> Still not impressed? Recently, in the US alone, effective altruists have:
> ended all gun violence, including mass shootings and police shootings
cured AIDS and melanoma
prevented a 9-11 scale terrorist attack
Okay. Fine. EA hasn’t, technically, done any of these things.
> But it has saved the same number of lives that doing all those things would have.
> About 20,000 Americans die yearly of gun violence, 8,000 of melanoma, 13,000 from AIDS, and 3,000 people in 9/11. So doing all of these things would save 44,000 lives per year. That matches the ~50,000 lives that effective altruist charities save yearly18.
> People aren’t acting like EA has ended gun violence and cured AIDS and so on. all those things. Probably this is because those are exciting popular causes in the news, and saving people in developing countries isn’t. Most people care so little about saving lives in developing countries that effective altruists can save 200,000 of them and people will just not notice. “Oh, all your movement ever does is cause corporate boardroom drama, and maybe other things I’m forgetting right now.”
I'm curious, have you ever gone to any EA meetups or interacted with these people in person, or is all of this just based on a certain pattern of blinking pixels on one of your devices?
As an idea, and an ideal, it's hard to seriously criticize EA. Sone pretty shady people have done really unethical things while claiming it as a rationale, but I don't understand how that's supposed to convince me that "most good for the least cost" should be anything other than a North star for moral action.
Effective altruism is the result of not teaching STEM majors enough classics and philosophy. These tech nerds have "invented" utilitarianism, a philosophy that goes back thousands of years and has known downsides when taken to the extreme (i.e. ignoring personal liberties and the means of doing things). The ends don't always justify the means.
If they've invented utilitarianism, why do they use that exact term so often?
Seems like EAs are actually pretty familiar with the history of utilitarian thought. Much EA discourse focuses on moral philosophy and meta-ethics. Will MacAskill, well-known EA, is a professor of moral philosophy.
It's worth to look at the track record of utilitarianism:
Jeremy Bentham, often regarded as the founder of classical utilitarianism, almost 300 years ago, was arguing in favor of women's rights, decriminalization of homosexuality, abolition of slavery, animal welfare, prison reform.
There's a long history of people saying this about Scott Alexander in particular.
Whenever I speak to them, they've clearly never actually read the 10 page essay they're complaining about. Makes me wonder if they actually read any philosophy either.
I would make the exact opposite case. "Weird EA" (the people worrying about paperclip generators and shrimp welfare) is a consequence of EA's roots in, and continued association with, academic philosophy.
The main, good part of EA is just about donating money in a way that does the most good possible. Which for most of us means organizations that stop people dying unnecessarily in poorer countries.
I'm not aware of any significant and serious criticism of the "give lots of money to malaria net organizations" approach to Effective Altruism. This also doesn't seem to be especially present in the article. I'm sure that you can find individual examples on twitter or whatever, but from my seat that seems to be a clear minority of the criticism.
It is the version of Effective Altruism that has gone beyond that to "we need to focus on AI safety" and "we need to fly to mars" that people are calling bananas. Heck, the article even mentions that it is difficult to separate Effective Altruism from AI Doomerism and lists a bunch of vague accomplishments about AI Alignment as accomplishments alongside "Saved 200,000 lives."
The argument that people should efficiently allocate their charitable giving is sound. Where things go off the rails is when people's model of efficiency involves wild future hypotheticals about robot uprisings.
AIUI the EA argument would be "focusing on EA safety is among the most effective usee of our resources" and "flying to Mars is among the most effective uses of our resources". I can see how the former might be viewed as a cost-effective way to improve the world, even if I personally haven't even tried to consider the matter.
The latter, not so much. Can you point to an effective altruist who argues that that's likely effective? I don't mean someone who says effective altrusts think so (and are stupid to think so), I mean someone who is an effective altruist and says so.
Exactly. Nonprofits have a principal agent problem — they are funded by donors, not the people they serve. As a result, they are incentivized to find ways to give a non financial ROI to donors in order to keep the money coming (eg galas, name a building, focus on the donor’s pet project, etc) instead of serving the interests of the people they are supposed to help.
