Given that contrast, I'd ask what evidence do you have for why OP's interpretation is incorrect, and what evidence do you have that your interpretation is correct?
The fact they're notorious makes them a biased sample.
My guess is for the majority of people interested in EA - the typical supporter who is not super wealthy or well known - the two central ideas are:
- For people living in wealthy countries, giving some % of your income makes little difference to your life, but can potentially make a big difference to someone else's
- We should carefully decide which charities to give to, because some are far more effective than others.
That's pretty much it - essentially the message in Peter Singer's book: https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/.
I would describe myself as an EA, but all that means to me is really the two points above. It certainly isn't anything like an indulgence that morally offsets poor behaviour elsewhere
> they could have been 13% more effective
If you think the difference between ineffective and effective altruism is a 13% spread, I fear you have not looked deeply enough into either standard altruistic endeavors nor EA enough to have an informed opinion.
The gaps are actually astonishingly large and trivial to capitalize on (i.e. difference between clicking one Donate Here button versus a different Donate Here button).
The sheer scale of the spread is the impetus behind the entire train of thought.
Especially rich people's vanity foundations are mostly a channel for dodging taxes and channeling corruption.
I donate to a lot of different organisations, and I do check which do the most good. Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders are very effective and always worthy of your donation, for example. Others are more a matter of opinion. Greenpeace has long been the only NGO that can really take on giant corporations, but they've also made some missteps over the years. Some are focused on helping specific people, like specific orphans in poor countries. Does that address the general poverty and injustice in those countries? Maybe not, but it does make a real difference for somebody.
And if you only look at the numbers, it's easy to overlook the individuals. The homeless person on the street. Why are they homeless, when we are rich? What are we doing about that?
But ultimately, any charity that's actually done, is going to be more effective than holding off because you're not sure how optimal this is. By all means optimise how you spend it, but don't let doubts hold you back from doing good.
For sure this is case. But just knowing what you are donating to doesn't need some sort of special designation. Like yes A is in fact much better than B, so I'll donate to A instead of B is no different than any other decision where you'd weigh options. Its like inventing 'effective shopping'. How is it different than regular shopping? Well, with ES, you evaluate the value and quality of the thing you are buying against its price, you might also read reviews or talk to people to have used the different products before. Its a new philosophy of shopping that no one has ever thought of before and its called 'effective shopping'. Only smart people are doing it.
Nobody said or suggested only smart people can or should or are “doing EA.” What people observe is these knee jerk reactions against what is, as you say, a fairly obvious idea once stated.
However it being an obvious idea once stated does not mean people intuitively enact that idea, especially prior to hearing it. Thus the need to label the approach
This has some truth to it and if EA were primarily about reminding people that not all donations to charitable causes pack the same punch and that some might even be deleterious, then I wouldn't have any issues with it at all. But that's not what it is anymore, at least not the most notable version of it. My knee jerk reaction to it comes from this version. The one where narcissistic tech bros posture moral and intellectual superiority not only because they give, but because they give better than you.
Subtract billionaire activity from your perception of EA attitude: is this critique still true? Who specifically makes it so?
But that's the problem, that is my entire perception of EA. I see regular altruism where, like in the shopping example I gave above, wanting to be effective is already intrinsic. Doing things like giving people information that some forms of giving are better than others is just great. No issues there at all, but again I see that as a part of plain old regular altruism.
Then there is Effective Altruism (tm) which is the billionaire version that I see as performative and corrupt. Even when it helps people, this seems to be incidental rather that the main goal which appears to be marketing the EA premise for self promotion and back patting.
And no, it’s not really. This negative branding mostly exists among people who actually will admit to knowing it’s not even accurate to them.
"A lot of people think that EA is some hifalutin, condescending endeavor and billionaire utilitarians hijack its ideology to justify extreme greed (and sometimes fraud!), but in reality, EA is simply the imperative (accessible to anyone) to direct their altruistic efforts toward what will actually do the most good for the causes they care about. This is in contrast to the most people's default mode of relying on marketing, locality, vibes, or personal emotional satisfaction to guide their generosity."
