Effective Altruism and Utilitarianism are just a couple of the presentations authoritarians sometimes make for convenience. To me the code simply as "if I had everything now, that would eventually be good for everybody."
The arguments always feel to me too similar "it is good Carnegie called in the Pinkerton's to suppress labor, as it allowed him to build libraries." Yes it is good what Carnegie did later, but it doesn't completely paper over what he did earlier.
> . . . but also what’s called long-termism, which is worrying about the future of the planet and existential risks like pandemics, nuclear war, AI, or being hit by comets. When it made that shift, it began to attract a lot of Silicon Valley types, who may not have been so dedicated to the development part of the effective altruism program.
The rationalists thought they understood time discounting and thought they could correct for it. They were wrong. Then the internal contradictions of long-termism allowed EA to get suckered by the Silicon Valley crew.
I expect the book itself (Death in a Shallow Pond: A Philosopher, a Drowning Child, and Strangers in Need, by David Edmonds) is good, as the author has written a lot of other solid books making philosophy accessible. The title of the article though, is rather clickbaity: it’s hardly “recovering” the origins of EA to say that it owes a huge debt to Peter Singer, who is only the most famous utilitarian philosopher of the late 20th century!
(Peter Singer’s books are also good: his Hegel: A Very Short Introduction made me feel kinda like I understood what Hegel was getting at. I probably don’t of course, but it was nice to feel that way!)
> it’s hardly “recovering” the origins of EA to say that it owes a huge debt to Peter Singer
Guessing by the contents of this comment section, many people seem to believe that EA was invented by SBF, so it can be quite a shock for them to learn otherwise.
(That of course assumes that they would read the article...)
> I think they’re recovering. They’ve learned a few lessons, including not to be too in hock to a few powerful and wealthy individuals.
I do not believe the EA movement to be recoverable; it is built on flawed foundations and its issues are inherent. The only way I see out of it is total dissolution; it cannot be reformed.
Which of the foundations is flawed, the "we have the ability to help others and should use it" or the "some ways of helping others are more effective than others"?
I find it to be a dangerous ideology since it can effectively be used to justify anything. I joined an EA group online (from a popular YouTube channel) and the first conversation I saw was a thread by someone advocating for eugenics. And it only got worse from there.
> A paradox of effective altruism is that by seeking to overcome individual bias through rationalism, its solutions sometimes ignore the structural bias that shapes our world.
Yes, this just about sums it up. As a movement they seem to be attracting some listless contrarians that seem entirely too willing to dig up old demons of the past.
The popularity of EA always seemed pretty obvious to me: here's a philosophy that says it doesn't matter what kind of person you are or how you make your fortune, as long as you put some amount of money toward problems. Exploiting people to make money is fine, as long as some portion of that money is going toward "a good cause." There is really no element of self virtue in the way that virtue ethics has..it's just pure calculation.
It's the perfect philosophy for morally questionable people with a lot of money. Which is exactly who got involved.
That's not to say that all the work they're doing/have done is bad, but it's not really surprising why bad actors attached themselves to the movement.
You'll never find a single prominent EA saying that because it's 100% made up. Maybe they'll remark that from an academic perspective it's a consequence of some interpretations of utilitarianism, a topic some EAs are interested in, but no prominent EA has ever actually endorsed or implied the view you put forward.
To an EA, what you said is as laughable of a strawman as if someone summarized your beliefs as "it makes no difference if you donate to starving children in africa or if you do nothing, because it's your decision and neither is immoral".
The popularity of EA is even more obvious than what you described. Here's why it's popular. A lot of people are interested in doing good, but have limited resources. EAs tried to figure out how to do a lot of good given limited resources.
ou might think this sounds too obvious to be true, but no one before EAs was doing this. The closest thing was charity rankings that just measured what percent of the money was spend on administration. (A charity that spends 100% of its donations on back massages for baby seals would be the #1 charity on that ranking.) Finding ways to do a lot of good given your budget is a pretty intuitively attractive idea.
And they're really all about this too. Go read the EA forum. They're not talking about how their hands are clean now because they donated. They're talking about how to do good. They're arguing about whether malaria nets or malaria chemotreatments are more effective at stopping the spread of the disease. They're arguing about how to best mitigate the suffering of factory farmed animals (or how to convince people to go vegan). And so on. EA is just people trying to do good. Yeah, SBF was a bad actor, but how were EA charities supposed to know that when the investors that gave him millions couldn't even do that?
