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Comment by meinmissoula | Hacker News Reader

Are we seeing that? I'm certainly not? I suppose "psychopaths" will attach themselves to literally anything given the right opportunities, but EA seems like a relatively poor target all things considered.

At it's core, I struggle to see how anyone can disagree with effective altruism as a basic principle. People want to do good in the world, but we're all monkey-brained and emotional, so that often manifests in ineffective use of time and resources to do things that give an immediate, visible outcome so we can feel good instead of what would actually do the most good.

EA to me is basically just shifting altruistic desires from emotional-payoff (volunteering at a soup kitchen around the holidays, donating to a local animal shelter) to things that have the best outcome (volunteering at a political action group to improve laws, donating to an NGO distributing mosquito nets in malaria zones).

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There's an element of "the ends justify the means" in EA that can lead to bad outcomes. An extreme example is SBF's hypothetical "coin flip"[1], but one could see how making the world worse in the short term could be justified with EA as long as those actions might make it better in the long term. Just as crucially, the meaning of "worse" and "better" is often not left up to the communities being affected but to each EA practitioner.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-bankman-fried-coin-flip-...

> If you flip it and get heads, the entire world improves by more than double.

> If you get tails, the world is destroyed.

> Sam Bankman-Fried said he would flip the coin — and urged everyone else to do so, too, Caroline Ellison testified in court Tuesday.

> At it's core, I struggle to see how anyone can disagree with effective altruism as a basic principle

I don't think anyone disagrees with that. The issue isn't the idea that we want to engage in altruism in the most effective way we can, the issue is the EA movement.

I don't get how effectiveness is a prerequisite. Be altruist, or not.

Sounds like ass-covering from people who are like 'I am ultimately rational and therefore must act with maximum effectiveness'. Ultimately rational as a perceived state within humans is a FEELING. You can take a bunch of ketamine and conclude that you possess that quality, and many people have done just that, some of 'em very wealthy and powerful.

Beats admitting the truth, I guess.

In my experience, people are better at rationalizing their feelings than actually being rational. There's a certain lack of humility to claiming that just because you used some numerical weights to arrive at a decision it was arrived at rationally.

Indeed the more complex and complete you make your rational model, the more tunable weights there are. By just dropping in the right weights, you can get whatever result you want. Therefore complex models tend to produce worse results in practice than very simple ones.

This lesson was brought home for me by https://www.amazon.com/Software-Estimation-Demystifying-Deve... explaining why the COCOMO model didn't work well in practice as an estimation technique, despite their having collected a lot of good data on what affects schedule.

This lesson is one that the EA community broadly seems to ignore.

> I don't get how effectiveness is a prerequisite. Be altruist, or not

It's not. What I meant by my comment was that pretty much everyone who engages in altruistic behavior wants that behavior to be as effective as possible. The EA movement did not invent or discover this, it's always been the case.

Even people whose altruistic behavior stops at dropping a few coins in the donation box at the supermarket wants those coins to be used in the most effective way.

The EA movement is something else entirely.

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