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Competence and practicality are severally underrated among many people who believe they are doing good. This belief seems to often short circuit critical thinki

Competence and practicality are severally underrated among many people who believe they are doing good. This belief seems to often short circuit critical thinking and the person ends up diminishing their impact or having an adverse effect. Examples: Habitat for humanity - for the cost of sending one incompetent american to build a house in the third world, an army of local builders can be hired. If you really want to make impact, donate rather than going in person. Talented and capable people who end up working low impact non profit jobs at low pay. If you had a real job and donated half your income to the cause, both you and the cause would be better off. Stupid advocacy. People who get excited about feel good slogans like "cancel rent" without considering impact on the medium and long term supply of housing, and thus end up amplifying the problem they believe they are fixing. These are just a few examples where not doing the seemingly good/moral thing can be much better than doing it.

jsmith99 6y ago
The perfect is the enemy of the good. Many of these charities are technically irrational but realistically people are likely not to get involved at all otherwise. For example, many people donate food to collection bins for food banks, despite the food banks being able to buy food wholesale for a tiny fraction of the price. Being aware of this I smugly refrain from donating overpriced retail food but I haven't yet gotten round to actually sending them some cash yet instead and I suppose not many other have either.
- thimkerbell 6y ago
  What % of the calories that food banks buy are junk food?
nmca 6y ago
I think this analysis is a bit oversimplified. If your goal is to build houses, then local labour is clearly better. But if it's to recruit lifetime donors, then perhaps shipping out incompetent (but fabulously wealthy) Americans is the way forward. Similarly for advocacy, our model should perhaps be that seemingly extreme proposals serve to stretch the Overton window before the middle-ground wins out. Naively disregarding approaches that don't myopically optimise for first-order impact seems likely to have harmful reprocussions. That said, lots of donations are deeply ineffective, and if you want to prioritize I'd suggest the excellent guides from https://www.givewell.org/ https://www.givewell.org/ , who reach many of the same conclusions as you do, after more detailed reasoning.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > If your goal is to build houses Which is the goal of Habitat for Humanity, correct? > if it's to recruit lifetime donors Which is not the goal of Habitat for Humanity, right? It's only a means to an end. The end is building homes for people. If that end can be accomplished by a means more efficient than "recruit lifetime donors", shouldn't it be done that way?
  - awillen 6y ago
    But if sending the incompetent American gets you a lifetime donor who pays for many houses to be built (assuming he would not have without the feeling of personal connection he got from his experience incompetently homebuilding), then isn't that the right thing to do if your goal is to build as many houses as possible? You mentioned efficiency, but the goal was never efficiency - it's to build houses. Would it be better if people were entirely rational and just gave money instead of incompetently homebuilding and then also became lifetime donors? Of course. That's not reality, though.
    - pdonis 6y ago
      > if sending the incompetent American gets you a lifetime donor who pays for many houses to be built (assuming he would not have without the feeling of personal connection he got from his experience incompetently homebuilding) If that is the case, yes. Basically you are saying that, because of a quirk in human psychology, the only way to get people to donate, over the long term, a portion of their income, derived from them doing jobs they are much more productive at than building houses, to building houses, is to engage them by having them build a house themselves first. The question then becomes, does this actually happen? Do people who volunteer to build homes end up becoming lifetime donors? Or are those two separate sets of people?
      - macintux 6y ago
        Speaking from personal experience, getting involved with volunteer work ensures I always consider those organizations when donating. Certainly I volunteered because I had strong feelings towards those needs anyway, but those connections make a big difference.
nicbou 6y ago
I often think of this SMBC comic [1]. If Superman wanted to maximise good, he could just turn a crank really fast. However, maximizing utility is not the only goal. People want to feel good about their actions, and dumping money in a black hole just isn't that satisfying. [1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13
- yboris 6y ago
