Maximizing earnings by any means is verifiably not effectively altruistic, because if everyone did this... no one would ever engage in true charitable causes. Young people would compete simply to rip off the gullibility of older people looking to scratch the charitable itch.
It is purely people justifying doing the evil things they personally desire by claiming some unverifiable benefit that accrues to hypothetical future people who may never even exist.
Aaaand this is why time discounts exist and are steep. Not because we are incapable of or unwilling to comprehend future rewards, but because we don't know if they'll come to pass. It's a dampening parameter - if you don't do it, you fall prey to Basilisks.
idk if it's all bad, I remember reading about it maybe a decade ago when rationalists talked about it. Like one good idea is donating to charities that are more efficient. But it seems like mostly BS wrapped up in mathematics to make it seem more rational. Some assumptions are not necessarily true but if you disagreed then you were immoral and irrational. It also comes with a form of very elitist virtue signalling like forming clubs where people bloviate about this.
Also a problem with charity, especially in the US, is as the IRS defines it, it's not necessarily charitable. So it's easy to confuse altruism with plain old politics, vanity, and for-profit business disguised as a tax-exempt and then argue that anyone that disagree is not rational.
p.s. You've unfortunately been posting a bunch of unsubstantive/baity comments lately. Can you please not? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
The politics of your comment completely elude me; I couldn't care less about your view or theirs, have no idea what "effective altruism" is, and learned nothing from your post since it was purely snark and swipes. All I care about is that you broke the HN guidelines. You've been doing that repeatedly (e.g. posting informationless flamebait) on lots of different topics. If you keep doing it, we'll end up having to ban you for what ought to be obvious reasons (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), so please stop.
If I tell you that repetitive railing against Marxism is tedious and off-topic, does that make me a Marxist? what if I tell you that repetitive railing against capitalism is just as tedious and off-topic?
The truth is that we're bored, tired, profoundly do not care, and feel exactly the same way about all such comments—the ones you'd consider most wrong and offensive, as well as the ones you'd most passionately agree with. Why? Because they're all mirror images of each other.
But it's probably inevitable that Hacker News will wither and go away (or at least stop being a place that attracts people like me). Eventually, somethign will replace HN like something replaced Slashdot (which had fantastic comments with not that much moderation, back in the day) and Usenet.
No, because new people wouldn't be informed about behaviour that breaks the site rules nearly as much, and thus continue breaking the site rules which makes it less attractive for the "old guard" to interact and more attractive for people who find posts that break the site rules appealing.
It would still stay decent for a few years, but after a decade or so it'd be unrecognizable IMO.
Of course, that prediction was sourced from out of thin air and unsubstantiated guesswork. Just writing my reasons of why I think so.
Objectively speaking you are one of the least-bad moderators I've seen in 30+ years of internet communications. But I wish you'd stop giving me a hard time about my comments as they are intended in good faith and written carefully with specific goals in mind (changing opinions as well as being amusing) and I honestly see far worse crap than my comments go unchallenged.
Thanks—I appreciate the kind words. I think there are two things going on here.
First, I'm sure you're right that far worse crap goes unchallenged. But that's not because it's ok (it's not), nor because moderators are choosing to go easier on them (we're not). Rather, it's for the same reason that only a small portion of speeding drivers actually gets pulled over and ticketed: there are way too many to catch them all. In other words, when you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we simply didn't see it—there are far too many posts for us to read them all. You can help by flagging such cases or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Second, I believe you that you're posting in good faith and with good intentions. Unfortunately, intent isn't enough—it doesn't communicate itself on the internet, especially not in these tiny little blobs of comment text. You have to include enough information to disambiguate your intent (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
It's common for commenters to assume that their posts will land with readers in a way that is consistent with the intent they have in mind. Unfortunately, they often don't—because while you have your intent in your head, the rest of us don't (I don't mean "you" personally, of course—it's the same for everybody). This is what leads to the 'rebound' phenomenon where someone posts a snarky one-liner or otherwise breaks the site guidelines, and then when a moderator asks them not to, they reply with the thoughtful, substantive comment they actually had in their head*. The problem is that all that good information doesn't communicate itself. You have to spell it out explicitly.
The title is unfairly conflating the idea with one organization. Plenty of people quietly donate some fraction of income to effective charities (effective altruism), without engaging with the Effective Altruism institution.
Though, yeah wow, I didn't realize how cliquey Effective Altruism had become.
It is sad! Distributing mosquito nets in malaria-afflicted areas saves lives on the cheap and is universally acclaimed. How better to describe this than "effective altruism"?
Why do perfectly nice general descriptive terms so often become tightly bound with one small group and their whole very particular worldview?
> Distributing mosquito nets in malaria-afflicted areas saves lives on the cheap and is universally acclaimed. How better to describe this than "effective altruism"?
Philanthropy? Charity? Those words fit perfectly.
Does anyone sincerely set out to be ineffective in those endeavors? I can't imagine anyone who was knowingly insincere would have trouble also claiming the moniker of effective altruism. Nonetheless, I think the term "effective altruism" is also intended to encompass and imply some additional--if optional--characteristics about the giver or the form of giving, such as leading a more sustainable lifestyle or the consideration given to one's choices in choosing particular acts of charity. But we don't need that term merely for the act of distributing or funding the distribution of mosquito nets--philanthropy and charity are more than sufficient. And, technically speaking, charity has usually sufficed in any event--e.g. clergy who give their entire lives over to charity work weren't in search of more descriptive nomenclature, AFAIK.
Not all philanthropy and charity are the same though. It's not all aimed through rigorous cost-benefit analysis. Which is not to say everyone should do that! But there's a difference between caring a lot about quantified impact and being guided by more qualitative considerations. What's the word to describe the difference? Quantitative altruism? Moneyball philanthropy?
Maybe you feel we don't need a word. But I find it odd, and kind of suspicious, when we insist we can't give a distinct name to something that is clearly a thing.
> But there's a difference between caring a lot about quantified impact and being guided by more qualitative considerations. What's the word to describe the difference?
Sure, if you needed a term to categorize. We can build ontologies (and identities) all day if we want. But I ask this: can you quantify the difference between a qualitative vs quantitative emphasis in charity work? Point being: I'm not sure the distinction has much substance or utility. If one's aims are merely to feel good, without any concern for concrete, identifiable impacts, that doesn't fit the definition of altruism or charity or philanthropy. And with mixed motives (as they always are), it's really only the selfless aspect that counts as any of those when we're being pedantic. Even the tax code recognizes this--something is a charitable deduction only to the extent you don't personally derive value from it, and the deduction value is (in principle) the actual value imparted.
But if being able to identify as an "effective altruist" motivates more people to perform more charity, then who am I to argue ;)
A charity organization that converts 70% of the money you give it into e.g. saved human lives is better than one that converts 5%.
EA was inspired by the observation that most people don't know where their money is going when they give it to charity.
>Does anyone sincerely set out to be ineffective in those endeavors? I can't imagine anyone who was knowingly insincere would have trouble also claiming the moniker of effective altruism.
I mean, I'll bite the bullet and say yes. People will always choose to have more effectiveness in a ceteris peribus sense, but the best you could say for the actual observed pattern of charitable contributions is that people are being swayed in their giving by all sorts of concerns (social pressures, ignorance, bigotry, etc.) that cause them to trade off effectiveness for those things. And the message of EA is basically "recognize and call out these biases unless they're truly reflective of your values."
Like most things: EA as a concept is fine. Finding the "maximal" way to improve the lives of others is great, and finding better ways to contribute than charity and volunteering is honorable.
The issue is when people take it to the extreme (like someone who literally argued that a person doing mere charity or volunteer work is bad, because they are wasting time and effort that they could've spent making money and recruiting to contribute more charity and volunteering), or just sidestepping "altruism" entirely and using the name and community as a stepping stone to push your unrelated scam.
I don't know whether or not SBF genuinely believed in effective altruism, but if he did, he let the "principles" override common sense.
Effective altruism (EA) is a philosophical and social movement that advocates "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis". [1]
Seems like a good idea, if only just to have some sort of open-system for rating charities. I suspect the issue is everything that comes around the idea, specially... people. The problem is always people :-). Perhaps a "Michelin Guide to Charities" would be easier to market and explain? :-p
My favorite explanation of how "effective altruism" works is this SMBC comic [2]. :-)
Would make sense if anyone could come up with the score, following some "standard". That way one could make sure that no specific grader has incentives to give good scores speculatively (or even maliciously).
The problem with EA and other utilitarian systems of thought is two-fold. Firstly, you can't predict the future so really you're working off your biases. Secondly, unfettered by principles other than the end justifying the means, you can easily turn those aforementioned biases into justifications for committing horrible acts. Mass murder, or evidently, theft on a massive scale.
For instance:
"The technological revolution was a disaster for the human race... so I'm going to murder a few people to draw attention to my manifesto against technology."
"Social inequality is a disaster for the majority of my countrymen, so I'm going to murder the Bourgeoisie"
"My altruism is more effective than anybody else's, so I'm going to steal everybody else's money so that I can put it to better use."
How do you stop this shit? Deontological ethics. Don't murder, because murder is wrong. Don't steal, because stealing is wrong. Damn the consequences, stick to simple principles such as these.
>Firstly, you can't predict the future so really you're working off your biases.
Um, are you saying that this implies that people should just throw up their hands and donate to whatever causes since who knows? Surely not. Once we acknowledge that these questions can be tackled empirically, that's what EA tries to do. Is there room for bias in this process? Absolutely. Does that justify embracing some sort of epistemic nihilism? Absolutely not.
> > Firstly, you can't predict the future so really you're working off your biases.
> Um, are you saying that this implies that people should just throw up their hands and donate to whatever causes since who knows?
No, it implies that you shouldn't lecture others that you have the one true answer as to the best path forwards. You are free to (and in fact should) use your best judgment in your own personal choices, just don't confuse that with absolute truth.
I don't think EA institutions argue that they have the One True Answer. They just often give recommendations - "eg. if you care about maximizing QALY overall, we recommend charities X, Y, and Z." If I don't care about QALY maximization, fine. But if I do, why would I not listen to the recommendations?
Peter Singer, one of the "founders" of effective altruism, argues pretty vehemently in his book "Effective Altruism" that the ends do NOT justify the means. Like you've said, doing that has lead some people to go off the deep end and do some horrifying stuff, so just because you think you can improve the world better than the guy next to you doesn't mean you should take the guy's money.
(Although, I've googled a bit and found a "counter"-example, where Singer argues that in a case where six innocent people could be wrongly accused of murder and killed, you should point at one as the perpetrator if it means only they get killed and the other five ones get let go, therefore saving five lives: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/866768837)
So yes, killing is morally wrong and should never be the mean to your end, but the rest is really muddy. Is stealing from the rich in order to feed the poor a justified mean? Is donating most of your money you make trading off the stock market, where other people have lost that money, a justified mean? Is lobbying against climate-unfriendly companies a justified mean?
> Peter Singer, one of the "founders" of effective altruism, argues pretty vehemently in his book "Effective Altruism" that the ends do NOT justify the means.
Even without such an argument, “the ends justify the means” isn’t a reason to do something in the real world, because there are no “ends” in the real world. Everything just keeps happening.
> "My altruism is more effective than anybody else's, so I'm going to steal everybody else's money so that I can put it to better use."
> How do you stop this shit?
If you ask yourself why you think "this shit" is bad, at root there will be a consequentialist reason. Deontological ethics is consequentialism by heuristics.
But if you ever try to put any consequentialist theories into practice, at root there will just be a set of deontological heuristics guiding your behavior. Consequentialism is just deontology in drag.
You're right. We are unable to be full consequentialist because the computational cost of seeing all ends is infinite, and unable to be full deontologist because competing heuristics are arbitrarily instantiated and mutually contradictory. Even if we're stuck in the middle forever, I know which way I'd strive.
Real heuristics, of course, are not arbitrary, they are the result of trial and error processes where societies and people with differing moral systems compete with each other, proving the fitness of their heuristic by surviving while less fit heuristics fail.
I'll go with the results of trial and error over long time horizons rather than blank slate theoretical calculations any day.
Heuristic selection as you describe is evolutionary. So the meme that survives may not have any bearing on human flourishing, just on its own viral ability to spread. Fitness of the heuristic is orthogonal to human benefit.
Further, when multiple heuristics are directly in conflict, it is up to the individual to make the final moral decision. The choice to reject one heuristic over another must be based in some moral calculus.
Finally, who said anything about blank slate? That's a clear straw man, as it's only logical for consequentialists to take current heuristics and their adherents into account.
Deontological ethics is worse than useless as aguide to doing good.
It only tells you what not to do, rather than what to do.
And it's full of exceptions and edge cases. Is stealing a loaf of bread from scrooge to stop a family from starving wrong? What if you call it "taxes" and the community voted on it? Is it murder to blow up a bridge in wartime? Is unplugging someone's life support murder? What if they're going to die in hours any way and you're out of life support machines for the patient who just came in and has good prospects?
Also, while we can't predict the future we all need to decide what to do. Sure, if you donate antimosquito nets to save kids from malaria one of them might grow up to become the next Hitler, but you should try and figure out on the balance of probability what the most likely outcomes are.
> Firstly, you can't predict the future so really you're working off your biases
Obviously. That is the human condition.
Do you not take actions in normal life because you don't have full knowledge of everything? Don't order breakfast because you don't know which menu item is for sure going to be the best.
> How do you stop this shit? Deontological ethics. Don't murder, because murder is wrong. Don't steal, because stealing is wrong. Damn the consequences, stick to simple principles such as these.
Simple rules like: dont hoard your money but find a worthy cause for it?
I agree with your second point that having deontological boundaries is important. Interestingly, people like Eliezer Yudkowsky (generally respected in the EA movement, I'm pretty sure?) also agree with you about that. He's been reiterating the point recently on twitter, though this post [1] says pretty much the same thing and it's from 2008. Generally, I'd attribute your examples of "utilitarianism gone wrong" to mental illness or sociopathy rather than to holding a utilitarian philosophy. For the average person, moral philosophy is much more of a way to explain the choices we make after the fact than a thing that actually determines the choices.
But it has very noticeably begun falling into the same traps long discovered and recognized by utilitarianism. EA now has a significant contingent that is most focused on very unlikely far future outcomes because they would be incredibly bad for an unimaginably vast number of people if they did occur eg unbounded utility. That's pascal's mugging!
The movement is based on the same ideas and values and it's running into the same problems. These similarities don't inherently discredit the movement, but not having a clear awareness of these faults in their framework and a plan for avoiding them is very worrying.
> EA now has a significant contingent that is most focused on very unlikely far future outcomes because they would be incredibly bad for an unimaginably vast number of people if they did occur eg unbounded utility. That's pascal's mugging!
I am very confused about why the rationalists, who first identified the concept of pascal's mugging seem to have a huge number of initiatives which seem to be examples of falling directly into the pascal's mugging trap.
With all of these examples, and pascal's mugging itself, there is an obvious error: there should be a practical upper bound on the adverse outcome you're concerned about, at which all higher values are effectively the same to you.
> I am very confused about why the rationalists, who first identified the concept of pascal's mugging seem to have a huge number of initiatives which seem to be examples of falling directly into the pascal's mugging trap.
The original rationalists were true rationalist. And the recent ones? I am not so sure.
> As such, Effective Altruism is inherently Utilitarian in character, even if the views are themselves distinct. Criticisms of Effective Altruism on the basis of critiques to Utilitarianism are not only expected, but fair.
That example is a bad one. There are many serious risks in trying to do that in practice, which is why our intuitions are against it. E.g. you might be found out and people might mistrust doctors, you might be wrong about the person having to connections, those patients might not live long anyway, etc etc
> EA effectively sanctions robbing a million people to help a million people + 1
Yes, EA people often think taxes are a good idea. This is not a rare thing.
No, just saying that it is a bad example doesn't make it.
I wish EA folks looked at the literature that discusses this very example.
> There are many serious risks in trying to do that in practice, which is why our intuitions are against it. E.g. you might be found out and people might mistrust doctors, you might be wrong about the person having to connections, those patients might not live long anyway, etc etc
Yes, that has been discussed thousands of times in the literature.
To answer, you can always have the person confirm they are ok with it (e.g. Switzerland allows physician-assisted suicide in some case).
That’s the sense I got too, especially after reading the fellatious piece on SBF from sequoia capital. Trying too hard to justify getting rich, because that would theoretically help the world, in the end, regardless of the means to get there.
It's the modern version of a religious indulgence. Worse, as you point out, all it offers is more undue and unjustified meddling in peoples lives to make up for unfair and injudicious meddling in other peoples financial affairs.
More cynically, you're giving hand outs to people who yet need to learn to be productive, while destroying the lives of people who were trying to leverage their own productivity. I think it has negative value, doubling harming progress for the sake of apology.
>The issue is when people take it to the extreme (like someone who literally argued that a person doing mere charity or volunteer work is bad, because they are wasting time and effort that they could've spent making money and recruiting to contribute more charity and volunteering)
I mean, the concern here is that coming off as an asshole can be self-defeating, not that these views are actually incorrect, right? Seems like it's like being an atheist - an "extreme view" for many and it's a topic that may need to be dealt with with caution sometimes but that's really mostly a critique of the sensitivities of others.
1. Both of them are concerns.
2. In case you are really lacking that much self awareness, yes, you are coming off as one in this conversation. You may call me "sensitive" and feel better about yourself now.
>In case you are really lacking that much self awareness, yes, you are coming off as one in this conversation. You may call me "sensitive" and feel better about yourself now.
No there is also something bad about rejecting less quantifiable forms of charity as well. Movements grow out of communities and through solidarity and you build neither by mailing a check across the world and considering your obligation met.
I do think it's good to optimize money spent for these things much of the time but it's also just inhuman to have no place, or respect, for forms of charity that are based on, form and reinforce human connection.
>No there is also something bad about rejecting less quantifiable forms of charity as well.
I don't think EA argues for this. I guess it depends on what you mean by "less quantifiable."
>I do think it's good to optimize money spent for these things much of the time but it's also just inhuman to have no place, or respect, for forms of charity that are based on, form and reinforce human connection.
Describing this as "inhuman" is pretty extreme. In any case I think if you acknowledge that you're indulging in various non-charitable preferences through your donations I don't think EA would offer a serious critique beyond pointing out that you could be doing better. I think a major goal of EA though is to get people to truly wrangle with their biases here. These organizings are pragmatic - they're not trying to chide us into being moral saints, but just "giving what we can" - a popular EA slogan.
The problem is the consequentialist ethics behind the position. Rigid consequentialism leads to all kinds of abhorrent views and is almost universally rejected among ethicists (with a few notable exceptions).
I don't think EA implies adherence to "rigid consequentialism". Like a lot of EA advocates are deeply into animal welfare for these reasons, but they offer advice to those that aren't. I think the weaker unifying argument is just that EA encourages more self-examination regarding whether one's charitable efforts are actually achieving one's values, and to provide advice to help achieve better alignment on this.
The problem is they can't possibly know if they are correct or not, we just don't have enough information about the actual future and what effect actions now might have on it.