This dynamic — which is similar to politicians serving special interests rather than constituents — leads to lots of inefficient philanthropy.
EA tries to solve this with - better spreadsheets! Surely we can just math our way out of this. This is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t solve the root problem that donors, not beneficiaries, allocate capital and they are not in a great position to determine what is “effective” because it’s highly subjective.
So even though I think EA largely means well, these same problems of donor motives creep back into giving, despite better spreadsheets and a bunch of phds.
EA gets funding from tech VCs and all of a sudden Mars and AI are the central topics to giving. If hedge funds were the main donors, we’d probably be back focusing on microfinance. And in a sense, the false confidence and superiority that EA lends to donors, even though it does help on the margins creates more cover for the rare nefarious donors or nonprofit that use it to hide sinister ulterior motives.
The whole thing is similar to communism not working and the people in charge think, “we need better spreadsheets to allocate resources!” Rather than, “maybe we should give some of our power back to the people we’re ostensibly trying to help so they can pick what best serves them.”
The single thing missing from 99% of philanthropy conversations after all these years is STILL the voices of the people we’re all trying to help. We don’t need more phds or business tycoons deciding what’s best for the poorest people in the world. We just need to give them a little more money and power. But deep down, most of us don’t want to do that. We want to help in our way, on our terms, while controlling the purse strings and taking the credit.
Your last paragraph is so huge. There's a ton of "well we know the trick" stuff coming from donors and donor organizations that lead to just obviously broken approaches. One Child One Laptop is a great example.
This is one reason why I like direct financial gifts. People receiving the money know what they need the most.
> The single thing missing from 99% of philanthropy conversations after all these years is STILL the voices of the people we’re all trying to help
Not so! Popular EA charity GiveDirectly does exactly what you're suggesting - giving money directly to people in extreme poverty through direct cash transfers.
I love GiveDirectly. If all of EA was simply advocating for unconditional cash transfers, I’d be a fan. But on the whole, it’s far from that. Cash is no longer cool, now it’s AI and existential risk, tomorrow it’ll be something else.
> It is the version of Effective Altruism that has gone beyond that to "we need to focus on AI safety" and "we need to fly to mars" that people are calling bananas.
There's been more of a move towards longtermism (and existential risk) in the last couple of years, but this is still not the majority of what the Effective Altruism community is about. I also don't think flying to Mars has ever been on their radar.
I'll bite. I go to LessWrong, ACX, and sometimes EA meetups. Why? Mainly because it's like the HackerNews comment section but in person.
I have never donated to EA. I choose instead to donate to https://www.gatesphilanthropypartners.org, which has very similar ideals and approaches and is arguably more effective, a debate which I have openly had with many EA proponents, and to the detriment of none!
At least in Austin, AI doomers only make up a smaller chunk than the rest of the people who show up. I'd say the overriding mentality is skepticism and curiosity. The range in political opinion is very large. There's no dominating ideology and every statement will result in someone who politely disagrees!
And yes, LW, ACX, and EA are all very intermingled, so make of that what you will!
The problem with billionaire philanthropy (which is what the term 'effective altruism' was intended to replace as part of a rebranding effort) is that it tends to be self-serving and opaque.
E.g. we don't want secretive private 'do-gooder' foundations running global public health programs because they're always incentivized to deliver their funds to the private investment interests of the billionaires in charge, rather than say bidding out contracts in a transparent manner. Similar arguments apply to the educational system, to clean air and water efforts, etc.
The better solution is to (1) increase tax rates on the wealthiest sectors of the economy by restoring 1960s-era tax brackets for income, corporate, and capital gains and (2) change how those funds are spent at the federal and state level, i.e. move away from funding foreign wars and towards fixing all the basic domestic problems.
The reason you want government agencies, not private foundations, in charge of this is that they're subject to public scrutiny, FOIA requests by journalists, etc.
