> Actually, if you think real hard about it, we're the good guys
--the bad guys
The economist likes it because it resembles what their target audience tells themselves so they can sleep at night.
If you wanna do good in the world, you can't just aim a bunch of money at a goal and expect the good to happen, you gotta get your hands dirty and course correct when your original plan turns out to be more harmful than helpful. I'm sure there are a lot of good intentions in there, but from the outside it's looking like the supposed rationality has been compromised by greed at the expense of the supposed altruism. As expressions of altruism go, EA just doesn't seem very effective.
The claims made there are beyond absurd and based on a remarkable absence of anything resembling reason.
That's echoed by a surprising amount of people here.
Or instead get brain-wormed into giving all your torment nexus dollars to "ai safety" cult that tells you that you're helping to prevent the endless torture of all sentient minds that could ever exist in the entire universe.
Hubbard proved that you can create an effective cult out of bad science fiction-- perhaps it should be surprising that it took so long for someone to improve on the design...
In the past, the community made the mistake of becoming too closely associated with “earning to give”. Many people involved in effective altruism still think this is a good strategy for some people, particularly those who have a good personal fit for high-paying careers. But donating to charity is not the only way to have a large impact. Many people can do even better by using their careers to help others more directly. Many people in the community do both.
This sentence is too short for such a complex topic. Whether you can (or should at all) mix your political projects with your career is an entire debate. That they throw it away entirely shows that they are very conservative: the entire idea of collective political action (which is not charity nor work) does not exist in their worldview.
I was initially curious about effective altruism ~10 years ago, but fortunately i had enough political background to realize that this is essentially a movement of silicon valley sociopaths virtue-painting their bad behavior and their working for the most evil industries on earth in the name of a hypothetical future greater good that will never materialize because they keep supporting the capitalist system that's destroying our planet. It's like saying you're gonna work for Darth Vader because the pay is good so you'll provide good for the universe; it's entirely fucked up and does not hold any form of scrutiny from actually-rational people with a modest social sciences / political background.
And it is a debate they (or at least the ones around here, I'm in Europe, having turned down each opportunity to relocate to the USA) will encourage you to think about.
For the purposes of "FAQ to sell you on the difference with earn-to-give", when earn-to-give is also a complex topic with an entire debate, the sentence they wrote is an appropriate size of answer, even if I find their writing style to be "preach to the choir" rather than actually saying something that would convince an outsider.
(Regarding un-convincing writing style: look at how caveated that whole quotation is. This is typical nerd writing (and I say that as a nerd), not bold "written in primary colours" language that political, business, and charity slogans use).
> That they throw it away entirely shows that they are very conservative: the entire idea of collective political action (which is not charity nor work) does not exist in their worldview.
They've definitely got political activities amongst their piles of recommendations, so I don't know what you have in mind here that makes them fail it. (Also, thanks to the way political language is a treadmill, when you say "conservative" I don't know if you mean "small government", "Trumpist", "pre-Trump Republican party", "Chesterton's fence", or something else; US use of the word has always been very different from European use of the term).
Don't get me wrong: I think EA is not particularly good at the "effective" part despite their attempts (and name), but you're not making a strong case here.
Earning money is not the problem. Most of us have had (or still have) morally-questionable jobs to put food on the table. That's a reasonable trade-off until we have a better, more ethical society. But making it a moral argument to work for the most evil corporations on earth to do good just doesn't make sense. At which point do you become the bad guy you're trying to avoid being through effective altruism?
It's not a competition, but it really feels like they're all trying to win that title.
started as
But the practice of effective altruism and the problematic influential figures who are vocal effective altruists is what is bringing all of the negative attention.
and your definitions of bad behavior are therefore not post hoc, so let me hear your definitions.
But we don't need to define it to know it when we see it. Here are some examples of bad behavior which is encouraged by the way we currently practice economics:
- Operating generators in violation of local regulation such that the neighborhood around your new data center now has a smattering of new respiratory illnesses is bad behavior. The economic system we've built encouraged that outcome by focusing only on the consent of whatever banker granted the loan and not on the consent of the nearby community (relevant because the loan created the money which then bought the illegal generators). We further encourage abuses of this kind by letting irrational markets determine that it's admirable, because if the stock price went up then surly it must be so, and by doing so we subsequently increase the operator's ability to take out more loans of this kind. People are dying of lung cancer and economic indicators are saying "all systems go."
- Sending weapons to terrorists with the understanding that once they destabilize the regional government, they'll give you a favorable deal re: making off with whatever local resources you're after is bad behavior. That's basically US foreign policy in South America in the 80's, and we provided teams of economists to help draft the new dictators' constitutions to ensure that we could continue to exploit those countries long after.
- Charging $80k for enough Sovaldi to treat a Hepatitis C infection is bad behavior. It's not difficult to synthesize (people have done it in their garages for <$500), and the risk of spreading further infection because you can't afford to treat yourself is high. Society bears a tremendous cost because Gilead has decided that the economics of the situation justify the price they're setting.
Economists tell people that these bad things are unfortunate consequences of a system that for the most part is a good thing. But when they're pressed to support that claim they always do so against a meaningless background, something having to do with barter, as if it's not obvious that if we didn't have a system with this broken design, we wouldn't go back to the stone ages, we'd instead have a different system with a potentially less broken design.
Despite resting on such a feeble value proposition re: the current status quo, economists don't seem at all motivated to explore alternatives either. They appear to be rather happily at work for powerful men who are hurting people, where they manufacture for those men justifications about why the pain is in fact an unavoidable consequence of the laws of physics, and no something that they should feel guilty about.
I realize that, like effective altruists, there are probably a lot of good intentions among economists. It's just hard to look at history and come to any conclusion besides that they're not very good at resisting to attempts to corrupt those intentions.
That much is clear. No one "owns" or "leads" EA, it's not a monolith; people have their own beliefs and co-opt it, including crazies. The only common tenet is in the name.
Notwithstanding that "shrimp welfare" and the like is in the margins, it does not preclude the overwhelmingly anthropocentric charitable giving by most members.
I mean, the most popular writer associated with that world, Scott Alexander, donated his kidney just to help others. Knowing the good people are trying to do, it's unseemly to me for EA not only to be discarded but viciously attacked because of "vibes" and weirdos who associate themselves with it.
You used the term "an excuse" twice; for what, a hidden motive to do harm? I think some types like Bentham's Bulldog are wrong or misguided in some respects, that doesn't mean you can leap to some notion that they want to harm humanity in the most stupid way possible: donating a meagre sum to shrimp welfare.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. How are you "ranking"? The most high-profile EA-adjacent personalities are guys like Scott Alexander, Benjamin Todd.