What the Hell Happened to Effective Altruism | Hacker News Reader

What the Hell Happened to Effective Altruism

fromthenew.world

28 pointsqsi31 comments

"...EA brand will now be associated with irrational feminized college students rather than interesting quantitative thinkers."

That is quite a quote, the kind that makes it hard to take anything in this essay seriously. If this guy has been to an EA event in the last year I'm sure he'd notice it's still like 90% men and the demographic is pretty much the same as in previous years.

Somehow he's been around EA for a long time but think AI safety is a problem to work on. He compares AI regulation to over regulation around medicine. Maybe because there's basically no regulation around AI and a huge amount in medicine and the stakes between the two are completely different. In fact they are completely different issues so why should it be the case that EA should have the same viewpoint on both.

Don't bother wasting your time reading this like I did

Weird article: if the point of EA-the-philosophy is to diligently measure and pursue utility-maximizing donations, then none of the "social" stuff should matter to its adherents. They can call themselves whatever they'd like, and nobody would find that basic premise particularly objectionable.

In other words, this doesn't really seem to be about EA. It's about who owns the EA "brand," a thought that's incoherent with the putative mission of EA.

It's not even clear what the complaint is. The article only gives a couple of examples of what's going wrong, mostly the fact that "new EAs" don't respect some of the people the author admires and some swipes at the FDA.

Indeed. EA makes sense as a blog post or a book but not really as an organization.

> EA used to be great.

It was always a cult-like delusion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33618156

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34646361

EA as a concept is great. The old saying "if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach him to fish, you feed him for life."

The EA movement itself over-complicates and distorts it. I recall reading about how someone from EA mocked a social worker and claimed she was selfish for not going into business and making millions, because she could help more people donating the millions than she could doing social work. This was before FTX collapsed.

The fallacy of the EA movement is that they persuaded themselves that it is possible to reason towards the most “effective” altruistic course action in a fully rational way. The reality is that there are serious philosophical-logical paradoxes, like the repugnant conclusion [0]. As a result, they reasoned themselves into conclusions that were most favorable to their own preferred way of life.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox

Interesting point. I would argue that every collective movement has philosophical-logical paradoxes. Religious organizations are some that immediately come to mind. Political action and legislation is another example.

Likewise, any attempt to "social engineer" for the benefit of some will in some way result in a loss for others. I can't argue any for any law of conservation of "benefit" here. I'm just suggesting that there are always pros and cons.

And thanks for the link!

I agree the original concept is fine. I think we can mostly split criticism of the movement from criticism of the ideas. We can look at the SBF thing and this article and the links posted by GP to see a lot that has gone wrong with the movement.

But then we have to split the ideas that have attached themselves to EA, because I don't think Peter Singer was talking about 10^54 simulated consciousness or whatever.

So the article seems to agree with the most basic idea of EA, which I feel even the average person on the street would agree with, the "donate money with maximum effectiveness". And your example is from a group that believes in "earn to give", which is way more controversial and one of the big excuses for SBF and crew. Also, assuming a random social worker could just choose to go into business and make millions seems just incorrect.

  But the evidence was there. Personal attacks against Nick Bostrum, Robin Hanson, among other leadings figures, not for their positions on the most important issues, or even for being wrong, but for not conforming to the socially desirable position on the current thing,

Nick Bostrum very clearly states that he believed blacks to be inantely intellectually inferior to the rest of humanity. I didn't realize that this was decidely correct, or even unimportant. Doesn't the belief of a racial hierarchy affect one's ability to decide on most optimal forms and recipients of altruism?

This blogpost just reads as a "go woke go broke" victory lap that has very little new to say about the current state of EA. At the very least I do genuinely appreciate that Chau directly linked to the detractors he discusses (even if the twitter link leads to a deleted post)

One of the benefits of being cynical and jaded is that I see exactly where these kind of movements are going as soon as they get started. The new-atheism movement from a decade ago is one example, rationalist movement was another. The newest one is e/acc. While the movements themselves often die and fade away, their impact often does not.

Something strange happens when an idea becomes a movement and then it becomes an identity. Pretty soon the identity alters the movement which then subverts the idea. Next thing you know you see someone who claims the identity in a TED talk speaking ideas you would never personally support.