Plus it doesn't take into account our individual competencies and nature. It doesn't matter how much I think curing cancer is more important than my current job, I know absolutely zilch about curing cancer. Also I have no idea if I'm actually right about cancer being a top priority, or if curing it is even possible. Meanwhile sick people that doctors and nurses can save using known techniques are dying right now.
Effective Altruism as a principle is fine, it makes a degree of sense. We do need to invest in long term projects, but all this talk of 1% chance of this or that saving humanity is fiddling while Rome burns.
>Plus it doesn't take into account our individual competencies and nature. It doesn't matter how much I think curing cancer is more important than my current job, I know absolutely zilch about curing cancer. Also I have no idea if I'm actually right about cancer being a top priority, or if curing it is even possible.
If curing cancer is a top priority, the EA advice is not that you should quit your job and try to cure cancer. It's probably to keep your job (which you likely have developed a comparative advantage in) and do serious research into which organizations will actually make progress towards curing cancer, and EA orgs will often try to provide advice on this latter front.
Yes, there is a big emphasis in these communities on various sorts of existential risks, but it doesn't imply that you can't be an EA if you have different beliefs on these risks, so long as those beliefs are informed by open-minded criticism and not "only privileged techbros could possibly care about this"-style sneers
What counts as longtermism though? Preserving archaeological sites rather than bulldozing them? Fighting CO2 emissions? Trying to avoid AGI risk you think will happen in less than a century?
The whole thing reminds me of "I, Robot", when the AI realizes that the greater good for humanity can't care for themselves, it is to be ruled by the AI for good.
This is the kind of vibe I get from this writeup, and the level of separation from humanity these people operate.
> like someone who literally argued that a person doing mere charity or volunteer work is bad, because they are wasting time and effort that they could've spent making money
This is the part of EA that triggers a lot of red flags for me. Making money, or rather making significant money, necessitates participation in a system of exploitation that is largely responsible for the ills the charitable donations are meant to alleviate in the first place. Maximizing that money necessitates optimizing the exploitation.
the whole thing just seems like an exercise in morality-washing one's own greed. Lies, damn lies, and statistics perpetrated with "rationality".
> This is the part of EA that triggers a lot of red flags for me. Making money, or rather making significant money, necessitates participation in a system of exploitation that is largely responsible for the ills the charitable donations are meant to alleviate in the first place.
I mean, given that you think that I understand where you're coming from. But just note that many, many people would highly disagree with that characterization.
I don't think our "system", whatever that means, is evil. I think it's pretty good, definitely better than other things people have come up with. And I don't think you need to give to charity to morality-wash greed. I think it's just the right thing to do.
You missed the major point of being the exact capitalists that are the reason for charity to be so necessary. That’s white washing greed and self interest. Get to have a better life selfishly then donate the money to be morally better.
Looking at other countries that don't have capitalism, everyone is worse off. I don't think capitalism is the reason charity is necessary. I think the world starts default-bad for humans, by default we don't have anywhere close to the living we want, and over the years, many technological advanacements, including capitalism, have slowly made most humans far better off.
This is fairly clear in the historical record or in comparing different countries.
(At least to me. Most people seem to disagree with this, but I honestly think they're wrong.)
> Looking at other countries that don't have capitalism, everyone is worse off.
Interesting that all I talked about was a system of exploitation and your mind immediately filled in 'capitalism'.
I think there are many countries that temper capitalism with socialist ideals and people are not worse off than the more unfettered variety practiced in the US.
> Interesting that all I talked about was a system of exploitation and your mind immediately filled in 'capitalism'.
That's not what happened. When I answered you I wrote "the system". I answered skinnymuch's post about capitalism, because they themselves talked about capitalism.
But out of curiosity - what "system" exactly did you have in mind?
> I think there are many countries that temper capitalism with socialist ideals and people are not worse off than the more unfettered variety practiced in the US.
The point as the OP is saying as well is that people are being unfairly exploited in capitalism. You went along with agreeing with me by arguing about capitalism which is what I called the system of exploitation as said by the OP.
Maybe this is superficial, but I was put off by the name "effective altruism". By naming it such, it felt like an implicit dig that most altruism is not effective. Like oh your altruism is not that productive, but my altruism, well it's effective altruism. Especially when that notion is pushed by people who overlap with the rationalist subculture, another arrogantly named group.
In general I find it concerning when technical people encroach upon non-technical areas without giving a sufficient amount of respect to the people who were in the field already. Those people, the experts, do know a lot and to have this kind of nerd savior branding of effective altruism, as if you are bringing the enlightenment that allows these poor altruists to finally be effective, well that just seems a little presumptuous.
I feel like real effective altruism is achieved by sites like charity navigator, which give you a sense of how well your donations to a given cause are spent by the organization.
I haven't watched the video (yet), but for example wikipedia has a stellar near-perfect rating, but still devote 15%/$12M of their budget to salaries which surely could be cut drastically if they wanted to really be on a shoestring.
Your reaction is a bit absolutist. The basic premise is that if you're capable of making 500k a year in the developed world then going to Africa to volunteer to build houses is not as effective as just donating your money to charities that send people to help, or hire people yourself.
What it evolved into is a bit controversial, overall they seem to be a bunch of kids who don't know what to do with the power and money they had at one point, as they all came too easy.
The founding idea is that giving $10,000 to save, y’know, four ailing dogs with bad livers or whatever, or a community theater, as opposed to many human lives, is fundamentally wrong.
“If you’re gonna give, you should maximize the impact as measured in human life” is fundamentally at odds with many common forms of giving, yes.
It's worth mentioning that organized EA is much more concerned with animal welfare and animal rights than a lot of the surrounding culture, so many EAs strongly advocate giving to animal-related causes. But they would still be concerned with having as large an impact as possible, so something to help 1,000,000 animals would be favored over something to help four.
The idea that you can precisely plan out the exact optimal path is arrogant and fundamentally wrong.
What if the friendships made at a community theater help a troubled kid through a rough patch and instead of committing suicide they go on to cure cancer? Not funding the theater would have been very sub-optimal.
Even without far-fetched hypotheticals what’s the point of saving everyone’s life if they’re just going to spend it figuring out how to make more mosquito nets or whatnot?
People are not as smart as they think and it’s important to leave room for serendipity and random associations.
And do you think the probability of the thing you describe (or anything analogous to it but still arising from the same intervention) is substantial?
I’m not claiming that all charity should be done in such an attempt-to-be-expected-utility-maximizing way, as there may be some like, component of how donations for more local causes might do more to improve the character of the person donating, and other things like that,
but I don’t see your view of “but-serendipity, and but-mosquito-nets-is-no-fun” don’t seem like compelling reasons to not look at QALYs and such.
That being said, I personally haven’t made any substantial donations, so if you’ve made even fairly inefficient donations (as long as they were at least a little effective, and not e.g. counterproductive) then your donations have likely done more good than mine have.
EA does not need the assumption that you can precisely plan out an optimal path. Just that simply accounting for the good you do and comparing it to other outlets will give you better outcomes than not. Which is a far weaker premise than you can precisely plan out every optimal path.
Several orders of magnitude more children would be saved from mosquito nets than community theater, and each of them has a chance to find a cure to cancer. Then there's a couple orders of magnitude of children who wouldn't die, but whose lives would have otherwise been significantly disrupted by malaria, hookworm or vitamin A deficiency. All these children could go on to find cures to cancer or at the very least live more meaningful lives.
Obviously, this isn't to say we should donate any less to community theaters, though I think that's a different type of donation. That is partially altruistic, but on some level it fulfills the same satisfaction as a purchase.
What if when jumping off a roof, I spontaneously developed the ability to fly? And yet I will not attempt it, and worse, strongly evangelize that roofhopping should be avoided by everyone. How arrogant of me, how presumptuous!
Though we cannot tell in every case what the outcome will be, that is no excuse to not consider the odds.
Almost like we should try to make advance predictions about outcomes given particular circumstances and continuously test them against reality :)
These people after all pursued theoretical means by which the risk of death could be reduced, and then put them into practice in order to improve their understanding.
You can die in the air. You can die on the ground! Sometimes jumping off a cliff is safer than staying there. There is no safe path, no guarantee of survival; you have to speculate, to make theories, to test them, to choose the path that seems best to you. There is nothing arrogant about this.
By all means speculate all you like about your own actions and act accordingly. The original comment was about how effective altruism is intentionally looking down on others (as they are implicitly ineffective) and holding themselves up as the ideal that everyone should follow.
Aren't you making a general point here against public arguments that certain things lead to better outcomes than others? Do you reserve the same rancor for these little warning labels printed on packs of cigarettes about cancer risk? (Look at these non-smokers looking down on others...)
Public debate is, to a first approximation, nothing but arguing about which actions lead to better outcomes.
I could see an argument that the claim is that EA is insulting because it's akin to calling a chocolate brand "asbestos-free!"; you're implicitly suggesting that competitors contain asbestos. But note that this depends on whether the other brands do, in fact, contain asbestos, and EA is not shy about its claims that many charities do not effectively pursue good outcomes. It's hard to accuse EA of trying to sneak in this point when it's a central part of its rhetoric. And of course, such debate is an entirely ordinary part of discourse.
I draw a distinction between a particular charitable organization being effective, i.e. the amount spent on overhead vs going to cause they claim to support and a particular charitable cause itself being effective (mosquito nets vs. community theater).
For the former I agree, seek out charities that most effectively support what you want to support.
For the latter, I don't think it's worthwhile to deride people for supporting a cause just because you think there's some other cause that might technically result in more living humans. Raw population is not a worthwhile metric to optimize for. People should be free to support things they care about and believe make the world a better place as long as it's not harming anyone.
I still think there is a fundamental internal inconsistency here. I agree that people will, for instance, hold the moral belief that their community theater is worth more than five foreign lives. However, explicitly espousing this belief is politically unviable. The "common knowledge" moral view is that all humans are of equal moral worth. EA, as I understand it, is largely pursued by people who internalize this view; who recognize the mismatch and as a result, will prefer to sacrifice their community theater rather than admit inconsistency.
The example of a community theater highlights another issue I have with effective altruism. It effectively encourages you to only donate to things you can make a quantifiable case for. And in a lot of situations, quantification fails. The arts have an immense value in developing philosophical, emotional, empathetic values. A theater may not show up in a balance sheet but it can have a massive effect. And it does concern me deeply that the flippant example for "non-effective altruism" is community theater. It reflects the attitude of SBF that a book is not worth reading. That is a profoundly destructive mindset.
Let me preface this with I know this is a mugging, I think community theater is great, and I don't think it's good to divert all societal resources to nets in Africa.
But I just don't think it's as effective, and I don't think most people agree.
If the only available labor was teenagers, rebuilding the community theater meant hiring them, and you knew that statistically there was a risk some might die from heat stroke. What risk of death would you deem acceptable to build a community theater?
Sorry, I'm confused as to what you mean by a mugging? Genuinely not sure what you meant by that.
Anyways, I never said any specifics about where this community theater is being built. I don't know where heat stroke came from. Sure, yeah, in the straw man situation of building a community theater in an extremely hot area, where the only labor is teenagers, I would...not enlist teenagers to build a community theater in an extremely hot area? I don't want to be dismissive of your comment but I genuinely don't know what's the point here.
The point is you wouldn't endanger the lives of teenagers to build a community theater because you believe the lives of teenagers are more valuable than a community theater.
But repairing a community theater could easily cost $100,000 which would save the lives of ~22 people in Guinea if donated to certain bed net charities. And even the most die hard theater fans probably wouldn't save a theater if to do so it would require risking 22 lives for.
So in this case quantification isn't failing, it's succeeding. It's correctly telling us which donations are more effective. And all our intuition agrees that the $100,000 theater is worth less than the 22 lives.
But the theatre has a chance of spawning a future movie star who also has a chance of being an EA advocate. Directly through their $50million movie paycheques they will be saving 10,000 lives at a future date.
Thus by chosing to repair the community theatre you are directly causing the death of 9,978 people.
The same argument means that any luxury that any person indulges in.
Let’s say thanksgiving, christmas, craft beer, VR headset, calling their mother, etc. is costing X lives (X is not necessary integer) and so isn’t the rationalist thing to do.
“Ah bit they are luxuries, distinct
from charity…”
Ok then give me the luxury of donating to the local theatre!
This game can go on endlessly. What if hiring the teenagers mean they’re getting a salary, can help their families, and without the job they’d run off into the jungle to join the warlord who runs a murder cult army? Turns out the community theatre prevented a massacre and one of the kids wins the Nobel Prize for her plays in fifty years.
You did straw man the example though. It's very different to say that building the theater will kill the workers, as to say that the money could be used elsewhere to save someone in an immediately dire situation.
Building a community theater with good working conditions might have a big impact on the community around it and could go end up saving lives down the road, or dramatically improving the quality of life of many.
It's very hard to quantity the impact of the community theater against say feeding 100 people for one week. All these people could die the week after, was it really sustainable improvements or just temporary relief?
...when did this become an either/or? We can do both. In fact diversification of one's "ethics portfolio" seems like something an effective altruist would understand quite well.
But much like with investing in stock I don't know for sure a priori which investment will bring the highest return. If I'm 80% sure that charity A is better than charity B (for my definition of 'better) I'll give 80% of my investment to charity A and 20% to charity B.
I don't have unlimited resources. I have the privilege of having a surplus that I can redirect to making the world better. EA is a framework for trying to do the most amount of good from the limited resources that I have.
> The example of a community theater highlights another issue I have with effective altruism. It effectively encourages you to only donate to things you can make a quantifiable case for.
Then you will be delighted/horrified to find out that the effective altruism community doesn't feel the need to make quantifiable justifications for how they spend their own donations, as evidenced by this $20k grant they gave someone to learn to ride a bike and think about AI[1].
That's about 3853 to 4090 mosquito nets' worth of donations, using GiveWell's numbers for the Against Malaria Foundation[2].
I am not sure exactly what people miss, but taking a stab in the dark - human emotions have evolved over millions of years to try and guide people in the direction of making rational decisions more often than not. The expected situation is that the rational option and the emotional option align. If they don't, that means:
1. Your model of the world is incomplete or inconsistent (eg, forgetting to include negotiation as a strategy, forgetting long term consequences).
2. You've hit on a cognitive bias and can probably do a huge amount of good that other people will miss (eg, lending with interest -> modern industrial society, rule of law rather than letting high status people do whatever -> mass prosperity). The cognitive bias is probably well known and understood and the evidence that the emotional response leads to poor outcomes should be obvious.
> I am not sure exactly what people miss, but taking a stab in the dark - human emotions have evolved over millions of years to try and guide people in the direction of making rational decisions more often than not. The expected situation is that the rational option and the emotional option align.
I'm completely befuddled by this. My experience is that people make most decisions emotionally and then harness their brain to rationalize those irrational decisions after the fact. It's the reason that science (the process) has to exist. Because people will fool themselves to reach a conclusion they want if there are no procedural guardrails.
SBF gave $40 million - 800,000 mosquito nets to candidates in politcal races.
Surely 800,000 mosquito nets is "more effective" than 800,000 robo calls and shitty campaign ads with a moron at the end saying "I'm Joe Blow, and I endorse this bullshit"
Oh my god, it ENCOURAGES you to do something it believes is right and you don't. This is outright CRIMINAL. How do they dare do something so audacious?
Sorry for the cringe, but really - you're actually saying that encouraging people to do what they think is right is a problem? Especially when they've actually read the books, done the numbers, and all you have is a feeling that they may be wrong in some cases? I can't really argue with that except with caps lock and sarcasm.
So, if you had to choose between funding community theater and saving X lives, how large would X need to be before you'd abandon the theater?
It's fine to spend money on the theater, everyone spends money and time on themselves and their interests. If you consider community theater altruism though, I think it makes sense to acknowledge that it is ineffective altruism - that is, you're doing a little bit of good with your money, but not nearly as much as you might be doing.
The issue as I see it is that you cannot say that the first is ineffective unless you can quantify the ROI of the theater. If I knew that my donation will fund the next Romeo and Juliet, then I'd expect X to be really high before I deprive future generations of such an important work.
Art in particular has a multiplicative effect that is essentially impossible to quantify. Once a work of art is out there, it can live forever and influence multiple generations. That seems like a pretty effective use of my money.
I agree arts and culture are valuable. The obvious objection now is why not build 5 theatres in Africa?
Obviously the local theatre benefits your own community, but if you live there then you are also benefiting yourself (via status and seeing plays), which seems less than altruistically pure, even if you could only build 1 theatre in Africa.
A theater won't have the same impact everywhere. You likely don't know anything about the neighborhoods in Africa, and how impactful a theater there could be.
You know a lot better what a theater could bring to a neighborhood you know well.
And then, there's the question of if altruism itself is most efficient at helping others. Some would argue that helping oneself but where it benefits others as well, win/win situations, in practice produces better outcomes. The idea of self-sacrifice, or having to lose or risk something personal to help others sounds noble, but might not be most effective.
You need to contextualize the life saved, do we mean they went to live one more day, or a full long life of prosperity and comfort with a happy painless death from old age.
And did they themselves gain the means to save more lives in turn?
For example, I feel giving people the means of saving their own life, or other people's lives a much more efficient way to save lives than actually saving a life.
And finally you have to address the sacrifices you've made and the people you've hurt in pursuit of saving that life.
To me, it looks like a charade, because the claim that you can actually measure and quantify all of these complex systems to truly arrive at the real impact of all these things, I just don't believe it. It seems you've picked a simple metric to measure, because it's easy, but is it lasting impact, is really more meaningful impact, that's all all still up in the air.
Our moral intuitions are developed for dealing with actual cases that we are actually experiencing. If you showed up with a fire hose and found that a bus full of X people and an empty community theater were on fire - it would not even occur to you to save the theater. You would save the screaming people who are begging for help.
One way to think about effective altruism is that it's trying to get you to apply whatever moral intuitions you would use in a concrete scenario to an abstract scenario. To any individual apart from it, it's abstract to know that mothers in some poor country can't adequately nourish their children, or that mosquito nets reduce malaria deaths, and so on. But, the reality is that those people are actually real, are actually suffering, and actually could be helped. If you take that message to heart then it won't make sense to send your charity to the community theater - by all means, send the theater money if you want, but it's a selfish thing, not an altruistic thing.
> it would not even occur to you to save the theater. You would save the screaming people who are begging for help.
If there was a crypto trade available to make a billion dollars available for the next 15 minutes only - but you have to chose between the community theater, the bus of X people on fire or giving 10% of your gainz to a charity to save X*2 ...
The other thing is that the actual standard of the "quantitative case" put forward is hugely variable anyway. With sufficiently inventive fantasy numbers, theatre enthusiasts could probably make an EA case of the form: "what if a person was so inspired by watching my amateur dramatic production of 2001: A Space Odyssey, that they solved all Unfriendly AI problems?". Sure, it's unlikely, but the rewards benefit an almost infinite number of people!
In practice, I think people coming from a starting point of "I'm going to focus on solving friendly AI because it fits with my interests and computer science background and I think I'll be able to help the process along a bit" are being more honest with themselves than people dressing up their preferences in magical utilitarian numbers which conclude they're more efficient than merely feeding people or giving them goats...
