8 ms·

The elitist philanthropy of so-called effective altruism (2013)

24 points by ivanvas 4y ago

PaulHoule 4y ago
"Effective Altruism" ultimately fails because money is mischievous and has a mind of its own. That is, if you devote your life to making as much money as possible you've already given up your agency and it's almost inevitable that you'll do more harm making the money than you can possibly do good spending it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
- slothtrop 4y ago
  Spending money on charities effectively does not necessitate maximizing income at any cost. But in the first place, generating high income does not necessitate imposing harm. A marxist would construe that it would by virtue that they believe all enterprise is exploitation, not by measuring harm. What I infer (but is left unsaid) of the denigration of EA on the part of far-left ideologues is that they think charity is a joke. They will not promote it, on the conceit that it would undermine the Socialist mission. The outcomes for beneficiaries are irrelevant.
  - jwmhjwmh 4y ago
    Specifically, profit made selling goods at their equilibrium price is made by exploiting workers. If you introduce a new good, you will have a monopoly on it for a time, meaning you could turn a profit selling it without exploiting your workers, theoretically. That's my understanding, at least.
    - PaulHoule 4y ago
      At first order in macroeconomics, "capital" as an abstract thing, the money itself, exploits everybody. With perfect competition it is impossible for a business to make a profit because if I can make something for $1 and sell it for $2 another business can enter and sell it for $1.99. That same force would make it impossible for employees to get ahead, investors to make money, etc. Profit, surplus for workers, investment return are all dependent on there being some kind of "friction" -- which abounds in the real economy. For instance you want a "moat" for your business such a patent, trade secrets, being at the center of a two-sided market, etc. The labor union quite literally extracts "dues" from workers to sustain the value it helps get for them. Numerous practical problems, such as agency problems, turn up in employing people and it is really not in your best interest to try too hard at paying people as little as possible. The original Marxian eschatology (before Lenin and the Bolsheviks) was that capitalism was going to eliminate all the friction, there would be no surplus for workers, no profits for business owners, capitalists would be unable to continue the game even if they wanted to.
      - jwmhjwmh 4y ago
        I think the orthodox Marxist position is that prices gravitate around labor values in a competitive market. The main reason for profit is that people can produce more value than is necessary to sustain themselves, so capitalists don't need to pay them for the all the value they produce. Some of the value produced becomes profit. It is true that the rate of profit falls over time, but I think this is because of increasing automation in the economy, increasing the proportion of dead labor to living labor. Capitalists have less and less living labor to profit from relative to their costs of production.
        PaulHoule 4y ago
        That's what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Harman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Harman would say. Harman wrote a number of great books on the subject and was buried next to Marx in London. Harman himself would admit, though, the the problem of "the tendency of the rate of profit to decline" isn't completely understood or even established (e.g. the basic 'science of civilization' answer is that 'everything fluctuates'.) I don't buy the idea of "dead" labor though in that capital investment does wear out. You could get a certain bit of infrastructure with 100 person-years or 10 person-years of effort with more or less bungling and the value is the same. You can't just add up the inputs, at the very least you have to apply a discount rate. I don't think that changes the thesis, because the problem that capitalist has is that he has to put more capital in over time to be competitive and to scale. Just like a worker would resent working harder and longer to get paid the same, the capitalist resents having to make larger capital investments to get the same return.
        jwmhjwmh 4y ago
        The increasing prevalence of "dead labor" (maybe another term for it is "fixed capital"?) depends on the changing processes of production. An example of the process is the switch from human-powered hoeing to animal-powered ploughing in agriculture (animals count as dead in this case, I guess.) Ploughing is more efficient, but requires more investment.
- savanaly 4y ago
  GiveWell no longer commonly recommends earning to give, or so I'm told. The amount of money sloshing around in causes they consider as the most impactful outweighs the human talent available so they now more commonly recommend going into a role in a charitable organization.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    Creating value via seeking work at effective charities strikes me as harder than earning-to-give and then donating the proceeds. So GiveWell's advice might be relevant to those who are already doing things in effective altruism, but not very much to the average charity donor (who would be most reliant on GiveWell's and others' advice).
    - PaulHoule 4y ago
