I keep seeing takes like this, but the effect EA has had on my life so far is that it gave me motivation and an easy framework to donate thousands of dollars a year to fund deworming, vaccination, and other direct relief in underdeveloped countries, for two years in a row. I honestly had no idea who SBF was until FTX melted down. I saw zero connection between EA and Musk, Trump, etc.
Was I duped? I don't think so. SBF's downfall has definitely shaken my confidence in EA as a trustworthy institution, but I still generally feel great about those donations and will likely repeat them again next year (albeit with a closer look at exactly how the funds are distributed).
As with many things, it easier and more fun to disparage movements than it is to get involved and make positive change. This article is a good example of that.
Speaking as somebody who isnt into EA, I assure you most of the people criticizing EA havent donated a dime or spent a single minute volunteering. Everybody talks the talk about how to charity but nobody walks the walk
If I want to criticize a cult do I need to join it or try on their beliefs first? Seems like no to me? It feels like you are trying to point out a hypocrisy that isn't there, the authors weren't correcting the movement on 'how to charity,' but rather problematic behaviors encoded into the group's mode of operation.
GP is not saying you have to join EA to criticize it. They are saying that you should probably try volunteering or giving a signiciant fraction of your excess income to charity before criticizing.
It's not "joining the cult", unless you consider altruism as a whole to be the cult.
>that a person/movement/concept is judged by those associated with it, instead of on its own.
This seems a bit odd... the issues happened within the context of the group's activities and the problems were shielded by EA. This is like suggesting the Catholic Church had nothing to do with child abuse and we should only blame the priests.
There is no HR department or board of quality assurance for effective altruism: it's like Spiderman fandom: the only qualification for becoming a fan of Spiderman is saying that you are a fan of Spiderman. The other Spiderman fans have no way to kick you out of the fandom. EA is more like Spiderman fandom than it is like priesthood in the Catholic Church.
At least in the Bay Area, I heard that the people who regularly organize in-person events will refuse entry to certain men who have a history of preying on women, but really there is no way to prevent those men or anyone else from persisting in publicly proclaiming that they are effective altruists.
If a web site owner misbehaves, no one concludes that the misbehavior reflects poorly on all the other web site owners because everyone understands that there is no way for the other web site owners to eject the misbehaving owner from their ranks. The fact that some of these web site owners are in fact very wealthy and own buildings is not relevant.
Similarly, effectivealtruism.org is just one non-profit in an ecosystem of dozens and does not own the trademark "effective altruism" or "effective altruist" (which might give it some ability to control how the trademark is used or by whom it is used).
> The fact that some of these web site owners are in fact very wealthy and own buildings is not relevant.
You're overgeneralizing too far. This is like saying just because a church has a building doesn't mean they are an organization. The building was purchased with the expressed intent of being used for the group. It appears you trying to suggest there are weak ties where there are actually strong ones. These people all know each other and shared ideas.
more like: just because a church is an organization, it doesn't mean that every christian believer is a member of that organization. like there is no requirement to be a member of a church to practice christianity, there is no requirement to be a member of any EA organization to practice EA.
correct. and bad people doing EA or bad people doing EA badly doesn't make EA bad.
I'm not a huge fan of EA, but I'm sick of seeing HN and EA endorse tribalism by saying that all Christians this or all Republicans this or all white people that or all rich people that....
As someone who doesn't have the resources: of course I don't.
But I also don't want the markets dictated by the whims of some dissociated jackoff arrogantly and ineffectively disbursing obscene amounts of money, and certainly not with the momentum of some centralized institution. I need cheaper food and cheaper rent and cheaper utilities prices to be able to effectively act as an altruist - you have to take care of yourself before you can take care of others - and when all of the resources are being siphoned off and distributed to the top, myself and millions of others simply lack the capacity.
And if many hands makes for little work, doesn't that give way to a more effective framework than a handful of people controlling affecting altruism? I reckon so.
Not to mention the whole free market thesis being wholly disrupted by the shrinkage of the middle class in developed nations, leaving the have-nots subordinated to the haves and ever more preoccupied with just getting by.