  "dumping money in a black hole" is a very misleading word choice. The analogy with a black hole suggests that money disappears with no good. Donating to cost-effective charities directly and significantly improves the quality of life for numerous individuals. Just because you don't "solve the whole problem" with your donations doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. Just like you don't choose to stop eating because eating a single meal won't satisfy your hunger for the next 30 years.
  - nicbou 6y ago
    It's a deliberate choice of words. Yes, your money is going towards a good cause, but if you accidentally sent the money to the wrong place, you couldn't possibly tell. Your donation is never mapped to a specific result. It's just added to a much larger pool. You will never get a message saying "your donation paid Paul's first month of rent" or something to that effect. By comparison, volunteering at a soup kitchen feels real, regardless of effectiveness. You see the people you help, and I suspect that's why people prefer being charitable in less efficient ways.
    - yboris 6y ago
      There are charities with extreme transparency. For example, all the money sent to the highly-rated (by GiveWell) charity the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) gets tied to specific distributions (specific villages). You get to see the photos of your money at work and updates about the quality of the malaria-protecting bednets years after they have been distributed. [0] https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf
    - 6y ago
CPLX 6y ago
> If you had a real job and donated half your income to the cause, both you and the cause would be better off. This argument takes as an unstated axiom that the correct way to organize society is by having everyone in a role that strictly maximizes that system's assessment of their economic output. It then concludes that the correct way to effect change is to embrace that system and after the results are in, redirect those economic outputs to desired goals. As the reader may have noticed in examining that unstated premise, this presents quite a dilemma when it becomes clear that this way of organizing society is in fact itself the main cause of the human misery you're trying to eliminate.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > This argument takes as an unstated axiom that the correct way to organize society is by having everyone in a role that strictly maximizes that system's assessment of their economic output. No, that's not the axiom. The axiom is that scarce resources should be allocated to their most productive uses. If the scarce resource of your time and energy can be more productive at building houses if you have a real job and donate a portion of your income to house building, than if you built houses directly, then that's how that scarce resource should be allocated. Note that it is you doing the resource allocation here, not "the system". It is true that "the system" is very inefficient, but what it's inefficient at is providing people with opportunities to choose from to be more productive with the scarce resource of their time and energy. The way to make that more efficient is more free markets and less government regulation; but our society tends to be the other way around.
  - eevilspock 6y ago
    > this way of organizing society is in fact itself the main cause of the human misery you're trying to eliminate. looks like this went completely over your head
    - pdonis 6y ago
      > looks like this went completely over your head The fact that I disgree with the statement you quoted doesn't mean I didn't read it.
mdorazio 6y ago
See "Effective Altruism" as a topic and the book "Doing Good Better" as a more in-depth exploration of what's being said here [1]. It's really interesting to see how psychology and outcomes are interrelated. [1] https://www.effectivealtruism.org/doing-good-better/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/doing-good-better/
watwut 6y ago
> Talented and capable people who end up working low impact non profit jobs at low pay. If you had a real job These are real jobs. As real as any other job. It is absurd to consider them not real. It is also not like people would be super lining up at those positions. And third, the people week make that choice do it because this is what they want to do. They might or might not be successful or happy in corporation. If only stupid people worked in those positions, those non-profits would never be a good place to send money to.
- tdeck 6y ago
  I'm glad someone pointed this out, it irks me. Also, when you work at a for-profit job and donate money, a lot of that money goes to pay salaries. Wouldn't we want those nonprofit workers to be talented and capable?
jvanderbot 6y ago
