desire for the heavens, soared higher. His nearness to the devouring sun softened the fragrant wax that held the wings: and the wax melted: he flailed with bare arms, but losing his oar-like wings, could not ride the air. Even as his mouth was crying his father’s name, it vanished into the dark blue sea ..." - Ovid
Deadalus was a great inventor and scientist. When imprisoned he devises a means for him and his son to escape, in fact he realizes one of mans greatest achievements, flight. While he is able to control his invention and makes good use out of it (making sure to avoid both extremes), his son can neither control himself nor the technology given to him. In the desire to reach ever greater heights he is ultimately destroyed.
The point is (or at least the one which is so easily read into the story) that all technology is dangerous and that great care needs to be put into how we make use of it.
The idea of using statistics and quantitative methods of the social sciences to devise the best way for humans to live is Icarus grasping at the sun. Very smart people have found new ideas, novel methods and all the mathematics to answer one of mankinds greatest question, if we let them use it a great future awaits. This already was the folly of "scientific socialism", and your new attempt at it will land you in the Icarian see, just like last time.
But it’s also how capitalist governments work. And businesses. And every scientific advancement, including how we decided which of the covid vaccines to give the OK to and which ones to reject. It’s also how the chemistry of the synthetic fibres in your clothes and the plastic in your computer were learned, how the machines which made each component of the latter and assembled them into the finished products became reliable enough. It’s how we even know there’s a rise in obesity levels, how we learned which things are good SSRIs and which have unfortunate side effects, how we learned not to let everyone have as much alcohol as they (or their bartender) felt like, and why various countries allow tobacco to be sold but only with graphic depictions of the consequences (consequences which we only know because of statistics and science). Online advertising is nothing but statistical aggregations; algorithmic timelines and personalised search results and recommend products/content are basically the exact same statistics but used to sell the recommender itself rather than a 3rd party. The politicians in a democracy also do statistics to figure out how well they’re selling their ideas and if they need to change tactics or entirely switch their message (or even messenger).
And, as I said, literal flight, that’s also science and statistics.
A chainsaw can be used for marvelous things, the wood for your house or your furniture. It can be used to help people in need, removing objects trapping them. Even to put out fires in roofs. There are thousands of great uses for chainsaws. Yet using it against a human will lead to a catastrophe. It is a mistake you do not want to make once. Making it twice should ve unthinkable.
Just because a tool is effective in situation A does not mean it is effective in situation B. We tried your idea and it resulted in a human catastrophe.
If you have better proposals, name them, let us discuss and maybe we can do even better!
(the movement is really open about this -- which is one of the reasons some people have seemingly weird beliefs -- simply because some people said 'You should be instead doing X!!', where X was saving humanity from existential risks; maybe you should be shouting at us 'You should be instead doing Y!!', where Y is your idea, and if you're right we sincerely, truly hope you can change our minds)
Doing nothing would have been better than doing scientific socialism.
>I understand the worry, but what's the alternative?
Obviously the hardest question. The first and most important issue is the truth. The second most important issue is what are the limits of truth. For me the idea of utilitarianism (and all variations on the idea of a purely rational/mathematical based morality) is an "anti truth", it isn't just false, it false and makes confident truth claims about the unknowable. Of course this an entirely negative claim, but there is one korrolary: People can be fulfilled without me understanding why and completely in despair with me not having any idea how to fix this.
I think nobody should be asking "how can I fix the world" before they have asked themselves if they are the person they think they should be. And whether there is someone there right now close to them, who could maybe really need some help. Of course the world isn't saved by that, but is there any hope if we ignore the people closest to us in favor of vain dreams?
So is the solution to stop thinking? Or just to stop quantifying and analyzing? Or maybe it's the motivation, humanism, that's at fault, and we should all just worry about ourselves?
When I was in 10th grade I was a utilitarian, in the philosophy class I assigned numerical values to suffering/happiness and calculated averages to solve moral dilemmas.
I have been wrong about a lot of things in my life, but that idea I certainly was the wrongest about.
Statistics knows absolutely nothing of kindness and hapiness can not be assigned a numerical value. Which didn't stop people from trying and creating unimaginable suffering.
> Which didn't stop people from trying and creating unimaginable suffering.
