The Deaths of Effective Altruism
wired.com
wired.com
I won't speculate on why some people are so insistent that we must throw the baby out with the bathwater immediately, declare EA Dead, and forget it ever existed.
No other thinking required
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not here.
EA is just a slogan and a group of people.
If those people are doing (significant amounts of) bad things in the name of EA, associating them, then EA is bad. The slogan doesn't override the people. The people doing EA are EA.
Trying to make it more complicated is overthinking it. What you said is correct.
The problem with EA, isn’t that it advocates doing that - there are a lot of moral frameworks that advocate that, but it creates an ethical framework that pretty much focuses solely on that and ignores the social and moral implications of the person’s behavior outside this. So no matter how many people the person is screwing over in their pursuit of wealth, no matter how many social rules they are breaking, as long as they are donating, they are fine.
It basically reduces morality to a cash flow problem and ignores the other moral and social implications of the (rich or wannabe rich) person’s pursuits and actions.
Even in computer science, many “new” ideas are recycled from the 60s and 70s.
Fake charity is a much bigger problem than an impure motive for giving.
This is like saying christians are immoral because they can sin as much as they want as long as they go to confession afterwards.
Are you sure? That sounds like a stupidly obvious factor to overlook.
Maybe people don't view themselves as pitiful and want to provide for themselves rather than be dependent on handouts at some unreliable rando's discression? People on the other side of the planet can have very different societal norms that go unconsidered outside of their communities.
I've always thought sticking to 1 or 2 degrees of separation avoids issues of cultural differences and long logistical chains. And who better to ask what would really help people than their friends?
Then again, I think fate sometimes chooses you for a bit of charity work and it's wise to go along with it.
At least initially, EA was a pretty big proponent of direct aid like GiveDirectly[0], because just giving people money was seen to be more effective than most (though not all[1]) other forms of aid.
As for myself, I don't see why someone on the other side of the world would be more or less pitiful than someone locally. My main reason for preferring indirect aid is that there's something morally suspicious to me about only people in my "clan" receiving my charity. Is it really charity if it goes only to people who I like and who are within knowing distance of me? Or am I trying to achieve something? (For the same reasons, I'm careful to keep most of my work anonymous)
[0]: GiveWell directed a lot of funds to GiveDirectly early on (https://www.givewell.org/top-charities-fund), though they haven't since 2016.
[1]: Healthcare interventions like deworming are usually more efficient per dollar, but not by much, but they benefit from economies of scale so directing money to them direction is worthwhile.
Yes. Its less valuable by definition because you are subtracting value from the system for yourself in the form of increased social standing.
There is a reason that charity should be anonymous. Its not charity otherwise, its quid quo pro.
I would argue it's a positive sum transaction - the person you helped receives something of value, from a real human they know, strengthening the relationship between the two of you, others in the community see that and are encouraged to do the same, and the recipient feels a sense of obligation to at "pay it forward" any way they can leading to further "good works".
Have you really never received anything of value from someone who had no obligation to do so? Not even a lead on a new job, or an introduction to someone who helped your career, or a mentor? If so, do you really feel the situation would have been better if that information had arrived in an anonymous form?
- you don’t have the same understanding of the needs of a community further away. You won’t be able to directly observe the impact of your actions (positive or negative)
I am not saying "don't help those who are far away". But you can make a case for giving greater emphasis to helping those who are closer to you purely on effectiveness grounds.
What answer did you find in this inquiry?
From my (admittedly shallow) understanding of effective altruism I question how well we can define the ‘effectivness’ of an action. I worry it prioritizes quantifiable metrics that are easy to compare over more diffuse benefits such as connection and personal bonds that are more difficult to measure (but equally important). For example I suspect you would argue it’s more cost effective to buy rice from an international supplier and feed 100 people than to use the same money to build a neighborhood garden with supplies from local businesses and feed a handful of people. But in one case the money remains in the community and continues to do good while in the other it simply further enriches an international conglomerate.
In one case you build community bonds and create a place for people to come together while in the other you potentially undercut the local suppliers, reducing the food supply in an area in the long term.
This is obviously a contrived hypothetical but I’m hoping you can read it in good faith and try to understand a different perspective.
An Effective Altruist is someone who would throw a current, existing person under a bus, if he believed that this would somehow cause three more people to exist sometime in the far future, or help speed up human colonization of the galaxy.
Have you looked into what EA is really about?
Also, SBF wasn't good optics.
From what I can tell, EA is still alive and well I the real world, donating bed nets to combat malaria and other very real, worldly tasks.