This is very true. I just want to point out one under-appreciated side effect of hands-on altruisim: it does often change the person for the better. It's often better to give money, and there's no better way to see how little you can do with your hands vs how much you can do with a dollar than to go and see it yourself. Even raising awareness about the problems with a visceral experience of being there can make a person more prone to donate money, advocate for causes, and be contemplative in their policy choices. But, money is not a sure-fire solution. Even when donating money, this is a cognitive barrier that must be overcome. In major philanthropic work, a huge problem is matching the donor's expepectations of targetted "This person saved 1000 people" investments vs a "general fund" investment to, say, a global vaccine initiative. There's no traceability when you dump your dollars into a pool to buy a billion vaccines, but there is enormous positive impact. Contrast that with, say, building a well in a village (something that is usually poorly done, poorly maintained, and not very helpful compared with a municipal water project or sanitation education program). But the well has immediate impact that can be photographed and they probably got their name etched into it. These aren't made up examples, I've heard these stories from policy / fund raisers. They just shake their head and agree that the world is slightly better, even if it could have been even more slightly better.
KineticLensman 6y ago
> Talented and capable people who end up working low impact non profit jobs at low pay I currently volunteer at a raptor conservation charity. For no pay at all. They cannot afford to pay anyone but their trained bird team and a small office staff. Volunteers like myself are a force multiplier for the trained permanent staff. By doing mundane jobs for them, we free them to apply their expertise where it matters. Pre-COVID, these mundane tasks included basic animal husbandry, grounds work and infrastructure maintenance. Good skill fits for these role include carpentry, building, 'roady' type knowledge (how to build and wire-up outdoor structures) and many others. Post-COVID, new tasks include cleaning, sanitization and crowd management (facilitating social distancing). > If you had a real job and donated half your income to the cause, both you and the cause would be better off. I used to provide financial support to them before I retired. Now I only work intermittently, and I'm using my income to fund my own time working for them, for free. This is genuinely the best way I can help them. Especially now that their income has been decimated by COVID lockdowns. [Edit] The flaw in the parent's line of reasoning is assuming that all a non-profit organisation needs is money. Sometimes they need actual stuff doing (such as building a new aviary) and volunteers let them reduce or even eliminate the not-insignificant labour and contracting costs.
- carbonguy 6y ago
  I think what you're describing is "moral competence" as the article frames it. That is to say: your efforts are not directed to the end of "how can I be seen as working to support raptor conservation" but rather "how can I support raptor conservation?" Or, in other words: how can you genuinely further the cause, rather than simply seem to?
yowlingcat 6y ago
A colleague in my extended network had a pithy way of describing this: "Many distribution problems look like moral problems from far away." Not saying I agree with it completely, but it did change how I started looking at framings of societal problems.
DenisM 6y ago
If you keep thinking these dissident thoughts you may eventually come to the conclusion that huge portion of do-gooding is done for the benefit of the do-gooders, primarily the feel-good benefit. A few are trying hard to build a link between their own feel-good and the benefit of the supposed beneficiaries, but wishful thinking is rampant.
imtringued 6y ago
Gentrification is often seen as bad but it's merely a matter how it's managed. Displacement is not a problem if you build the newcomers enough housing. They are willing to pay for expensive high rises and live there. Be happy that they don't actually want your house. But for the NIMBY that's the worst outcome. He doesn't want his neighbor to sell the plot because he wants to sell his own plot for profit. The lack of housing eventually results in displacement. The opposite of gentrification is far worse. Stagnating communities feel the same effect. The local economy is transforming. Local culture is getting lost. Except all of it happens for no one's benefit. People get the wrong impression and start "fighting" gentrification and then introduce real problems through misguided policy.
anemoiac 6y ago
I’m personally sympathetic to your concerns, but to play devil’s advocate: Who’s to say that typical high-paying “real jobs” are a net good for society, (even) assuming that their occupants donate half of their earnings to worthy causes? I’d imagine that plenty of “talented and capable” people working in (what might be considered) “low impact non profit jobs at low pay” are aware of effective altruism, or similar movements that seem to reflect your perspective, but would consider working in high finance/Big Tech/management consulting/etc counterproductive to their ultimate goals.