Aren't we already creating immense amounts of suffering by the conditions of animals (which often have terrible living conditions), preventable diseases and poverty? Why putting a number on it is more evil than doing nothing?
The incentives will not be to reduce any actual suffering or solve any real problems, since those might only be loosely correlated with the number. It is extremely easy to reduce the number of crimes, or the amount of people needing psychiatric care. It is extremely hard to increase safety and social cohesion or the mental wellbeing of the population.
People behind those charities have diverse backgrounds in social sciences, philosophy, economics, and welcome better ways to do more good, better.
If we are not reducing suffering, we will investigate, and try to do better. If we're only decreasing malaria death statistics and increasing death by other means, if we're not effective, we really want to know. Some very skilled social scientists are working on this problem -- many in the field, talking to people, going to poor places where things like tropical diseases happen.
I think giving more weight to the psychological and broader human side is a fundamentally important point as well (which I agree with and have voiced opinions about), but we also have to remember the basic realities of the diseases (like malaria or diseases that cause lifelong blindness!), and the reality of living in extreme poverty. In the end I recommend that you see documentaries about people living in poverty, visit them if you can, to solidify your decision (and tell it to others -- communication is real and important!)
I have just heard of the Happy Lives Institute which seems to be looking at the global mental wellbeing perspective (note: I have done 0 research on them, but the idea seems good!), and I admire Scott Suskind's free website that gives evidence-based treatment guides for mental health issues[1]. Maybe share this perspective on EA forums?
If there was something truly absurd about what I am doing, really sincere criticism, I think I would have heard it more by now, but I welcome further examination of GiveWell charities (I personally really like GiveDirectly as well).
I also believe the point about giving locally.
The power of simply caring, being humane, is really important, and very central to EA. This is different from many other organizations where you're just optimizing a number, where you're guided by ego, by power, or just blindly maximizing something. By fundamentally caring about the result, which is the idea behind effectiveness, we can go much further and be much more robust to our own failures.
[1] https://lorienpsych.com/2021/06/05/depression/
I recommend this source to anyone, Scott Suskind is a professional psychiatrist
Is EA actually... bad? It would seem at worst it's not as good as advertised.
If 10% of the followers donate 10% of their income to charity, isn't that a massive win?
I'm not part of EA myself, like many I'm mildly annoyed by the arrogance but also feel like that's not enough to substantially criticise a movement.
It’s the “do well while doing good” philosophy that underlies EA, that is quietly grinning in the shadows eyes glowing sick with greed. Doing well while doing good means turning a profit (or gaining/maintaining power, after the fact) by fixing important problems. The issue here is that you’ve got a principal-agent problem. Jeff Bezos has $150B, says he’ll give it all away in his lifetime. But he’s not going to give it away. He is going to invest it. You’ve got the Bezos Earth Fund which is looking to bootstrap solutions to climate change. The end result of just one winner? Bezos interest group has a huge foot on the thing that controls climate change. This is a lever, for them to pull as necessary. The same way Twitter is a lever for Must.
EA is fine, but the problem is that in America “the best of us are by definition the richest” and so it’s pretty hard to engineer a situation where the rich don’t get richer much less agree to concede power to the next party.
Without EA he might still have some BS foundation like many before (I'm not actually taking a stance on his work, I have no idea about it). He might use one to push his weight around and have an outsized influence.
Maybe without the label of EA there would be more pressure to justify the scope and impact of charitable work? I'm not sure.
Are you being snarky? I genuinely can’t tell, sorry if you aren’t.
> trying to find the bit where the world would be better off if..
You’re right. I don’t genuinely know. I get the feeling more and more each day that our system is hardcore stupid broken.
My gut feeling is that the existence of Bezos and EA are, on the whole, part and parcel. Bezos is the product of a system that warps mankind around working to build empires for the few that win the Pareto distribution game. EA feels like the latest contemporary whitewash used to protect it.
Maybe I’m just a loser and I deserved to be fucked over at the grocery store and the doctors office for existing but not having more to give to my employer. I just wish my perception would catch up to reality.
It's not as if you get a bunch of free stuff the moment you say I am doing something for EA purposes.
Any activity can be described this way. "Working in a soup kitchen?" "I bet you are doing this because it makes you feel superior to all the others who do not volunteer, right? And also, you feel less guilty seeing homeless people now, after all you are already doing something, so there is no reason to feel obligated to them aswell".