That guy who went to jail believed in it, so it has to be good.
I hope SBF doesn’t buy a pardon from our corrupt president, but I hope for a lot of things that don’t turn out the way I’d like. Apologies for USA-centric framing. I’m tired.
That's not what it's about. Exploiting people to make money is not fine. Causing harm while mitigating it elsewhere defeats the point. Giving is already about the kind of person you are.
Similarly, the reason comments like yours get voted to the top of discussions about EA is that they imply "It's best if rich people keep their money, because the people trying to save poor people's lives are actually bad". There's a very obvious appeal to that view, especially somewhere like HN.
The practice of effective altruism, as distinct from the EA movement, is good for our culture. If you have a lot of money or talent, please think critically about how to leverage it efficiently to make the world a better place.
Doing that doesn’t buy you personal virtue. It doesn’t excuse heinous acts. But within the bounds of ordinary standards of good behavior, try to do the most good you can with the talents and resources at your disposal.
Lots of charity is just about buying something else. Buying good press, buying your way out of guilt, etc. Short sellers even count some companies' altruism as a red flag.
That argument applies to any charity. The difference in EA, even if one was to agree with your general framing, is that at least the money one uses on whitewashing should actually do some good and not be wasted.
Man, EA is so close to getting it. They are right that we have a moral obligation to help those in need but they are wrong about how to do it.
Don't outsource your altruism by donating to some GiveWell-recommended nonprofit. Be a human, get to know people, and ask if/how they want help. Start close to home where you can speak the same language and connect with people.
The issues with EA all stem from the fact that the movement centralizes power into the hands of a few people who decide what is and isn't worthy of altruism. Then similar to communism, that power gets corrupted by self-interested people who use it to fund pet projects, launder reputations, etc.
Just try to help the people around you a bit more. If everyone did that, we'd be good.
I'm leery of any philosophy that is popular in tech circles because they all seem to lead to eugenics, hyperindividualism, ignoring systemic issues, deregulation and whatever the latest incarnation of prosperity gospel is.
Utilitarianism suffers from the same problems it always had: time frames. What's the best net good 10 minutes from now might be vastly different 10 days, 10 months or 10 years from now. So whatever arbitrary time frame you choose affects the outcome. Taken further, you can choose a time frame that suits your desired outcome.
"What can I do?" is a fine question to ask. This crops up a lot in anarchist schools of thought too. But you can't mutual aid your way out of systemic issues. Taken further, focusing on individual action often becomes a fig leaf to argue against any form of taxation (or even regulation) because the government is limiting your ability to be altruistic.
I expect the effective altruists have largely moved on to transhumanism as that's pretty popular with the Silicon Valley elite (including Peter Thiel and many CEOs) and that's just a nicer way of arguing for eugenics.
Is there a term for what I had previously understood Effective Altruism to be, since I don’t want to reference EA in a conversation and have the other person think I’m associated with these sorts of people.
I had assumed it was just simple mathematics and the belief that cash is the easiest way to transfer charitable effort. If I can readily earn 50USD/hour, rather than doing a volunteering job that I could pay 25USD/hour to do, I simply do my job and pay for 2 people to volunteer.
Man this is such a loaded term. Even in a comment section about the origins of it, everyone is silently using their own definition. I think all discussions of EA should start with a definition at the top. I'll give it a whirl:
>Effective altruism: Donating with a focus on helping the most people in the most effective way, using evidence and careful reasoning, and personal values.
What happens in practice is a lot worse than this may sound at first glance, so I think people are tempted to change the definition. You could argue EA in practice is just a perversion of the idea in principle, but I dont think its even that. I think the initial assumption that that definition is good and harmless is just wrong. It's basically just spending money to change the world into what you want. It's similar to regular donations except you're way more invested and strategic in advancing the outcome. It's going to invite all sorts of interests and be controversial.
> Donating with a focus on helping the most people in the most effective way
It's not just about donating. Modern day EA is focused on impactful jobs, like working in research, policy, etc., more than it is focused on donating money.