Well maybe I'm in the minority then, but I donate monthly to a number of charities and causes and I think Effective Altruism is obvious bunk created by grifters.
I also think I should be taxed more and more taxes should be used for social programs and welfare, I'm certainly not best positioned to decide the most effective use of my money.
You do you, and please don’t take this as a complaint about altruism per se. But making one feel good is often considered the most important (and most effective) part of effective altruism.
The stated goals put it (warm fuzzies donation) at less important than being effective (but still required so you don't burn out). So to the first order, your comment is incorrect.
However, perhaps you meant something more like "Ea trains you to be happy with making donations which which are more 'effective'", which would be true. And maybe a touch of pride/smugness for having figured it out.
Glad it's worked out for you. But if you had been inspired to take charitable action by, say, being born again in evangelical christianity, should people abstain from pointing out the problems with that institution? And does every article critical of such an institution need to be tempered with praise to satisfy those who have not experienced its dark side or who disagree with the premise?
But is EA an institution? It seems to me like a big-tent philosophy; anybody (honest or dishonest) can declare themselves an adherent, and while there are several organizations that have set themselves up within the umbrella, there's nobody conferring official titles.
I can't speak for the original commenter, but I would definitely have similar concerns about an article called "Evangelical Christianity Is A Welter of Lies, Hypocrisy, and Eugenic Fantasies". If you're trying to impartially inform people about what's going on in a particular movement, or argumentatively convince people sympathetic to the movement that they're wrong about it, it doesn't seem like a helpful framing. (It is, of course, a great framing if your goal is to dunk on people your readers don't like.)
What happens in the EA is pretty much exactly a mirror of what happens in churches. The good and the bad. I hope it will serve to illustrate how we all are human and will react similarly in similar environments.
Both function as a 'we are the good people' mask for bad behaviors. I don't think it's necessarily human to join and protect groups that function as whitewashing.
I may be missing sarcasm here, but isn't the lower case version just altruism? The kind where you just do good stuff for people and don't brand it or advertise it?
Altruism is just any kind of selfless helping of others. The "effective" part means thinking about how to do more good with limited resources; ie does a marginal dollar spent on cancer research do as much good as a dollar spent on malaria control.
Not everyone wants to do the math themselves so there's some communication involved in sharing that research.
And as with any cause, outreach can be very productive as well. Unless you're so wealthy that you think you can solve the world's problems all by yourself, you might find it worthwhile to spend some time on advocacy.
>Altruism is just any kind of selfless helping of others. The "effective" part means thinking about how to do more good with limited resources; ie does a marginal dollar spent on cancer research do as much good as a dollar spent on malaria control.
It seems like an unnecessary qualifier. E.g. I could make up 'effective frugality' but the efficiency factor of frugality is already implied. Nobody out there is pushing 'ineffective altruism' either. The effective branding seems like it is simply putting on a layer of ideology and/or branding over the existing term in order to sell it.
I've never before encountered a literature that explicitly prioritized careful analysis of one's charitable giving, centered around a universal metric like EA has. A lot of charity centers around other things, like making an impact on one's local community, or donating to the memory of a loved one who suffered from heart disease, or something like that.
Those are all good in their own way, but EA is very much a branch in its own direction away from that, and I think it's worth having some kind of qualifier to specify in what way EA is philosophically different.
At the bottom of it, how is it philosophically different?
Everyone who engages in altruism is trying to further a goal. Everyone thinks that the more effective their actions in pursuing that goal, the better. Is that really different than ea (not EA)?
It seems to me that the difference is more about strategy than philosophy.
if you are making an impact on your local community then you are being effective. research on heart disease is most likely effective too, like any research that actually advances our knowledge.
I'm apparently struggling to make the point that this is not necessarily true. Not every charity is built around achieving an objective with analytic efficiency.
I've seen countless efforts to "fight" climate change by very feel-good but ineffective methods, like... spending thousands of dollars on algae sculptures for an art museum. Effective altruism brings the effectiveness to the forefront as an explicit priority. Like, are there other things we could do for a thousand dollars that might have a million times bigger impact on CO2?