I am sure that there are many entirely sincere EA enthusiasts, wanting nothing more than see their money be used to better the lives of others. Spending time organizing, fundraising, optimizing charity, doing outreach, some of it might even be "hard work", done gladly without receiving any praise or compensation. On the other hand a friend of mine is regularly getting up at 2am to drag the injured, freezing, decrepit and mentally ill into a place where they can get some semblance of help. To me it is clear who is actually more deserving of respect and who does more to improve the lives of people.
If everything you have is money, all problem look like they are solved by spending.
What disturbs me is crypto scammers and the uninformed spouting off about “AI alignment” buying influence within the government, with stolen money
Also people who are either dishonest or comically aware of conflicts of interest, pretending they’re above it because they’re “rational”.
Eg the AI alignment stuff is mostly funded by corporations and is part of their marketing arm
I think it's normal charity that should be considered conscience laundering. You give money to the Red Cross and feel good about yourself, and ignore the fact that the money is embezzled or squandered without helping anyone. It's people that don't care where the charity money goes or the long term consequences of it when it does at least go to someone in need that should be criticized.
The article doesn't accuse them of doing anything bad exactly, but it's kind of... in the background? And even if the article writer didn't intend that, a lot of people, when they discuss this type of thing do intend it. That being rich is somehow bad, or means you did something bad, or reflects poorly on your moral fiber. Which I want to point out is a huge assumption and should be drawn out and pinned to the ground as something worthy of discussion.
My own (more extreme) take is that not only have none of them done anything to feel bad about, but that most of them are living hugely net social positive lives and would have been even if they never gave so much as a dime to charity.
If your philosophy tries to contradict that, you need to figure out why your philosophy is wrong, not double down on counterintuitive reasoning as to why it is right.
If you can't see why and don't have your eyes open as to why this is obvious, I can't help you.
Humans really are afraid to be punished, they've all been kids at some point, the fear of being bad is deeply ingrained.
In practice, the more important and beneficial part is to be seen as good by others. If someone can convince enough people, they will have little doubts about themselves.
As a rule, I consider any advertisement of virtue as suspicious.
How you got rich is important, because damages as well contributions must be accounted for.
The notion of 'end justify the mean' probably just means you end up being a docuhebag instead of contributing anything meaningful.
It seems a little hypocritical to use him as ethical cover without adhering more closely to his specific ethical proscriptions (which don't, to my knowledge, include Internet Rationalist stuff like AGI and colonizing the galaxy).
If you got pushback, then I guess it must be controversial what "EA" refers to at the moment. I hope it shakes out in a sensible way.
On the Overwhelming Importance Of Shaping the Far Future
If you are right, I am confident that, at best, there's a small comment about how it might be the case that in some situations, particular people could do more good with resources, and not (as you put it!) that "wealthy people in developed countries deserved aid more than poor people"
By ordinary standardsat least by ordinary enlightened humanitarian standardssaving and improving lives in rich countries is about equally as important as saving and improving lives in poor countries, provided lives are improved by roughly comparable amounts. But it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal
I feel like there's either a disconnect between your perception of the EA movement, or mine. It could totally be mine! I know that a lot of the EA movement has been slowly shifting focus to long termism and X-risk. Is this your main criticism of the EA movement today? Is it your sense that it's no longer about actually supporting charities ala Givewell, but rather this other stuff, and that's what you dislike about it?
(Genuinely curious here, since you seem to be super anti EA and I don't understand why.)
The headline seems to imply that gaining wealth is inherently a slimy thing to do. I just don't buy it. And if those people choose to donate some of that wealth, that seems strictly better than just being wealthy on its own.
Maybe it's just so difficult for people to get ahead these days that they start to focus more on what other people have and become bitter?
What a rude and erroneous way to summarize a complex movement comprised of so many different activities and points of view.
"Effective" by what standards? "Altruism" according to who? One person's altruism is another's abuse. Safe Injection Sites for drug addicts are a good example, on one hand they are "altruistic" in trying to prevent deaths of drug addicts and hopefully steer some toward rehab programs. On the other hand they bring crowds of junkies to whatever neighborhood they're in, likely making life more dangerous for any residents/businesses.