Instead, the definition of EA given on their own site is
> Effective altruism is the project of trying to find the best ways of helping others, and putting them into practice.
> Effective altruism breaks down into a philosophy that aims to identify the most effective ways of helping others, and a practical community of people who aim to use the results of that research to make the world better.
The fundamental problem is that Effective Altruism is a political movement that spun out of a philosophical one. If you want to talk about the relative strengths and weaknesses of consequentialism, go right ahead. If you want to assume consequentialism is true and discuss specific ethical questions via that framing, power to you.
If you want to form a movement, you now have a movement, with all that entails: leaders, policies, politics, contradictions, internecine struggles, money, money, more money, goals, success at your goals, failure at your goals, etc.
This is historically inaccurate. EA’s origins are in charity evalutions to quantify the marginal impact of a donation. This motivated philosophical debate about how to operationalize “good,” and later became influential enough to have political impact. Obviously EAs were inspired by philosophical ideas or even were philosophers. But that is not the same as it being the downstream practice of a uniform set of pre-existing philosophical commitments.
> Inspired by Singer, Oxford philosophers Toby Ord and Will MacAskill launched Giving What We Can in 2009, which encouraged members to pledge 10 percent of their incomes to charity.
I never expected EA to get so much flak in this comment section.
Most comments read like a version of "Who do you think you are?". Apparently it is very bad to try to think rationally about how and where to give out your money
I mean if rich people want to give out their money for good and beyond are actually trying to do work of researching whether it has an impact instead of just enjoying the high-status feeling of the optics of giving to a good cause (see The Anonymous Donor episode of Curb your enthusiasm), what is it to you all ?
It feels to me like some parents wanting to plan the birth of their children and all the people around are like "Nooo, you have to let Nature decide, don't try to calculate where you are in your cycle !!! "
Apparently this is "authoritarian", "can be used to justify anything" like eugenics but also will end up "similar to communism" but also leads to "hyperindividualism ?
The only way I can explain it is no one wants to give out 1% of their money away and hate the people who make them feel guilty by doing so and saying it would be a good thing so everyone is lashing out
You know, I wonder if this is an idea that has been twisted a bit from people who "took over" the idea, like Sam Bankman-Fried.
I remember reading the original founder of (MADD) Mothers Against Drunk Driving, left because of this kind of thing.
"Lightner stated that MADD "has become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever wanted or envisioned … I didn't start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving".
A lot of these EA comments seem to be using their own definition of EA that they've imagined. It really sounds a lot like people judging Judaism because of what Bernie Madoff did.
>here's a philosophy that says it doesn't matter what kind of person you are or how you make your fortune, as long as you put some amount of money toward problems.
TBH I am not like, 100% involved, but my first exposure to EA was a blog post from a notorious rich person, describing how he chose to drop a big chunk of his wealth on a particular charity because it could realistically claim to save more lives per dollar than any other.
Now, that might seem like a perfect ahole excuse. But having done time in the NFP/Charity trenches, it immediately made a heap of sense to me. I worked for one that saved 0 lives per dollar, refused to agitate for political change that might save people time and money, and spent an inordinate amount of money on lavish gifts for its own board members.
While EA might stink of capitalism, to me, it always seemed obvious. Charities that waste money should be overlooked in favor of ones that help the most people. It seems to me that EA has a bad rap because of the people who champion it, but criticism of EA as a whole seems like cover for extremely shitty charities that should absolutely be starved of money.
The book is titled "Death in a Shallow Pond" and seems to be all about Peter Singer. (I don't see a table of contents online.)
The way I first heard of Effective Altruism, I think before it was called that, took a rather different approach. It was from a talk given by the founders of GiveWell at Google. (This is going off of memory so this is approximate.)
Their background was people working for a hedge fund who were interested in charity. They had formed a committee to decide where best to donate their money.
The way they explained it was that there are lots of rigorous approaches to finding and evaluating for-profit investments. At least in hindsight, you can say which investments earned the most. But there's very little for charities, so they wanted to figure out a rigorous way to evaluate charities so they could pick the best ones to donate to. And unlike what most charitable foundations do, they wanted to publish their recommendations and reasoning.
There are philosophical issues involved, but they are inherent in the problem. You have some money and you want to donate it, but don't know which charity to give it to. What do you mean by the best charity? What's a good metric for that?