jsmith99 6y ago

The perfect is the enemy of the good. Many of these charities are technically irrational but realistically people are likely not to get involved at all otherwise. For example, many people donate food to collection bins for food banks, despite the food banks being able to buy food wholesale for a tiny fraction of the price. Being aware of this I smugly refrain from donating overpriced retail food but I haven't yet gotten round to actually sending them some cash yet instead and I suppose not many other have either.

thimkerbell 6y ago
What % of the calories that food banks buy are junk food?

nmca 6y ago

I think this analysis is a bit oversimplified. If your goal is to build houses, then local labour is clearly better. But if it's to recruit lifetime donors, then perhaps shipping out incompetent (but fabulously wealthy) Americans is the way forward. Similarly for advocacy, our model should perhaps be that seemingly extreme proposals serve to stretch the Overton window before the middle-ground wins out. Naively disregarding approaches that don't myopically optimise for first-order impact seems likely to have harmful reprocussions. That said, lots of donations are deeply ineffective, and if you want to prioritize I'd suggest the excellent guides from https://www.givewell.org/ https://www.givewell.org/ , who reach many of the same conclusions as you do, after more detailed reasoning.

pdonis 6y ago
> If your goal is to build houses Which is the goal of Habitat for Humanity, correct? > if it's to recruit lifetime donors Which is not the goal of Habitat for Humanity, right? It's only a means to an end. The end is building homes for people. If that end can be accomplished by a means more efficient than "recruit lifetime donors", shouldn't it be done that way?
- awillen 6y ago
  But if sending the incompetent American gets you a lifetime donor who pays for many houses to be built (assuming he would not have without the feeling of personal connection he got from his experience incompetently homebuilding), then isn't that the right thing to do if your goal is to build as many houses as possible? You mentioned efficiency, but the goal was never efficiency - it's to build houses. Would it be better if people were entirely rational and just gave money instead of incompetently homebuilding and then also became lifetime donors? Of course. That's not reality, though.
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > if sending the incompetent American gets you a lifetime donor who pays for many houses to be built (assuming he would not have without the feeling of personal connection he got from his experience incompetently homebuilding) If that is the case, yes. Basically you are saying that, because of a quirk in human psychology, the only way to get people to donate, over the long term, a portion of their income, derived from them doing jobs they are much more productive at than building houses, to building houses, is to engage them by having them build a house themselves first. The question then becomes, does this actually happen? Do people who volunteer to build homes end up becoming lifetime donors? Or are those two separate sets of people?
    - macintux 6y ago
      Speaking from personal experience, getting involved with volunteer work ensures I always consider those organizations when donating. Certainly I volunteered because I had strong feelings towards those needs anyway, but those connections make a big difference.

nicbou 6y ago

I often think of this SMBC comic [1]. If Superman wanted to maximise good, he could just turn a crank really fast. However, maximizing utility is not the only goal. People want to feel good about their actions, and dumping money in a black hole just isn't that satisfying. [1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13

yboris 6y ago
"dumping money in a black hole" is a very misleading word choice. The analogy with a black hole suggests that money disappears with no good. Donating to cost-effective charities directly and significantly improves the quality of life for numerous individuals. Just because you don't "solve the whole problem" with your donations doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. Just like you don't choose to stop eating because eating a single meal won't satisfy your hunger for the next 30 years.
- nicbou 6y ago
  It's a deliberate choice of words. Yes, your money is going towards a good cause, but if you accidentally sent the money to the wrong place, you couldn't possibly tell. Your donation is never mapped to a specific result. It's just added to a much larger pool. You will never get a message saying "your donation paid Paul's first month of rent" or something to that effect. By comparison, volunteering at a soup kitchen feels real, regardless of effectiveness. You see the people you help, and I suspect that's why people prefer being charitable in less efficient ways.
  - yboris 6y ago
    There are charities with extreme transparency. For example, all the money sent to the highly-rated (by GiveWell) charity the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) gets tied to specific distributions (specific villages). You get to see the photos of your money at work and updates about the quality of the malaria-protecting bednets years after they have been distributed. [0] https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf
  - 6y ago

CPLX 6y ago

> If you had a real job and donated half your income to the cause, both you and the cause would be better off. This argument takes as an unstated axiom that the correct way to organize society is by having everyone in a role that strictly maximizes that system's assessment of their economic output. It then concludes that the correct way to effect change is to embrace that system and after the results are in, redirect those economic outputs to desired goals. As the reader may have noticed in examining that unstated premise, this presents quite a dilemma when it becomes clear that this way of organizing society is in fact itself the main cause of the human misery you're trying to eliminate.

pdonis 6y ago
> This argument takes as an unstated axiom that the correct way to organize society is by having everyone in a role that strictly maximizes that system's assessment of their economic output. No, that's not the axiom. The axiom is that scarce resources should be allocated to their most productive uses. If the scarce resource of your time and energy can be more productive at building houses if you have a real job and donate a portion of your income to house building, than if you built houses directly, then that's how that scarce resource should be allocated. Note that it is you doing the resource allocation here, not "the system". It is true that "the system" is very inefficient, but what it's inefficient at is providing people with opportunities to choose from to be more productive with the scarce resource of their time and energy. The way to make that more efficient is more free markets and less government regulation; but our society tends to be the other way around.
- eevilspock 6y ago
  > this way of organizing society is in fact itself the main cause of the human misery you're trying to eliminate. looks like this went completely over your head
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > looks like this went completely over your head The fact that I disgree with the statement you quoted doesn't mean I didn't read it.

mdorazio 6y ago

See "Effective Altruism" as a topic and the book "Doing Good Better" as a more in-depth exploration of what's being said here [1]. It's really interesting to see how psychology and outcomes are interrelated. [1] https://www.effectivealtruism.org/doing-good-better/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/doing-good-better/

watwut 6y ago

> Talented and capable people who end up working low impact non profit jobs at low pay. If you had a real job These are real jobs. As real as any other job. It is absurd to consider them not real. It is also not like people would be super lining up at those positions. And third, the people week make that choice do it because this is what they want to do. They might or might not be successful or happy in corporation. If only stupid people worked in those positions, those non-profits would never be a good place to send money to.