Is the use of imminent domain to build public infrastructure "effective altruism" when it bulldozes peoples' homes for a new road?
Most of the time calling something "effective altruism" is just the time-honored tradition of projecting a veneer of righteousness onto an action, and sometimes an attempt to shut down counterarguments that are pointing out negative impacts.
It's just the new, trendier "making the world a better place".
What if two EAs making the same amount give the same 10% to two effective but opposing charities (say one donates to a charity promoting veganism and the other donates to a charity that provides free meals, including meat, to starving populations), is their altruism still effective or does it cancel out?
Like I said, it's "making the world a better place" 2.0. Better for whom? With what trade-offs? Well that seems to be up to the EA in question, with vague guiding principles of "be good, honest and focus on helping as many neglected people as possible" (https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-e...). Who decides who's being neglected? Can a group of people, say a subsistence farming community be considered "neglected" if they're satisfied with their lives, even if they're technically living in extreme poverty?
I could go on in detail, but reading that site's "values" is largely just a collection of left-wing-ish tropes where it's assumed the reader already knows what otherwise vague terms mean and agrees with their definitions. Which is ironic given Value 3:
"Rather than starting with a commitment to a certain cause, community or approach, it’s important to consider many different ways to help and seek to find the best ones. This means putting serious time into deliberation and reflection on one’s beliefs, being constantly open and curious for new evidence and arguments, and being ready to change one’s views quite radically."
Ultimately it suffers from similar attempts to replace religion with secular humanism. The belief system is so abstract that, despite all the words it and its advocates spend describing itself, it doesn't really stand for anything more sophisticated than the lyrics to the Power Rangers Wild Force intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Y3Ib0YNFaQ
You are concerned about people thinking that dumping clothes in sub-Saharan Africa is "effective". I strongly doubt that any Effective Altruists think this is a worthy cause to support or promote.
Some of the questions you ask sound like you would enjoy joining in on Effective Altruism discussions -- it's a welcoming community: read some blog posts first and then start sharing your thoughts: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/
You say 10% is "no different than a tithe". I'm unsure where you're going with it, but I recommend you give 10% of your income to cost-effective charities (ones you pick in good faith after doing diligent research). I've been giving for over 10 years now.
It was my own country that severed the last ties that the Western world had with medieval society's focus on the afterlife and overruled the Bible on economics. To quote Madonna we live in a material world.
That being said EA has clearly gone completely off the rails and FTX should be the final nail in the coffin. It's become a way for nerdy people to do stats and thought experiments and pretend they're doing something altruistic. EA will never be net positive given the massive negative that's been done by SBF and FTX.
Can someone explain to me what happened here? The last I knew about EA was from a JRE podcast in 2017 with macaskill, where his ideas were to spend currency where it had the greatest impact and with the greatest efficiency while presenting the least friction to give, and I recall these ideas and the charity being supported by thinkers like Sam Harris and others. Now I'm reading connections with sbf and future now and you'd think macaskill had gone full dark side. Macaskill's wiki says he wrote a book about longtermism which seems fine on its face but I've only read negative things about here on HN.
Without knowing more, Seems like people are being reactionary to me. What's the scoop?
What I suspect might be happening is that "do gooders" (as research has shown) are often attacked by others because those that do good are a "threat" to the status quo. Rather than living your life as you do, when you encounter a vegetarian, you are reminded that your meat consumption causes suffering in animals. When you encounter an EA (Effective Altruist) giving 10% of their income to charity, you are reminded about how you too could do the same but are choosing not to. So for many people, it is easier to find some shred of hypocrisy or fault in those doing the good and thus have the clean conscience to ignore the good aims.
EA doesn't support this. It's absolutely not okay to do immoral things to make money and even things like Earning to Give via legit quant roles is and was pretty hotly debated.
It's all very well to pay lip service to 'common sense morality' but it doesn't seem to fit into the actual theology of EA, and this is what fanatics are most likely to follow.
Because most people who are willing to donate x% of their salary to charity tends to be decent people? Apart from that, there's tons of fundermental EA posts and writings that talk about how EA cannot be an 'ends justify the means' philosophy to donating. Sadly this SBF shit has really corrupted the core message which is to be skeptical of charities and view them like investments, picking the best one for QALY per $, and valuing all lives equally. I don't even like the futurist side of EA because I personally can't put the value of a hypothetical person above someone who's sick today and focus on global health & animal welfare. Honestly the core point of EA is imo very hard to discredit aside from longtermism.