I mean, it's not fundamentally wrong. It's better than wasting $10,000 on, e.g. luxuries for yourself that probably won't even make you happier. But it's literally orders of magnitude worse than what you could do, even if you only ever care about your fellow citizens (not people in distant poor countries) in a generation near to your own (as opposed to mankind's long-term progeny).
> It's better than wasting $10,000 on, e.g. luxuries for yourself
I'm honestly not sure. Spending your money back into the economy contributes to a system with a proven track record, part of it goes to taxes, the rest pays for jobs, creates value for the owner, who'll pay some more taxes on their income, and then spend the rest elsewhere, etc.
Donating 10k to a charity has many practical flaws, the charity itself isn't incentivized to maximize the use of the 10k, it can be corrupt, or might operate in a corrupt and inefficient environment, etc.
Let us make the example more extreme. Let's make it spending 100 billion on building a supermassive yacht, that you then proceed to sink for your own entertainment. Which is not dissimilar from 10 million people spending $10k each on luxury consumption for themselves.
Would you still argue that it still does no harm? You have just squandered 100b worth of society's resources - people's time, physical materials, engineering effort etc. for your own entertainment.
That's a bit of an extreme made up example, which wouldn't be very representative of the common case, but I'll entertain it. Just keep in mind what's true of an extreme edge case, is not necessarily true of the common case, and you can't extrapolate like that.
Say there was a 100 billion yacht, it still served as a means to redistribute flow of funds to others. Those engineers, material extractors, workers, staff, all that contributed to people being given some of that money.
This goes towards creating an economy, and good economies can sustain countries and lift many people out of poverty, saving many lives.
Creating a demand for people's labor and resources helps with creating an economy.
This isn't money wasted, the money went to many people, it was a way to redistribute the money to others.
So I don't see the harm at all, at least not from a financial standpoint, you could argue about environmental harm though.
Now what about opportunity cost? Sure, maybe that 100 billion could have been used in ways that redistribute it more evenly, more fairly, or to people who needs the money most, or towards an endeavor that has longer term uplifting outcomes, etc, there might be a better use, though it becomes hard to figure out what use is truly better.
The way I see it, there's two dimensions:
- Redistributing money, who gets it? Split amongst how many people?
- Potential for future returns, is the money spent in a way that gives people the means to produce more?
The yacht definitely redistributes money, but maybe you disagree about the distribution of it, who got the money.
Arguably the yacht could bring future returns. Creating a demand for engineers pushed more people into engineering, now more people have the engineering know how, they go on to use that to build other projects, creating an infrastructure that others can then leverage to make other things more efficient and build on top, etc.
Basically, I just don't think it's as black and white as you claim, even in this extreme example.
The point of my example was to draw attention to what actually happens to the real resources, how they get used. They get wasted, which is a terrible outcome.
I believe your focus on money obscures that fact. Money is just a mechanism for a (good, efficient, fair?) way of using the resources available. Money is not real wealth.
What lifts people out of poverty is not money, it is ultimately useful stuff - food, shelter etc. produced so efficiently that people also are able to specialise and spend time on teaching, medicating, investing into producing not just the bare necessities but things that make them even more efficient and productive etc. In the yacht example, such scarce resources are squandered! The 'economy' created is quite literally destructive - it is geared towards consumption (i.e. destruction) of many resources - materials to build the yacht, countless peoples' time - for the mere entertainment of the person who then sinks the yacht.
Yes, the people that were involved in building the yacht now have bigger claims on a shrinking share of resources. They personally win; the person who enjoyed sinking the yacht wins; overall society greatly looses and is now much poorer.
So overall, society would be better off if that person just hoarded the money, buried it in their back yard, and preserved the scarce resources. That outcome is better than personal luxury consumption. Even better, of course, if they used it to get other people to do something productive that benefits wider society.
> So overall, society would be better off if that person just hoarded the money, buried it in their back yard, and preserved the scarce resources. That outcome is better than personal luxury consumption. Even better, of course, if they used it to get other people to do something productive that benefits wider society
Ok, so your argument is in the actual materials consumed? The water, metal, and all that being "wasted" for a yacht, as opposed to used for life critical purposes instead?
So, that's kind of the environmental aspect I mentioned, I'm not opposed here, sustainable resource use is important.
But donating to a charity can similarly be a temporary waste of resources with no sustainability improvements made.
Just feeding people food for an extra week for example, is very different from investing in sustainable farming methods that can guarantee us renewable and long lasting sources of food.
And on that topic, it's surprising how in practice discoveries that can help us with sustainability and production methods are discovered through various other ventures, often military for example, but it can happen anywhere.
The person who invented ammonia was researching chemical warfare, now it's used for fertilizer and dramatically helped boost our food production efficiency.
These second order effects I think are hard to predict, similarly hard to predict what the workers that got money from building the yacht than go on to use that money for themselves, maybe they spend it investing in food production efficiencies.
I thought the idea was that, provided you want to achieve X in the world, it's likely suboptimal.
Not wrong or bad as people in this thread seem to universally interpret it, but if you want to optimize for animal welfare, you might be better off doing something about farm animals rather than donating to a local shelter. If that turns out to be too far removed from your personal situation to care about, okay then apparently that's not your priority and that is fine. But between the things you spend effort or money on, it's worth looking into what is the most effective means to your end.
I am not involved in this whole thing in any way but that's what I thought the underlying idea was. Not an explicit dig at those who already try to do good, not at all... (Edit: realization: and that method of making people feel bad wouldn't be very altruistic nor effective right?)
that's a good way of putting it. I kind of ignored a lot of what they said but again, just like the rationalists who pretty much were all of the EA people, they came with biases they refused to admit they had.
like for example, if a family member of mine needed money for a cancer treatment that had a 50% chance of working versus giving that money to save the life of someone I don't know on the other side of the planet, I will consistently try to save my family member. That is how most people would operate. I will do this because I don't know the person on the other side of the planet. If it were not for the internet and their subreddit/lesswrong style of shaming campaigns, no one would ever even know there was a person on the other side of the planet who also needed the money. Why should I be asked to ignore my own family by annoying redditors who don't give a shit about me anyways?
I doubt even the EA people would do that unless they could virtue signal about how smart they are and how stupid everyone else is online. Most of the time, these people just speculated about how they might spend their money if they were in such a scenario. It was like a hobby.
Although in fairness rating charities by their effectiveness is a good idea. Yes, people do blindly give cash away to corrupt charities.
> like for example, if a family member of mine needed money for a cancer treatment that had a 50% chance of working versus giving that money to save the life of someone I don't know on the other side of the planet, I will consistently try to save my family member.
So would most people, and we wouldn’t call it altruism. Looking for an objective criterion (whether ‘number of lives saved per dollar’ or something else) is an angle that I’m happy someone is taking. If you don’t like their approach then don’t give them money.
Knowing the true motives of another human is very difficult, perhaps impossible (without a predictive biological model of consciousness we can't be sure we're reading minds correctly, and it's still an open question whether such a thing can exist).
> Why should I be asked to ignore my own family by annoying redditors who don't give a shit about me anyways?
You shouldn't; doing so would be irrational. There is a fairly decent chance that your relative, if they survive, will be in a position to help you in the future. But the random person on the other side of the planet? The chance of them randomly helping you in the future is about one in a few billion. Particularly if they don't know who their benefactor was, so they couldn't deliberately repay the favor to you.
So the rational/selfish position is to always put family and friends first, before strangers.
That’s fine… but that’s _not the reason_, right? The reason is that you know the person and don’t want them to suffer. Trying to ignore that lived reality in a quest to be objective or rational seems to me like a recipe for mistaken thinking.
It's not the reason, but it is a reason. The reason (for me) would be the principle of family coming first. But as is often the case, you can reconstruct deontological principles within a utilitarian framework.
For instance; if everybody sticks to the principle of murder being wrong despite the consequences, then there will be fewer misguided mass murderers, and this is better for society in the long run than everybody going around committing murders they believe to be justified by some end.
I don't know about "always", but yes, there's a strong rational element behind favouring friends and especially family, and in general others that you're more likely to interact with in the future. For one thing, I'd think confidence that you have family members that will ensure your children will thrive even after you're gone gives peace of mind for most parents. And even if I never actually need help from family or friends of the nature I give them now, the regular act of providing assistance is an important part of what maintains good relationships, which we all know are pretty vital to mental health etc.
I would say though that giving money is probably not generally the best way to achieve that end, and EA are primarily (solely?) about monetary donations.
Honestly I don't think there's any realistic way to decide in general whether giving assistance to person A vs person B is more "rational" or even more "effective", but it's good to at least be aware that some charities/NGOs/etc. are at least trustworthy and ensure a high % of donations do actively go towards providing help, rather being swallowed in marketing and admin budgets.
In defense of marketing and admin budgets. What would you prefer, a nonprofit where $100 of your donation goes to "providing help" (I don't really know what that means, since money alone can't do anything) or a nonprofit where $30 of your $100 is invested in "marketing and admin" which results in:
- the charity has $500
- there are admin humans around to "provide help" (and you're paying them a decent or even above-average salary because you want them to do an amazing job, right?)
What if they took $60 out of your $100 and turned it into $5,000 (not unheard of if they invest in digital ads to a warm list, for example)
It's counterproductive to insist that nonprofits operate without operations budgets.
I wouldn't consider 30% unreasonable or an example of money being swallowed - but there are known instances of non-profits where over 60% of donations go towards covering such costs (the Law Enforcement Legal Defense fund supposedly is one of the worst offenders).
Yes, I think this is reasonable. I would also like to take a moment to reiterate why so many people are bitter about the marketing / admin angle:
I pay them money. Charity pays consultants to turn that into more money (plus admins to manage the consultants). Consultants determine that a fraction of that money should be used to solicit more donations. Research indicates best source of new donations is in fact existing donors.
At this point charity is spending money I gave them to extract further donations from me. The ice-cream cone is now licking itself :/
This take on EA notion replaces it with a straw man.
Essentially EA tells not "let's save as many lives as possible" but "let's improve the world according to our values as much as possible". And values might differ among the people.
In your example with cure for relative working with only X probability Vs definitely curing stranger on the other side of the world there should be value X for which you will prefer to cure the stranger. Whether it 10% , 1% or maybe 0.01% I will not blame you. But it worth to know your values like value of your family member life over the stranger's life to act accordingly.
Dive into EA activities starts with exploring your values. How do you value lives of animals in comparison to lives of people? Do you prefer improving people well being now or reducing existential risks like wars and epidemies? EA literally made a tool to estimate one's values and promote this tool on the front page.
Ok but now I’m kind of lost. I genuinely don’t know anything about EA, so this is an honest question.
If EA is improving the world according to your values, is it really distinct as a concept? Like, to me, the reason why I think almost anything is because it improves the world according to my values.
Another way to put it is that to me it kind of sounds like someone is saying, “we believe in doing the best thing”, but I don’t want to put words in your mouth. I also hope everyone wants to do the best thing ;)
Effective altruism is about the _effective_ part. Don't just donate to the charity or cause that _sounds_ good; look for where your money would provide the biggest impact.
If you want to save lives in general, look for the most _effective_ charity like that, which may be something like mosquito nets rather than a cancer research foundation. Don't just donate money to whatever is the most obvious charity advertised on television.
If you had a family member with cancer, look at which of N cancer foundations spend the money most effectively and donate there.
Often, altruism comes down to people giving money to the 'obvious' causes, which don't necessarily use the money effectively.
cancer research will give benefits forever once a solution is found whereas mosquito nets will get worn out and so are only a temporary fix. Cancer cure also scales to more people eventually. Worse, how much is your donation contributing to cancer research? You just can't quantify that.
The whole concept just seems to assume you know everything, present and future, and have infinite calculation power.
"Doing good better" was the book title, and I think better defines the goal well. Not perfect, better.
The choices that people make with giving often have no framework for deciding good, let alone better. The moral question is not is X better than Y, but what of all the choices I am going to make can I make better?
If everyone made better choices, not perfect just better, there is a LOT we could improve.
First a disclaimer: I am not a part of EA community, but I have met several people from this community. And I am loosely connected to rationalists community. I find EA concept appealing and I think I should allocate some of my resources to help this movement.
Indeed my wording was too broad and over-compassing. Effective altruism was kick started from comparison of different organizations collecting money for whatever altruistic means. And comparison showed that these initiatives are vastly different in effectiveness which prompted an idea that we should take into account effectiveness of particular initiative before giving it money.
EA seems to focus on reducing suffering over improving happiness. Giving a hand to a stranger who have stumbled and have fallen to the ground near you is out of the scope: EA is about strategic long lasting calculated stuff.
I took this passage from effectivealtruism.org but I was mostly referring to the EA community online which seemed to mostly be the rationalists like the OP said. It's worth pointing out that Eliezer Yudkowsky was mentioned ITT.
Impartial altruism: We believe that all people count equally. Of course it's reasonable to have special concern for one's own family, friends and life. But, when trying to do as much good as possible, we aim to give everyone's interests equal weight, no matter where or when they live. Thi s means focusing on the groups who are most neglected, which usually means focusing on those who don’t have as much power to protect their own interests.
So this is not saying all EA people think the same thing or have the same values or are on that site but I do think this is a common viewpoint among them. I just question why that should be and whether or not a lot of EA people are even altruistic or just virtue signalling on the internet.
I toned down some of the language in this post. I am not being meticulous I am just freestyling my thoughts because it's fun and there is a dose of humor I am putting in here but usually it's not appreciated on HN. Anyways, I don't know if there is a counter criticism to EA officially by some philosopher, and I actually agree with some of what they say because I remember a lot of discussion about choosing charities wisely and not wasting charitable resources. So I don't want to write a formal argument but nevertheless I think what I wrote is a summary of why I am skeptical.
> I will consistently try to save my family member
Sure, but that's because we all prefer living in a society where everyone abides by their obligations to the people closest to them - nothing wrong with this. That's special pleading, though.
> I doubt even the EA people would do that unless they could virtue signal about how smart they are and how stupid everyone else is online. Most of the time, these people just speculated about how they might spend their money if they were in such a scenario. It was like a hobby
I think it's clear you don't know any EA people in real life.
> like for example, if a family member of mine needed money for a cancer treatment that had a 50% chance of working versus giving that money to save the life of someone I don't know on the other side of the planet, I will consistently try to save my family member. That is how most people would operate.
I just want to point out that:
1. Just because this is how most people operate does not mean this is the ethical choice. Slavery was normal at one time remember.
2. You say EA people have biases they refuse to admit to, but your argument is showing that you are exhibiting the bias, namely the bias towards preferring your family member over general human life. Arguably a position that does not prefer one human life over another is less biased, no?
yes I am biased if bias means not weighting all people equally on moral grounds. I am not sure why I should. If someone did that I think it's interesting what conclusions they might draw about how to spend their money or what job they might choose. It destroys much of the point of having a family. You would have to weight random strangers with equal status to your own children. So the needs of random strangers would almost always outweigh the needs of your children assuming they are healthy and you live comfortably. It would not surprise me if EA people thought families were immoral though.
I don't think assuming an equal weighting is being unbiased though. It could be a result of a political bias. As I said I don't know why people should assume this. The digital era of social media and digital banking enable this viewpoint so I think that is another angle to discuss regarding how to weigh these issues.
But the specific bias I was accusing some in the EA community of having is virtue signalling as having superior ethics, morals, and intelligence. I think that is a real bias. I don't want to accuse everyone in the community of not being altruistic but claiming to be an effective altruist could certainly be a career enhancer if you are an ethicist. Also, my experience with this community is some of them come off as misanthropes. A misanthrope might be motivated to argue elaborate contrarian viewpoints in order to cause harm or annoy people.
> If someone did that I think it's interesting what conclusions they might draw about how to spend their money or what job they might choose. It destroys much of the point of having a family.
I'm not sure they would. They might adopt instead of having their own kids, for instance.
> So the needs of random strangers would almost always outweigh the needs of your children assuming they are healthy and you live comfortably.
Not necessarily. Divide and conquer is one of our most effective problem solving strategies, and family units fall under this umbrella of dividing the work of raising the next generation.
> But the specific bias I was accusing some in the EA community of having is virtue signalling as having superior ethics, morals, and intelligence. I think that is a real bias.
It could be. It's also possible that they are more ethical and intelligent though. Not in the sense that becoming an EA makes you more intelligent, but in the sense that maybe EA attracts more intelligent and ethical people. This self-sorting effect would diminish as EA spreads in popularity of course.
Ultimately, whether they are more ethical or intelligent is an empirical claim that you can validate, and while it's reasonable to think it's implausible for it to be true, that's not a proof that it isn't true.
Is there a term you would deem acceptable for seeking to give to others in a cost-effective manner?
This seems to be a perfectly good idea. Doesn't it seem problematic that giving it a simple, straightforward name seems inherently arrogant and insufferable?
The article mentions its philosophical underpinnings: utilitarianism. There’s a wealth of philosophical discussion of its own merits and problems. Reading the article but having been unfamiliar with the “effective altruism” term, I immediately recognized utilitarianism in it and the rest was predictable. It seemed a perfectly good idea to me too for some time, and still does with a slew of caveats.
Giving it a simple name is fine, but it has one. Giving it a manipulative name is, well, one of the potential philosophical problems with utilitarianism.
I don't know what else they should have picked? It seems like a fairly straightforward name for movement that focuses on charity effectiveness. I guess you could call it "effective giving" or something like that but caring about effectiveness is it core differentiating tenant and anything related to altruism/giving/charity is going to sound good.
I think the argument is that everyone else doing charity/altruism also (ostensibly) cares about effectiveness so it’s only a differentiating tenant if you somehow think your caring about effectiveness is somehow different to everyone else’s.
They care about effectiveness in the sense of if you asked if they cared about effectiveness they'd say yes.
They don't care about effectiveness in the sense that they are doing the math on how effective different outreach is, comparing that against other uses of the money, and sharing that with their donors.
I've been to 9-10 charity events and none of them talked about effectiveness in a dollar and cents way like the way givewell does. It's a real change from the status quo.
Like someone else said and articles have said. Socialism is the most effective altruism. This doesn’t allow you to become worth $100M+ with the reasoning being you’ll be an effective altruist though. The upper EA people are suspect. As well as the thinking that making more money is better then a great society helping job. Not that most EA people are like this.
> Maybe this is superficial, but I was put off by the name "effective altruism". By naming it such, it felt like an implicit dig that most altruism is not effective.
As an outsider, I feel the same way about "evidence based medicine". It'll be interesting to see, in 40 years, whether or not either moniker was earned.
Hilary Greaves: Philosopher, and he double-majored in physics in undergrad
William MacAskill: Philosopher/Ethicist. PhD in philosophy.
Eliezer Yudkowsky: self-described autodidact, no formal education or notable work history. Runs a "AI" "Research" center called MIRI.
Holden Karnofsky: Co-Founder of GiveWell, Harvard degree in Social Studies
Yew-Kwang Ng: Welfare Economist, has published biology, mathematics, philosophy, cosmology, psychology, and sociology papers.
Derek Parfit: Philosopher. Has a history degree.
Nick Bostrom: Philosopher. BA in philosophy and math, MA in philosophy and physics.
Benjamin Todd: Physics/Philosophy double major, worked at Kodak for eight months and at an investment firm for 1.25 years before joining the Centre for Effective Altruism.