Of course they cannot even write the answer they’re implicating because it’s laughable on its face, so they’re just here to “ponder” the questions, then accuse EA of navel gazing.
As you say, EA asks those same questions, gets to an answer that’s far less ridiculous than “my neighbors deserve more by virtue of being my neighbors,” then writes checks.
It starts with the author discovering that some charities are not effective, especially when rich people go to poor countries and try to do direct actions. Then it somehow uses this as an argument that trying to measure the effectiveness of charities is bad and that giving money to charities in general is bad because sometimes charities are mismanaged.
Half of the article is basically complaining that charities in general are sometimes ineffective or have unintended negative side effects (for example malaria bed nets being used for fishing).
Guess what - the fact that it's a difficult problem to tell how to do good is exactly why EA exists - to at least try and bring order into chaos. What's the alternative? The article just keeps complaining about collecting data and statistics and trying to estimate good by saying "but sometimes the estimates are wrong!", but it presents zero alternatives. It's basically just advocating against charity in general, saying that it should be the job of the governments. Or it's arguing that you people need to only support things they are emotionally invested in, because "unsentimental calculations" are evil.
The other half of the article is citing random billionaire's opinions on the world and complaining that they are self-important and weaving in lots of random things about the SBF trial for some reason.
There's some valid criticisms of effective altruism in the article, specifically: criticizing how they try to put a value on everything (even when it is a hard problem or not exact) and criticizing longtermism (because it's difficult to say whether to weigh the present or the future more). It also mentions the common discussion about doing direct action yourself versus spending more time working and donating more money. But I think those are already the obvious discussions about EA that everyone knows about.
I assure you that everyone does not know about them. And more to the point, reading the EA forums, it does not appear that the EA community has even settled on any sort of strategy for addressing them; other than “hope we can minimize the issues until people run out of attention span and we can treat this as old news.”
The article is pretty clear in its call for givewell (and things like it) to estimate both the good and the bad, and to publicly share the estimates for both.
They're not bringing order to chaos with their current methods.
> The overwhelmingly thrust of Wenar's article -- from the opening jab about asking EAs "how many people they’ve killed", to the conditional I bolded above -- seems to be to frame charitable giving as a morally risky endeavor, in contrast to the implicit safety of just doing nothing and letting people die.
...
> (If he just wants to advocate for more GiveDirectly-style anti-paternalistic interventions that "shift our power to them", that seems fine but obviously doesn't justify the other 95% of the article.)
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cfwxiG8ovaAA9us6t/...
And here's a link to GiveWell's comments on the article (that Wired sent them for review).
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WfBvF7N4Z1VyQcqtQmqJPY59...
Basically it allows assholes who have a single minded focus on making money a way to salve their conscience by reducing morality to a cash flow problem and ignoring any of the other social and moral implications of their behavior.
“For this reason, many people think it’s our top recommendation for the majority of people. But it’s not.”
“Might you do harm in a high-earning career?
Yes, some high-earning careers can do a lot of harm. We don’t recommend taking careers you think might be harmful in order to donate.
First, if the harm done by the work offsets the good done by your donations — including both direct and indirect harms — then that’s clearly overall negative for the world and bad by any lights.
But even if you think the donations might outweigh the costs of a harmful career, we think doing harm “for the greater good” is almost never a good idea. And if you think you might be the exception, you’re almost certainly not. This is for many reasons, so we’ve written a separate article about why not to take a harmful career in order to do more good.”
Yes, he did. However, his advocacy was in the context within the larger of Christian morality and inherited a lot from it. The modern version of effective altruism does not exist within a larger ethical/religious framework which makes it more prone to go wrong.
Note the difference: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-eff...
Uh, I feel pretty happy about it? I'd also be somewhat annoyed at the superintendent, the one that actually did the scheduling if this reaction wasn't a total fluke. But much happier than annoyed.
I mean, you just told me the pill adds a month of life expectancy. Am I supposed to not think that's true a couple sentences later?
The way this analogy is explained is a mess.
I think the thing that is irritating about EA is that it often feels like this generation’s ‘post-colonial guilt’. Many people with the privilege to act on their EA sentiments are the beneficiaries of financial inequality, either via inheritance or VC froth, and can afford to absorb the risks.
To be honest, EA feels like church without the beardy cloud man, and IMO is a better use of the philosophy brain-trust than metaphysics, so I have no desire to see it fail. The cultish part is more a Silicon Valley thing than an EA thing.