"Lives saved" is a pretty crude metric, but it's better than nothing. "Quality-adjusted life years" is another common one.
Unfortunately, when you make a spreadsheet to try to determine these things, there are a lot of uncertain inputs, so doing numeric calculations only provides rough estimates. GiveWell readily admits that, but they still do a lot of research along these lines to determine which charities are the best.
There's been a lot of philosophical nonsense associated with Effective Altruism since then, but I think the basic approach still makes sense. Deciding where to donate money is a decision many people have! It doesn't require much in the way of philosophical commitments to decide that it's helpful to do what you can to optimize it. Why wouldn't you want to do a better job of it?
GiveWell's approach has evolved quite a bit since then, but it's still about optimizing charitable donations. Here's recent blog post that goes into their decision-making:
People get wrapped up in a lot of emotion about this but the idea seemed sound: you want to make some change in the world? It makes sense to spend your money to maximize the change you desire.
The GiveWell objective is lives saved or QALYs or whatever. Others have qualia maximized or whatever. But the idea is entirely logical.
I think part of the problem with popularization is that many people have complex objective functions, not all of which are socially acceptable to say. As an example, I want to be charitable in a way that grants me status in my social circle, where spending on guinea worm is less impressive than, say, buying ingredients for cookies, baking them, and giving the cookies to the poor.
Personally I think that’s fine too. I know that some aspect of the charity I do (which is not effective, I must admit) has a desire for recognition and I think it’s good to encourage this because it leads to more charity.
But for many people, encouraging stating one’s objective function is seen as a way to “unearth the objective functions of the ones with lesser motives” and some number of EA people do that.
To say nothing of the fact that lots of people get very upset about the idea that “you think you’re so much better than me?” and so on. It’s an uphill climb, and I wouldn’t do it, but I do enjoy watching them do it because I get the appeal.
The origins of EA were never in question, nothing new there. It was Peter Singer's work on maximising value for charitable outcomes. Comment section seems to be about something else altogether.
Maybe a book clarifying what it really is is a good idea.
The idea that effective altruism has attracted particularly bad actors only seems to be the case because effective altruism is still new enough to be newsworthy.
For example, the most prominent scandal in the U.S. right now is the Epstein saga. A massive scandal that likely involves the President, a former President, one of the richest men in the world, and a member of the UK royal family.
And in a nutshell, Eostein’s job and source of power was his role as a philanthropist.
No one is using that example to say that regular philanthropy and charity has something wrong with it (even though there are a lot of issues with it…).
[3] What We Owe The Future (EA book): “naive calculations that justify some harmful action because it has good consequences are, in practice, almost never correct.” and “it's wrong to do harm even when doing so will bring about the best outcome.”
[5] The Precipice (EA book): “Don't act without integrity. When something immensely important is at stake and others are dragging their feet, people feel licensed to do whatever it takes to succeed. We must never give in to such temptation. A single person acting without integrity could stain the whole cause and damage everything we hope to achieve.”
[10] There is a large Christian community within EA. “We are Christians excited about doing the most good possible.”: https://www.eaforchristians.org/
[11] Many EAs consider Christian charity to be one of the seeds of EA. “A potential criticism or weakness of effective altruism is that it appeals only to a narrow spectrum of society, and exhibits a ‘monoculture’ of ideas. I introduce Dorothea Brooke, a literary character who I argue was an advocate for the principles of effective altruism -- as early as 1871 -- in a Christian ethical tradition”: Load more comments (3 threads left)
49 comments
[ 9.1 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadThis is sadly still true, given the percentage of money that goes to getting someone some help vs the amount dedicated to actually helping.
The arguments always feel to me too similar "it is good Carnegie called in the Pinkerton's to suppress labor, as it allowed him to build libraries." Yes it is good what Carnegie did later, but it doesn't completely paper over what he did earlier.
The rationalists thought they understood time discounting and thought they could correct for it. They were wrong. Then the internal contradictions of long-termism allowed EA to get suckered by the Silicon Valley crew.
Alas.
(Peter Singer’s books are also good: his Hegel: A Very Short Introduction made me feel kinda like I understood what Hegel was getting at. I probably don’t of course, but it was nice to feel that way!)