A lot of people really don't think about that, or at least don't treat it as a priority. And some charities are even happy to tread water forever while never engaging with solving a problem, just to maintain the status quo and the need for that charity.
i get you now, and i agree. these feel-good activities are obviously not effective, but to me that also means that they don't have an impact either, unless you count making people feel good as impact. in other words i see impact and being effective as closely related. i guess my point was that the examples you used at first were not the kind of bad examples that you give now. at least to me.
i see having local impact as something very important. but i have not looked very closely at EA yet, and maybe EA does not consider that, i don't know.
There's a context mismatch context here. EA is offering a philosophy of altruism. Where as most charities are organizations that put donations into direct action of some kind. These are different aims. It's a bit disingenuous to suggest that charities that aren't as efficient as others are pushing "ineffective altruism" unless they are literally scams.
> ... but the effect EA has had on my life so far is that it gave me motivation and an easy framework to donate thousands of dollars a year to fund deworming, vaccination, and other direct relief in underdeveloped countries
TFA literally explains how a $18m donation with stolen money was used by the EA movement to buy a lavish mansion.
TFA also explains of the EA movement was lauding SBF for driving in a beaten up Toyota Corolla even though they fully knew he was living in a $40m luxury mansion in the Bahamas while flying private.
What makes you think most of the money you donate to such gurus actually end up to charitable causes ?
If you want to donate, donate directly to charitable causes instead of donating to obvious charlatans.
The EA movement tarnished its reputation by being accomplice in defrauding people's money in the FTX scam.
They played the "SBF is an altruistic genius driving a Toyota Corolla" card while they knew it wasn't true and people fell for it.
Turns out: there was no altruistic genius. And that's a decision of justice: guilty on seven criminal counts.
Maybe "EA" should be renamed "EC": "Effective Criminals"?
GP was defending EA even though TFA clearly explains how stolen money by SBF was used to buy a $16 mansion in the UK by the EA movement, all the while knowing SBF was living a lavish lifestyle but presenting him as an altruistic genius.
In other words: GP's comment defends EA without taking into account the facts shown in TFA.
Article is BS, that money wasn't stolen. The decision making behind the purchase was transparant. Furthering the cause of EA itself was a goal of the specific fund from which they drew that money [1]. It gives them a place to have big nice conferences, which drives donations which will well exceed $16M.
Anyway, I didn't donate to that fund. I donated to the Global Dev fund [2]. If you donated to fund [1], then you knew your money would be spent on stuff like conferences.
Prior to ~2021 or so, I felt that many if not most in the EA community not only wanted to donate their money in the manner that most effectively saved lives, but also donate as much of their money as they could while still avoiding relative poverty. So many were extremely frugal, living in small homes or apartments, donating as much money as they could afford to purchase mosquito nets, vaccines, and deworming medication for others, as well as many donating one of their kidneys to strangers, all things I think most would find commendable.
Billionaires who live luxurious lifestyles and donate to prevent AI catastrophes was not something I was aware of at all prior to ~2021. I'm not sure how that ever became part of the movement.
In fact, longtermism in general wasn't something I was aware of until sometime around then. Purchasing mosquito nets, vaccines, and deworming medication has a demonstrable impact for saving lives and objectively reduces human suffering. In contrast, while AI, nuclear warfare, etc. can indeed kill billions, donating to those charities has absolutely no demonstrable impact. It's possible it has an impact, but it is near impossible to prove.
GiveWell states the following:
> GiveWell evaluates potential top charities along four main criteria: (1) Effectiveness, as supported by evidence the program the charity is implementing saves or improves lives; (2) cost-effectiveness, or how much ‘bang for the buck’ the charity offers in terms of lives saved or improved per donation; (3) room for more funding, or the charity’s ability to put additional donations to use; and (4) transparency.
So certain charities likely do save lives, but would never be recommended by GiveWell because they aren't transparent enough to verify that. There has to be concrete proof in order to get a recommendation, which is a perfectly reasonable decision on their part, and something I thought was the felt among all in the EA community until I heard some advocating for charities to reduce the chances of AI catastrophes and nuclear warfare, but those people always felt like a fringe part of the community until they started getting more news coverage.