tdeck 6y ago
I'm glad someone pointed this out, it irks me. Also, when you work at a for-profit job and donate money, a lot of that money goes to pay salaries. Wouldn't we want those nonprofit workers to be talented and capable?

jvanderbot 6y ago

This is very true. I just want to point out one under-appreciated side effect of hands-on altruisim: it does often change the person for the better. It's often better to give money, and there's no better way to see how little you can do with your hands vs how much you can do with a dollar than to go and see it yourself. Even raising awareness about the problems with a visceral experience of being there can make a person more prone to donate money, advocate for causes, and be contemplative in their policy choices. But, money is not a sure-fire solution. Even when donating money, this is a cognitive barrier that must be overcome. In major philanthropic work, a huge problem is matching the donor's expepectations of targetted "This person saved 1000 people" investments vs a "general fund" investment to, say, a global vaccine initiative. There's no traceability when you dump your dollars into a pool to buy a billion vaccines, but there is enormous positive impact. Contrast that with, say, building a well in a village (something that is usually poorly done, poorly maintained, and not very helpful compared with a municipal water project or sanitation education program). But the well has immediate impact that can be photographed and they probably got their name etched into it. These aren't made up examples, I've heard these stories from policy / fund raisers. They just shake their head and agree that the world is slightly better, even if it could have been even more slightly better.

KineticLensman 6y ago

> Talented and capable people who end up working low impact non profit jobs at low pay I currently volunteer at a raptor conservation charity. For no pay at all. They cannot afford to pay anyone but their trained bird team and a small office staff. Volunteers like myself are a force multiplier for the trained permanent staff. By doing mundane jobs for them, we free them to apply their expertise where it matters. Pre-COVID, these mundane tasks included basic animal husbandry, grounds work and infrastructure maintenance. Good skill fits for these role include carpentry, building, 'roady' type knowledge (how to build and wire-up outdoor structures) and many others. Post-COVID, new tasks include cleaning, sanitization and crowd management (facilitating social distancing). > If you had a real job and donated half your income to the cause, both you and the cause would be better off. I used to provide financial support to them before I retired. Now I only work intermittently, and I'm using my income to fund my own time working for them, for free. This is genuinely the best way I can help them. Especially now that their income has been decimated by COVID lockdowns. [Edit] The flaw in the parent's line of reasoning is assuming that all a non-profit organisation needs is money. Sometimes they need actual stuff doing (such as building a new aviary) and volunteers let them reduce or even eliminate the not-insignificant labour and contracting costs.

carbonguy 6y ago
I think what you're describing is "moral competence" as the article frames it. That is to say: your efforts are not directed to the end of "how can I be seen as working to support raptor conservation" but rather "how can I support raptor conservation?" Or, in other words: how can you genuinely further the cause, rather than simply seem to?

yowlingcat 6y ago

A colleague in my extended network had a pithy way of describing this: "Many distribution problems look like moral problems from far away." Not saying I agree with it completely, but it did change how I started looking at framings of societal problems.

DenisM 6y ago

If you keep thinking these dissident thoughts you may eventually come to the conclusion that huge portion of do-gooding is done for the benefit of the do-gooders, primarily the feel-good benefit. A few are trying hard to build a link between their own feel-good and the benefit of the supposed beneficiaries, but wishful thinking is rampant.

imtringued 6y ago

Gentrification is often seen as bad but it's merely a matter how it's managed. Displacement is not a problem if you build the newcomers enough housing. They are willing to pay for expensive high rises and live there. Be happy that they don't actually want your house. But for the NIMBY that's the worst outcome. He doesn't want his neighbor to sell the plot because he wants to sell his own plot for profit. The lack of housing eventually results in displacement. The opposite of gentrification is far worse. Stagnating communities feel the same effect. The local economy is transforming. Local culture is getting lost. Except all of it happens for no one's benefit. People get the wrong impression and start "fighting" gentrification and then introduce real problems through misguided policy.

anemoiac 6y ago

I’m personally sympathetic to your concerns, but to play devil’s advocate: Who’s to say that typical high-paying “real jobs” are a net good for society, (even) assuming that their occupants donate half of their earnings to worthy causes? I’d imagine that plenty of “talented and capable” people working in (what might be considered) “low impact non profit jobs at low pay” are aware of effective altruism, or similar movements that seem to reflect your perspective, but would consider working in high finance/Big Tech/management consulting/etc counterproductive to their ultimate goals.