Guessing by the contents of this comment section, many people seem to believe that EA was invented by SBF, so it can be quite a shock for them to learn otherwise.
(That of course assumes that they would read the article...)
I do not believe the EA movement to be recoverable; it is built on flawed foundations and its issues are inherent. The only way I see out of it is total dissolution; it cannot be reformed.
> A paradox of effective altruism is that by seeking to overcome individual bias through rationalism, its solutions sometimes ignore the structural bias that shapes our world.
Yes, this just about sums it up. As a movement they seem to be attracting some listless contrarians that seem entirely too willing to dig up old demons of the past.
It's the perfect philosophy for morally questionable people with a lot of money. Which is exactly who got involved.
That's not to say that all the work they're doing/have done is bad, but it's not really surprising why bad actors attached themselves to the movement.
Sam Bankman-Fried was all in with EA, but instead of putting his own money in, he put everybody else's in.
Also his choice of "good causes" was somewhat myopic.
To an EA, what you said is as laughable of a strawman as if someone summarized your beliefs as "it makes no difference if you donate to starving children in africa or if you do nothing, because it's your decision and neither is immoral".
The popularity of EA is even more obvious than what you described. Here's why it's popular. A lot of people are interested in doing good, but have limited resources. EAs tried to figure out how to do a lot of good given limited resources.
ou might think this sounds too obvious to be true, but no one before EAs was doing this. The closest thing was charity rankings that just measured what percent of the money was spend on administration. (A charity that spends 100% of its donations on back massages for baby seals would be the #1 charity on that ranking.) Finding ways to do a lot of good given your budget is a pretty intuitively attractive idea.
And they're really all about this too. Go read the EA forum. They're not talking about how their hands are clean now because they donated. They're talking about how to do good. They're arguing about whether malaria nets or malaria chemotreatments are more effective at stopping the spread of the disease. They're arguing about how to best mitigate the suffering of factory farmed animals (or how to convince people to go vegan). And so on. EA is just people trying to do good. Yeah, SBF was a bad actor, but how were EA charities supposed to know that when the investors that gave him millions couldn't even do that?
I hope SBF doesn’t buy a pardon from our corrupt president, but I hope for a lot of things that don’t turn out the way I’d like. Apologies for USA-centric framing. I’m tired.
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-work-for-an-evil-compa...
I am not impressed with billionaires who dodge taxes and then give a few pennies to charity.
Doing that doesn’t buy you personal virtue. It doesn’t excuse heinous acts. But within the bounds of ordinary standards of good behavior, try to do the most good you can with the talents and resources at your disposal.
Don't outsource your altruism by donating to some GiveWell-recommended nonprofit. Be a human, get to know people, and ask if/how they want help. Start close to home where you can speak the same language and connect with people.
The issues with EA all stem from the fact that the movement centralizes power into the hands of a few people who decide what is and isn't worthy of altruism. Then similar to communism, that power gets corrupted by self-interested people who use it to fund pet projects, launder reputations, etc.
Just try to help the people around you a bit more. If everyone did that, we'd be good.
Utilitarianism suffers from the same problems it always had: time frames. What's the best net good 10 minutes from now might be vastly different 10 days, 10 months or 10 years from now. So whatever arbitrary time frame you choose affects the outcome. Taken further, you can choose a time frame that suits your desired outcome.
"What can I do?" is a fine question to ask. This crops up a lot in anarchist schools of thought too. But you can't mutual aid your way out of systemic issues. Taken further, focusing on individual action often becomes a fig leaf to argue against any form of taxation (or even regulation) because the government is limiting your ability to be altruistic.
I expect the effective altruists have largely moved on to transhumanism as that's pretty popular with the Silicon Valley elite (including Peter Thiel and many CEOs) and that's just a nicer way of arguing for eugenics.
I had assumed it was just simple mathematics and the belief that cash is the easiest way to transfer charitable effort. If I can readily earn 50USD/hour, rather than doing a volunteering job that I could pay 25USD/hour to do, I simply do my job and pay for 2 people to volunteer.
>Effective altruism: Donating with a focus on helping the most people in the most effective way, using evidence and careful reasoning, and personal values.