      There was a woman who had worked as a non-profit manager that we joked looked like https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Lusamine https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Lusamine although she was of better moral character than that. I thought the story of Pokémon Sun and Moon does the "evil NGO" trope pretty well, complete with a Very Large Floating Structure!
    - savanaly 4y ago
      Yeah I only meant they don't recommend earning to give as your career path if you are going to devote your career to altruism. Giving money is still highly beneficial, just not as beneficial as giving top charities your mind full-time.
- catchclose8919 4y ago
  ...you're mixing a straw man with a red-herring with a couple non-sequiturs ...then dumping a Marx quote at the end. Congrats for creating an argument that is un-atackable because it blocks attempts of rational criticism by means of inducing choice paralysis of where to even begin criticizing it from :)
- hammock 4y ago
  An alternate thesis to Karl Marx: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_investing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_investing
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    I like that better than charity. The profit motive motivates Boeing to make the 777, motivates Microsoft to make Windows, etc. In non-profits, frequently, money works its mischief unopposed, but the motive of "you can make a huge amount of money for yourself and your investors by satisfying a need" is a force for good.
  - chaps 4y ago
    Considering how little funding local journalism non-profits tend to have (even in big cities!), donating to a high-impact local journalist org is a great way to make a considerable impact to your communities.
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      Yes, if you have private knowledge of unfunded, high-impact opportunities, these can beat even the most efficient EA charities. Though the social benefit of improved local journalism is speculative, and best compared to the EA funding choices of the Open Philanthropy Project.
- michaelt 4y ago
  > it's almost inevitable that you'll do more harm making the money than you can possibly do good spending it. levels.fyi claims a Google 'Senior SWE' earns $358,000 a year, while [1] estimates some of the most cost-effective charities can save a life for $4500. If that Googler donates a mere 10% of their salary, that's 8 lives saved a year. So I'm kinda sceptical of what you call 'almost inevitable' here. [1] https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    One general counter is that groups like the Gates Foundation that work in countries with sub-functioning governments do a certain amount of good in the short term by bypassing the government... But they are complicit in keeping governments sub-functioning, corrupt, not accountable to people, etc.
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      For governments to be truly accountable to the people, you need some form of stable civil society which requires some wealth. So bypassing the corrupt government is exactly what you want to begin with.
savanaly 4y ago
I surely hope this is being linked here for us to marvel at its pettiness and incorrectness. >“We believe a more accurate phrase for this concept is “defective altruism” and will therefore use that term for the remainder of this article.” Why not use "poo poo altruism" for even better effect?
- omginternets 4y ago
  It would be helpful (and interesting!) if you would articulate which parts appear incorrect to you. I think we would all benefit from the ensuing discussion :)
  - b450 4y ago
    > Eric Friedman’s new book Reinventing Philanthropy: A Framework for More Effective Giving presents a similar take. In the book, Friedman goes even further than Singer by contrasting the work of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospitals with Malaje Provincial Hospital in Angola. After contrasting two patients served at the different hospitals for life-threatening medical conditions, he concludes, “I’d probably also be very angry at the donors who are continuously funding St. Jude and leaving Malanje Provincial woefully under-resourced. Why are [the patients of St. Jude] so much more worthy of life…?” This seems to us an absurd contrast and presumes a callousness by St. Jude donors that bears no resemblance to reality. Of course it is worthwhile to support both institutions if they both provide life-saving results; but Friedman and others indicate that one should support Malanje and not St. Jude as the “best” choice, and support that claim with nothing other than a decidedly skewed morality. Not OP, but this passage is representative. The authors' claims here are: (a) the contrast between patients at Malanje Provincial and St Jude is "absurd". The authors don't explain what in particular is absurd about it. This is basically the style of argument employed in the article, which mostly amounts to "EA is self-evidently wrong" without elaboration. (b) Friedman presumes that St. Jude donors are "callous". This is clearly unfounded, since the quoted passage is consistent with the idea that St. Jude donors are (say) well-intentioned but culpably ignorant. This is another thread in the authors' arguments - roughly, "EA takes issues with X; X is obviously good; therefore EA is wrong". This is a generic argument that could be employed against any position that isn't a bland endorsement of totally conventional morality, and is another version of "EA is just wrong". (c) Friedman supports his claim with "nothing other than a decidedly skewed morality." This is overtly false, since Friedman's argument is almost certainly defended via some sort of EA premise, like, "saving more lives/alleviating more suffering (per dollar donated) is better than fewer/less." Not an unassailable argument by any means, but the author's don't assail the argument so much as deny that it exists at all, except as a morality that they flatly assert is "skewed".
