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Comment by operatingthetan | Hacker News Reader

>Altruism is just any kind of selfless helping of others. The "effective" part means thinking about how to do more good with limited resources; ie does a marginal dollar spent on cancer research do as much good as a dollar spent on malaria control.

It seems like an unnecessary qualifier. E.g. I could make up 'effective frugality' but the efficiency factor of frugality is already implied. Nobody out there is pushing 'ineffective altruism' either. The effective branding seems like it is simply putting on a layer of ideology and/or branding over the existing term in order to sell it.

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I've never before encountered a literature that explicitly prioritized careful analysis of one's charitable giving, centered around a universal metric like EA has. A lot of charity centers around other things, like making an impact on one's local community, or donating to the memory of a loved one who suffered from heart disease, or something like that.

Those are all good in their own way, but EA is very much a branch in its own direction away from that, and I think it's worth having some kind of qualifier to specify in what way EA is philosophically different.

At the bottom of it, how is it philosophically different?

Everyone who engages in altruism is trying to further a goal. Everyone thinks that the more effective their actions in pursuing that goal, the better. Is that really different than ea (not EA)?

It seems to me that the difference is more about strategy than philosophy.

if you are making an impact on your local community then you are being effective. research on heart disease is most likely effective too, like any research that actually advances our knowledge.

I'm apparently struggling to make the point that this is not necessarily true. Not every charity is built around achieving an objective with analytic efficiency.

I've seen countless efforts to "fight" climate change by very feel-good but ineffective methods, like... spending thousands of dollars on algae sculptures for an art museum. Effective altruism brings the effectiveness to the forefront as an explicit priority. Like, are there other things we could do for a thousand dollars that might have a million times bigger impact on CO2?

A lot of people really don't think about that, or at least don't treat it as a priority. And some charities are even happy to tread water forever while never engaging with solving a problem, just to maintain the status quo and the need for that charity.

i get you now, and i agree. these feel-good activities are obviously not effective, but to me that also means that they don't have an impact either, unless you count making people feel good as impact. in other words i see impact and being effective as closely related. i guess my point was that the examples you used at first were not the kind of bad examples that you give now. at least to me.

i see having local impact as something very important. but i have not looked very closely at EA yet, and maybe EA does not consider that, i don't know.

Plenty of people are pushing ineffective altruism

https://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/28/celebrated-charities-th...

There's a context mismatch context here. EA is offering a philosophy of altruism. Where as most charities are organizations that put donations into direct action of some kind. These are different aims. It's a bit disingenuous to suggest that charities that aren't as efficient as others are pushing "ineffective altruism" unless they are literally scams.

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