This is at odds with its core adoption of utilitarianism, which is the movement's fundamental justification. Utilitarianism is sort of textbook "sounds nice on paper, works crappy in practice" outcome.
It's covered briefly here https://www.effectivealtruism.org/faqs-criticism-objections
I don't really know how to defend EA as not Utilitarian beyond that, except saying take a look at some EA-based books or blog posts that aren't from the last month and decide for yourself!
Many have, including the press, hence why the press says its utilitarianism reskinned! :)
EA is reskinned utilitarianism, which folks have repeated pointed out.
Well then I respectfully argue you're misinformed, or simply reading a small subset that is utilitarian. I don't know a single utilitarian in the EA circles I'm in. Central EA-orgs define themselves as not utilitarian. There's many sources arguing you give what you can afford while a utilitarian approach would be to give beyond that if you can save more lives. SBF would be championed as a hero, not a villain, for his ponzi scheme. No money would be going to animal welfare or modern healthcare worries because longtermism would have won the argument. There'd be more than one case of someone using EA to cause harm like robbing a bank. There'd be popular EA speakers calling themselves utilitarian in public. There'd be a single post arguing the ends justify the means from a central EA organisation.
Etc...
EA is very simply the idea that one should check the efficiency of charities and try get the best bang for their dollar. That is it.
Maybe it'd help to understand your idea of what EA and Utilitarianism actually are? Because there's a disconnect somewhere between us. And utilitarianism is a huge subject so perhaps your thinking of a particular kind that is different to my (and many EA's) understanding of the topic.
I'm confident I'm not misinformed, and I have no need to inefficiently waste your and, much worse, my and other HN readers' time arguing with a clear acolyte on the topic. So, to circle back to the portion you dodged from my prior comment:
>> Please do me a favor and at least acknowledge that many people you interact with regarding EA have thought about it and aren't babes in the wool.
----
> I don't know a single utilitarian in the EA circles I'm in ... There'd be popular EA speakers calling themselves utilitarian in public.
With due respect, your personal take on the EA movement is less informative than* that of* the core EA thinkers, which I've reviewed. Why would they not want to claim association to utilitarianism? Utilitarianism has a lot of nasty known failure modes and edge cases. Repackaging it is more sellable than fixing an older idea.
EDIT: Missing word
A misunderstanding of utilitarianism. If telling people to give everything makes them give nothing, then it is a bad approach. The utilitarian aims to maximize the amount given, which may entail telling them to give less. You treat utilitarianism as if we are philosophers considering it in theory, not practitioners who have accepted its logic.
>SBF would be championed as a hero, not a villain, for his ponzi scheme.
A terrible approach for similar reasons. Telling people you intend to scam them is a good way to get them to not give you money.
>No money would be going to animal welfare or modern healthcare worries because longtermism would have won the argument.
Treated similarly: EA is like a funnel. They draw you in by saying "you give to charity anyways, shouldn't you do so 'effectively'?" Then, instead of telling you which local homeless shelters are best, they tell you "effective" means curing diseases in africa. Once you accept that, then they have another style of charity to sell you. They carefully avoid pushing you too far, to avoid having you throw out the whole project.
> EA is very simply the idea that one should check the efficiency of charities and try get the best bang for their dollar.
"Effectiveness" is not defined, and any concrete definition is carefully buried. In practice, it usually means "maximizing human welfare" or something to that effect (ie utilitarianism), but they will carefully avoiding forcing that definition on anyone. "Oh, you want to donate to a local foodbank," they might say, "better make sure its an effective food bank" - this for reasons explained above. But every EA organization knows exactly what it means by effective, which is always some variant of utilitarianism. Importantly, they never refer to it as such, because utilitarianism is a ideology, and thus open to criticism. Instead, they always describe it in terms of platitudes that seems sufficiently obvious as to be impossible to question. In this way, they prevent anyone from falling off the ramp.
I’m curious if you would accept the claim that a regular churchgoer is unlikely to act immorally, because I can’t see any difference in principle, down to the “donating a portion of your salary” part.