lambdaphagy 4y ago
The article makes several important criticisms of EA that are obscured beneath self-parodically uncharitable language. The insults are self-defeating in that they suggest the authors can't think calmly about the targets of their criticism.
catchclose8919 4y ago
That's eye opening - to know that effective altruism and the whole movement exists, the article itself is the opposite of right of course. Next time I am to donate time or money to charity I will instead choose to invest in in improving the infrastructure for evaluating the performance and impact of existing charities to help people better decide where yo donate their moneys instead of getting emotionally-hijacked by the charities with the best PR. I think we should all take better attention to this, there's a lot of money in philantropy and tons of either ineffective or downright predatory or manipulative charities!
atemerev 4y ago
Effective altruism in a nutshell: “I can do more good by persuading/forcing more people around me to do more good — and to do it efficiently, I should spend most of my time on it, and not trying to do good myself”. Well, eventually you run out of other people.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  "I can do more good by persuading/forcing more people around me to do more good" This is what most well-known charities do. They spend a lot of money on fundraising and administration, and very little of it on the underlying cause. EA is trying to avoid this failure mode by ensuring that they can derive their visibility by demonstrating actual effectiveness at what they do (providing advice transparently) rather than simply "persuading" others via any other means.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > Well, eventually you run out of other people. In this case, that means you've converted the entire world and that the problem is solved. That's like saying that eventually you run out of people who could vote for you.
  - atemerev 4y ago
    A Kantian approach would be to imagine a world where everyone is following this strategy.
- tomcatfish 4y ago
  Real question: What are you talking about? EA is about doing math to find charities that the highest "good per dollar" and giving them dollars in exchange for created goodness. Whatever you're talking about is something I'm unaware of.
- dtagames 4y ago
  Upvoted for the TL;DR. Would upvote again for the Thatcher.
omginternets 4y ago
This is a heuristic at best, but Ive learned to be skeptical of moral/ethical stances that allow their holder to have their cake and eat it too. Notable examples include: - divine providence and it’s relation to material success - business shouldn’t concern itself with ethics - charitable donations are best treated as a business investment I admit to being surprised that anyone truly, deeply believes any of this. They just ooze of starting from the desired conclusion and working backwards.
sweetheart 4y ago
This is an incredibly meaningless article. The author tries to tear down EA by simply calling it moralistic, but doesn’t actually get around to trying to attack whether or not it’s actually effective. This is the exact same language people use when they are upset because they feel attacked, but don’t understand their emotions enough to make a reasoned argument or get to their actual point. They just lash out with whatever ammo they have, and in this case that just means vague insults and very, very little actual content. Big yikes.
- Traster 4y ago
  I completely disagree. The point that the article is making is that effective altruism has baked into it one very peculiar view of what effective means. Effective altruism is essentially utilitarian altruism. Don't spend £5 at your school's summer fair so they can buy a new set of books for the school library, take that money and hand it to Oxfam to provide clean water to a child in a war torn area. Sure, if you define charitable giving only in terms of one psuedo-objective globalist optimization problem, then effective altruism is the answer. But that's not what most people actually are or should be doing with their altruism. Are we seriously saying we should shut down all the foodbanks in the UK and divert the money to UN aid camps on the borders of Ukraine? Because the inevitable result of this logic is that we accept that the vast majority of things we give our money to charitably should cease, diverted to one very specific group of problems. You could envision a different view of effective altruism which poses the question as "Finding ways to make sure your altruism solves the problem you want to solve efficiently without taking a view on which problems are worth solving". Take a look at GiveWell - a famous EA organisation. The sum total of their recommendation is basically "Give money to stop African people from dying from Malaria, having vitamin deficiency, and vaccinate them"
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    The value of "a book in the local school library" is basically as a consumption good for local students. It's something entirely different from funding socially beneficial causes even locally (such as funding scientific research) - which many EA's would support BTW. There are good arguments for both. EA accepts that there will be differences among people wrt. issues such as how much of our income should pay for broad causes, and whether we should prefer local causes even when they are somewhat less effective. They argue that the advice they can provide as to effectiveness makes a big difference regardless.
