Effective altruism is this century's biggest idea | Hacker News Reader

Effective altruism is this century's biggest idea

economist.com

9 pointsAnon8433 comments

The basic idea of EA is the same many people have (especially those not used to the idea of nonlinear orders): quantifying everything, even "goodness" or "utility".

Not everything is quantifiable, and even more, not any family of things (investments, in this case) admits a linear ordering (they may even not admit a total order).

There can be incomparable outcomes from actions, and they may be maximal in their suborder.

This is difficult until you stop measuring everything and dedicate a minute to think of ordered trees.

The basic idea of EA is that if you want to spend money on improving something, you probably would want to spend it as efficiently as possible because your budget isn't infinite. "Getting the biggest bang for your buck", as the say. Spending millions on a specific way to solve a certain problem when it can be solved in a different way for mere thousands is plain silly. Of course, this idea isn't new at all.

The main problem with the charity from the ultra-wealthy, of course, is that they first materially worsen the world in order to get that wealth, and then they use part of that wealth to partially undo the damage (breaking things is easier than fixing them, after all). Like trying to help to alleviate Africa's problems with clean water when your own mining megacorporation is one of the major drivers of the pollution in the first place.

I was thinking of applying partially ordered set theory to social science. Order theory assumes only comparison operation ("less than" or "greater than") is possible to perform on the elements of the sets, so ordering is possible, but the values themselves can be completely non-measurable.

What parts of social science do you think are amenable to this approach?

Identifying what social policies work best in the long-term, hopefully. Or why certain cultural patterns persist and how they contribute to the society well-being.

You really start to get the sense that these people have never really had the opportunity to question themselves, consider their assumptions, to take up a critical posture towards the ideology. Where else could an entire movement produce exactly zero peer reviewed work and yet receive millions upon millions?

If this new way of organizing is meant to address the problems of ivory-tower academia, why does it just seem to be reproducing it at (hyper)scale? All in the name of euphemized utilitarianism?

Is there any room here for healthy debate? For academic rigor? For looking to the past? Or is it all just vibes? Just imagining a world where they didn't happen to get all their money from like one guy, but still persevered in their thought. What could that look like? Is it even anything at all?

It is a less effective version of mohism/state consequencialism. If 21st century biggest idea is worse than China's 6th century biggest idea, pardon my french: On a pas le cul sorti des ronces

> It is a less effective version of mohism/state consequencialism. If 21st century biggest idea is worse than China's 6th century biggest idea, pardon my french: On a pas le cul sorti des ronces

Iamverysmart tech nerds re-inventing wheels, because they did none of the reading? Say it ain't so!

yeah but I am a proven tech leader so if you don't listen to me you must be a dumb dumb smelly person

What a totally ridiculous headline.

It’s just last century’s Objectivism with an even more smoke-and-mirrors name.

Effective altruism should have been effectively killed by SBF’s take on consequentialism - that basically the ends justify the means, and the means are all fine because one has egotistically (and narcissistically) omnipotently computed the optimal end result therefore the steps between now and that end are all justified. The problem is the world is a complex messy place, and reason is the slave of the passions, so in the real world it just seems to result in fraud and manipulation and can justify basically any kind of behaviour while making the doer believe they’re acting morally.

It would be if it wasn't hijacked by the scammers and the criminals.

Although it did get large donations from the scammers and the criminals, they didn't get control of it, with the result that it still saves about 50,000 lives a year: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-eff...

It only looks that way because you don't live someplace where malaria is a major problem today and don't need a kidney donation.

I'm not sure if you posted that link to make fun of EA or because you genuinely believe all the claims made there.

The ones I've investigated turned out to be correct. It sounds like you may have investigated some and found otherwise? If so, which ones?

But you can't credit them to EA, it's not as if they invented the concept of altruism.

It's a bit like religion: you claim that all the good stuff is yours and all the bad stuff is the evil people and then you get people to give you lots of money to do more good stuff. But meanwhile you use that money in the first place to enrich yourself.

There are lots of these tech cults, EA, 'The Long Now', The Rationalists and the Freezer Fanatics, all of them have three central themes: gullible people, money and promises and concepts that are so far over the horizon that they can safely make claims in the knowledge they'll never be found out.

That's a very common theme in religion in general. And it works, lots of people fall for it. If you want effective altruism in your life go do something that is actually good or directly (and anonymously) give your money to people in need.

The things described at the link I provided can be credited to "effective altruists" because "effective altruists" are the ones who did them. Just like the scams and crimes — even though the scammers and criminals aren't in charge of EA, as you falsely claimed, they certainly belonged to it.