I'm not condemning longtermism outright, I think those who with the appropriate skills should work towards reducing the likelihood of nuclear warfare and AI induced disasters, but I don't see how it could possibly be considered "effective" altruism to donate money to charities tackling those issues considering we have not the slightest clue as to whether it's effective.
In a world where people die of preventable and curable diseases because governments choose not to spend more (or more effectively) on foreign aid, I absolutely believe it is critical that people take responsibility for saving those that they can. If I see someone drowning at the beach, I'm not going to say "Well I'm not going to save them because the government didn't pay for lifeguards." Sure, they probably should have, but at the end of the day someone is living or dying based on my decision: I'm going to try to save them. The same is true for those dying of malaria, neglected tropical diseases and malnutrition: yes, I believe governments should take responsibility for those issues, but they haven't, and if I don't donate what I can, more people will die. Hundreds of thousands die each year from malaria and NTDs and millions from malnutrition. While I'm not remotely capable of solving those issues, I absolutely am capable of saving some of those people, which certainly has an enormous impact on those I can save (also, while hundreds of thousands die from malaria each year, millions suffer from it but survive, so not only can reduce death but also pain.) I think trying to get more people to donate to charities that are demonstrably effective at saving lives is extremely important. With the "Effective Altruism" movement now including stuff like longtermism, as well as having its reputati...
It's a wonder that obnoxious hit pieces like this still get made in this day and age. The first paragraph is filled with disingenuous strawman rhetoric.
> colonize space, plunder the vast resources of the cosmos
The author obviously tries to draw a parallel between inter-earth colonization and plundering to make longtermism and by proxy AE look bad.
I'm not an EA but I've never met people more receptive to criticism as they are. This is a group of people, uniting around a desire to do good, actually going through with it, and somehow catching a huge amount of flak for it.
Think of all the poor unsuspecting stars! Have we not drained enough heat from our own already? When will plants learn to stop appropriating energy that isn't theirs to take?
EA sounds rational and wonderful. And it does make sense. We should follow our logic to its rational conclusions. Our moral intuitions are obviously wrong a lot - just look at the trolley problem. With reason we can do better.
The problem is that it quickly becomes an invitation to ideas like longtermism. Which involve long chains of potentially flawed reasoning, leading to the belief that you're doing tremendous good. And with confirmation bias making it hard for you to doubt your logic, leading to an unbounded potential for error.
As the old moral goes, "Nobody is as easy to fool as a person who wants to fool himself."
This problem is not original to EA. The history of the 20th century is full of potential utopias. On the basis of the end justifies the means, the prospect of infinite good justifies unlimited harm. Unlimited harm came in the form of wars, famines, and mass repression. But the utopian futures never materialized.
That said, there is a lot of good to the idea of EA. It is better to do something effective than to virtue signal. But we should also be biased towards wins we can be more sure are real. Things that are short term and concrete. The more distant and hard to measure the win, the more that we should bias ourselves to the belief that we're missing something.
It's the old debate between rationalism and empiricism again.
"Rational" is a dangerous word. On the surface, it sounds like "smart". But if you take rationalism to the extreme, it becomes epistemological opposition to evidence. You build mental models and make logical conclusions without considering if the conclusions are also valid in the real world.
Scientific worldview is closer to empiricism than rationalism. You start by assuming that your mental models are wrong. They may still be useful, but you have to make observations and experiments and consider the evidence to determine that.
Effective altruism is a useful concept. It only becomes problematic once you get too deep into rationalism. The effectiveness of your altruism is fundamentally an empirical question, and it should be answered by empirical means rather than by reasoning.
Yeah. The trouble with as the dictionary has it "the practice or principle of basing opinions and actions on reason and knowledge" is what are you basing it on? Why are we here? What's the purpose of life. The answer to those is basically don't know, and they you build your reasoning on top of that.
However common sense "be nice to people" etc kind of works.
> The problem is that it quickly becomes an invitation to ideas like longtermism. Which involve long chains of potentially flawed reasoning, leading to the belief that you're doing tremendous good. And with confirmation bias making it hard for you to doubt your logic, leading to an unbounded potential for error.
We haven't been reading the same article I think for you've got an extremely gentle take on this.