So you can conclude that you should just do whatever makes you feel good and all ethics are nonsense as you seem to prefer, but I'm not sure that you've really refuted the basic premise that you should try to maximize the amount of good you can accomplish.
Even if you find a "pure" utilitarian (which is rare), it's considered "naive utilitarianism" to ignore the long-term and broad effects of creating harm, and it's also considered intellectually arrogant to think you know enough about the impacts of your decisions and moral philosophy that you can justify causing definite short-term harm for potential long-term gain against the moral frameworks of just about everyone else.
On the whole, I can't personally think of any one person involved in EA, or widely-read EA literature, that promote or support that type of thinking.
I say this as someone who took the Earning to Give path from 80,000 hours and happily donate to healthcare charities suggested by Givewell via Giving What We Can. My wife took the other path and is a postdoc at Stanford working on medical research with an EA focus (both in her field and on replication crisis in medicine). I'm pretty in this space so to speak, albeit only in a small way.
In the case of SBF, if he essentially stole from a bunch of retail investors, and then went about doing altruism (this is not yet verified, of course) did he ultimately create a net positive? That only works if the investors in FTX did not lose out, which they did.
Anything that goes into the 'ends justifies the means' territory ends up badly. Sometimes immediately, sometimes over time, but always.
“Ya. Hehe. I [SBF] had to be. It’s what reputations are made of, to some extent. I feel bad for those guys who get fucked by it, by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”
https://www.gawker.com/money/sam-bankman-fried-is-so-stupid-...
He did donate and fund many people through his FTX Foundation and donations via Giving What We Can. I know this because 1) people were funded with real money, even if some people who have not received money yet are of course screwed and 2) I did some voluntary data analysis work for some EA orgs and saw figures, SBF donated.
In the case of EA, we now have exactly one instance where someone engaged in this ends-justify-the-means behavior in a morally problematic way, and this is for some reason supposed to show that EA is irredeemably flawed. This seems a bit absurd.
It's basically a license to be a charming scoundrel. Everything good you do can be balanced by some vice of yours, and that's how we get powerful people abusing their employees and other relations.
The MO is not new, you might have heard of the Sacklers donating to art. Should it buy them any sympathy for what they've done? Doubt it.
If you want to do good things, do good things. As soon as you do a good thing and get publicity for it, I'm going to think you're buying publicity. I think there's an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm about this.
If you want to turn money into publicity, then giving locally to high profile causes is optimal. EA discourages both in favor of more global, more impactful causes.
Consider learning more https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
I'm unsure I understand your concern fully.
This is why Jesus said:
> Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
> based on […] some quick reading I’ve done on the topic
and is dominated by a quote from Hitchhiker’s Guide.
There are much better considered critiques of effective altruism than this article.
The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?
https://www.economist.com/1843/2022/11/15/the-good-delusion-...
Edit: this article is discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33618156
I wrote a long piece about the features Twitter needs, and I'd say that's a nice long article. This one is definitely just a quick note, but hopefully with an insightful connection that resonates with the HN crowd.
Long before the internet, and the means to make up language and spread the most nonsensical ideas to millions of people across the globe in milliseconds, people, some of whom became wealthy, acted altruistically.
One does not need wealth to practice altruism. Many people do it instinctively.
To suggest or even imply that altruism not backed by wealth is insignificant or even less significant is not a novel idea, nor is it non-obvious. It is, of course, deeply cynical. We can expect such unoriginal "thinking" from those entranced by the so-called "tech" industry.
Quoted from https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_elitist_philanthropy_of_...
How could anyone take an article that includes a sentence like that seriously?
It's written like a paper and I quoted from "the abstract".
To understand the conclusion in the abstract you obviously need to read the paper.
"But", they say, "that's got to be the most valuable way of knowing what to do, basically by definition". No, you're just doing that thing again: you're measuring your measuring sticks using the same system, and then measuring your way of measuring measuring sticks using the same system again, ad infinitum.
"But isn't that better? Your moral system must be worse than that." Yeah, mine's worse _in your system_. But it's better _in mine_, and to me you seem like... well.... a self-absorbed buffoon who found a way to fetishize utilitarianism and wealth-maximization and reason themselves out of any imperative to feel empathy or consideration for, like, the people or communities around you.