The financial backers are more diverse:
Dustin Moskovitz: Co-Founder of Facebook, Co-Founder of Open Philanthropy
Cari Tuna: Dustin's wife, previously worked as a reporter before cofounding Open Philanthropy
Dan Smith: Professional poker player
Liv Boeree: Professional poker player. Physics degree
Sam Bankman-Fried: con-artist, thief, fraudster. Has a physics degree and a minor in math, interned/worked as a trader at Jane Street, and founded Alameda Capital and FTX.
And yet Effective Altruism in itself is not technology focused. There's no evidence that list of people (many philosophers) think tech will solve everything.
Longtermism explicitly is technology focused though:
> Many longtermists reckon that the antidote to the threat from technology is more technology; mastering artificial intelligence will forestall a malevolent AI from enslaving us. They also believe that technological acceleration is morally good in its own right, as it enables the universe to sustain more people. Bostrom laments the lives lost every second that technological advances are delayed. In a paper from 2003 he invites readers to imagine all the “unused energy…being flushed down black holes”, and all the suns beyond our own that are “illuminating and heating empty rooms”, because we lack the means to populate the planets orbiting them
And longtermism has taken over much of the EA movement:
> Disillusioned effective altruists are dismayed by the increasing predominance of “strong longtermism” ..[snip].. According to Benjamin Todd, a founder of 80,000 Hours, longtermism “might well turn out to be one of the most important discoveries of effective altruism so far” ..[snip].. Projects devoted to global health and poverty still garner the most funding, but their share of the total allocation is shrinking as long-term-risk research attracts more cash.
> And longtermism has taken over much of the EA movement
Show me the money. Sci-Fi/Fantasy longtermst nerd concerns get a disproportionate amount of attention. But from what I can tell, most donations still go to charities dealing with malaria, deficiencies and vaccines: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/2021-allocation-to...
Sure, some people are getting paid thousands of dollars for navel gazing. But more than a billion dollars was donated to directly improve global health.
It's great that over $1B was donated now for global health!
But the highest ever grant was $55M for "potential risks from AI". The 4th and 6th highest grants were similar.[1]
More recently[2] the highest ($10.7M) grant was for "Potential Risks from Advanced AI" and third highest grant ($2.3M) was for "longtermism" and there were 4 other similar grants on the first page.
potential risks of AI sounds the opposite of the position of someone who would think technology can solve everything. You're shifting goalposts to protect the initial narrative.
> potential risks of AI sounds the opposite of the position of someone who would think technology can solve everything.
Yes, that's a logical conclusion, but it's not right because of the weird "longtermist" logic. Their "AI risk research" is about AI alignment, which is a "longtermist" priority.
To repost my previous quote:
> Many longtermists reckon that the antidote to the threat from technology is more technology; mastering artificial intelligence will forestall a malevolent AI from enslaving us. They also believe that technological acceleration is morally good in its own right.
This is the "acceleratist view" of AI research, of which Nick Bostrom is a prominent proponent: basically he views progress as inevitable, so it's best to accelerate AI that is aligned with human values. See https://nickbostrom.com/papers/openness.pdf
He also values future lives equally to existing lives (the "longtermist" view) so any timme where we aren't expanding to the stars is morally repugnant:
> One recent paper speculates, using loose theoretical considerations based on the rate of increase of entropy, that the loss of potential human lives in our own galactic supercluster is at least ~10^46 per century of delayed colonization. [snip] The effect on total value, then, seems greater for actions that accelerate technological development than for practically any other possible action.
Let me requote that:
The effect on total value, then, seems greater for actions that accelerate technological development than for practically any other possible action.
Nah, it's an insult meant to lower the assumed position/opinion of whoever it was aimed at. Maybe in the past it meant what you describe it as, but I haven't seen that in any recent use.
It's more or less a term one would use to signal to others to dogpile the person and get them to leave the conversation/topic, mostly by being absurdly obtuse and misconstruing their words to it's most literal meaning with nothing left to deem charitable if engaging, or just speaking to other people entirely and not towards the subject whatsoever. Kind of like how most insults devolve into in pretty much all social media, just another word to pull out of the ad-hom bag.
It's easy to say you're doing things "longterm" for "future generations". The non-existent are the easiest people to advocate for. They demand absolutely nothing of you. And if your projected "altruism" will only really be felt well after you're dead, you aren't on the hook to show results now. They claim this is utilitarian, but it's not. It never was.
What is known is that small real changes now can affect large changes later. Doing things to improve today will improve tomorrow, next year, next decade, etc. If you are looking to be effective with your altruism, the most rational, utilitarian thing you can do is solve the problems of today. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to separate you from your money.
Most effective altruists are working on relatively near term things, like education in India or parasitic worms in Nigeria, those just aren't controversial and so get discussed less.
But long term projects like switching away from CO2 and to renewables can still be worth doing.
> By naming it such, it felt like an implicit dig that most altruism is not effective. Like oh your altruism is not that productive, but my altruism, well it's effective altruism.
Pretty much. A subset of altruism is effective, a subset is ineffective. And there's another term for a third subset that overlaps with both: virtue signaling. Usually people treat the term like aligns closer to ineffective altruism though, like "oh that's just virtue signaling", even though it can be both effective and virtue signaling.
>most altruism is not effective. Like oh your altruism is not that productive, but my altruism, well it's effective altruism.
I unironically think this. In Hungary where I live, if you don't care about these things much but still want to contribute somewhat to society by charity, the first lines of contact will mostly be crooks that feed on goodwill. There will be beggars, organized into groups, charities that don't exist or have such an overhead that only a single percent goes to the actual cause, corporations that take your donation and then boast with the amount as if they were the ones giving it, and charities that are popular but are actually fronts for ideologies, or churches, and frauds like people collecting clothes for the poor, only to sell them abroad. These entities grind up a large amount of goodwill, while producing little or negative value for mankind. So yes - the altruism of the people donating to entities like this does fuck-all, while I imagine that if someone researches a bit, they will be more likely to give to entities that contribute more.
With that being said, I don't like the EA people either. But the concept is valid.
I'm a bit ashamed because of the wording, I don't actually know any, not even online. I only have experience with the expression of the ideas, gathered from various websites.
> By naming it such, it felt like an implicit dig that most altruism is not effective. Like oh your altruism is not that productive, but my altruism, well it's effective altruism.
But ... that's where effective altruism comes from. Have you not noticed the eroding trust in charities (https://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2015/se...) over the past decade? Effective altruism is just a counter-movement against wasteful charities and engenders a growing realization that not all donations are good and even that donations might not always be the best solution. It wasn't about lecturing anybody, it was about (for example) figuring out which charities are most effective and least wasteful with the money that they receive.
Just the other day I was listening to this Dave Troy podcast "against long termism"[0] and it's the first time I ever heard the term "effective altruism", however within the last few days of having listened to EA has come up multiple times. I also remembered when listening to it that the title screen of the Baba Is You videogame on the nintendo switch promotes the "Giving what we can" charity. Very interesting stuff, I highly recommend checking out not only that podcast but the rest of the Oil, Gold, Crypto and Fascism series from Dave Troy.
Effective altruists would risk the 10% chance of making thousands of clients lose all their money if it gives them a 50% chance of donating more to charity later. Since it makes sense according to their utility function. That’s what we learned from the FTX debacle. Sort of reminds me of the paper clip manufacturer A.I. who ends up killing all humans due to a broken utility function.
That's an over-generalization... I would think most effective altruists recognise that acting unethically by for example, risking client money, is not justified due to the long-term damage that causes. Big lies usually get found out. Most effective altruists are outraged at what SBF apparently did..
I've always found EA to be the most capitalist way of trying to do good. Instead of like being humble, not accumulating wealth for yourself, not thinking of yourself as better, etc. EA is pushing for this weird self-centered egotistical philanthropic avenue.
That's literally the least efficient way to help anyone.
This also always felt very American. I'll get rich by paying workers poorly, finding any advantageous loophole I can, screwing customers, but once I'm rich I'll donate some of that money to do good...
How does this make any sense?
If you want to do good, just work for others from the get go. Be nice, be kind, be humble, offer mentoring and encouragement, don't hord things for yourself to redistribute it later, instead work to create sustainable opportunities for others.
> This also always felt very American. I'll get rich by paying workers poorly, finding any advantageous loophole I can, screwing customers, but once I'm rich I'll donate some of that money to do good...
That also feels very inaccurate and misrepresentative of the philosophy.
Rather, I'd say: live mindfully in a broken system. Pick a job that meets your needs with minimal intentional side-effects, donate some surplus to bettering the world. Do not be a paperclip maximizer or "ends justify the means".
That is a good and fair philosophy, except in my personal experience EAs have been very much a "paperclip maximizer" towards their (self-defined) goals of "bringing the most good to the world". From my point of view, claiming that the self-serving class of consultants and cryptobros donating 10% of their is not "true EA" sounds very much like a no true scotsman fallacy.
> Rather, I'd say: live mindfully in a broken system. Pick a job that meets your needs with minimal intentional side-effects, donate some surplus to bettering the world. Do not be a paperclip maximizer or "ends justify the means".
I think that is a very valid philosophy and one I would agree with.
However, EA has a large overlap with longtermism, which has some very paperclip maximizer like features:
> Providing we are capable of colonising the rest of our galaxy and nearby ones, a 1% reduction in the risk of extinction on such a time horizon would be the equivalent of saving 1032 lives. In such a perspective, nothing else matters.
> That year, Bostrom founded the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, dedicated to mitigating risk. He elaborated on his theory of longtermism in a book in 2008, urging people to be “good ancestors” by practising “altruism toward our descendants”. He didn’t mean composting or stopping driving, but mitigating existential risks to humanity – “x-risks” in community parlance – from hazards such as advanced artificial intelligence and bio-hacking, that could potentially wipe out or severely deplete humankind.
(from the linked article).
I think this a very problematic view, because (as noted) almost everything is justifiable if you think you are avoiding extinction of the human race.
> That also feels very inaccurate and misrepresentative of the philosophy.
I admit, I don't want to generalize, I'm sure there are many interpretation of the ideas of EA and different people practice it differently.
That said, in practice, at least the prominent figures and their prominent groups, my impression is that they fall into what I described.
Seems there's an appealing aspect to it that's about being able to be the most cut throat, dirty capitalist where ends justify the means, and where you can feel good about being filthy rich off the back of everyone else, because you'll be efficiently altruistic in donating some of it back.
Feels there's a dimension to it that seems to justify taking from the poor to give to the poorer, while keeping a cut for yourself.
It’s because we threw away Christianity as a moral compass which many interpret similarly and the hole was filled with EA, woke, etc. These people just totally missed the point of why we ditched Christianity/religion in the first place. It wasn’t so we could replace it with a different socio-political hegemony or otherwise moralizing institution.
Mostly it's a method of assuaging the guilt and resolving the cognitive dissonance that comes with having left-wing values but also wanting to be very rich.
>Instead of like being humble, not accumulating wealth for yourself, not thinking of yourself as better, etc.
The EA advice is that if you're good at something valuable, then the best strategy for being charitable is to do that valuable thing and then donate your money. Do you think it's incompatible with humility to believe that you're good at something valuable? I don't think there's any notion of "thinking of yourself as better" baked in here.
This pretty much hits it on the nose for me. I think with a little extra spice of thinking you know best and experts in the field are dumb, aka, white savior complex.
> I've always found EA to be the most capitalist way of trying to do good.
If by "capitalist", you mean the system that incentivized the most selfish assholes on the planet to accidentally lift billions of people out of poverty, then I agree.
> This also always felt very American. I'll get rich by paying workers poorly...
The median American gets paid more than their counterparts in all but a couple countries. When you account for the population size and diversity of America, it's a statistical miracle how well Americans get paid.
EA and capitalism focus on efficiency and not virtue. You can't substitute being unvirtuous with being hyper-efficient, and I don't think anyone is going to argue otherwise. There's an argument to be made that efficiency is crowding out virtue, especially when it comes to capitalism, but even then I think you're significantly overestimating this effect. I don't think this same argument can be applied to EA. Overall, I think it inspires rationalist-obsessing nerds to be more interested in virtuous behavior. One of them happens to be me. Another, happens to be a billionaire scam artist.
While I definitely think you have a point, I'm still not sure I have a better idea of how to do good. Perhaps you have though? (genuinely asking)
I work in tech and definitely make more than I need. I work for a small company (and don't even have any employees under me) so I'd at least like to think that I'm not that involved in exploiting people in order to make money.
Now the question that I have is what do I do with the excess money I'm making, especially since I do actually agree with you about the not accumulating wealth part. One option is of course spending a lot of time analysing charities to figure out which one I think would be the best to donate to, but while I'm still not completely ruling it out, I feel like that would make analysing charities almost a part time job. Since at least at the moment i don't want to do that, I still settled on donating based on GiveWell's recommendations, essentially outsourcing the charities analysis. I am aware that GiveWell and I probably don't share 100% of our values, but I truly don't see a better option.
So really, if you, or anyone else, has a better idea of what I can do with the excess money I'm making, I'd be more than happy to listen.
> EA is pushing for this weird self-centered egotistical philanthropic avenue.
That's literally the least efficient way to help anyone.
What.
The stereotypical EA person is a banker who makes $150k/year after tax and donates $100k/year to the against malaria foundation. As opposed to the lawyer who quits working for corporate and becomes a gardner, which seems to be what you're advocating.
The former seems to do far more good in the world, saving hundreds of young lives.
Either that or just confusion about what and/or who we are talking about.
EA is not a well defined set of concepts or ideas. I do know a lot of people who identify as EA and have argued for "earn-to-give" where the giving part is deferred far into the future.
I won't spur the confusion further but my own personal experience is that there are several people I have personally met who more closely match the parents description than the description you give.
I'm all for earn-to-give if you are doing the giving soon and to causes where the outcomes are easier to measure, like what you mentioned. This is very commendable.
Where EA-style thinking runs into trouble is where it places excess confidence in future predictions
either A) I will eventually donate this money B) This cause I'm donating to has no obvious impact now, but it will have immense impact in the future or C) Even though I can't see all the negative impacts my work is having, my prediction/inference is that the negative impacts will be smaller than the positive impacts of my altruism.
So I have nothing against the idea of trying to maximize good, I just think that I frequently see it used in conjunction with excessively high-confidence predictions or inferences.
In your case, I think it's important that the banker do some sort of accounting of whether he is having a negative impact on their current project/firm etc. There are bankers who have had a huge negative impact in the past and so this does need to be part of the accounting.
> The former seems to do far more good in the world, saving hundreds of young lives
I guess the example is incomplete, the banker also contributes to some system in a way, is the work harmful to others?
And if the work is beneficial, they're still part of a system where, why are they taking such a large salary in the first place?
Now, I'm actually not opposed to this form of EA. Like the other commenter said, donating money is fine, it's choosing to become a banker and trying to become the highest paid banker in history, so that you can then go and donate a larger sum of that income that I find problematic.
The latter form of EA seems wrong to me, because the idea that you'll take more money from people, to then personally decide who else you'll give it back too and how much of it you'll keep for yourself or not, that does not seem altruistic.
Instead I wish that people adopted a moral where making excessively more than others, or owning excessively more things than others was just seen as wrong to begin with. If you don't need more than 100k, then just charge less for your services, or pay your employees and staff more, or heck accept higher tax brackets and give more back to fund social institutions and infrastructure.
I'm not familiar with Effective Altruism, but a takeaway as a tech person working in the clinical trial field:
Most drugs go to market with the idea of being effective, e.g. treating as many people / conditions as possible. This leads to a problem that most people deal with a slightly different problem from the next person, so you just end up with large groups of small numbers of people who are essentially overlooked, because they're not profitable enough to make a drug or treatment for. This class is called "orphan drugs"
Yes, this is mostly "how the industry / capitalism" works, but that's the point. By measuring how effective altruism is, and by only doing the things that are most effective, you'll essentially end up with many "orphan" categories at the end.
“Efficiency” isn’t a universally, objectively better goal, but it’s what technocrats focus on.
There are many other equally good (and often conflicting) possible goals: sufficiency, diversity, happiness, regret, etc.
The current economy focuses on efficiency because it’s about infinite capital accumulation using finite resources, and that’s what benefits the people at the helm.
Perhaps before 1983, but there's a strong case that since the Orphan Drug Act was passed in the US, orphan drugs are overincentivized and a massive misallocation of resources [0]. Orphan drugs represent nearly half of FDA approved drugs in some recent years and come with huge tax benefits, near monopoly conditions, and typically the most outrageous prices. Maximizing quality-adjusted life years would be better achieved by incentivizing single-dose therapeutics for common ailments. Not the best example but the first that comes to mind is upcoming psychedelic therapy, which could have major potential, but is seen as having a broken business model because most people won't want more than one treatment.
I used to work for one of the largest software vendors in the non-profit space worldwide and it fundamentally changed the way I look at the non-profit world. The big ones have essentially become these weird quasi-think tanks that passively influence policy or actively engage the community to achieve an often political agenda.
For example, a large non-profit can't explicitly lobby congress to ban sex education in schools. But, they can go around and "buy out" small non-profits into fulfilling their agenda. This is usually pretty easy to do because small non-profits are almost always cash-starved, and it can be really hard to say "no" when some outside figure is willing to provide a massive percentage of your operating budget in perpetuity in exchange for avoiding certain topics (like mutual consent) in schools.
This very scenario happened to an acquaintance of mine. She wanted to teach consent in schools after the #metoo scandal, spent 2 years grinding to improve access to consent-based communication for kids and then someone offered her obscene money under the condition that she make tweaks (i.e. "don't talk about consent in school because that will encourage children to have sex", that kind of stuff). She took the money because she saw a way out of needing hustle so hard for cash, but of course she sold her soul at the end and regretted it.
And none of those interactions ever get recorded. Nobody is tracking what big non-profits and charitable funds ask (or demand) others to do, and they get to market themselves as doing good for the world. I'm sure some of them are, and I'm sure there are tons of well-meaning people working for some of them, but that world was so much darker than I ever imagined, at least from the periphery.
While I agree with you that non-profits can grow to a point that they become sclerotic and lost in their own bureaucracy, I'll give a contrary opinion as to why non-profits that actually want to be effective care deeply about public policy.
For example, consider a simple animal rescue non-profit. While it may on its surface just seem like "this organization should just exist to try to find homes for pets needing adoption", it's actually more helpful to look at a more fundamental question: "What causes animals to be put up for adoption in the first place." It turns out that in most states there are a host of systemic, government-caused problems that are directly responsible for the reasons why many people need to surrender their pets to shelters in the first place. So yes, the animal rescue non-profit is still in the day-to-day business of finding homes for homeless animals, I would say a good organization would actually do more to try to change the status quo and fix the root cause problem, and that often intersects with government policy.
>Nobody is tracking what big non-profits and charitable funds ask (or demand) others to do, and they get to market themselves as doing good for the world.
Forget about tracking, the people paying even get a tax deduction.
> Nobody is tracking what big non-profits and charitable funds ask (or demand) others to do, and they get to market themselves as doing good for the world.
Well, if there are no written agreements - take the money and do your thing anyway, then?