TFA specifically how the "poster boy" of the EA movement bought its way into having a best-seller by using $10m of stolen money gifted by FTX to propel his book ("based on marketing, not merit" according to TFA) and how that same person bought a $16m 15th century mansion in the UK using stolen FTX money.
All the while they were presenting SBF as an "altruistic genius driving a Toyota Corolla" while they fully knew he was living an ultra-lavish lifestyle.
It's now a fact that SBF is a criminal and the EA movement still hasn't given the ill-acquired donations from SBF back.
I hope that John J. Ray III (the person who was in charge of the EA liquidation and now the FTX liquidation) goes after that mansion in the UK and manages to claw money back from the EA movement. There's hope though as 15 years after the Enron scam money was still clawed back.
While there were bad actors within the EA movement, I don't believe that most involved with EA were truly aware of the level of hypocrisy that you're discussing.
People love to make quasi-religions by introducing flawed premises or arguments early in the reasoning process and then proceeding to build a massive superstructure on top of that. People see this gigantic tower of stuff builded on flawed premises and assume it must be legit.
A clever religion founder probably engineered the thing from end to beginning where they found the conclusion they wanted and then worked their way back through their argument to see where they could sneak in a flawed premise or argument to make it work.
What should matter is how many lives are lost and how many are saved.
But the trolley problem shows that in practice we care more about whether we were the one to throw a switch than the cost in human lives of our decision.
We had a class of about 30 engineers nearly give an arts ethics professor a nervous breakdown. The entire class went the obvious choice of flipping the switch to kill the one person. She just couldn't get her head around how we all had no issue.
Pretty simple, 1<5, and taking no action has no material difference to taking an action. It's a choice either way.
The philosophical question is, what's the discount rate on moral decisions? Is saving 2 lives in 10 years better than saving one life now? It's the trolley problem over time. What should that number be? And who gets to set it?
Optimal values for young people are higher than those for old people.
The problem with "effective altruism" is much simpler. Most of the people behind it were crooks.
The article is focused almost entirely on personal drama and no attempt is really made to refute the central tenets of EA.
I think a lot of people find the concept of EA morally threatening. Their natural reaction is to want to "take those people down a peg" because they perceive EA as an incursion on the moral high ground. I think this tendency is more pronounced among the left. Rather than discuss "how can we do good and get the best bang for buck and is this movement doing that?" they'll focus on people they think have illegitimately gained status and pillory them.
I think the EA "brand" should be more careful to avoid this very natural "crab bucket" type of moral backlash. IMHO a good start would be to de-emphasise "high flyers" and direct focus towards the many unpretentious people who do their best to do "a little good".
The author of the article isn't playing fair. He opens with SBF's downfall and then says even without that, there are so many reason EA is suspect. But then he keeps reintroducing SBF into the narrative, and conflates the billions that SBF swindled with the millions he gave to EA, shading it to seem that the total amount was dirty EA money.
He also says things like, "leading EAs were spending large sums of money on Oxfordshire palaces". One is bad enough and I don't fully trust his reporting on it when he blithely claims that that multiple palaces were bought.
I've recommended "The Life You Can Save" to multiple people because the book had a great impact on me. Most of the things being claimed critics make of EA sound completely alien to me, such as justifying getting filthy rich because at some point you will be giving half of it away. I'm sure people use EA in that way, but does EA promote that view? In the same way, the eugenics movement try to hijack the theory of evolution to justify behavior that the theory itself says nothing about.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 42.6 ms ] threadWas I duped? I don't think so. SBF's downfall has definitely shaken my confidence in EA as a trustworthy institution, but I still generally feel great about those donations and will likely repeat them again next year (albeit with a closer look at exactly how the funds are distributed).
As with many things, it easier and more fun to disparage movements than it is to get involved and make positive change. This article is a good example of that.
no, but you should investigate the claims and verify that the criticism is fair.
It's not "joining the cult", unless you consider altruism as a whole to be the cult.
And there's a sickness in our society, that a person/movement/concept is judged by those associated with it, instead of on its own.