In other words, 'effective altruism' is just another con artist program intended to give legitimacy and cover to the USA's ridiculously greedy, out-of-control and amoral investment capitalism culture.
Your first sentence betrays lack of familiarity with EA. It is offensive to me that you state it as fact.
EA started as a continuation of Peter Singer's argument in "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" (1972), as a progression after the founding of Giving What We Can (thousands of people giving at least 10% of their pre-tax income to cost-effective charities).
As per the other replies, you've seriously misunderstood some fundamentals about EA.
But aside from that:
> The better solution is to (1) increase tax rates on the wealthiest sectors of the economy by restoring 1960s-era tax brackets for income, corporate, and capital gains and (2) change how those funds are spent at the federal and state level, i.e. move away from funding foreign wars and towards fixing all the basic domestic problems.
Why are these mutually exclusive? Why can't I favour progressive taxation and better foreign / domestic policies, while also making donations to stop people dying of preventable diseases? Obviously EA people aren't all the same, but I'd say that was a fairly typical position among EAs, and I see nothing wrong with it.
If there is some slight way in which donating to malaria prevention as at odds with taxing the rich, is it really worth the large death toll associated with withdrawing funding from the former?
Malaria is a good example. It used to be endemic in the southeastern United States but was eradicated within a couple of decades - not by billionaire philanthropy, but by a robust government-managed public health effort:
> "Malaria affected 30 percent of the population in the region when the TVA was incorporated in 1933. The Public Health Service played a vital role in the research and control operations and by 1947, the disease was essentially eliminated."
In the absence of basic local public health infrastructure and disease monitoring and response agencies, i.e. government services, malaria eradication is highly unlikely and all the mosquito nets in the world won't change that.
How will it help if people stop donating to the Against Malaria Foundation? It seems to me that'll cost a lot of lives and not benefit public health infrastructure one jot.
Hi, I'm pro-EA and also in favor of significantly higher taxes, higher infra spending, medicare for all, UBI, and changes to corporate law that would lessen the power that multinational corporations have over developing countries. A lot of EAs feel that way, perhaps most.
I can't singlehandedly change the US tax code, budget, and foreign policy. But I can donate a chunk of my income, and I can participate in online communties which debate the most effective way to spend those donations. So I do, and EA has made it easy for me to do that.
How does that square with your made-up history about billionaire philanthropy? What do you do to make the world a better place?
"What do you do to make the world a better place?"
Work to limit the scope and reach of US intellectual property law?
(The world is a rather complex place, but patents have been doing more to limit technological progress such as access to clean water than to stimulate it.)
And that's not 'made-up history' either, look up Ford Foundation South Africa CIA for example.
Effective Altruism is a bad idea. Applying money in a way that does the most good possible is focusing/obsessing too much on one angle. A Local Maximum will be reached without mechanisms to get out of it.
Sure. The one angle I am talking about is focusing on maximizing the application of money on the _things that do the most good possible_. There may be cases where financing something that will certainly not do the most good possible, on the contrary, it may cause havoc, suffering, death and destruction, like war, is the best course of action. Sacrifice sometimes is needed. Effective Altruism already proved to be a failed idea. It inspired smart and good people to justify any means for and end, just because they thought the end was ultimately good and honest (I believe that SBF was aware of the illegality of what he was doing but it was ok because it was for a good cause). EA is a virtue signalling and a god complex pit.
Of course, no one is against maximizing resources to where they are needed the most. That it should be an evidence based approach and focused on systemic change and long term solutions, rather than just alleviating symptoms. Yes, but this is just common sense. Now, naming it Altruism and adding Effective on top is just creating a banner for another Crusade like endeavor. Throw your money at us and you will be saved and your sins forgiven.
41 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] thread> ended all gun violence, including mass shootings and police shootings cured AIDS and melanoma prevented a 9-11 scale terrorist attack Okay. Fine. EA hasn’t, technically, done any of these things.
> But it has saved the same number of lives that doing all those things would have.