It's not a list of altruistic things that have been done by random people that the EA cult is trying to take credit for, as you seem to be implying; it's a list of specific things done by specific EA cultists and EA cult organizations, so you can credit them to EA. (EA is pretty much just a marketing name for the "rationalists". Although technically you may be able to find a few people who claim to belong to one but not the other, I found a Russian printed copy of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality on a conference room coffee table at Mox.)

It seems fair to criticize EA for the harm done by its cult aspects, but not to claim that they aren't doing the beneficial things they are in fact doing. I'm not a big fan of the guilt-by-association switcheroo you're trying to get away with here, either.

It's like the Catholic church in roughly exactly the same way: 'some of us have engaged in misconduct but look at all the good we're doing'.

Yes, "some of us have engaged in misconduct but look at all the good we're doing" is exactly right. And, at least in the case of EA, this is not special pleading; they are advocating, explicitly and at extremely tiresome length, that everyone should judge themself by exactly that standard. This is, however, in conflict with Catholic dogma.

The EAs have saved about 40 people's lives since your first comment in this thread. I sure haven't done that. How about you?

You are seriously comparing an individual with a large organization?

No, I did not, though pro-rata I've done my bit and then some. But I also did not commit any crimes. And you can't be equally sure about those associated with EA.

It's really just one weird dude and his followers. There's maybe 1000 people in the world who would say, "Yes, I'm an Effective Altruist." By the broadest definition, you could stretch the number to 13000: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/about-us/members says, "Our community includes 11,274 lifetime members pledging ≥10% of their income, plus 1,721 trial pledgers, together making up our 12,995 strong giving community." But a large fraction of those "members" wouldn't even recognize the term "Effective Altruism" (which doesn't appear on the GWWC front page or their "About Us" page), much less realize that they were supporting it with a lifetime pledge.

On average, each of those 13000 people have saved a dozen or two lives.

As for crimes, I can't be sure at all that you haven't committed any crimes. And neither can you! If you've ever been to the US, you almost certainly have!

It all starts with credentials in hiring, for future reference.

First there was Uber (Illegal cab company)

Then AirBnB (Illegal hotel)

Then crypto (Money for criminals)

Then came AI (Plagiarism engine)

I'm sure Effective Altruism will find a usecase!

Almost any ideology, no matter how noble and inspiring, can be hijacked by the worst kind of people for their own selfish wants.

How to fix this problem?

Pick an ideology that allows for selfish wants. For example, long-term greed would actually allow a lot more win-win coordination than currently happens.

Incidentally, the consequentialist theories of ethics that EA is founded on are especially bad at this. Usually, consequentialism excludes supererogation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demandingness_objection

One of the most effective (heh) programs of EA, predating the "EA" name itself, is an explicit halfway measure here, called "Giving What We Can", which advocates for people to donate less to charity than the maximum amount they could; specifically, 10% of their income: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/

It can be done, but only partially, and it's really @#%ing hard. Christianity no longer offers indulgences, for instance.

Not starting with completely faulty ideologies where egotism and manipulation and coercion are baked-in.

The idea of spending your money where it will do the most good is a good one. The execution can certainly be bad, though. Good deeds don't make up for bad deeds, and we should have learned a long time ago that "the ends justify the means" usually leads to terrible things.

effective altruism is this century's biggest scam

That says more about the century than it says about the "idea" of EA, which, for all intents and purposes, seems to be a lobotomized and perverted rehash of utilitarianism mixed with delusions of grandeur, used to distract people from real political decisions.

Since people seem to be offended by my description, I read a bit about what the supposed differences to utilitarianism are.

I didn't find anything that convinced me really, but I guess a more civilized phrasing of what I mean is this

> He also wrote that even from a purely consequentialist perspective, "naive calculations that justify some harmful action because it has good consequences are, in practice, almost never correct"

(Wikipedia quoting William MacAskill, I don't know who that is, I am not a philosopher)

To me all this invokes "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". But I question even whether the intentions are good with some arguments.

Arguing about longtermism and pretending to be able to predict how many humans might be alive very far into the future, to justify current actions: this is the type of argument that I consider grandiose.

We are not very successful at fixing global cooperation problems in the present so far, or ensuring the wellbeing of the next 1-2 generations of hunmans. This is why I feel like this whole philosophy/ethics sounds like a con.

But well, politics on HN, again. Should avoid it.

Ah, Economist is on the guest list for the bay area sex cult orgy :-)

they are all about Pinning the Weasel

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