HidyBush 4y ago
I see charity as being a space filling algorithm. If everyone was charitable to their neighbors then everyone in the world would ultimately receive help! But if everyone in the world donated to, say, Save the Children, would railroad workers in Cambodia suffer less work-related deaths? I believe that immediate and far reaching help should be in the hands of governments. I have no connection to the people in Myanmar, but I'm sure a part of my nation's economy and politics does. So I will leave my government to consult with experts about the situation in order to organize best our aid paid with a portion of my tax money. There's also the question of giving help to people without teaching them anything and perpetrating a useless cycle, but that's a whole other matter...
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Governments have little or no incentive to spend foreign aid money effectively. They get their money from the taxpayer regardless, and policymakers are incented to alter the set up of foreign aid programs in pursuit of goals that are entirely unrelated to effectiveness.
  - orwin 4y ago
    > set up of foreign aid programs in pursuit of goals that are entirely unrelated to effectiveness. Mostly true, but the side-effect are quite positive. I'd argue that in the long run, foreign aid between 1990 and 2012-ish was more effective than any charity donation. They set up vaccine and OMS programs, they created ports and infrastructure and pressured some government into being a bit more republican (not democratic sadly, but since a third of the third world country was colonized by Bonapartists, and a half by a parlementary monarchy, i'll settle for republic). Yes, Foreign aid do have some undercover agents, but most charity have them too, and the one pushed by GiveWell the most (the Malaria one) is too.
- IHLayman 4y ago
  The problem is that not everyone has the same neighbors. If everyone gave what they could to their neighbors, then people in poorer neighborhoods would still be worse off. Maybe you are speaking more in the abstract, but I think it is important to also donate to groups who _aren’t_ in your local topology, or else you will still have wealth/benefit disparity.
ErikVandeWater 4y ago
Because of this article I visited GiveWell for the first time. I was surprised that their top charities didn't include one that provides contraception. I would presume the highest bang for the buck in attacking poverty would be allowing poor couples to decide not to take on the financial burden of a child. I wonder if it's for political reasons (pro-life donors), or if it's because contraception is expensive.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Contraception tends to be one of those areas that are so well funded already that additional money makes very little difference. EA focuses on causes that are broadly unfunded, and/or with plenty of room for expansion.
- yboris 4y ago
  One organization that you could have on your radar is Population Services International - recommended by The Life You Can Save (which aims to encourage people to commit to giving at least 1% of their income to cost-effective charities) https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/best-charities/population-services-international/ https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/best-charities/population-...
- gnramires 4y ago
  I'm not sure where to fall on this argument, but there are several studies showing that more education, quality of life and life expectancy lead to decreased fertility rates.
- slothtrop 4y ago
  Try these guys - https://www.psi.org/ https://www.psi.org/
SemanticStrengh 4y ago
The issue (not with effective altruism) but with its current main proponents is that the rationalist diaspora is very far from erudition and rationality. They absolutely fail to quantify the relevancy of some existential threats like e.g AGI and thus allocate far too much money on defense mechanisms, which is ridiculous for anyone that has actually studied neural networks. The same goes on for some other existential threats while mostly ignoring the certain major cause of suffering on earth, such as e.g not funding clinical trials for mitochondria targeted antioxidants.
- gnramires 4y ago
  This would be a welcome discussion on Effective Altruism forums :) I really think there's little credible attack on Effective Altruism -- it's like trying to attack science as a whole. Of course you should be altruistic (in a general sense, particulars can vary), and of course you should be effective in your altruism. The details of what it means to be effective and what are the ethical goals that define altruism are part of the process -- and input is not only welcome but essential in refining it.
thrower123 4y ago
The people I know who call themselves effective altruists seem to have gone beyond any actual philanthropy at this point and just go on tirades about AI risk and the singularity.
jwarden 4y ago
To summarize the argument: EA says that we should give money to the most effective causes, which implies that certain less effective but still very good causes should not be supported, so EA is harmful.
- gnramires 4y ago