See? Fair and accurate, and without propagating things I know or suspect to be untrue!
Why so?
“Well Kathy Griffin and Carrot Top fit the bill”
Do you think that is a fair characterization of red headed people in general?
“Not really, but I’m allowed to say so anyway.”
…
Sure I guess?
They'll insist on propagating it anyway, but they will actually say they don't actually believe it themselves!
The core notions as you state them are entirely a good idea. But the good you do with part of your money does not absolve you for the bad things you do with the rest, or the bad things you did to get rich in the first place.
Mind you, that's how the rich have always used philanthropy; Andrew Carnegie is now known for his philanthropy, but in life we was a brutal industrialist responsible for oppressive working conditions, strike breaking, and deaths.
Is that really effective altruism? I don't think so. How you make your money matters too. Not just how you spend it.
An even worse trap is to prioritize a future utopia. Utopian ideals are dangerous. They push people towards "the ends justify the means". If the ends are infinitely good, there is no bound on how bad the "justified means" can be.
But history shows that imagined utopias seldom materialize. By contrast the damage from the attempted means is all too real. That's why all of the worst tragedies of the 20th century started with someone who was trying to create a utopia.
EA circles have shown an alarming receptiveness to shysters who are trying to paint a picture of utopia. For example look at how influential someone like Samuel Bankman-Fried was able to be, before his fraud imploded.
I do agree that things like EA and Libertarianism have to answer for the in-the-wild proponents they tend to attract but not to the point of epistemic closure in response to its subject matter.
I will never take a proponent of The Bell Curve seriously who tries to say they're "just following the data", because I do hold them and the book responsible for their social and cultural entanglements and they would have to be blind to ignore it. But the book is wrong for reasons intrinsic to its analysis and it would be catastrophic to treat that point as moot.
If I wished to mirror your comment style with its performative weight and implied authority, then I would adopt a tone closer to this.
I said:
"I do agree that things like EA and Libertarianism have to answer for the in-the-wild proponents they tend to attract"
"I think social dynamics are real and must be answered for"
"I will never take a proponent of The Bell Curve seriously who tries to say they're "just following the data", because I do hold them and the book responsible for their social and cultural entanglements"
In the face of that, you're trying to claim that I'm ignoring "social indicators as a valid heuristic."
That's not true and no amount of projection or character attacks can make it true. These are verbatim quotes from both of us. You're attempting to present a point I agree with as if it's a new unacknowledged critique.
Meanwhile, when I say the subject matter of a belief system matters for its content, you don't engage with it but reply to me by re-asserting the point I agree with as if it does the work of responding to me. No amount of social signalling takes the place of evaluating intellectual content on its merits and saying "intellectual content matters" is not a denial of the importance of social signalling.
And I said that people tend not to associate themselves with labels that have connotations that they don't like.
These two statements are not the same.
> "I think social dynamics are real and must be answered for"
Yet you completely dismiss my point.
> "I will never take a proponent of The Bell Curve seriously who tries to say they're "just following the data", because I do hold them and the book responsible for their social and cultural entanglements"
What does this have to do with group associations?
> In the face of that, you're trying to claim that I'm ignoring "social indicators as a valid heuristic."
Because you never acknowledged my point.
> That's not true and no amount of projection or character attacks can make it true.
You are the one who started with the insults, I was following suit.
> Meanwhile, when I say the subject matter of a belief system matters for its content, you don't engage with it but reply to me by re-asserting the point I agree with as if it does the work of responding to me.
Because I wasn't contesting that. I was adding something to it.
Most tellingly: you dismiss my direct, repeated acknowledgments as 'not counting' while claiming credit for 'adding' a point you never actually verbalized until this moment. Your standard for what constitutes 'acknowledgment' shifts based entirely on whether you're demanding it or taking credit for it.
And the Bell Curve example directly illustrates holding proponents responsible for social entanglements, the exact thing you claim I never addressed.
Your entire tone is disdainful and dismissive, and your constant need to insist that I am missing something when you refuse to acknowledge my basic point is tedious.
Yes, you acknowledged 'social indicators'. No, you did not acknowledge that 'people who stick around in clubs filled with other people they vehemently disagree with about core issues tend to be rare'.