This seems a bit odd... the issues happened within the context of the group's activities and the problems were shielded by EA. This is like suggesting the Catholic Church had nothing to do with child abuse and we should only blame the priests.
At least in the Bay Area, I heard that the people who regularly organize in-person events will refuse entry to certain men who have a history of preying on women, but really there is no way to prevent those men or anyone else from persisting in publicly proclaiming that they are effective altruists.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33903850
Similarly, effectivealtruism.org is just one non-profit in an ecosystem of dozens and does not own the trademark "effective altruism" or "effective altruist" (which might give it some ability to control how the trademark is used or by whom it is used).
You're overgeneralizing too far. This is like saying just because a church has a building doesn't mean they are an organization. The building was purchased with the expressed intent of being used for the group. It appears you trying to suggest there are weak ties where there are actually strong ones. These people all know each other and shared ideas.
I'm not a huge fan of EA, but I'm sick of seeing HN and EA endorse tribalism by saying that all Christians this or all Republicans this or all white people that or all rich people that....
-rich white Republican Christian
But I also don't want the markets dictated by the whims of some dissociated jackoff arrogantly and ineffectively disbursing obscene amounts of money, and certainly not with the momentum of some centralized institution. I need cheaper food and cheaper rent and cheaper utilities prices to be able to effectively act as an altruist - you have to take care of yourself before you can take care of others - and when all of the resources are being siphoned off and distributed to the top, myself and millions of others simply lack the capacity.
And if many hands makes for little work, doesn't that give way to a more effective framework than a handful of people controlling affecting altruism? I reckon so.
Not to mention the whole free market thesis being wholly disrupted by the shrinkage of the middle class in developed nations, leaving the have-nots subordinated to the haves and ever more preoccupied with just getting by.
Poor people in underdeveloped nations also need help.
EA targets the latter need, but that does not invalidate the former need.
Unfortunately, people like SBF, who it'd be fair to consider enemies of the working class, associated themselves with EA and have tarnished the brand.
I also think I should be taxed more and more taxes should be used for social programs and welfare, I'm certainly not best positioned to decide the most effective use of my money.
The stated goals put it (warm fuzzies donation) at less important than being effective (but still required so you don't burn out). So to the first order, your comment is incorrect.
However, perhaps you meant something more like "Ea trains you to be happy with making donations which which are more 'effective'", which would be true. And maybe a touch of pride/smugness for having figured it out.
If the organization is truly bad, then facts will speak for themselves. IMO heavy editorialization is a sign of a weak argument.
Effective Altruists hijacked their original, not-terrible idea into a cult.
Not everyone wants to do the math themselves so there's some communication involved in sharing that research.
And as with any cause, outreach can be very productive as well. Unless you're so wealthy that you think you can solve the world's problems all by yourself, you might find it worthwhile to spend some time on advocacy.
It seems like an unnecessary qualifier. E.g. I could make up 'effective frugality' but the efficiency factor of frugality is already implied. Nobody out there is pushing 'ineffective altruism' either. The effective branding seems like it is simply putting on a layer of ideology and/or branding over the existing term in order to sell it.
Those are all good in their own way, but EA is very much a branch in its own direction away from that, and I think it's worth having some kind of qualifier to specify in what way EA is philosophically different.
Everyone who engages in altruism is trying to further a goal. Everyone thinks that the more effective their actions in pursuing that goal, the better. Is that really different than ea (not EA)?
It seems to me that the difference is more about strategy than philosophy.
I've seen countless efforts to "fight" climate change by very feel-good but ineffective methods, like... spending thousands of dollars on algae sculptures for an art museum. Effective altruism brings the effectiveness to the forefront as an explicit priority. Like, are there other things we could do for a thousand dollars that might have a million times bigger impact on CO2?
A lot of people really don't think about that, or at least don't treat it as a priority. And some charities are even happy to tread water forever while never engaging with solving a problem, just to maintain the status quo and the need for that charity.
i see having local impact as something very important. but i have not looked very closely at EA yet, and maybe EA does not consider that, i don't know.
https://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/28/celebrated-charities-th...
TFA literally explains how a $18m donation with stolen money was used by the EA movement to buy a lavish mansion.