> About 20,000 Americans die yearly of gun violence, 8,000 of melanoma, 13,000 from AIDS, and 3,000 people in 9/11. So doing all of these things would save 44,000 lives per year. That matches the ~50,000 lives that effective altruist charities save yearly18.
> People aren’t acting like EA has ended gun violence and cured AIDS and so on. all those things. Probably this is because those are exciting popular causes in the news, and saving people in developing countries isn’t. Most people care so little about saving lives in developing countries that effective altruists can save 200,000 of them and people will just not notice. “Oh, all your movement ever does is cause corporate boardroom drama, and maybe other things I’m forgetting right now.”
all the movement does is attempt to distort reality to the childlike views of the wealthy.
yes, ea practitioners think they are better than everyone else. that’s why all the haters are wrong.
yes, in person interaction, but beyond that is none of your business. of course this will be unsatisfactory, but satisfaction isn’t the goal, is it?
since we are trading info, when did you become one?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38459320
Seems like EAs are actually pretty familiar with the history of utilitarian thought. Much EA discourse focuses on moral philosophy and meta-ethics. Will MacAskill, well-known EA, is a professor of moral philosophy.
Deontology has its problems too.
Jeremy Bentham, often regarded as the founder of classical utilitarianism, almost 300 years ago, was arguing in favor of women's rights, decriminalization of homosexuality, abolition of slavery, animal welfare, prison reform.
https://www.utilitarianism.net/utilitarian-thinker/jeremy-be...
In the 60’s/70’s it would have been called a cult.
Whenever I speak to them, they've clearly never actually read the 10 page essay they're complaining about. Makes me wonder if they actually read any philosophy either.
The main, good part of EA is just about donating money in a way that does the most good possible. Which for most of us means organizations that stop people dying unnecessarily in poorer countries.
I'm not aware of any significant and serious criticism of the "give lots of money to malaria net organizations" approach to Effective Altruism. This also doesn't seem to be especially present in the article. I'm sure that you can find individual examples on twitter or whatever, but from my seat that seems to be a clear minority of the criticism.
It is the version of Effective Altruism that has gone beyond that to "we need to focus on AI safety" and "we need to fly to mars" that people are calling bananas. Heck, the article even mentions that it is difficult to separate Effective Altruism from AI Doomerism and lists a bunch of vague accomplishments about AI Alignment as accomplishments alongside "Saved 200,000 lives."
The argument that people should efficiently allocate their charitable giving is sound. Where things go off the rails is when people's model of efficiency involves wild future hypotheticals about robot uprisings.
The latter, not so much. Can you point to an effective altruist who argues that that's likely effective? I don't mean someone who says effective altrusts think so (and are stupid to think so), I mean someone who is an effective altruist and says so.
This dynamic — which is similar to politicians serving special interests rather than constituents — leads to lots of inefficient philanthropy.
EA tries to solve this with - better spreadsheets! Surely we can just math our way out of this. This is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t solve the root problem that donors, not beneficiaries, allocate capital and they are not in a great position to determine what is “effective” because it’s highly subjective.
So even though I think EA largely means well, these same problems of donor motives creep back into giving, despite better spreadsheets and a bunch of phds.
EA gets funding from tech VCs and all of a sudden Mars and AI are the central topics to giving. If hedge funds were the main donors, we’d probably be back focusing on microfinance. And in a sense, the false confidence and superiority that EA lends to donors, even though it does help on the margins creates more cover for the rare nefarious donors or nonprofit that use it to hide sinister ulterior motives.
The whole thing is similar to communism not working and the people in charge think, “we need better spreadsheets to allocate resources!” Rather than, “maybe we should give some of our power back to the people we’re ostensibly trying to help so they can pick what best serves them.”
The single thing missing from 99% of philanthropy conversations after all these years is STILL the voices of the people we’re all trying to help. We don’t need more phds or business tycoons deciding what’s best for the poorest people in the world. We just need to give them a little more money and power. But deep down, most of us don’t want to do that. We want to help in our way, on our terms, while controlling the purse strings and taking the credit.
This is one reason why I like direct financial gifts. People receiving the money know what they need the most.