  I consider myself part of the EA movement, and I don't donate exclusively to e.g. Givewell charities -- although I wouldn't say I don't try to make my donations most effective as a whole. The cost of saving a life for Givewell is about $3000 dollars. I think local development that is expected to truly generate productivity, like even education in higher income regions, can have an economic outcome that generates far more than what was invested (by having them produce far more than $3000, while also being charitable). Not only does the wellbeing of people around me matter (as much as everyone else), we should work to maintain the local health and productivity so it can continue its contribution to the world. I think this mindset is similar to the EA "earning to give" argument. Also, EA usually recognizes humans are not perfectly rational. If you're going to be miserable by donating most/all of your income, it may be best to cut back a little so you can be happier and more productive (or at least seek psychological support to be more comfortably altruistic).
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    The usual argument though is that giving money to "save lives" by improving health in poor regions, also helps bootstrap development in those regions by boosting their income generating capacity. So even improving productivity is something that might be a lot easier in poor countries.
    - gnramires 4y ago
      Yes, that's certainly true (for the record, most of my donations are to Givewell -- I particularly admire GiveDirectly as well -- and I think most charity should go directly to where it's most needed). But there are exceptions -- for example, investing in (relatively already wealthy) health research industries (e.g. addressing pandemics) can save lives in the long run (indirectly), and I think some educational efforts and reserving a small part of your donations to local issues is effective. Diversification is a good idea in this case because I don't have time to measure some of those impacts precisely; otherwise I'd give everything to the most effective cause.
tomcatfish 4y ago
A few paragraphs in > infused with logic so cold that even Mr. Spock would cringe upon hearing it > By contrast, defective altruism is [...] an approach that [...] implements this bold claim by weighing causes and beneficiaries against one another. > Which is the “better” thing to do? To provide a guide dog to one blind American, or cure 2,000 people of blindness in developing countries? [...] it was obvious which choice Singer thought was the “better” of the two; indeed, he said the choice was “clear.” We get it, the author doesn't like comparing things using numbers. I'm not going to try to convince them they should feel otherwise, but I am going to note that an article titled "You Can't Compare Moral Things With Numbers" would have been more relevant, less inflammatory, and less likely to get accused of being mean. I've got more complaints, but they feel nitpickier than this one, and would probably be eaten in the transfer from this article to the suggested, so I'll consider them support for the above instead of separate points.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure that the authors would support curing 200 Americans of blindness over providing one of them with a guide dog, so their only workable objection to Singer's scenario is that people in the developing world are somehow less salient to them. Does it make sense for that different salience to outweigh a plausible 10x factor in effectiveness? For that matter, plenty of donors don't even bother to pick causes that are locally effective; they fund frivolous pursuits such as art galleries and the like. (Which is why Open Philanthropy Project, among other EA orgs, tries to also identify good oppprtunities that would be relevant to the U.S. - such as pandemic preparedness, or policy work on reforming criminal justice.)
- gnramires 4y ago
  Also, the point of EA is not just numbers. Numbers are a tool to help make you the most ethical, rational judgement, to help the most. If you could provide a convincing rational, ethically coherent argument that (if we have a binary choice) we should choose 1 guide dog over curing 2000 people of blindness, we should accept it. When speaking of large evils, and large impacts, I don't see how you could build an argument without numbers to support any decision, that wouldn't be obtuse, incoherent, unfounded. The only problem with numbers is oversimplification: when you use some metric (it could even be lives saved) without taking into account more complex factors like quality of life. Of course, when you can cheaply cure a person of blindness, save a man's life or address extreme poverty (hunger, lack of education, sanitary and material conditions), that seems to overwhelm fine considerations or quality of life... addressing extreme poverty is the first step in providing a rich and good life (and we should be always mindful of such goals).
pessimizer 4y ago
This might be a mean, partisan dismissal, but this essay for me is another example of wealthy liberals identifying themselves as victims by proximity. The fact that they run charities that help the weak somehow means that disagreeing with how they run them is abuse, even if that disagreement entirely consists of moving your cash to someone who is doing a better job.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  There's nothing about running charities that specifically applies to liberals. Many conservatives donate to charities or manage charitable efforts, especially since religious people do a lot of charity.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Absolutely true, but I don't think they would be making this argument. They'd more likely be making specific claims about their own effectiveness.

