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Comment by spindle | Hacker News Reader

This certainly isn't true for some of the founders of effective altruism, like Peter Singer, who gives away money as he earns it (as opposed to promising to give it away in the future) and isn't rich (by First World standards).

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I don't know to what extent "mainstream" EA can rest on Singer's plaudits: I got a decent amount of pushback from EAs (or EA-sympathetic people) on this site just last week for pointing out that they've diverged significantly from Singer's original altruistic positions.

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).

I agree with you about Singer. And about hypocrisy.

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.

I hope so too! I think Singer (and the school he's produced) have made some very important contributions to applied ethics, and it would be a shame to have those contributions imploded or overwhelmed by a small group of conscience-plagued billionaires.

But it is true for other leaders in the movement, like Nick Beckstead, who wrote a PhD dissertation that argued that wealthy people in developed countries deserved aid more than poor people in developing countries, because the wealthy were more likely to make a further positive impact.

Just to be clear, you're criticizing a movement that has, as one of its cornerstones, the idea that most people in the developed world should be donating more money to the developing world, because they can do more good there. And your criticism is that actually they want to save lives in the developed world more? That seems weird to me.

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.)

Could you share where Nick says this? His dissertation is here: https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/40469/PDF/1...

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"

This is a weird hand to go all-in on, since you can just CMD-F the dissertation to find this:

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

All this assumes that "saving and improving lives" costs the same. Because this is very not true, your summary: "that wealthy people in developed countries deserved aid more than poor people in developing countries" fees like an inaccurate summary of Nick's views.

I really don't care how you want to slice and dice this excerpt. Whatever the fairest summary of it you can come up with is, just pretend that's what I was referring to, and I think my point will still hold.

Could you clarify your point then? What were you trying to say?

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