> Over the past two years, I’ve heard many stories of young, ambitious people who came to effective altruism wanting to change the world but grew disenchanted.
> This disillusionment was partly because the community expends so much effort raising money for the proliferation of institutes and think-tanks that host its most prominent thinkers.
> Open Philanthropy, a foundation that Dustin Moskovitz helped to create, funds 80,000 Hours (over $10m since 2017),
Is this the same 80,000 hours as https://80000hours.org/? A self help guide and a job board? Listing Sam Bankman-Fried as the #1 anecdote? $10,000,000? Hm.
To me, SBF embodied the worst stereotypes about the Effective Altruism movement. The not-so-subtle air of I'm-smarter-than-thou, the hubris to think whatever they have thought of haven't been thought and dismissed by others (probably for good reason), and a bull-headed focus on risk and return that can be exactly quantified, to the point of ignoring other, "softer" sides of the issue.
SBF isn't alone in this. In school, while interning for a competing hedge fund, I met a drove of Jane Street interns who thought exactly the same way, in terms of "EV" or expected value -- the mean outcome from a random event. For example, whenever we would go out for ice cream, they would try to flip a coin to see who pays, given the "expected cost" was same. This behavior is fine if you're a market maker betting 0.001% of your worth on a toss that you win 51% of the time, and I imagine this is why Jane Street tries to cultivate it. But unfortunately, in this hyperfocus on returns, they forgot that "risk"/"variance" exists, and sometimes flipping a coin will land you in such a deep hole that you can't continue to play the game long enough to dig yourself out of there.
> The not-so-subtle air of I'm-smarter-than-thou, the hubris to think whatever they have thought of haven't been thought and dismissed by others (probably for good reason), and a bull-headed focus on risk and return that can be exactly quantified, to the point of ignoring other, "softer" sides of the issue.
It’s a little long for an HN tagline but it’ll do.
I don't think anything he said there flies in the face of kelly. Single event, he is explicit about his utility function and why.
He just doesn't seem very good at managing risk in the real world. If you spend any time at an investment bank or similar where you do a lot of trading, there are just hundreds of "gotchas" that those institutions are aware of and manage (or they aren't and don't and go bankrupt eventually).
There are lots of fields like this in the real world, just lots of gotchas. He didn't seem to understand that. I'd bet Jane Street understands this at the org level, but the younger folks likely just see a little bit of the whole picture, and have a lot of theory.
expected value makes some sense when you're sampling a lot, but basically none for one offs.
personally i think if you're making big bets/one-offs, you probably should be computing something like minimax trees for all the possible outcomes before making a choice and maybe adjust the bet size such that the worst case is something you can swallow.
Kelly maximizes the long run returns as the number of bets approaches infinity. If the variance is extremely high on f(x) and you get a single bet it can be rational to go very heavy. (Here x is the Bernoulli with p=0.75 and f(x) the payoff of 10000:1 on x = 1)
This problem is usually considered from the other angle: if variance is high but the odds are unfavorable you should favor fewer bigger bets over many smaller bets. Why? Because the more bets you make the more likely you are to converge onto the expectation. A single big bet leaves you either running way over expectation or slightly under it. All of this assumes that you have to bet though, the safest thing to do with negative expectation is to just not bet.
His example is unusual in that it has positive expectation (so you want to bet) and high variance (because you’re limited to a single bet). f(x) = 0b or 10000b so the single sample has a mean of 5000 and a variance of 50,000,000 but the E[f(x)] is 7500. A bigger than Kelly bet is rational here but if you had unlimited (or a large number of) bets you should revert to Kelly.
If you are making money trading - you are "making money" - if you are buing lottery tickets with a 1:1,000,000 payout and are on losing ticket #500,000 you are making "High EV trades"
Judas got 30 pieces of silver, and with Jesus being crucified he lived a life free of sin on humanities behalf, opening the gates of heaven for us all.
I agree that utilities between people aren’t really commensurate in a way that allows adding them to be particularly well-defined/meaningful, and that therefore utilitarianism is not the actual full truth of morality,
However, I don’t think that precludes using a kind of utilitarianism where you just kinda fudge over that “there isn’t a canonical way of adding these” bit, in order to produce something which can be a rather good heuristic for “does this provide more or less help to people than that?”.
Like, yes, you can’t really add utilities, but if you value helping people, you can consider how much you value different people getting different amounts of different kinds of help, and if you pretend that this is the same thing as “the utility you provide them”, then you can add up how much you value the individual things and assume that how much you value the stuff adds linearly.
And, in some cases, morality should presumably impose some constraints regarding how much you should value providing one sort of help in some quantity to some person or persons, compared to how much you value providing some other kind of help in some quantity to some other person(s).
And so, while I don’t think utilitarianism is true exactly, I think it likely that morality probably demands something which in some ways looks at least a little bit like utilitarianism? Though there are still cases where it is important to recognize that utilitarianism can lead one astray.
Totally agree. There are plenty of EAs, including myself, who use EA to direct their giving towards mosquito nets and not towards charitable organizations with overpaid CEOs or an otherwise terrible ROI.
EA is best as as critique of the narcissism of most wealthy western ‘altruism’. But all this mixing of billionaires, crypto, and long-termism has reintroduced narcissism into the community.
Effective Altruism is bullshit and here is why; because, the invisible hand has already shown itself to be a far better lever of human good through the acceptance of human nature. "Helping people" implies you know what people need. It's a power position to begin with and thus designed to fulfill the doers goals of doing good not the receivers 'need' of being helped.
Each of us, individually, pursuing our own self-interests produce value to society and others as a whole. Whether through producing products, offering services, performing labor, or consuming goods, we all seek our own interests to the betterment of the whole.
EA is just a new sort of chivalry for a new wannabe class of Nobles. That's it.
>"Helping people" implies you know what people need.
No it doesn't. I'm content to outsource my charitable decision-making to recommenders that I think align with my values. A competitor is free to come along and convince me that they'd make a better recommendation and I'll shift my money accordingly, just like buying any other product. They can even skim a bit off the top if I really trust them and give to their funds! That's the invisible hand.
The concept that seeking our own interests is to the betterment of the whole seems to be demonstrably false.. For example consider the tobacco and fossil fuel executives who are trying to delay the phase-out of their products. Or the people who buy/sell meat in spite of the resulting ecological damage & animal suffering.
By the way, a charity quite popular in mainstream Effective Altruism is Give Directly - which aims to avoid trying to figure out what poor people need by giving them cash.
EA is about the most "invisible hand"-friendly school of philanthropic thought going, complete with ethical arguments generally siding in favour of individuals preferring to take the best paid private sector job going to raise funds rather than working directly for nonprofits.
- Social control + the creation of an 'other': They are absolutely convinced that sentient AGI will inevitably kill everyone without any real evidence. However, if we manage to create sentient AGI, what these guys plan to do with it is best described as modern slavery https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/ai-boxing-containment#:~:text=...
- Desire for government power: TFA is super clear about that. More interestingly, here's the FTX Future Fund on space governance:
"We’d love to see workshops or a mock constitutional convention where sharp people think hard about how to structure international governance institutions for the long-term future, or how to govern space settlement. As explained in more detail on our areas of interest page, we believe that the onset of space settlement could be a watershed moment in human history. We want people to start thinking about how it should work."
https://ftxfuturefund.org/projects/alternative-voting-system...
- Entryism/influence operations: Pretty much every career profile on 80,000 Hours encourages taking a job at government agencies/influential private organizations to push the EA agenda https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/
Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk. No one with morals and a spine should fear this. (FWIW, the same justification of fearing retribution by an evil power for refusing to collaborate could be used by people in occupied countries who collaborated with the Nazis.)
The base model Roko's basilisk is pretty stupid, but I have talked to people who have worked on "improving" the idea, so it actually works in more realistic and diverse decision theories. It's like base model MOND vs improved versions of MOND, the idea is still pretty wacky but they did some fudging to get it to work better "empirically" (with that word being used very loosely, of course). I think some people don't want anyone talking about the improved basilisks, but if anyone cares I can try to dig them up. Probably don't care though, because it's really stupid.
The EA eschatology is pretty much Christian eschatology, except they aren't at all sure their savior (a Friendly, Strong AI) will come. There's a good chance of just getting the Beast and the Harlot instead.
Hence the obsession with AI safety - Christians just have to work to bring Christ's kingdom to where they are. The EAs have to make sure nobody summons a vengeful demon overlord while they're slowly crafting their own all-loving, all-powerful digital deity.
> Also known as social democratic governments that collect taxes.
Well yes, but in the absence (or inadequacy) of such government action for causes you care about, doesn't it make sense to donate to the charities that most effectively do the thing you care about?
I've seen this criticism a few times and figured it was just ambiguous.... while the FTX affair is obviously bad for the institutions that represent the modern EA movement, to me this doesn't represent a real critique of EA as a philosophy. "Most EA supporters are techbros and FTX reinforces the view that techbros are bad, therefore EA is bad" is not a real argument, it's a sneer. Is the implication that I should start donating money to the Red Cross rather than GiveWell? I don't think so. At the margin yes I should be more suspicious that my money won't be used well, but I don't believe that all of these institutions are corrupt.
The more material argument is whether from an EA perspective running massive scams and funneling the proceeds to EA causes should be applauded or not. Obviously the fact that this discussion is even being surfaced will cause brand damage, but again it says nothing to which perspective is correct, just that these discussions are subject to optics-based constraints. It's like the open discussions in the rationalist community over whether various horrible civilizational collapses happening to humanity might actually be desirable because it will prevent (or at least delay) an AI from killing us. There's serious discussions but it never plays well to bring this to a "normie" audience. But pretty much every movement has its Straussian elements where the "insider" narratives contradict the "outsider" narratives.
> The more material argument is whether from an EA perspective running massive scams and funneling the proceeds to EA causes should be applauded or not.
Is that really the material argument? It seems obvious to this normie that the answer ought to be "hell no".
>”But if he established a well-paid private practice in Britain, he would be able to “earn to give”: he’d save “considerably more” lives and still be comfortable… …As the community has expanded, it has also become more exclusive. Conferences, seminars and even picnics held by the Centre for Effective Altruism are application-only.
Yes, by application only. Because the near-intuitive next step in thinking is that, heck, we can’t all be the comfortable one, someone has got to be the person getting their hands dirty incrementally adding to all of those QALY’s and clearly They’re too enlightened in understanding this to be the one living uncomfortably with dirty hands.
So the mathematical inevitability is there needs to be some gate keeping, and why shouldn’t it be the people who realized that also make the decisions about access?
Self serving, self reinforcing bullshit. Probably a mixture of honest good intentions and rationalizing of guilt for being better off than others.
The modern age makes it just about impossible to not be aware of a lot of awful crap in the world, so it’s no surprise that some of the current generation, finding themselves at or adjacent to the pinnacle of wealth and opportunity through some admixture of at least a little ability and a lot of good fortune and circumstance and some degree— large or small— of actual empathy, become plagued by the cognitive dissonance. By living so well but knowing that right this moment countless people are at the absolute opposite most desperate and miserable end of that spectrum, many soon to be dead, many dead just in the time it took me to type this.
Maybe I have it easier, cognitive dissonance wise, by virtue of having just a little of my formative years that 1) preceded a time when easy knowledge of the systemic awfulness of much of the world was unavoidable before a person hit a double-digit age and 2) Had a fair bit of personal awfulness in them as well. awfulness that was, in terms of the world wide range, still thankfully minor but enough that the dissonance is small.
So it’s no surprise that a somewhat cliquish group of the generation around the cultural/economic/academic centers of the world that, even just by virtue of their location, afford a great deal of opportunity have come up with a line of thinking that justifies their place in the world.
My hope is that an extra decade or two of experience and living and seeing how consequences play out slices off some critical mass of those folks who are a bit more self aware. At least enough to recognize that figuring out how to live your life as a decent person isn’t always going to be a problem that’s algorithmicaly or mathematically solvable.
Because I’d really prefer the next crop of people who find themselves in positions of wealth, power, and influence— again through some combination of (hopefully) a little merit and a lot of good fortune and circumstance… well, I’d prefer them to not be well intentioned but tragically arrogant assholes trying to figure out things like:
Is it better to suffer the inconvenience of saving the fleeing refugee on my doorstep? Or should I instead work an extra hour or two a month in order to earn a calculated incremental bonus in pay that might be donated to a cause that might be able to save 10 refugees?
I don’t want people in positions of power and influence to think that is, in any way, an interesting or worthwhile question to pursue as a mature intellectual use of their brain power rather than a shitty waste of time.
And a brief addendum: it is vastly both telling and unsettling that the core movement 1) recognizes that their most brutal “calculations” would be looked on in horror and absurdity (rationalized no doubt as those who simply are not enlightened or intelligent enough to understand) and therefore 2) work to silence adherents who start to explore them in any type of open forum, necessitating 3) a PR campaign that blithely pays lips service to welcoming all ideas and open discussion at the same time that 4) it is clear there are aspects or implications of their philosophy that they are only willing to talk about behind closed doors.
It really, really, is not hard to see where applying quasi mathematical calculation will get you when you start weighing hypothetical future lives against the resources directed today towards various EA projects.
Anything can be justified when you’re trying to do mathematical ethics against vastly unlikely but catastrophically bad scenarios, all while ignoring the fact that if you don’t address the “right now” systemic and intractable problems we’ll get to much more likely existential crisis long before we have to worry about runaway ai-complete malevolent entities causing harm.
And that is actually an apt example— there is a certain amount of overlap between the EAS movement and the rational discussion communities that came up the idea of Roko’s Basilisk.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 352 ms ] threadAlso a problem with charity, especially in the US, is as the IRS defines it, it's not necessarily charitable. So it's easy to confuse altruism with plain old politics, vanity, and for-profit business disguised as a tax-exempt and then argue that anyone that disagree is not rational.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. You've unfortunately been posting a bunch of unsubstantive/baity comments lately. Can you please not? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
Every passionate ideologue thinks that the mods are secretly against them (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). This you're-just-moderating-me-because-you-don't-like-my-opinion perception is a cognitive bias. If you don't believe me, look at the first batch of examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870. I could give you a hundred more of those.
The truth is that we're bored, tired, profoundly do not care, and feel exactly the same way about all such comments—the ones you'd consider most wrong and offensive, as well as the ones you'd most passionately agree with. Why? Because they're all mirror images of each other.
We don't need the moderation on HN any more.
But it's probably inevitable that Hacker News will wither and go away (or at least stop being a place that attracts people like me). Eventually, somethign will replace HN like something replaced Slashdot (which had fantastic comments with not that much moderation, back in the day) and Usenet.
It would still stay decent for a few years, but after a decade or so it'd be unrecognizable IMO.
Of course, that prediction was sourced from out of thin air and unsubstantiated guesswork. Just writing my reasons of why I think so.
I'm not saying I'm a good moderator; there are other prerequisites.
First, I'm sure you're right that far worse crap goes unchallenged. But that's not because it's ok (it's not), nor because moderators are choosing to go easier on them (we're not). Rather, it's for the same reason that only a small portion of speeding drivers actually gets pulled over and ticketed: there are way too many to catch them all. In other words, when you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we simply didn't see it—there are far too many posts for us to read them all. You can help by flagging such cases or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Second, I believe you that you're posting in good faith and with good intentions. Unfortunately, intent isn't enough—it doesn't communicate itself on the internet, especially not in these tiny little blobs of comment text. You have to include enough information to disambiguate your intent (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
It's common for commenters to assume that their posts will land with readers in a way that is consistent with the intent they have in mind. Unfortunately, they often don't—because while you have your intent in your head, the rest of us don't (I don't mean "you" personally, of course—it's the same for everybody). This is what leads to the 'rebound' phenomenon where someone posts a snarky one-liner or otherwise breaks the site guidelines, and then when a moderator asks them not to, they reply with the thoughtful, substantive comment they actually had in their head*. The problem is that all that good information doesn't communicate itself. You have to spell it out explicitly.
* A case of this from earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33623956
Though, yeah wow, I didn't realize how cliquey Effective Altruism had become.
No thanks.
Why do perfectly nice general descriptive terms so often become tightly bound with one small group and their whole very particular worldview?
Philanthropy? Charity? Those words fit perfectly.
Does anyone sincerely set out to be ineffective in those endeavors? I can't imagine anyone who was knowingly insincere would have trouble also claiming the moniker of effective altruism. Nonetheless, I think the term "effective altruism" is also intended to encompass and imply some additional--if optional--characteristics about the giver or the form of giving, such as leading a more sustainable lifestyle or the consideration given to one's choices in choosing particular acts of charity. But we don't need that term merely for the act of distributing or funding the distribution of mosquito nets--philanthropy and charity are more than sufficient. And, technically speaking, charity has usually sufficed in any event--e.g. clergy who give their entire lives over to charity work weren't in search of more descriptive nomenclature, AFAIK.
Maybe you feel we don't need a word. But I find it odd, and kind of suspicious, when we insist we can't give a distinct name to something that is clearly a thing.
Sure, if you needed a term to categorize. We can build ontologies (and identities) all day if we want. But I ask this: can you quantify the difference between a qualitative vs quantitative emphasis in charity work? Point being: I'm not sure the distinction has much substance or utility. If one's aims are merely to feel good, without any concern for concrete, identifiable impacts, that doesn't fit the definition of altruism or charity or philanthropy. And with mixed motives (as they always are), it's really only the selfless aspect that counts as any of those when we're being pedantic. Even the tax code recognizes this--something is a charitable deduction only to the extent you don't personally derive value from it, and the deduction value is (in principle) the actual value imparted.
But if being able to identify as an "effective altruist" motivates more people to perform more charity, then who am I to argue ;)
I mean, I'll bite the bullet and say yes. People will always choose to have more effectiveness in a ceteris peribus sense, but the best you could say for the actual observed pattern of charitable contributions is that people are being swayed in their giving by all sorts of concerns (social pressures, ignorance, bigotry, etc.) that cause them to trade off effectiveness for those things. And the message of EA is basically "recognize and call out these biases unless they're truly reflective of your values."
The issue is when people take it to the extreme (like someone who literally argued that a person doing mere charity or volunteer work is bad, because they are wasting time and effort that they could've spent making money and recruiting to contribute more charity and volunteering), or just sidestepping "altruism" entirely and using the name and community as a stepping stone to push your unrelated scam.
I don't know whether or not SBF genuinely believed in effective altruism, but if he did, he let the "principles" override common sense.
Seems like a good idea, if only just to have some sort of open-system for rating charities. I suspect the issue is everything that comes around the idea, specially... people. The problem is always people :-). Perhaps a "Michelin Guide to Charities" would be easier to market and explain? :-p
My favorite explanation of how "effective altruism" works is this SMBC comic [2]. :-)
--
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism
2: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13
While the following examples aren't exactly _open_ systems, some organizations address the niche you highlight. Examples: https://www.givewell.org/, https://animalcharityevaluators.org/
Would make sense if anyone could come up with the score, following some "standard". That way one could make sure that no specific grader has incentives to give good scores speculatively (or even maliciously).
For instance:
"The technological revolution was a disaster for the human race... so I'm going to murder a few people to draw attention to my manifesto against technology."