What happens in practice is a lot worse than this may sound at first glance, so I think people are tempted to change the definition. You could argue EA in practice is just a perversion of the idea in principle, but I dont think its even that. I think the initial assumption that that definition is good and harmless is just wrong. It's basically just spending money to change the world into what you want. It's similar to regular donations except you're way more invested and strategic in advancing the outcome. It's going to invite all sorts of interests and be controversial.
It's not just about donating. Modern day EA is focused on impactful jobs, like working in research, policy, etc., more than it is focused on donating money.
See for example: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/80000-hours-thinks-that-only-...
Instead, the definition of EA given on their own site is
> Effective altruism is the project of trying to find the best ways of helping others, and putting them into practice.
> Effective altruism breaks down into a philosophy that aims to identify the most effective ways of helping others, and a practical community of people who aim to use the results of that research to make the world better.
Oh, god forbid people try to change the world, especially when the change they want to see is fewer drowned children. Or eliminating malaria.
If you want to form a movement, you now have a movement, with all that entails: leaders, policies, politics, contradictions, internecine struggles, money, money, more money, goals, success at your goals, failure at your goals, etc.
Congratulations you rediscovered tithing.
Most comments read like a version of "Who do you think you are?". Apparently it is very bad to try to think rationally about how and where to give out your money
I mean if rich people want to give out their money for good and beyond are actually trying to do work of researching whether it has an impact instead of just enjoying the high-status feeling of the optics of giving to a good cause (see The Anonymous Donor episode of Curb your enthusiasm), what is it to you all ?
It feels to me like some parents wanting to plan the birth of their children and all the people around are like "Nooo, you have to let Nature decide, don't try to calculate where you are in your cycle !!! "
Apparently this is "authoritarian", "can be used to justify anything" like eugenics but also will end up "similar to communism" but also leads to "hyperindividualism ?
The only way I can explain it is no one wants to give out 1% of their money away and hate the people who make them feel guilty by doing so and saying it would be a good thing so everyone is lashing out
I remember reading the original founder of (MADD) Mothers Against Drunk Driving, left because of this kind of thing.
"Lightner stated that MADD "has become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever wanted or envisioned … I didn't start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothers_Against_Drunk_Driving#...
TBH I am not like, 100% involved, but my first exposure to EA was a blog post from a notorious rich person, describing how he chose to drop a big chunk of his wealth on a particular charity because it could realistically claim to save more lives per dollar than any other.
Now, that might seem like a perfect ahole excuse. But having done time in the NFP/Charity trenches, it immediately made a heap of sense to me. I worked for one that saved 0 lives per dollar, refused to agitate for political change that might save people time and money, and spent an inordinate amount of money on lavish gifts for its own board members.
While EA might stink of capitalism, to me, it always seemed obvious. Charities that waste money should be overlooked in favor of ones that help the most people. It seems to me that EA has a bad rap because of the people who champion it, but criticism of EA as a whole seems like cover for extremely shitty charities that should absolutely be starved of money.
YMMV
The way I first heard of Effective Altruism, I think before it was called that, took a rather different approach. It was from a talk given by the founders of GiveWell at Google. (This is going off of memory so this is approximate.)
Their background was people working for a hedge fund who were interested in charity. They had formed a committee to decide where best to donate their money.
The way they explained it was that there are lots of rigorous approaches to finding and evaluating for-profit investments. At least in hindsight, you can say which investments earned the most. But there's very little for charities, so they wanted to figure out a rigorous way to evaluate charities so they could pick the best ones to donate to. And unlike what most charitable foundations do, they wanted to publish their recommendations and reasoning.
There are philosophical issues involved, but they are inherent in the problem. You have some money and you want to donate it, but don't know which charity to give it to. What do you mean by the best charity? What's a good metric for that?
"Lives saved" is a pretty crude metric, but it's better than nothing. "Quality-adjusted life years" is another common one.
Unfortunately, when you make a spreadsheet to try to determine these things, there are a lot of uncertain inputs, so doing numeric calculations only provides rough estimates. GiveWell readily admits that, but they still do a lot of research along these lines to determine which charities are the best.
There's been a lot of philosophical nonsense associated with Effective Altruism since then, but I think the basic approach still makes sense. Deciding where to donate money is a decision many people have! It doesn't require much in the way of philosophical commitments to decide that it's helpful to do what you can to optimize it. Why wouldn't you want to do a better job of it?