TFA also explains of the EA movement was lauding SBF for driving in a beaten up Toyota Corolla even though they fully knew he was living in a $40m luxury mansion in the Bahamas while flying private.
What makes you think most of the money you donate to such gurus actually end up to charitable causes ?
If you want to donate, donate directly to charitable causes instead of donating to obvious charlatans.
The EA movement tarnished its reputation by being accomplice in defrauding people's money in the FTX scam.
They played the "SBF is an altruistic genius driving a Toyota Corolla" card while they knew it wasn't true and people fell for it.
Turns out: there was no altruistic genius. And that's a decision of justice: guilty on seven criminal counts.
Maybe "EA" should be renamed "EC": "Effective Criminals"?
In other words: GP's comment defends EA without taking into account the facts shown in TFA.
Article is BS, that money wasn't stolen. The decision making behind the purchase was transparant. Furthering the cause of EA itself was a goal of the specific fund from which they drew that money [1]. It gives them a place to have big nice conferences, which drives donations which will well exceed $16M.
Anyway, I didn't donate to that fund. I donated to the Global Dev fund [2]. If you donated to fund [1], then you knew your money would be spent on stuff like conferences.
[1] https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/ea-community
[2] https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/global-development
Billionaires who live luxurious lifestyles and donate to prevent AI catastrophes was not something I was aware of at all prior to ~2021. I'm not sure how that ever became part of the movement.
In fact, longtermism in general wasn't something I was aware of until sometime around then. Purchasing mosquito nets, vaccines, and deworming medication has a demonstrable impact for saving lives and objectively reduces human suffering. In contrast, while AI, nuclear warfare, etc. can indeed kill billions, donating to those charities has absolutely no demonstrable impact. It's possible it has an impact, but it is near impossible to prove.
GiveWell states the following:
> GiveWell evaluates potential top charities along four main criteria: (1) Effectiveness, as supported by evidence the program the charity is implementing saves or improves lives; (2) cost-effectiveness, or how much ‘bang for the buck’ the charity offers in terms of lives saved or improved per donation; (3) room for more funding, or the charity’s ability to put additional donations to use; and (4) transparency.
So certain charities likely do save lives, but would never be recommended by GiveWell because they aren't transparent enough to verify that. There has to be concrete proof in order to get a recommendation, which is a perfectly reasonable decision on their part, and something I thought was the felt among all in the EA community until I heard some advocating for charities to reduce the chances of AI catastrophes and nuclear warfare, but those people always felt like a fringe part of the community until they started getting more news coverage.
I'm not condemning longtermism outright, I think those who with the appropriate skills should work towards reducing the likelihood of nuclear warfare and AI induced disasters, but I don't see how it could possibly be considered "effective" altruism to donate money to charities tackling those issues considering we have not the slightest clue as to whether it's effective.
In a world where people die of preventable and curable diseases because governments choose not to spend more (or more effectively) on foreign aid, I absolutely believe it is critical that people take responsibility for saving those that they can. If I see someone drowning at the beach, I'm not going to say "Well I'm not going to save them because the government didn't pay for lifeguards." Sure, they probably should have, but at the end of the day someone is living or dying based on my decision: I'm going to try to save them. The same is true for those dying of malaria, neglected tropical diseases and malnutrition: yes, I believe governments should take responsibility for those issues, but they haven't, and if I don't donate what I can, more people will die. Hundreds of thousands die each year from malaria and NTDs and millions from malnutrition. While I'm not remotely capable of solving those issues, I absolutely am capable of saving some of those people, which certainly has an enormous impact on those I can save (also, while hundreds of thousands die from malaria each year, millions suffer from it but survive, so not only can reduce death but also pain.) I think trying to get more people to donate to charities that are demonstrably effective at saving lives is extremely important. With the "Effective Altruism" movement now including stuff like longtermism, as well as having its reputati...
> colonize space, plunder the vast resources of the cosmos
The author obviously tries to draw a parallel between inter-earth colonization and plundering to make longtermism and by proxy AE look bad.
I'm not an EA but I've never met people more receptive to criticism as they are. This is a group of people, uniting around a desire to do good, actually going through with it, and somehow catching a huge amount of flak for it.