"Social inequality is a disaster for the majority of my countrymen, so I'm going to murder the Bourgeoisie"
"My altruism is more effective than anybody else's, so I'm going to steal everybody else's money so that I can put it to better use."
How do you stop this shit? Deontological ethics. Don't murder, because murder is wrong. Don't steal, because stealing is wrong. Damn the consequences, stick to simple principles such as these.
Um, are you saying that this implies that people should just throw up their hands and donate to whatever causes since who knows? Surely not. Once we acknowledge that these questions can be tackled empirically, that's what EA tries to do. Is there room for bias in this process? Absolutely. Does that justify embracing some sort of epistemic nihilism? Absolutely not.
> Um, are you saying that this implies that people should just throw up their hands and donate to whatever causes since who knows?
No, it implies that you shouldn't lecture others that you have the one true answer as to the best path forwards. You are free to (and in fact should) use your best judgment in your own personal choices, just don't confuse that with absolute truth.
I don't think that myself, but it's internally consistent.
(Although, I've googled a bit and found a "counter"-example, where Singer argues that in a case where six innocent people could be wrongly accused of murder and killed, you should point at one as the perpetrator if it means only they get killed and the other five ones get let go, therefore saving five lives: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/866768837)
So yes, killing is morally wrong and should never be the mean to your end, but the rest is really muddy. Is stealing from the rich in order to feed the poor a justified mean? Is donating most of your money you make trading off the stock market, where other people have lost that money, a justified mean? Is lobbying against climate-unfriendly companies a justified mean?
Even without such an argument, “the ends justify the means” isn’t a reason to do something in the real world, because there are no “ends” in the real world. Everything just keeps happening.
> How do you stop this shit?
If you ask yourself why you think "this shit" is bad, at root there will be a consequentialist reason. Deontological ethics is consequentialism by heuristics.
I'll go with the results of trial and error over long time horizons rather than blank slate theoretical calculations any day.
Further, when multiple heuristics are directly in conflict, it is up to the individual to make the final moral decision. The choice to reject one heuristic over another must be based in some moral calculus.
Finally, who said anything about blank slate? That's a clear straw man, as it's only logical for consequentialists to take current heuristics and their adherents into account.
It only tells you what not to do, rather than what to do.
And it's full of exceptions and edge cases. Is stealing a loaf of bread from scrooge to stop a family from starving wrong? What if you call it "taxes" and the community voted on it? Is it murder to blow up a bridge in wartime? Is unplugging someone's life support murder? What if they're going to die in hours any way and you're out of life support machines for the patient who just came in and has good prospects?
Also, while we can't predict the future we all need to decide what to do. Sure, if you donate antimosquito nets to save kids from malaria one of them might grow up to become the next Hitler, but you should try and figure out on the balance of probability what the most likely outcomes are.
Obviously. That is the human condition.
Do you not take actions in normal life because you don't have full knowledge of everything? Don't order breakfast because you don't know which menu item is for sure going to be the best.
> How do you stop this shit? Deontological ethics. Don't murder, because murder is wrong. Don't steal, because stealing is wrong. Damn the consequences, stick to simple principles such as these.
Simple rules like: dont hoard your money but find a worthy cause for it?
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB/ends-don-t...
It is just utilitarianism with modern marketing and pure utilitarianism has problems.
See one example below where utilitarianism's suggestion goes against what almost everyone considers ethical:
You can take 10 healthy organs from one person without any social connections and use the organs to save 10 terminal patients who would otherwise die.
EA effectively sanctions robbing a million people to help a million people + 1
The movement is based on the same ideas and values and it's running into the same problems. These similarities don't inherently discredit the movement, but not having a clear awareness of these faults in their framework and a plan for avoiding them is very worrying.
Indeed! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging
(Although the term itself comes from the EA community)
With all of these examples, and pascal's mugging itself, there is an obvious error: there should be a practical upper bound on the adverse outcome you're concerned about, at which all higher values are effectively the same to you.
The original rationalists were true rationalist. And the recent ones? I am not so sure.
This is a well known issue:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/
https://blog.apaonline.org/2021/03/29/is-effective-altruism-...
> As such, Effective Altruism is inherently Utilitarian in character, even if the views are themselves distinct. Criticisms of Effective Altruism on the basis of critiques to Utilitarianism are not only expected, but fair.
> EA effectively sanctions robbing a million people to help a million people + 1
Yes, EA people often think taxes are a good idea. This is not a rare thing.
No, just saying that it is a bad example doesn't make it.
I wish EA folks looked at the literature that discusses this very example.
> There are many serious risks in trying to do that in practice, which is why our intuitions are against it. E.g. you might be found out and people might mistrust doctors, you might be wrong about the person having to connections, those patients might not live long anyway, etc etc
Yes, that has been discussed thousands of times in the literature.
To answer, you can always have the person confirm they are ok with it (e.g. Switzerland allows physician-assisted suicide in some case).
Yes, and that's why the strawman is bad.
EA folks don't in practice follow or advocate for any form of ethical system that leads to doctors killing people for their organs.
No, thats why it is good. It is discussed thousands of times *because* none of the solutions are satisfactory.
> EA folks don't in practice follow or advocate for any form of ethical system that leads to doctors killing people for their organs.
But the axioms they evangelize imply that. And this is essentially what Bankman has done financially.
More cynically, you're giving hand outs to people who yet need to learn to be productive, while destroying the lives of people who were trying to leverage their own productivity. I think it has negative value, doubling harming progress for the sake of apology.
I mean, the concern here is that coming off as an asshole can be self-defeating, not that these views are actually incorrect, right? Seems like it's like being an atheist - an "extreme view" for many and it's a topic that may need to be dealt with with caution sometimes but that's really mostly a critique of the sensitivities of others.
Isn't this just tone policing then?
I do think it's good to optimize money spent for these things much of the time but it's also just inhuman to have no place, or respect, for forms of charity that are based on, form and reinforce human connection.
I don't think EA argues for this. I guess it depends on what you mean by "less quantifiable."
>I do think it's good to optimize money spent for these things much of the time but it's also just inhuman to have no place, or respect, for forms of charity that are based on, form and reinforce human connection.
Describing this as "inhuman" is pretty extreme. In any case I think if you acknowledge that you're indulging in various non-charitable preferences through your donations I don't think EA would offer a serious critique beyond pointing out that you could be doing better. I think a major goal of EA though is to get people to truly wrangle with their biases here. These organizings are pragmatic - they're not trying to chide us into being moral saints, but just "giving what we can" - a popular EA slogan.
Plus it doesn't take into account our individual competencies and nature. It doesn't matter how much I think curing cancer is more important than my current job, I know absolutely zilch about curing cancer. Also I have no idea if I'm actually right about cancer being a top priority, or if curing it is even possible. Meanwhile sick people that doctors and nurses can save using known techniques are dying right now.
Effective Altruism as a principle is fine, it makes a degree of sense. We do need to invest in long term projects, but all this talk of 1% chance of this or that saving humanity is fiddling while Rome burns.
If curing cancer is a top priority, the EA advice is not that you should quit your job and try to cure cancer. It's probably to keep your job (which you likely have developed a comparative advantage in) and do serious research into which organizations will actually make progress towards curing cancer, and EA orgs will often try to provide advice on this latter front.
Yes, there is a big emphasis in these communities on various sorts of existential risks, but it doesn't imply that you can't be an EA if you have different beliefs on these risks, so long as those beliefs are informed by open-minded criticism and not "only privileged techbros could possibly care about this"-style sneers
Part of the danger is the name. I support long term thinking! I love things like the Long Now project! But this specific viewpoint is very wrong.
This is the kind of vibe I get from this writeup, and the level of separation from humanity these people operate.
This is the part of EA that triggers a lot of red flags for me. Making money, or rather making significant money, necessitates participation in a system of exploitation that is largely responsible for the ills the charitable donations are meant to alleviate in the first place. Maximizing that money necessitates optimizing the exploitation.
the whole thing just seems like an exercise in morality-washing one's own greed. Lies, damn lies, and statistics perpetrated with "rationality".
I mean, given that you think that I understand where you're coming from. But just note that many, many people would highly disagree with that characterization.
I don't think our "system", whatever that means, is evil. I think it's pretty good, definitely better than other things people have come up with. And I don't think you need to give to charity to morality-wash greed. I think it's just the right thing to do.
Looking at other countries that don't have capitalism, everyone is worse off. I don't think capitalism is the reason charity is necessary. I think the world starts default-bad for humans, by default we don't have anywhere close to the living we want, and over the years, many technological advanacements, including capitalism, have slowly made most humans far better off.
This is fairly clear in the historical record or in comparing different countries.
(At least to me. Most people seem to disagree with this, but I honestly think they're wrong.)
Interesting that all I talked about was a system of exploitation and your mind immediately filled in 'capitalism'.
I think there are many countries that temper capitalism with socialist ideals and people are not worse off than the more unfettered variety practiced in the US.
That's not what happened. When I answered you I wrote "the system". I answered skinnymuch's post about capitalism, because they themselves talked about capitalism.
But out of curiosity - what "system" exactly did you have in mind?
> I think there are many countries that temper capitalism with socialist ideals and people are not worse off than the more unfettered variety practiced in the US.
Who said anything about the US?
In general I find it concerning when technical people encroach upon non-technical areas without giving a sufficient amount of respect to the people who were in the field already. Those people, the experts, do know a lot and to have this kind of nerd savior branding of effective altruism, as if you are bringing the enlightenment that allows these poor altruists to finally be effective, well that just seems a little presumptuous.
What it evolved into is a bit controversial, overall they seem to be a bunch of kids who don't know what to do with the power and money they had at one point, as they all came too easy.
Maturity-wise... that's still unclear to me.
The founding idea is that giving $10,000 to save, y’know, four ailing dogs with bad livers or whatever, or a community theater, as opposed to many human lives, is fundamentally wrong.
“If you’re gonna give, you should maximize the impact as measured in human life” is fundamentally at odds with many common forms of giving, yes.
What if the friendships made at a community theater help a troubled kid through a rough patch and instead of committing suicide they go on to cure cancer? Not funding the theater would have been very sub-optimal.
Even without far-fetched hypotheticals what’s the point of saving everyone’s life if they’re just going to spend it figuring out how to make more mosquito nets or whatnot?
People are not as smart as they think and it’s important to leave room for serendipity and random associations.
I’m not claiming that all charity should be done in such an attempt-to-be-expected-utility-maximizing way, as there may be some like, component of how donations for more local causes might do more to improve the character of the person donating, and other things like that,
but I don’t see your view of “but-serendipity, and but-mosquito-nets-is-no-fun” don’t seem like compelling reasons to not look at QALYs and such.
That being said, I personally haven’t made any substantial donations, so if you’ve made even fairly inefficient donations (as long as they were at least a little effective, and not e.g. counterproductive) then your donations have likely done more good than mine have.
Obviously, this isn't to say we should donate any less to community theaters, though I think that's a different type of donation. That is partially altruistic, but on some level it fulfills the same satisfaction as a purchase.
> The idea that the moon is made out of cheese is stupid.
Agreed, but you are the only one that claimed this was the idea because clearly you are not the "arrogant and fundamentally wrong" one.
Though we cannot tell in every case what the outcome will be, that is no excuse to not consider the odds.
These people after all pursued theoretical means by which the risk of death could be reduced, and then put them into practice in order to improve their understanding.
You can die in the air. You can die on the ground! Sometimes jumping off a cliff is safer than staying there. There is no safe path, no guarantee of survival; you have to speculate, to make theories, to test them, to choose the path that seems best to you. There is nothing arrogant about this.
Public debate is, to a first approximation, nothing but arguing about which actions lead to better outcomes.
I could see an argument that the claim is that EA is insulting because it's akin to calling a chocolate brand "asbestos-free!"; you're implicitly suggesting that competitors contain asbestos. But note that this depends on whether the other brands do, in fact, contain asbestos, and EA is not shy about its claims that many charities do not effectively pursue good outcomes. It's hard to accuse EA of trying to sneak in this point when it's a central part of its rhetoric. And of course, such debate is an entirely ordinary part of discourse.
For the former I agree, seek out charities that most effectively support what you want to support.
For the latter, I don't think it's worthwhile to deride people for supporting a cause just because you think there's some other cause that might technically result in more living humans. Raw population is not a worthwhile metric to optimize for. People should be free to support things they care about and believe make the world a better place as long as it's not harming anyone.
But I just don't think it's as effective, and I don't think most people agree.
If the only available labor was teenagers, rebuilding the community theater meant hiring them, and you knew that statistically there was a risk some might die from heat stroke. What risk of death would you deem acceptable to build a community theater?
Anyways, I never said any specifics about where this community theater is being built. I don't know where heat stroke came from. Sure, yeah, in the straw man situation of building a community theater in an extremely hot area, where the only labor is teenagers, I would...not enlist teenagers to build a community theater in an extremely hot area? I don't want to be dismissive of your comment but I genuinely don't know what's the point here.
But repairing a community theater could easily cost $100,000 which would save the lives of ~22 people in Guinea if donated to certain bed net charities. And even the most die hard theater fans probably wouldn't save a theater if to do so it would require risking 22 lives for.
So in this case quantification isn't failing, it's succeeding. It's correctly telling us which donations are more effective. And all our intuition agrees that the $100,000 theater is worth less than the 22 lives.
Thus by chosing to repair the community theatre you are directly causing the death of 9,978 people.
“Ah bit they are luxuries, distinct from charity…”
Ok then give me the luxury of donating to the local theatre!
Schindler's List | "I Didn't Do Enough"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9vj2Wf57rQ
In the end, nearly everyone values their life higher than the life of others. The more distant that the "others" are the less we value them.
Mine was specifically to be an intuition pump to see how valuable the OP thinks a theater is when weighed against actual lives.
It's easy to say x is important where x is saving sea turtles, teaching kids to read, or repairing a community theaters.
It's harder to say x is more important than y charity when y charity saves lives effectively.
Building a community theater with good working conditions might have a big impact on the community around it and could go end up saving lives down the road, or dramatically improving the quality of life of many.
It's very hard to quantity the impact of the community theater against say feeding 100 people for one week. All these people could die the week after, was it really sustainable improvements or just temporary relief?
Too bad these empathetic values privilege building an entertainment venue over saving lives or preventing suffering. /s
Every dollar you spend on a theater donation is a dollar less that you value human lives.
Of course, the same logic applies to candy bars, internet, television, and all the things that being you joy in life.
But that’s what leads to “earn to give”, which is what leads to deciding to become a billionaire and/or give away other people’s money instead.
I don't have unlimited resources. I have the privilege of having a surplus that I can redirect to making the world better. EA is a framework for trying to do the most amount of good from the limited resources that I have.
> We can do both.
So, save fewer lives for more theatre seats?
> diversification of one's "ethics portfolio"
I don't understand what that is supposed to mean.
Then you will be delighted/horrified to find out that the effective altruism community doesn't feel the need to make quantifiable justifications for how they spend their own donations, as evidenced by this $20k grant they gave someone to learn to ride a bike and think about AI[1].
That's about 3853 to 4090 mosquito nets' worth of donations, using GiveWell's numbers for the Against Malaria Foundation[2].
[1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/...
[2] https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf
1. Your model of the world is incomplete or inconsistent (eg, forgetting to include negotiation as a strategy, forgetting long term consequences).
2. You've hit on a cognitive bias and can probably do a huge amount of good that other people will miss (eg, lending with interest -> modern industrial society, rule of law rather than letting high status people do whatever -> mass prosperity). The cognitive bias is probably well known and understood and the evidence that the emotional response leads to poor outcomes should be obvious.
I'm completely befuddled by this. My experience is that people make most decisions emotionally and then harness their brain to rationalize those irrational decisions after the fact. It's the reason that science (the process) has to exist. Because people will fool themselves to reach a conclusion they want if there are no procedural guardrails.
Surely 800,000 mosquito nets is "more effective" than 800,000 robo calls and shitty campaign ads with a moron at the end saying "I'm Joe Blow, and I endorse this bullshit"
Sorry for the cringe, but really - you're actually saying that encouraging people to do what they think is right is a problem? Especially when they've actually read the books, done the numbers, and all you have is a feeling that they may be wrong in some cases? I can't really argue with that except with caps lock and sarcasm.
Are eggplants fruits? Yes. Do you feel you should put them in a fruit cup? No.
This is called “the map is not the territory”.
It's fine to spend money on the theater, everyone spends money and time on themselves and their interests. If you consider community theater altruism though, I think it makes sense to acknowledge that it is ineffective altruism - that is, you're doing a little bit of good with your money, but not nearly as much as you might be doing.
Art in particular has a multiplicative effect that is essentially impossible to quantify. Once a work of art is out there, it can live forever and influence multiple generations. That seems like a pretty effective use of my money.
Obviously the local theatre benefits your own community, but if you live there then you are also benefiting yourself (via status and seeing plays), which seems less than altruistically pure, even if you could only build 1 theatre in Africa.
You know a lot better what a theater could bring to a neighborhood you know well.
And then, there's the question of if altruism itself is most efficient at helping others. Some would argue that helping oneself but where it benefits others as well, win/win situations, in practice produces better outcomes. The idea of self-sacrifice, or having to lose or risk something personal to help others sounds noble, but might not be most effective.
You need to contextualize the life saved, do we mean they went to live one more day, or a full long life of prosperity and comfort with a happy painless death from old age.
And did they themselves gain the means to save more lives in turn?
For example, I feel giving people the means of saving their own life, or other people's lives a much more efficient way to save lives than actually saving a life.
And finally you have to address the sacrifices you've made and the people you've hurt in pursuit of saving that life.
To me, it looks like a charade, because the claim that you can actually measure and quantify all of these complex systems to truly arrive at the real impact of all these things, I just don't believe it. It seems you've picked a simple metric to measure, because it's easy, but is it lasting impact, is really more meaningful impact, that's all all still up in the air.
One way to think about effective altruism is that it's trying to get you to apply whatever moral intuitions you would use in a concrete scenario to an abstract scenario. To any individual apart from it, it's abstract to know that mothers in some poor country can't adequately nourish their children, or that mosquito nets reduce malaria deaths, and so on. But, the reality is that those people are actually real, are actually suffering, and actually could be helped. If you take that message to heart then it won't make sense to send your charity to the community theater - by all means, send the theater money if you want, but it's a selfish thing, not an altruistic thing.
If there was a crypto trade available to make a billion dollars available for the next 15 minutes only - but you have to chose between the community theater, the bus of X people on fire or giving 10% of your gainz to a charity to save X*2 ...
In practice, I think people coming from a starting point of "I'm going to focus on solving friendly AI because it fits with my interests and computer science background and I think I'll be able to help the process along a bit" are being more honest with themselves than people dressing up their preferences in magical utilitarian numbers which conclude they're more efficient than merely feeding people or giving them goats...
I'm honestly not sure. Spending your money back into the economy contributes to a system with a proven track record, part of it goes to taxes, the rest pays for jobs, creates value for the owner, who'll pay some more taxes on their income, and then spend the rest elsewhere, etc.
Donating 10k to a charity has many practical flaws, the charity itself isn't incentivized to maximize the use of the 10k, it can be corrupt, or might operate in a corrupt and inefficient environment, etc.