For that reason I don't just judge ideas on their own merits. I try to consider the movement that will arise around it. Then I try to consider the assumed identity of those caught up in the movement. Then I consider how a large number of individuals sharing an identity will reflect back onto the movement.

All movements that want to preserve their identity need a (at least benevolent) dictator and the ability to self-police. EA had neither. Therefore, it inevitably morphed into a movement that none of the original supporters could recognize.

It is not the first to give into such naivete and it won't be the last.

If this article represents the quality of thinking behind EA, then it’s no wonder it fell apart. “safetyism, a malicious pathology“, “Irrational feminized college students”??

I thought it especially interesting that the “Centre For Effective Altruism flew in world-class autists”

I assumed that one was a typo for altruists, but given the other bizarre phrase selection maybe not.

The best part to me is the only person I've had make good arguments for EA in person is female. And she was supporting the analytical quantitative scientific argument and data driven process, so it seems that some "masculized college students" maybe were the problem.

One is reminded of how the percentage of women in symphony orchestras shot way up once they started doing blind auditions

Transmuted into Effective Accelerationism (e/acc). Cringe.

...what? Are you really claiming that EA is bad for... advocating for public policy around AI xrisk, rather than just writing off the government entirely? That EA is at fault for the leading AI companies having profit motivations, and that somehow they are less interested in safety than without it? That EA should reject people who come to us because, by knowing us for being in the news, they aren't what, ethically pure enough?

> It is inevitable that the EA brand will now be associated with irrational feminized college students rather than interesting quantitative thinkers willing to bite socially undesirable bullets.

In all my interactions with EAs I... what? What??

You are right that at least one trad EA thinks this reads like a strawman. I'm sorry you've had whatever experience led you to this. Maybe visit Cambridge sometime.

> It went from wanting to repeal the FDA to wanting to make a new one for AI.

They wanted to repeal the FDA?

They believed the FDA causes great harm by gatekeeping potentially tremendously lifesaving but risky treatments.

For instance, some worked to develop a covid vax within a few weeks of COVID emerging, and distribute knowledge of how to build and self-dose with this home covid vax. This would help save livs, probably, at the cost of potentially being dangerous, but each individual could choose whether they were willing to take that risk.

This feels related to the movement at the beginning of the AIDS crisis that pushed for the release of new treatments. I can't remember exactly how it all shook out in the end; the alternative treatment (DDI) had better side effects for some people, but wasn't the final really effective treatment that was researched years later (protease inhibitors). That research was lobbied for by the same movements I believe.

Are you being sarcastic here? Regarding Covid, America did go through "Let each individual choose their own best remedy if they're willing to take the risk," and we all know how that worked out.

Something just as effective happens automatically: really driven non-altruists achieve success and realise it doesn't bring happiness. Then proceed to donate their wealth. Buffet nor Gates started out as altruists but are both planning it as an end.

It’s been exposed for what it always was.

Writing about altruism behind pop-up.

> EA was founded on rejecting a great falsehood: a lie that almost everyone believed, that is not just false but the opposite of truth. This was the lie that donating based on your feelings was the best way to help people.

What utter nonsense.

EA is as myopic when looking at normies, as it is when performing introspection.

What’s the counterpoint you’re actually trying to make?

I categorically reject the claim that 'most non-EA people believe that the 'best way to help people' is donating based on feelings'.

I follow it up with a corollary that if EA is so utterly deluded about 'the pillar upon which it was founded', I have strong doubts that its disciples are particularly good at 'qualitatively' measuring impact.

Given that most NGO ad campaigns that I've seen looking for people to donate were emotionally manipulative nonsense, I disagree.

All advertising is emotionally manipulative, but just because I bought something that was advertised to me doesn't mean that I consider it 'the best possible purchase'.

It could have been the purchase of least resistance. It could have been the best at maximizing some particular utility. It could have been a purchase of the most recent thing that was on my mind. My decisions, unlike that of these theoretical EAs don't solely consist of maximizing some global 'goodness' utility function.

When I gave $500 to the town's theatre this year, it wasn't because 'I was trying to maximize the best way to help people, and I erroneously made a sub-optimal choice, because I based it on feelings'.

Paperclip-maximization was the furthest thing from my mind at the time. Anyone looking at my decision, and concluding based on it that I was buying into some Big Lie is completely nuts.

It was always batshit and bat shit.

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