The problem is that it quickly becomes an invitation to ideas like longtermism. Which involve long chains of potentially flawed reasoning, leading to the belief that you're doing tremendous good. And with confirmation bias making it hard for you to doubt your logic, leading to an unbounded potential for error.
As the old moral goes, "Nobody is as easy to fool as a person who wants to fool himself."
This problem is not original to EA. The history of the 20th century is full of potential utopias. On the basis of the end justifies the means, the prospect of infinite good justifies unlimited harm. Unlimited harm came in the form of wars, famines, and mass repression. But the utopian futures never materialized.
That said, there is a lot of good to the idea of EA. It is better to do something effective than to virtue signal. But we should also be biased towards wins we can be more sure are real. Things that are short term and concrete. The more distant and hard to measure the win, the more that we should bias ourselves to the belief that we're missing something.
known for ages* by the phrase "the end does not justify the means"
* exitus acta numquam probat
"Rational" is a dangerous word. On the surface, it sounds like "smart". But if you take rationalism to the extreme, it becomes epistemological opposition to evidence. You build mental models and make logical conclusions without considering if the conclusions are also valid in the real world.
Scientific worldview is closer to empiricism than rationalism. You start by assuming that your mental models are wrong. They may still be useful, but you have to make observations and experiments and consider the evidence to determine that.
Effective altruism is a useful concept. It only becomes problematic once you get too deep into rationalism. The effectiveness of your altruism is fundamentally an empirical question, and it should be answered by empirical means rather than by reasoning.
However common sense "be nice to people" etc kind of works.
We haven't been reading the same article I think for you've got an extremely gentle take on this.
TFA specifically how the "poster boy" of the EA movement bought its way into having a best-seller by using $10m of stolen money gifted by FTX to propel his book ("based on marketing, not merit" according to TFA) and how that same person bought a $16m 15th century mansion in the UK using stolen FTX money.
All the while they were presenting SBF as an "altruistic genius driving a Toyota Corolla" while they fully knew he was living an ultra-lavish lifestyle.
It's now a fact that SBF is a criminal and the EA movement still hasn't given the ill-acquired donations from SBF back.
I hope that John J. Ray III (the person who was in charge of the EA liquidation and now the FTX liquidation) goes after that mansion in the UK and manages to claw money back from the EA movement. There's hope though as 15 years after the Enron scam money was still clawed back.
A clever religion founder probably engineered the thing from end to beginning where they found the conclusion they wanted and then worked their way back through their argument to see where they could sneak in a flawed premise or argument to make it work.
I don't understand what I'm supposed to see in it. Could you clarify?
But the trolley problem shows that in practice we care more about whether we were the one to throw a switch than the cost in human lives of our decision.
Pretty simple, 1<5, and taking no action has no material difference to taking an action. It's a choice either way.
My favorite line of research involving this is using the trolley problem to get at hidden moral biases that we normally wouldn't admit to ourselves.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/given-the-choice-liber...
The problem with "effective altruism" is much simpler. Most of the people behind it were crooks.
I think a lot of people find the concept of EA morally threatening. Their natural reaction is to want to "take those people down a peg" because they perceive EA as an incursion on the moral high ground. I think this tendency is more pronounced among the left. Rather than discuss "how can we do good and get the best bang for buck and is this movement doing that?" they'll focus on people they think have illegitimately gained status and pillory them.
I think the EA "brand" should be more careful to avoid this very natural "crab bucket" type of moral backlash. IMHO a good start would be to de-emphasise "high flyers" and direct focus towards the many unpretentious people who do their best to do "a little good".
He also says things like, "leading EAs were spending large sums of money on Oxfordshire palaces". One is bad enough and I don't fully trust his reporting on it when he blithely claims that that multiple palaces were bought.
I've recommended "The Life You Can Save" to multiple people because the book had a great impact on me. Most of the things being claimed critics make of EA sound completely alien to me, such as justifying getting filthy rich because at some point you will be giving half of it away. I'm sure people use EA in that way, but does EA promote that view? In the same way, the eugenics movement try to hijack the theory of evolution to justify behavior that the theory itself says nothing about.