Would you still argue that it still does no harm? You have just squandered 100b worth of society's resources - people's time, physical materials, engineering effort etc. for your own entertainment.
Say there was a 100 billion yacht, it still served as a means to redistribute flow of funds to others. Those engineers, material extractors, workers, staff, all that contributed to people being given some of that money.
This goes towards creating an economy, and good economies can sustain countries and lift many people out of poverty, saving many lives.
Creating a demand for people's labor and resources helps with creating an economy.
This isn't money wasted, the money went to many people, it was a way to redistribute the money to others.
So I don't see the harm at all, at least not from a financial standpoint, you could argue about environmental harm though.
Now what about opportunity cost? Sure, maybe that 100 billion could have been used in ways that redistribute it more evenly, more fairly, or to people who needs the money most, or towards an endeavor that has longer term uplifting outcomes, etc, there might be a better use, though it becomes hard to figure out what use is truly better.
The way I see it, there's two dimensions:
- Redistributing money, who gets it? Split amongst how many people?
- Potential for future returns, is the money spent in a way that gives people the means to produce more?
The yacht definitely redistributes money, but maybe you disagree about the distribution of it, who got the money.
Arguably the yacht could bring future returns. Creating a demand for engineers pushed more people into engineering, now more people have the engineering know how, they go on to use that to build other projects, creating an infrastructure that others can then leverage to make other things more efficient and build on top, etc.
Basically, I just don't think it's as black and white as you claim, even in this extreme example.
I believe your focus on money obscures that fact. Money is just a mechanism for a (good, efficient, fair?) way of using the resources available. Money is not real wealth.
What lifts people out of poverty is not money, it is ultimately useful stuff - food, shelter etc. produced so efficiently that people also are able to specialise and spend time on teaching, medicating, investing into producing not just the bare necessities but things that make them even more efficient and productive etc. In the yacht example, such scarce resources are squandered! The 'economy' created is quite literally destructive - it is geared towards consumption (i.e. destruction) of many resources - materials to build the yacht, countless peoples' time - for the mere entertainment of the person who then sinks the yacht.
Yes, the people that were involved in building the yacht now have bigger claims on a shrinking share of resources. They personally win; the person who enjoyed sinking the yacht wins; overall society greatly looses and is now much poorer.
So overall, society would be better off if that person just hoarded the money, buried it in their back yard, and preserved the scarce resources. That outcome is better than personal luxury consumption. Even better, of course, if they used it to get other people to do something productive that benefits wider society.
Ok, so your argument is in the actual materials consumed? The water, metal, and all that being "wasted" for a yacht, as opposed to used for life critical purposes instead?
So, that's kind of the environmental aspect I mentioned, I'm not opposed here, sustainable resource use is important.
But donating to a charity can similarly be a temporary waste of resources with no sustainability improvements made.
Just feeding people food for an extra week for example, is very different from investing in sustainable farming methods that can guarantee us renewable and long lasting sources of food.
And on that topic, it's surprising how in practice discoveries that can help us with sustainability and production methods are discovered through various other ventures, often military for example, but it can happen anywhere.
The person who invented ammonia was researching chemical warfare, now it's used for fertilizer and dramatically helped boost our food production efficiency.
These second order effects I think are hard to predict, similarly hard to predict what the workers that got money from building the yacht than go on to use that money for themselves, maybe they spend it investing in food production efficiencies.
Not wrong or bad as people in this thread seem to universally interpret it, but if you want to optimize for animal welfare, you might be better off doing something about farm animals rather than donating to a local shelter. If that turns out to be too far removed from your personal situation to care about, okay then apparently that's not your priority and that is fine. But between the things you spend effort or money on, it's worth looking into what is the most effective means to your end.
I am not involved in this whole thing in any way but that's what I thought the underlying idea was. Not an explicit dig at those who already try to do good, not at all... (Edit: realization: and that method of making people feel bad wouldn't be very altruistic nor effective right?)
like for example, if a family member of mine needed money for a cancer treatment that had a 50% chance of working versus giving that money to save the life of someone I don't know on the other side of the planet, I will consistently try to save my family member. That is how most people would operate. I will do this because I don't know the person on the other side of the planet. If it were not for the internet and their subreddit/lesswrong style of shaming campaigns, no one would ever even know there was a person on the other side of the planet who also needed the money. Why should I be asked to ignore my own family by annoying redditors who don't give a shit about me anyways?
I doubt even the EA people would do that unless they could virtue signal about how smart they are and how stupid everyone else is online. Most of the time, these people just speculated about how they might spend their money if they were in such a scenario. It was like a hobby.
Although in fairness rating charities by their effectiveness is a good idea. Yes, people do blindly give cash away to corrupt charities.
So would most people, and we wouldn’t call it altruism. Looking for an objective criterion (whether ‘number of lives saved per dollar’ or something else) is an angle that I’m happy someone is taking. If you don’t like their approach then don’t give them money.
Most people would call helping a relative pay their medical bills altruism. It's also the selfish and rational choice. It's both simultaneously.
Altruism is the disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others. Helping your family is not altruism.
Not necessarily altruism.
It absolutely could be.
Knowing the true motives of another human is very difficult, perhaps impossible (without a predictive biological model of consciousness we can't be sure we're reading minds correctly, and it's still an open question whether such a thing can exist).
You shouldn't; doing so would be irrational. There is a fairly decent chance that your relative, if they survive, will be in a position to help you in the future. But the random person on the other side of the planet? The chance of them randomly helping you in the future is about one in a few billion. Particularly if they don't know who their benefactor was, so they couldn't deliberately repay the favor to you.
So the rational/selfish position is to always put family and friends first, before strangers.
For instance; if everybody sticks to the principle of murder being wrong despite the consequences, then there will be fewer misguided mass murderers, and this is better for society in the long run than everybody going around committing murders they believe to be justified by some end.
Honestly I don't think there's any realistic way to decide in general whether giving assistance to person A vs person B is more "rational" or even more "effective", but it's good to at least be aware that some charities/NGOs/etc. are at least trustworthy and ensure a high % of donations do actively go towards providing help, rather being swallowed in marketing and admin budgets.
It's counterproductive to insist that nonprofits operate without operations budgets.
I pay them money. Charity pays consultants to turn that into more money (plus admins to manage the consultants). Consultants determine that a fraction of that money should be used to solicit more donations. Research indicates best source of new donations is in fact existing donors.
At this point charity is spending money I gave them to extract further donations from me. The ice-cream cone is now licking itself :/
Essentially EA tells not "let's save as many lives as possible" but "let's improve the world according to our values as much as possible". And values might differ among the people.
In your example with cure for relative working with only X probability Vs definitely curing stranger on the other side of the world there should be value X for which you will prefer to cure the stranger. Whether it 10% , 1% or maybe 0.01% I will not blame you. But it worth to know your values like value of your family member life over the stranger's life to act accordingly.
Dive into EA activities starts with exploring your values. How do you value lives of animals in comparison to lives of people? Do you prefer improving people well being now or reducing existential risks like wars and epidemies? EA literally made a tool to estimate one's values and promote this tool on the front page.
If EA is improving the world according to your values, is it really distinct as a concept? Like, to me, the reason why I think almost anything is because it improves the world according to my values.
Another way to put it is that to me it kind of sounds like someone is saying, “we believe in doing the best thing”, but I don’t want to put words in your mouth. I also hope everyone wants to do the best thing ;)
If you want to save lives in general, look for the most _effective_ charity like that, which may be something like mosquito nets rather than a cancer research foundation. Don't just donate money to whatever is the most obvious charity advertised on television.
If you had a family member with cancer, look at which of N cancer foundations spend the money most effectively and donate there.
Often, altruism comes down to people giving money to the 'obvious' causes, which don't necessarily use the money effectively.
The whole concept just seems to assume you know everything, present and future, and have infinite calculation power.
The choices that people make with giving often have no framework for deciding good, let alone better. The moral question is not is X better than Y, but what of all the choices I am going to make can I make better?
If everyone made better choices, not perfect just better, there is a LOT we could improve.
Indeed my wording was too broad and over-compassing. Effective altruism was kick started from comparison of different organizations collecting money for whatever altruistic means. And comparison showed that these initiatives are vastly different in effectiveness which prompted an idea that we should take into account effectiveness of particular initiative before giving it money.
EA seems to focus on reducing suffering over improving happiness. Giving a hand to a stranger who have stumbled and have fallen to the ground near you is out of the scope: EA is about strategic long lasting calculated stuff.
I took this passage from effectivealtruism.org but I was mostly referring to the EA community online which seemed to mostly be the rationalists like the OP said. It's worth pointing out that Eliezer Yudkowsky was mentioned ITT.
Impartial altruism: We believe that all people count equally. Of course it's reasonable to have special concern for one's own family, friends and life. But, when trying to do as much good as possible, we aim to give everyone's interests equal weight, no matter where or when they live. Thi s means focusing on the groups who are most neglected, which usually means focusing on those who don’t have as much power to protect their own interests.
So this is not saying all EA people think the same thing or have the same values or are on that site but I do think this is a common viewpoint among them. I just question why that should be and whether or not a lot of EA people are even altruistic or just virtue signalling on the internet.
I toned down some of the language in this post. I am not being meticulous I am just freestyling my thoughts because it's fun and there is a dose of humor I am putting in here but usually it's not appreciated on HN. Anyways, I don't know if there is a counter criticism to EA officially by some philosopher, and I actually agree with some of what they say because I remember a lot of discussion about choosing charities wisely and not wasting charitable resources. So I don't want to write a formal argument but nevertheless I think what I wrote is a summary of why I am skeptical.
Sure, but that's because we all prefer living in a society where everyone abides by their obligations to the people closest to them - nothing wrong with this. That's special pleading, though.
I think it's clear you don't know any EA people in real life.
I just want to point out that:
1. Just because this is how most people operate does not mean this is the ethical choice. Slavery was normal at one time remember.
2. You say EA people have biases they refuse to admit to, but your argument is showing that you are exhibiting the bias, namely the bias towards preferring your family member over general human life. Arguably a position that does not prefer one human life over another is less biased, no?
I don't think assuming an equal weighting is being unbiased though. It could be a result of a political bias. As I said I don't know why people should assume this. The digital era of social media and digital banking enable this viewpoint so I think that is another angle to discuss regarding how to weigh these issues.
But the specific bias I was accusing some in the EA community of having is virtue signalling as having superior ethics, morals, and intelligence. I think that is a real bias. I don't want to accuse everyone in the community of not being altruistic but claiming to be an effective altruist could certainly be a career enhancer if you are an ethicist. Also, my experience with this community is some of them come off as misanthropes. A misanthrope might be motivated to argue elaborate contrarian viewpoints in order to cause harm or annoy people.
I'm not sure they would. They might adopt instead of having their own kids, for instance.
> So the needs of random strangers would almost always outweigh the needs of your children assuming they are healthy and you live comfortably.
Not necessarily. Divide and conquer is one of our most effective problem solving strategies, and family units fall under this umbrella of dividing the work of raising the next generation.
> But the specific bias I was accusing some in the EA community of having is virtue signalling as having superior ethics, morals, and intelligence. I think that is a real bias.
It could be. It's also possible that they are more ethical and intelligent though. Not in the sense that becoming an EA makes you more intelligent, but in the sense that maybe EA attracts more intelligent and ethical people. This self-sorting effect would diminish as EA spreads in popularity of course.
Ultimately, whether they are more ethical or intelligent is an empirical claim that you can validate, and while it's reasonable to think it's implausible for it to be true, that's not a proof that it isn't true.
This seems to be a perfectly good idea. Doesn't it seem problematic that giving it a simple, straightforward name seems inherently arrogant and insufferable?
Giving it a simple name is fine, but it has one. Giving it a manipulative name is, well, one of the potential philosophical problems with utilitarianism.
They don't care about effectiveness in the sense that they are doing the math on how effective different outreach is, comparing that against other uses of the money, and sharing that with their donors.
I've been to 9-10 charity events and none of them talked about effectiveness in a dollar and cents way like the way givewell does. It's a real change from the status quo.
Not the OP but State-imposed socialism might do the trick. Free housing, free decent education, free healthcare, what's there not to like?
The only thing is that you wouldn't be the one "doing" the giving as an individual, because that's not your job to do (again, as an individual).
As an outsider, I feel the same way about "evidence based medicine". It'll be interesting to see, in 40 years, whether or not either moniker was earned.
The people mentioned on the Effective Altruism Wikipedia page:
Peter Singer: Professor of Bioethics (philosopher)
Toby Ord: Philosopher. Philosophy PhD, Computer Science bachelors
Hilary Greaves: Philosopher, and he double-majored in physics in undergrad
William MacAskill: Philosopher/Ethicist. PhD in philosophy.
Eliezer Yudkowsky: self-described autodidact, no formal education or notable work history. Runs a "AI" "Research" center called MIRI.
Holden Karnofsky: Co-Founder of GiveWell, Harvard degree in Social Studies
Yew-Kwang Ng: Welfare Economist, has published biology, mathematics, philosophy, cosmology, psychology, and sociology papers.
Derek Parfit: Philosopher. Has a history degree.
Nick Bostrom: Philosopher. BA in philosophy and math, MA in philosophy and physics.
Benjamin Todd: Physics/Philosophy double major, worked at Kodak for eight months and at an investment firm for 1.25 years before joining the Centre for Effective Altruism.
The financial backers are more diverse:
Dustin Moskovitz: Co-Founder of Facebook, Co-Founder of Open Philanthropy
Cari Tuna: Dustin's wife, previously worked as a reporter before cofounding Open Philanthropy
Dan Smith: Professional poker player
Liv Boeree: Professional poker player. Physics degree
Sam Bankman-Fried: con-artist, thief, fraudster. Has a physics degree and a minor in math, interned/worked as a trader at Jane Street, and founded Alameda Capital and FTX.
> Many longtermists reckon that the antidote to the threat from technology is more technology; mastering artificial intelligence will forestall a malevolent AI from enslaving us. They also believe that technological acceleration is morally good in its own right, as it enables the universe to sustain more people. Bostrom laments the lives lost every second that technological advances are delayed. In a paper from 2003 he invites readers to imagine all the “unused energy…being flushed down black holes”, and all the suns beyond our own that are “illuminating and heating empty rooms”, because we lack the means to populate the planets orbiting them
And longtermism has taken over much of the EA movement:
> Disillusioned effective altruists are dismayed by the increasing predominance of “strong longtermism” ..[snip].. According to Benjamin Todd, a founder of 80,000 Hours, longtermism “might well turn out to be one of the most important discoveries of effective altruism so far” ..[snip].. Projects devoted to global health and poverty still garner the most funding, but their share of the total allocation is shrinking as long-term-risk research attracts more cash.
Both quotes from the linked article.
Show me the money. Sci-Fi/Fantasy longtermst nerd concerns get a disproportionate amount of attention. But from what I can tell, most donations still go to charities dealing with malaria, deficiencies and vaccines: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/2021-allocation-to...
Sure, some people are getting paid thousands of dollars for navel gazing. But more than a billion dollars was donated to directly improve global health.
But the highest ever grant was $55M for "potential risks from AI". The 4th and 6th highest grants were similar.[1]
More recently[2] the highest ($10.7M) grant was for "Potential Risks from Advanced AI" and third highest grant ($2.3M) was for "longtermism" and there were 4 other similar grants on the first page.
[1] https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/?sort=high-to-low#ca...
[2] https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/?sort=recent#categor...
Yes, that's a logical conclusion, but it's not right because of the weird "longtermist" logic. Their "AI risk research" is about AI alignment, which is a "longtermist" priority.
To repost my previous quote:
> Many longtermists reckon that the antidote to the threat from technology is more technology; mastering artificial intelligence will forestall a malevolent AI from enslaving us. They also believe that technological acceleration is morally good in its own right.
This is the "acceleratist view" of AI research, of which Nick Bostrom is a prominent proponent: basically he views progress as inevitable, so it's best to accelerate AI that is aligned with human values. See https://nickbostrom.com/papers/openness.pdf
He also values future lives equally to existing lives (the "longtermist" view) so any timme where we aren't expanding to the stars is morally repugnant:
> One recent paper speculates, using loose theoretical considerations based on the rate of increase of entropy, that the loss of potential human lives in our own galactic supercluster is at least ~10^46 per century of delayed colonization. [snip] The effect on total value, then, seems greater for actions that accelerate technological development than for practically any other possible action.
Let me requote that:
The effect on total value, then, seems greater for actions that accelerate technological development than for practically any other possible action.
https://nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste
I'd highly recommend you read the linked article this discussion is about. It goes into some depth about on these points.
It's more or less a term one would use to signal to others to dogpile the person and get them to leave the conversation/topic, mostly by being absurdly obtuse and misconstruing their words to it's most literal meaning with nothing left to deem charitable if engaging, or just speaking to other people entirely and not towards the subject whatsoever. Kind of like how most insults devolve into in pretty much all social media, just another word to pull out of the ad-hom bag.
Because it was all a hustle to continue doing exactly whatever they wanted to do. Here is a good book that talks about the mindset:
https://www.amazon.com/Winners-Take-All-Charade-Changing/dp/...
It's easy to say you're doing things "longterm" for "future generations". The non-existent are the easiest people to advocate for. They demand absolutely nothing of you. And if your projected "altruism" will only really be felt well after you're dead, you aren't on the hook to show results now. They claim this is utilitarian, but it's not. It never was.
What is known is that small real changes now can affect large changes later. Doing things to improve today will improve tomorrow, next year, next decade, etc. If you are looking to be effective with your altruism, the most rational, utilitarian thing you can do is solve the problems of today. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to separate you from your money.
Most effective altruists are working on relatively near term things, like education in India or parasitic worms in Nigeria, those just aren't controversial and so get discussed less.
But long term projects like switching away from CO2 and to renewables can still be worth doing.
Pretty much. A subset of altruism is effective, a subset is ineffective. And there's another term for a third subset that overlaps with both: virtue signaling. Usually people treat the term like aligns closer to ineffective altruism though, like "oh that's just virtue signaling", even though it can be both effective and virtue signaling.
I unironically think this. In Hungary where I live, if you don't care about these things much but still want to contribute somewhat to society by charity, the first lines of contact will mostly be crooks that feed on goodwill. There will be beggars, organized into groups, charities that don't exist or have such an overhead that only a single percent goes to the actual cause, corporations that take your donation and then boast with the amount as if they were the ones giving it, and charities that are popular but are actually fronts for ideologies, or churches, and frauds like people collecting clothes for the poor, only to sell them abroad. These entities grind up a large amount of goodwill, while producing little or negative value for mankind. So yes - the altruism of the people donating to entities like this does fuck-all, while I imagine that if someone researches a bit, they will be more likely to give to entities that contribute more.
With that being said, I don't like the EA people either. But the concept is valid.
Do you actually know any? The ones I know in real life are wonderful people. Intelligent, caring and hard working.
But ... that's where effective altruism comes from. Have you not noticed the eroding trust in charities (https://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2015/se...) over the past decade? Effective altruism is just a counter-movement against wasteful charities and engenders a growing realization that not all donations are good and even that donations might not always be the best solution. It wasn't about lecturing anybody, it was about (for example) figuring out which charities are most effective and least wasteful with the money that they receive.