24 points by ivanvas 4y ago

"Effective Altruism" ultimately fails because money is mischievous and has a mind of its own. That is, if you devote your life to making as much money as possible you've already given up your agency and it's almost inevitable that you'll do more harm making the money than you can possibly do good spending it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

slothtrop 4y ago
Spending money on charities effectively does not necessitate maximizing income at any cost. But in the first place, generating high income does not necessitate imposing harm. A marxist would construe that it would by virtue that they believe all enterprise is exploitation, not by measuring harm. What I infer (but is left unsaid) of the denigration of EA on the part of far-left ideologues is that they think charity is a joke. They will not promote it, on the conceit that it would undermine the Socialist mission. The outcomes for beneficiaries are irrelevant.
- jwmhjwmh 4y ago
  Specifically, profit made selling goods at their equilibrium price is made by exploiting workers. If you introduce a new good, you will have a monopoly on it for a time, meaning you could turn a profit selling it without exploiting your workers, theoretically. That's my understanding, at least.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    At first order in macroeconomics, "capital" as an abstract thing, the money itself, exploits everybody. With perfect competition it is impossible for a business to make a profit because if I can make something for $1 and sell it for $2 another business can enter and sell it for $1.99. That same force would make it impossible for employees to get ahead, investors to make money, etc. Profit, surplus for workers, investment return are all dependent on there being some kind of "friction" -- which abounds in the real economy. For instance you want a "moat" for your business such a patent, trade secrets, being at the center of a two-sided market, etc. The labor union quite literally extracts "dues" from workers to sustain the value it helps get for them. Numerous practical problems, such as agency problems, turn up in employing people and it is really not in your best interest to try too hard at paying people as little as possible. The original Marxian eschatology (before Lenin and the Bolsheviks) was that capitalism was going to eliminate all the friction, there would be no surplus for workers, no profits for business owners, capitalists would be unable to continue the game even if they wanted to.
    - jwmhjwmh 4y ago
      I think the orthodox Marxist position is that prices gravitate around labor values in a competitive market. The main reason for profit is that people can produce more value than is necessary to sustain themselves, so capitalists don't need to pay them for the all the value they produce. Some of the value produced becomes profit. It is true that the rate of profit falls over time, but I think this is because of increasing automation in the economy, increasing the proportion of dead labor to living labor. Capitalists have less and less living labor to profit from relative to their costs of production.
      - PaulHoule 4y ago
        That's what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Harman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Harman would say. Harman wrote a number of great books on the subject and was buried next to Marx in London. Harman himself would admit, though, the the problem of "the tendency of the rate of profit to decline" isn't completely understood or even established (e.g. the basic 'science of civilization' answer is that 'everything fluctuates'.) I don't buy the idea of "dead" labor though in that capital investment does wear out. You could get a certain bit of infrastructure with 100 person-years or 10 person-years of effort with more or less bungling and the value is the same. You can't just add up the inputs, at the very least you have to apply a discount rate. I don't think that changes the thesis, because the problem that capitalist has is that he has to put more capital in over time to be competitive and to scale. Just like a worker would resent working harder and longer to get paid the same, the capitalist resents having to make larger capital investments to get the same return.
        jwmhjwmh 4y ago
        The increasing prevalence of "dead labor" (maybe another term for it is "fixed capital"?) depends on the changing processes of production. An example of the process is the switch from human-powered hoeing to animal-powered ploughing in agriculture (animals count as dead in this case, I guess.) Ploughing is more efficient, but requires more investment.
savanaly 4y ago
GiveWell no longer commonly recommends earning to give, or so I'm told. The amount of money sloshing around in causes they consider as the most impactful outweighs the human talent available so they now more commonly recommend going into a role in a charitable organization.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Creating value via seeking work at effective charities strikes me as harder than earning-to-give and then donating the proceeds. So GiveWell's advice might be relevant to those who are already doing things in effective altruism, but not very much to the average charity donor (who would be most reliant on GiveWell's and others' advice).
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    There was a woman who had worked as a non-profit manager that we joked looked like https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Lusamine https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Lusamine although she was of better moral character than that. I thought the story of Pokémon Sun and Moon does the "evil NGO" trope pretty well, complete with a Very Large Floating Structure!
  - savanaly 4y ago
    Yeah I only meant they don't recommend earning to give as your career path if you are going to devote your career to altruism. Giving money is still highly beneficial, just not as beneficial as giving top charities your mind full-time.
catchclose8919 4y ago
...you're mixing a straw man with a red-herring with a couple non-sequiturs ...then dumping a Marx quote at the end. Congrats for creating an argument that is un-atackable because it blocks attempts of rational criticism by means of inducing choice paralysis of where to even begin criticizing it from :)
hammock 4y ago
An alternate thesis to Karl Marx: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_investing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_investing
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  I like that better than charity. The profit motive motivates Boeing to make the 777, motivates Microsoft to make Windows, etc. In non-profits, frequently, money works its mischief unopposed, but the motive of "you can make a huge amount of money for yourself and your investors by satisfying a need" is a force for good.
- chaps 4y ago
  Considering how little funding local journalism non-profits tend to have (even in big cities!), donating to a high-impact local journalist org is a great way to make a considerable impact to your communities.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    Yes, if you have private knowledge of unfunded, high-impact opportunities, these can beat even the most efficient EA charities. Though the social benefit of improved local journalism is speculative, and best compared to the EA funding choices of the Open Philanthropy Project.
michaelt 4y ago
> it's almost inevitable that you'll do more harm making the money than you can possibly do good spending it. levels.fyi claims a Google 'Senior SWE' earns $358,000 a year, while [1] estimates some of the most cost-effective charities can save a life for $4500. If that Googler donates a mere 10% of their salary, that's 8 lives saved a year. So I'm kinda sceptical of what you call 'almost inevitable' here. [1] https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  One general counter is that groups like the Gates Foundation that work in countries with sub-functioning governments do a certain amount of good in the short term by bypassing the government... But they are complicit in keeping governments sub-functioning, corrupt, not accountable to people, etc.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    For governments to be truly accountable to the people, you need some form of stable civil society which requires some wealth. So bypassing the corrupt government is exactly what you want to begin with.

savanaly 4y ago

I surely hope this is being linked here for us to marvel at its pettiness and incorrectness. >“We believe a more accurate phrase for this concept is “defective altruism” and will therefore use that term for the remainder of this article.” Why not use "poo poo altruism" for even better effect?