Coincidentally, libertarian socialism is also a thing.
Just wait until you find out about vegetarianism's most notorious supporter.
So basically everyone who has a lot of money to donate has questionable morals already.
The question is, are the large donators to EA groups more or less 'morally suspect' than large donors to other charity types?
In other words, everyone with a lot of money is morally questionable, and EA donors are just a subset of that.
You say this like it's fact beyond dispute, but I for one strongly disagree.
Not a fan of EA at all though!
To quote[1]:
> In Astronomical Waste, Nick Bostrom makes a more extreme and more specific claim: that the number of human lives possible under space colonization is so great that the mere possibility of a hugely populated future, when considered in an “expected value” framework, dwarfs all other moral considerations.
[1] https://blog.givewell.org/2014/07/03/the-moral-value-of-the-...
This is an interesting take. So if we found out for certain that an action we are taking today is going to kill 100% of humans in 200 years, it would be immoral to consider that as a factor in making decisions? None of those people are living today, obviously, so that means we should not worry about their lives at all?
But to put future lives on the same scale (as in to allow for the possibility of measuring one against the other) of current lives is immoral.
Future lives are important, but balancing them against current lives is immoral
You cannot make 1000x the average persons wealth by acting morally. Except possibly winning the lottery.
A person is not capable of creating that wealth. A group of people have created that wealth, and the 1000x individual has hoarded it to themselves instead of sharing it with the people who contributed.
If you are a billionaire, you own at least 5000x the median (200000k in the US). If you're a big tech CEO, you own somewhere around 50-100,000x the median. These are the biggest proponents of EA.
The bottom 50% only own about 2% of the wealth anymore, the top 10% own two thirds of the wealth, the top 1% owns a whole third and it's only getting worse. Who is responsible for the wealth inequality? The people at the right edge of the Lorenz curve. They could fix it, but don't, in fact they benefit more from their workers being poorer and more desperate for a job. I hope that explains the exploitation.
The risk profile of early startup founders looks a lot like "winning the lottery", except that the initial investment (in terms of time, effort and lost opportunities elsewhere as well as pure monetary ones) is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of a lottery ticket. There's only a handful of successful unicorns vs. a whole lot of failed startups. Other contributors generally have a choice of sharing into the risk vs. playing it safe, and they usually pick the safe option because they know what the odds are. Nothing has been taken away from them.
For Google and Facebook, users' data was sold to advertisers, and their behaviour is manipulated to benefit the company and its advertising clients. For Amazon, the workers are squeezed for all the contribution they can give and let go once they burn out, and they manipulate the marketplace that they govern to benefit them. If you make multiple hundreds of millions, you are either exploiting someone in the above way, or you are extracting rent from them.
Just looking at the wealth distribution is a good way to see how unicorns are immoral. If you suddenly shoot up into the billionaire class, you are making the wealth distribution worse, because your money is accruing from the less wealthy proportion of society.
That unicorns propagate this inequality is harmful in itself. The entire startup scene is also a fishing pond for existing monopolies. The unicorns are sold to the big immoral actors, making them more powerful.
What is taken away when inequality becomes worse is political power and agency. Maybe other contributors close to the founders are better off, but society as a whole is worse off.
That's quite a claim, as there's a higher probability of unicorns screwing people over. If a unicorn lives long enough it ends up at the top of the wealth pyramid. As far as I can tell, all of the _big_ anti-social actors were once unicorns.
That most organizations engaging in bad behavior aren't unicorns says nothing, because by definition most companies aren't unicorns. If unicorns are less than 0.1% of the population of companies X, then P(X | !unicorn(X)) > P(X | unicorn(X)) is almost guaranteed to be true for all P.
He's far from the only example.
I understand the distribution of wealth. I agree that in the US in particular it is setup to exploit poor people.
I don't think being rich is immoral.
That's an interesting position. I would guess that in order to square these two beliefs you either have to think exploiting the poor is moral (unlikely) or that individuals are not responsible for their personal contributions to the wealth inequality.
I'm interested to hear how you argue for this position. It's one I rarely see.