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/against-longtermism-wi...
That's literally the least efficient way to help anyone.
This also always felt very American. I'll get rich by paying workers poorly, finding any advantageous loophole I can, screwing customers, but once I'm rich I'll donate some of that money to do good...
How does this make any sense?
If you want to do good, just work for others from the get go. Be nice, be kind, be humble, offer mentoring and encouragement, don't hord things for yourself to redistribute it later, instead work to create sustainable opportunities for others.
That also feels very inaccurate and misrepresentative of the philosophy.
Rather, I'd say: live mindfully in a broken system. Pick a job that meets your needs with minimal intentional side-effects, donate some surplus to bettering the world. Do not be a paperclip maximizer or "ends justify the means".
I think that is a very valid philosophy and one I would agree with.
However, EA has a large overlap with longtermism, which has some very paperclip maximizer like features:
> Providing we are capable of colonising the rest of our galaxy and nearby ones, a 1% reduction in the risk of extinction on such a time horizon would be the equivalent of saving 1032 lives. In such a perspective, nothing else matters.
> That year, Bostrom founded the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, dedicated to mitigating risk. He elaborated on his theory of longtermism in a book in 2008, urging people to be “good ancestors” by practising “altruism toward our descendants”. He didn’t mean composting or stopping driving, but mitigating existential risks to humanity – “x-risks” in community parlance – from hazards such as advanced artificial intelligence and bio-hacking, that could potentially wipe out or severely deplete humankind.
(from the linked article).
I think this a very problematic view, because (as noted) almost everything is justifiable if you think you are avoiding extinction of the human race.
I admit, I don't want to generalize, I'm sure there are many interpretation of the ideas of EA and different people practice it differently.
That said, in practice, at least the prominent figures and their prominent groups, my impression is that they fall into what I described.
Seems there's an appealing aspect to it that's about being able to be the most cut throat, dirty capitalist where ends justify the means, and where you can feel good about being filthy rich off the back of everyone else, because you'll be efficiently altruistic in donating some of it back.
Feels there's a dimension to it that seems to justify taking from the poor to give to the poorer, while keeping a cut for yourself.
The EA advice is that if you're good at something valuable, then the best strategy for being charitable is to do that valuable thing and then donate your money. Do you think it's incompatible with humility to believe that you're good at something valuable? I don't think there's any notion of "thinking of yourself as better" baked in here.
If by "capitalist", you mean the system that incentivized the most selfish assholes on the planet to accidentally lift billions of people out of poverty, then I agree.
> This also always felt very American. I'll get rich by paying workers poorly...
The median American gets paid more than their counterparts in all but a couple countries. When you account for the population size and diversity of America, it's a statistical miracle how well Americans get paid.
EA and capitalism focus on efficiency and not virtue. You can't substitute being unvirtuous with being hyper-efficient, and I don't think anyone is going to argue otherwise. There's an argument to be made that efficiency is crowding out virtue, especially when it comes to capitalism, but even then I think you're significantly overestimating this effect. I don't think this same argument can be applied to EA. Overall, I think it inspires rationalist-obsessing nerds to be more interested in virtuous behavior. One of them happens to be me. Another, happens to be a billionaire scam artist.
I work in tech and definitely make more than I need. I work for a small company (and don't even have any employees under me) so I'd at least like to think that I'm not that involved in exploiting people in order to make money.
Now the question that I have is what do I do with the excess money I'm making, especially since I do actually agree with you about the not accumulating wealth part. One option is of course spending a lot of time analysing charities to figure out which one I think would be the best to donate to, but while I'm still not completely ruling it out, I feel like that would make analysing charities almost a part time job. Since at least at the moment i don't want to do that, I still settled on donating based on GiveWell's recommendations, essentially outsourcing the charities analysis. I am aware that GiveWell and I probably don't share 100% of our values, but I truly don't see a better option.
So really, if you, or anyone else, has a better idea of what I can do with the excess money I'm making, I'd be more than happy to listen.
What.
The stereotypical EA person is a banker who makes $150k/year after tax and donates $100k/year to the against malaria foundation. As opposed to the lawyer who quits working for corporate and becomes a gardner, which seems to be what you're advocating.
The former seems to do far more good in the world, saving hundreds of young lives.
Either that or just confusion about what and/or who we are talking about.
EA is not a well defined set of concepts or ideas. I do know a lot of people who identify as EA and have argued for "earn-to-give" where the giving part is deferred far into the future.
I won't spur the confusion further but my own personal experience is that there are several people I have personally met who more closely match the parents description than the description you give.
I'm all for earn-to-give if you are doing the giving soon and to causes where the outcomes are easier to measure, like what you mentioned. This is very commendable.
Where EA-style thinking runs into trouble is where it places excess confidence in future predictions
either A) I will eventually donate this money B) This cause I'm donating to has no obvious impact now, but it will have immense impact in the future or C) Even though I can't see all the negative impacts my work is having, my prediction/inference is that the negative impacts will be smaller than the positive impacts of my altruism.
So I have nothing against the idea of trying to maximize good, I just think that I frequently see it used in conjunction with excessively high-confidence predictions or inferences.
In your case, I think it's important that the banker do some sort of accounting of whether he is having a negative impact on their current project/firm etc. There are bankers who have had a huge negative impact in the past and so this does need to be part of the accounting.
I guess the example is incomplete, the banker also contributes to some system in a way, is the work harmful to others?
And if the work is beneficial, they're still part of a system where, why are they taking such a large salary in the first place?
Now, I'm actually not opposed to this form of EA. Like the other commenter said, donating money is fine, it's choosing to become a banker and trying to become the highest paid banker in history, so that you can then go and donate a larger sum of that income that I find problematic.
The latter form of EA seems wrong to me, because the idea that you'll take more money from people, to then personally decide who else you'll give it back too and how much of it you'll keep for yourself or not, that does not seem altruistic.
Instead I wish that people adopted a moral where making excessively more than others, or owning excessively more things than others was just seen as wrong to begin with. If you don't need more than 100k, then just charge less for your services, or pay your employees and staff more, or heck accept higher tax brackets and give more back to fund social institutions and infrastructure.
Am I reading this wrong or are you saying that the government is the most efficient form of charity?
Most drugs go to market with the idea of being effective, e.g. treating as many people / conditions as possible. This leads to a problem that most people deal with a slightly different problem from the next person, so you just end up with large groups of small numbers of people who are essentially overlooked, because they're not profitable enough to make a drug or treatment for. This class is called "orphan drugs"
Yes, this is mostly "how the industry / capitalism" works, but that's the point. By measuring how effective altruism is, and by only doing the things that are most effective, you'll essentially end up with many "orphan" categories at the end.
There are many other equally good (and often conflicting) possible goals: sufficiency, diversity, happiness, regret, etc.
The current economy focuses on efficiency because it’s about infinite capital accumulation using finite resources, and that’s what benefits the people at the helm.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/01/17/5095068...
For example, a large non-profit can't explicitly lobby congress to ban sex education in schools. But, they can go around and "buy out" small non-profits into fulfilling their agenda. This is usually pretty easy to do because small non-profits are almost always cash-starved, and it can be really hard to say "no" when some outside figure is willing to provide a massive percentage of your operating budget in perpetuity in exchange for avoiding certain topics (like mutual consent) in schools.
This very scenario happened to an acquaintance of mine. She wanted to teach consent in schools after the #metoo scandal, spent 2 years grinding to improve access to consent-based communication for kids and then someone offered her obscene money under the condition that she make tweaks (i.e. "don't talk about consent in school because that will encourage children to have sex", that kind of stuff). She took the money because she saw a way out of needing hustle so hard for cash, but of course she sold her soul at the end and regretted it.
And none of those interactions ever get recorded. Nobody is tracking what big non-profits and charitable funds ask (or demand) others to do, and they get to market themselves as doing good for the world. I'm sure some of them are, and I'm sure there are tons of well-meaning people working for some of them, but that world was so much darker than I ever imagined, at least from the periphery.
For example, consider a simple animal rescue non-profit. While it may on its surface just seem like "this organization should just exist to try to find homes for pets needing adoption", it's actually more helpful to look at a more fundamental question: "What causes animals to be put up for adoption in the first place." It turns out that in most states there are a host of systemic, government-caused problems that are directly responsible for the reasons why many people need to surrender their pets to shelters in the first place. So yes, the animal rescue non-profit is still in the day-to-day business of finding homes for homeless animals, I would say a good organization would actually do more to try to change the status quo and fix the root cause problem, and that often intersects with government policy.
Forget about tracking, the people paying even get a tax deduction.
Well, if there are no written agreements - take the money and do your thing anyway, then?
> This disillusionment was partly because the community expends so much effort raising money for the proliferation of institutes and think-tanks that host its most prominent thinkers.
> Open Philanthropy, a foundation that Dustin Moskovitz helped to create, funds 80,000 Hours (over $10m since 2017),
Is this the same 80,000 hours as https://80000hours.org/? A self help guide and a job board? Listing Sam Bankman-Fried as the #1 anecdote? $10,000,000? Hm.
SBF isn't alone in this. In school, while interning for a competing hedge fund, I met a drove of Jane Street interns who thought exactly the same way, in terms of "EV" or expected value -- the mean outcome from a random event. For example, whenever we would go out for ice cream, they would try to flip a coin to see who pays, given the "expected cost" was same. This behavior is fine if you're a market maker betting 0.001% of your worth on a toss that you win 51% of the time, and I imagine this is why Jane Street tries to cultivate it. But unfortunately, in this hyperfocus on returns, they forgot that "risk"/"variance" exists, and sometimes flipping a coin will land you in such a deep hole that you can't continue to play the game long enough to dig yourself out of there.
You can read some thoughts by the man himself here, which flies in the face of all such work (Kelly bets, etc.) in variance minimization: https://nitter.net/SBF_FTX/status/1337250686870831107
It’s a little long for an HN tagline but it’ll do.
He just doesn't seem very good at managing risk in the real world. If you spend any time at an investment bank or similar where you do a lot of trading, there are just hundreds of "gotchas" that those institutions are aware of and manage (or they aren't and don't and go bankrupt eventually).
There are lots of fields like this in the real world, just lots of gotchas. He didn't seem to understand that. I'd bet Jane Street understands this at the org level, but the younger folks likely just see a little bit of the whole picture, and have a lot of theory.
personally i think if you're making big bets/one-offs, you probably should be computing something like minimax trees for all the possible outcomes before making a choice and maybe adjust the bet size such that the worst case is something you can swallow.
This problem is usually considered from the other angle: if variance is high but the odds are unfavorable you should favor fewer bigger bets over many smaller bets. Why? Because the more bets you make the more likely you are to converge onto the expectation. A single big bet leaves you either running way over expectation or slightly under it. All of this assumes that you have to bet though, the safest thing to do with negative expectation is to just not bet.
His example is unusual in that it has positive expectation (so you want to bet) and high variance (because you’re limited to a single bet). f(x) = 0b or 10000b so the single sample has a mean of 5000 and a variance of 50,000,000 but the E[f(x)] is 7500. A bigger than Kelly bet is rational here but if you had unlimited (or a large number of) bets you should revert to Kelly.
Food for thought.
Who knew Judas was the good guy this whole time?
But yeah it applied to 30 pieces of silver as well.
However, I don’t think that precludes using a kind of utilitarianism where you just kinda fudge over that “there isn’t a canonical way of adding these” bit, in order to produce something which can be a rather good heuristic for “does this provide more or less help to people than that?”.
Like, yes, you can’t really add utilities, but if you value helping people, you can consider how much you value different people getting different amounts of different kinds of help, and if you pretend that this is the same thing as “the utility you provide them”, then you can add up how much you value the individual things and assume that how much you value the stuff adds linearly. And, in some cases, morality should presumably impose some constraints regarding how much you should value providing one sort of help in some quantity to some person or persons, compared to how much you value providing some other kind of help in some quantity to some other person(s).
And so, while I don’t think utilitarianism is true exactly, I think it likely that morality probably demands something which in some ways looks at least a little bit like utilitarianism? Though there are still cases where it is important to recognize that utilitarianism can lead one astray.
Good listen: https://pca.st/episode/61ba0858-0eac-4a92-91a3-9fbbacc49e69
Please stop repackaging the same garbage and calling it new.
So was there any of that… that made getting into crypto or AI a good idea?
What was the math there?
I’ve seen effective altruism mentioned on HN before and I don’t really understand how it turns into directing people to jobs or specific tech… at all.
I feel like if you’re trying to help people the moment you mix your business in it, now you have conflicts of interest.
EA is best as as critique of the narcissism of most wealthy western ‘altruism’. But all this mixing of billionaires, crypto, and long-termism has reintroduced narcissism into the community.
Each of us, individually, pursuing our own self-interests produce value to society and others as a whole. Whether through producing products, offering services, performing labor, or consuming goods, we all seek our own interests to the betterment of the whole.
EA is just a new sort of chivalry for a new wannabe class of Nobles. That's it.
No it doesn't. I'm content to outsource my charitable decision-making to recommenders that I think align with my values. A competitor is free to come along and convince me that they'd make a better recommendation and I'll shift my money accordingly, just like buying any other product. They can even skim a bit off the top if I really trust them and give to their funds! That's the invisible hand.
By the way, a charity quite popular in mainstream Effective Altruism is Give Directly - which aims to avoid trying to figure out what poor people need by giving them cash.
Smelly, dead hands, liberal
> fossil fuel
Polluting, dead hands, liberal
> buy sell meat
Greasy, dead hands, liberal
On good terms I would have permitted the fossil fuel claim, but in the context of the others I'd rather be a militant.
Lots of parallels here beyond the obvious common thread of utilitarian collectivism:
- Censorship: the concept of "infohazards" is super-popular https://nickbostrom.com/information-hazards.pdf https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/information-hazards
- Social control + the creation of an 'other': They are absolutely convinced that sentient AGI will inevitably kill everyone without any real evidence. However, if we manage to create sentient AGI, what these guys plan to do with it is best described as modern slavery https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/ai-boxing-containment#:~:text=...
- Surveillance: They justify it using Bostrom's "vulnerable world hypothesis": https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf?platform=hoots... (TFA also discusses it well)
- Desire for government power: TFA is super clear about that. More interestingly, here's the FTX Future Fund on space governance: "We’d love to see workshops or a mock constitutional convention where sharp people think hard about how to structure international governance institutions for the long-term future, or how to govern space settlement. As explained in more detail on our areas of interest page, we believe that the onset of space settlement could be a watershed moment in human history. We want people to start thinking about how it should work." https://ftxfuturefund.org/projects/alternative-voting-system...
Also: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/space-governance/
- Entryism/influence operations: Pretty much every career profile on 80,000 Hours encourages taking a job at government agencies/influential private organizations to push the EA agenda https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/
Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk. No one with morals and a spine should fear this. (FWIW, the same justification of fearing retribution by an evil power for refusing to collaborate could be used by people in occupied countries who collaborated with the Nazis.)
I mean, maybe sorta.. the eschatology is far more interesting with EA, at least.
Hence the obsession with AI safety - Christians just have to work to bring Christ's kingdom to where they are. The EAs have to make sure nobody summons a vengeful demon overlord while they're slowly crafting their own all-loving, all-powerful digital deity.
What’s better than picking individual charities based on utility? Charity index funds. Also known as social democratic governments that collect taxes.
Well yes, but in the absence (or inadequacy) of such government action for causes you care about, doesn't it make sense to donate to the charities that most effectively do the thing you care about?
That conclusion does not follow. Why do you think a social democratic government has any focus on the utility of its work?
The more material argument is whether from an EA perspective running massive scams and funneling the proceeds to EA causes should be applauded or not. Obviously the fact that this discussion is even being surfaced will cause brand damage, but again it says nothing to which perspective is correct, just that these discussions are subject to optics-based constraints. It's like the open discussions in the rationalist community over whether various horrible civilizational collapses happening to humanity might actually be desirable because it will prevent (or at least delay) an AI from killing us. There's serious discussions but it never plays well to bring this to a "normie" audience. But pretty much every movement has its Straussian elements where the "insider" narratives contradict the "outsider" narratives.
Is that really the material argument? It seems obvious to this normie that the answer ought to be "hell no".
Yes, by application only. Because the near-intuitive next step in thinking is that, heck, we can’t all be the comfortable one, someone has got to be the person getting their hands dirty incrementally adding to all of those QALY’s and clearly They’re too enlightened in understanding this to be the one living uncomfortably with dirty hands.
So the mathematical inevitability is there needs to be some gate keeping, and why shouldn’t it be the people who realized that also make the decisions about access?
Self serving, self reinforcing bullshit. Probably a mixture of honest good intentions and rationalizing of guilt for being better off than others.
The modern age makes it just about impossible to not be aware of a lot of awful crap in the world, so it’s no surprise that some of the current generation, finding themselves at or adjacent to the pinnacle of wealth and opportunity through some admixture of at least a little ability and a lot of good fortune and circumstance and some degree— large or small— of actual empathy, become plagued by the cognitive dissonance. By living so well but knowing that right this moment countless people are at the absolute opposite most desperate and miserable end of that spectrum, many soon to be dead, many dead just in the time it took me to type this.
Maybe I have it easier, cognitive dissonance wise, by virtue of having just a little of my formative years that 1) preceded a time when easy knowledge of the systemic awfulness of much of the world was unavoidable before a person hit a double-digit age and 2) Had a fair bit of personal awfulness in them as well. awfulness that was, in terms of the world wide range, still thankfully minor but enough that the dissonance is small.
So it’s no surprise that a somewhat cliquish group of the generation around the cultural/economic/academic centers of the world that, even just by virtue of their location, afford a great deal of opportunity have come up with a line of thinking that justifies their place in the world.
My hope is that an extra decade or two of experience and living and seeing how consequences play out slices off some critical mass of those folks who are a bit more self aware. At least enough to recognize that figuring out how to live your life as a decent person isn’t always going to be a problem that’s algorithmicaly or mathematically solvable.
Because I’d really prefer the next crop of people who find themselves in positions of wealth, power, and influence— again through some combination of (hopefully) a little merit and a lot of good fortune and circumstance… well, I’d prefer them to not be well intentioned but tragically arrogant assholes trying to figure out things like:
Is it better to suffer the inconvenience of saving the fleeing refugee on my doorstep? Or should I instead work an extra hour or two a month in order to earn a calculated incremental bonus in pay that might be donated to a cause that might be able to save 10 refugees?
I don’t want people in positions of power and influence to think that is, in any way, an interesting or worthwhile question to pursue as a mature intellectual use of their brain power rather than a shitty waste of time.
It really, really, is not hard to see where applying quasi mathematical calculation will get you when you start weighing hypothetical future lives against the resources directed today towards various EA projects.
Anything can be justified when you’re trying to do mathematical ethics against vastly unlikely but catastrophically bad scenarios, all while ignoring the fact that if you don’t address the “right now” systemic and intractable problems we’ll get to much more likely existential crisis long before we have to worry about runaway ai-complete malevolent entities causing harm.
And that is actually an apt example— there is a certain amount of overlap between the EAS movement and the rational discussion communities that came up the idea of Roko’s Basilisk.