omginternets 4y ago
It would be helpful (and interesting!) if you would articulate which parts appear incorrect to you. I think we would all benefit from the ensuing discussion :)
- b450 4y ago
  > Eric Friedman’s new book Reinventing Philanthropy: A Framework for More Effective Giving presents a similar take. In the book, Friedman goes even further than Singer by contrasting the work of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospitals with Malaje Provincial Hospital in Angola. After contrasting two patients served at the different hospitals for life-threatening medical conditions, he concludes, “I’d probably also be very angry at the donors who are continuously funding St. Jude and leaving Malanje Provincial woefully under-resourced. Why are [the patients of St. Jude] so much more worthy of life…?” This seems to us an absurd contrast and presumes a callousness by St. Jude donors that bears no resemblance to reality. Of course it is worthwhile to support both institutions if they both provide life-saving results; but Friedman and others indicate that one should support Malanje and not St. Jude as the “best” choice, and support that claim with nothing other than a decidedly skewed morality. Not OP, but this passage is representative. The authors' claims here are: (a) the contrast between patients at Malanje Provincial and St Jude is "absurd". The authors don't explain what in particular is absurd about it. This is basically the style of argument employed in the article, which mostly amounts to "EA is self-evidently wrong" without elaboration. (b) Friedman presumes that St. Jude donors are "callous". This is clearly unfounded, since the quoted passage is consistent with the idea that St. Jude donors are (say) well-intentioned but culpably ignorant. This is another thread in the authors' arguments - roughly, "EA takes issues with X; X is obviously good; therefore EA is wrong". This is a generic argument that could be employed against any position that isn't a bland endorsement of totally conventional morality, and is another version of "EA is just wrong". (c) Friedman supports his claim with "nothing other than a decidedly skewed morality." This is overtly false, since Friedman's argument is almost certainly defended via some sort of EA premise, like, "saving more lives/alleviating more suffering (per dollar donated) is better than fewer/less." Not an unassailable argument by any means, but the author's don't assail the argument so much as deny that it exists at all, except as a morality that they flatly assert is "skewed".

lambdaphagy 4y ago

The article makes several important criticisms of EA that are obscured beneath self-parodically uncharitable language. The insults are self-defeating in that they suggest the authors can't think calmly about the targets of their criticism.

catchclose8919 4y ago

That's eye opening - to know that effective altruism and the whole movement exists, the article itself is the opposite of right of course. Next time I am to donate time or money to charity I will instead choose to invest in in improving the infrastructure for evaluating the performance and impact of existing charities to help people better decide where yo donate their moneys instead of getting emotionally-hijacked by the charities with the best PR. I think we should all take better attention to this, there's a lot of money in philantropy and tons of either ineffective or downright predatory or manipulative charities!

atemerev 4y ago

Effective altruism in a nutshell: “I can do more good by persuading/forcing more people around me to do more good — and to do it efficiently, I should spend most of my time on it, and not trying to do good myself”. Well, eventually you run out of other people.

zozbot234 4y ago
"I can do more good by persuading/forcing more people around me to do more good" This is what most well-known charities do. They spend a lot of money on fundraising and administration, and very little of it on the underlying cause. EA is trying to avoid this failure mode by ensuring that they can derive their visibility by demonstrating actual effectiveness at what they do (providing advice transparently) rather than simply "persuading" others via any other means.
pessimizer 4y ago
> Well, eventually you run out of other people. In this case, that means you've converted the entire world and that the problem is solved. That's like saying that eventually you run out of people who could vote for you.
- atemerev 4y ago
  A Kantian approach would be to imagine a world where everyone is following this strategy.
tomcatfish 4y ago
Real question: What are you talking about? EA is about doing math to find charities that the highest "good per dollar" and giving them dollars in exchange for created goodness. Whatever you're talking about is something I'm unaware of.
dtagames 4y ago
Upvoted for the TL;DR. Would upvote again for the Thatcher.

omginternets 4y ago

This is a heuristic at best, but Ive learned to be skeptical of moral/ethical stances that allow their holder to have their cake and eat it too. Notable examples include: - divine providence and it’s relation to material success - business shouldn’t concern itself with ethics - charitable donations are best treated as a business investment I admit to being surprised that anyone truly, deeply believes any of this. They just ooze of starting from the desired conclusion and working backwards.

sweetheart 4y ago

This is an incredibly meaningless article. The author tries to tear down EA by simply calling it moralistic, but doesn’t actually get around to trying to attack whether or not it’s actually effective. This is the exact same language people use when they are upset because they feel attacked, but don’t understand their emotions enough to make a reasoned argument or get to their actual point. They just lash out with whatever ammo they have, and in this case that just means vague insults and very, very little actual content. Big yikes.