GiveWell's approach has evolved quite a bit since then, but it's still about optimizing charitable donations. Here's recent blog post that goes into their decision-making:
https://blog.givewell.org/2025/07/17/apples-oranges-and-outc...
DDT is also a "very bad, evil, and wicked" thing - for anyone educated between 1970 and 2010.
I remember cartoons having villains who were seeking to make DDT legal again - that's how stigmatized it is.
The EA people did a pretty good job rehabilitating DDT. Good for them.
But the problem is there still asking, "What's the cheapest way to save a human life?"
The GiveWell objective is lives saved or QALYs or whatever. Others have qualia maximized or whatever. But the idea is entirely logical.
I think part of the problem with popularization is that many people have complex objective functions, not all of which are socially acceptable to say. As an example, I want to be charitable in a way that grants me status in my social circle, where spending on guinea worm is less impressive than, say, buying ingredients for cookies, baking them, and giving the cookies to the poor.
Personally I think that’s fine too. I know that some aspect of the charity I do (which is not effective, I must admit) has a desire for recognition and I think it’s good to encourage this because it leads to more charity.
But for many people, encouraging stating one’s objective function is seen as a way to “unearth the objective functions of the ones with lesser motives” and some number of EA people do that.
To say nothing of the fact that lots of people get very upset about the idea that “you think you’re so much better than me?” and so on. It’s an uphill climb, and I wouldn’t do it, but I do enjoy watching them do it because I get the appeal.
Maybe a book clarifying what it really is is a good idea.
For example, the most prominent scandal in the U.S. right now is the Epstein saga. A massive scandal that likely involves the President, a former President, one of the richest men in the world, and a member of the UK royal family.
And in a nutshell, Eostein’s job and source of power was his role as a philanthropist.
No one is using that example to say that regular philanthropy and charity has something wrong with it (even though there are a lot of issues with it…).
Bingo card (and their rebuttals):
– Effective altruists donate money and think it’s the most effective way to do good. [1][2]
– They think that exploiting people is fine if money is given to a good cause. [3][4][5]
– They think they are so much morally-superior/better than us. [3]
– Sam Bankman-Fried is a thief and he self-identified as an EA, so EA must be bad as a whole. [4][6]
– It’s dangerous because it’s an “end justifies the means” philosophy. [4][5]
– If it’s not perfect then it’s terrible and has no merit whatsoever. [7][8][9]
– They think they are so smart but they just stole the idea of donating part of the income from Christians. [10][11]
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[1] https://www.effectivealtruism.org/faqs#objectionsto-effectiv...
[2] “80,000 Hours thinks that only a small proportion of people should earn to give long term”: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/80000-hours-thinks-that-only-...
[3] What We Owe The Future (EA book): “naive calculations that justify some harmful action because it has good consequences are, in practice, almost never correct.” and “it's wrong to do harm even when doing so will bring about the best outcome.”
[4] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1591218028381102081.html / https://xcancel.com/willmacaskill/status/1591218028381102081
[5] The Precipice (EA book): “Don't act without integrity. When something immensely important is at stake and others are dragging their feet, people feel licensed to do whatever it takes to succeed. We must never give in to such temptation. A single person acting without integrity could stain the whole cause and damage everything we hope to achieve.”
[6] “Bankman-Fried agreed his ethically driven approach was "mostly a front".”: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20231009-ftxs-sam-bankm...
[7] “It’s perfectly okay to be an imperfect effective altruist”: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog/its-perfectly-okay-to-b...
[8] “Mistakes we’ve made”: https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/our-mistakes
[9] “GiveWell's Impact”: https://www.givewell.org/about/impact
[10] There is a large Christian community within EA. “We are Christians excited about doing the most good possible.”: https://www.eaforchristians.org/
[11] Many EAs consider Christian charity to be one of the seeds of EA. “A potential criticism or weakness of effective altruism is that it appeals only to a narrow spectrum of society, and exhibits a ‘monoculture’ of ideas. I introduce Dorothea Brooke, a literary character who I argue was an advocate for the principles of effective altruism -- as early as 1871 -- in a Christian ethical tradition”: Load more comments (3 threads left)