Not so! Popular EA charity GiveDirectly does exactly what you're suggesting - giving money directly to people in extreme poverty through direct cash transfers.
There's been more of a move towards longtermism (and existential risk) in the last couple of years, but this is still not the majority of what the Effective Altruism community is about. I also don't think flying to Mars has ever been on their radar.
I have never donated to EA. I choose instead to donate to https://www.gatesphilanthropypartners.org, which has very similar ideals and approaches and is arguably more effective, a debate which I have openly had with many EA proponents, and to the detriment of none!
At least in Austin, AI doomers only make up a smaller chunk than the rest of the people who show up. I'd say the overriding mentality is skepticism and curiosity. The range in political opinion is very large. There's no dominating ideology and every statement will result in someone who politely disagrees!
And yes, LW, ACX, and EA are all very intermingled, so make of that what you will!
E.g. we don't want secretive private 'do-gooder' foundations running global public health programs because they're always incentivized to deliver their funds to the private investment interests of the billionaires in charge, rather than say bidding out contracts in a transparent manner. Similar arguments apply to the educational system, to clean air and water efforts, etc.
The better solution is to (1) increase tax rates on the wealthiest sectors of the economy by restoring 1960s-era tax brackets for income, corporate, and capital gains and (2) change how those funds are spent at the federal and state level, i.e. move away from funding foreign wars and towards fixing all the basic domestic problems.
The reason you want government agencies, not private foundations, in charge of this is that they're subject to public scrutiny, FOIA requests by journalists, etc.
In other words, 'effective altruism' is just another con artist program intended to give legitimacy and cover to the USA's ridiculously greedy, out-of-control and amoral investment capitalism culture.
I thought EA was people buying malaria nets while quoting Scott Alexander and reading the sequences.
EA started as a continuation of Peter Singer's argument in "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" (1972), as a progression after the founding of Giving What We Can (thousands of people giving at least 10% of their pre-tax income to cost-effective charities).
Have you ever read about it here? https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-e...
But aside from that:
> The better solution is to (1) increase tax rates on the wealthiest sectors of the economy by restoring 1960s-era tax brackets for income, corporate, and capital gains and (2) change how those funds are spent at the federal and state level, i.e. move away from funding foreign wars and towards fixing all the basic domestic problems.
Why are these mutually exclusive? Why can't I favour progressive taxation and better foreign / domestic policies, while also making donations to stop people dying of preventable diseases? Obviously EA people aren't all the same, but I'd say that was a fairly typical position among EAs, and I see nothing wrong with it.
If there is some slight way in which donating to malaria prevention as at odds with taxing the rich, is it really worth the large death toll associated with withdrawing funding from the former?
> "Malaria affected 30 percent of the population in the region when the TVA was incorporated in 1933. The Public Health Service played a vital role in the research and control operations and by 1947, the disease was essentially eliminated."
https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...
In the absence of basic local public health infrastructure and disease monitoring and response agencies, i.e. government services, malaria eradication is highly unlikely and all the mosquito nets in the world won't change that.
I can't singlehandedly change the US tax code, budget, and foreign policy. But I can donate a chunk of my income, and I can participate in online communties which debate the most effective way to spend those donations. So I do, and EA has made it easy for me to do that.
How does that square with your made-up history about billionaire philanthropy? What do you do to make the world a better place?
Work to limit the scope and reach of US intellectual property law?
(The world is a rather complex place, but patents have been doing more to limit technological progress such as access to clean water than to stimulate it.)
And that's not 'made-up history' either, look up Ford Foundation South Africa CIA for example.
Very cool. I don't doubt that it's impactful work.
I still think you're way off base with your views on EA :)
Of course, no one is against maximizing resources to where they are needed the most. That it should be an evidence based approach and focused on systemic change and long term solutions, rather than just alleviating symptoms. Yes, but this is just common sense. Now, naming it Altruism and adding Effective on top is just creating a banner for another Crusade like endeavor. Throw your money at us and you will be saved and your sins forgiven.