Traster 4y ago
I completely disagree. The point that the article is making is that effective altruism has baked into it one very peculiar view of what effective means. Effective altruism is essentially utilitarian altruism. Don't spend £5 at your school's summer fair so they can buy a new set of books for the school library, take that money and hand it to Oxfam to provide clean water to a child in a war torn area. Sure, if you define charitable giving only in terms of one psuedo-objective globalist optimization problem, then effective altruism is the answer. But that's not what most people actually are or should be doing with their altruism. Are we seriously saying we should shut down all the foodbanks in the UK and divert the money to UN aid camps on the borders of Ukraine? Because the inevitable result of this logic is that we accept that the vast majority of things we give our money to charitably should cease, diverted to one very specific group of problems. You could envision a different view of effective altruism which poses the question as "Finding ways to make sure your altruism solves the problem you want to solve efficiently without taking a view on which problems are worth solving". Take a look at GiveWell - a famous EA organisation. The sum total of their recommendation is basically "Give money to stop African people from dying from Malaria, having vitamin deficiency, and vaccinate them"
- zozbot234 4y ago
  The value of "a book in the local school library" is basically as a consumption good for local students. It's something entirely different from funding socially beneficial causes even locally (such as funding scientific research) - which many EA's would support BTW. There are good arguments for both. EA accepts that there will be differences among people wrt. issues such as how much of our income should pay for broad causes, and whether we should prefer local causes even when they are somewhat less effective. They argue that the advice they can provide as to effectiveness makes a big difference regardless.

HidyBush 4y ago

I see charity as being a space filling algorithm. If everyone was charitable to their neighbors then everyone in the world would ultimately receive help! But if everyone in the world donated to, say, Save the Children, would railroad workers in Cambodia suffer less work-related deaths? I believe that immediate and far reaching help should be in the hands of governments. I have no connection to the people in Myanmar, but I'm sure a part of my nation's economy and politics does. So I will leave my government to consult with experts about the situation in order to organize best our aid paid with a portion of my tax money. There's also the question of giving help to people without teaching them anything and perpetrating a useless cycle, but that's a whole other matter...

zozbot234 4y ago
Governments have little or no incentive to spend foreign aid money effectively. They get their money from the taxpayer regardless, and policymakers are incented to alter the set up of foreign aid programs in pursuit of goals that are entirely unrelated to effectiveness.
- orwin 4y ago
  > set up of foreign aid programs in pursuit of goals that are entirely unrelated to effectiveness. Mostly true, but the side-effect are quite positive. I'd argue that in the long run, foreign aid between 1990 and 2012-ish was more effective than any charity donation. They set up vaccine and OMS programs, they created ports and infrastructure and pressured some government into being a bit more republican (not democratic sadly, but since a third of the third world country was colonized by Bonapartists, and a half by a parlementary monarchy, i'll settle for republic). Yes, Foreign aid do have some undercover agents, but most charity have them too, and the one pushed by GiveWell the most (the Malaria one) is too.
IHLayman 4y ago
The problem is that not everyone has the same neighbors. If everyone gave what they could to their neighbors, then people in poorer neighborhoods would still be worse off. Maybe you are speaking more in the abstract, but I think it is important to also donate to groups who _aren’t_ in your local topology, or else you will still have wealth/benefit disparity.

ErikVandeWater 4y ago

Because of this article I visited GiveWell for the first time. I was surprised that their top charities didn't include one that provides contraception. I would presume the highest bang for the buck in attacking poverty would be allowing poor couples to decide not to take on the financial burden of a child. I wonder if it's for political reasons (pro-life donors), or if it's because contraception is expensive.

zozbot234 4y ago
Contraception tends to be one of those areas that are so well funded already that additional money makes very little difference. EA focuses on causes that are broadly unfunded, and/or with plenty of room for expansion.
yboris 4y ago
One organization that you could have on your radar is Population Services International - recommended by The Life You Can Save (which aims to encourage people to commit to giving at least 1% of their income to cost-effective charities) https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/best-charities/population-services-international/ https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/best-charities/population-...
gnramires 4y ago
I'm not sure where to fall on this argument, but there are several studies showing that more education, quality of life and life expectancy lead to decreased fertility rates.
slothtrop 4y ago
Try these guys - https://www.psi.org/ https://www.psi.org/

SemanticStrengh 4y ago

The issue (not with effective altruism) but with its current main proponents is that the rationalist diaspora is very far from erudition and rationality. They absolutely fail to quantify the relevancy of some existential threats like e.g AGI and thus allocate far too much money on defense mechanisms, which is ridiculous for anyone that has actually studied neural networks. The same goes on for some other existential threats while mostly ignoring the certain major cause of suffering on earth, such as e.g not funding clinical trials for mitochondria targeted antioxidants.

gnramires 4y ago
This would be a welcome discussion on Effective Altruism forums :) I really think there's little credible attack on Effective Altruism -- it's like trying to attack science as a whole. Of course you should be altruistic (in a general sense, particulars can vary), and of course you should be effective in your altruism. The details of what it means to be effective and what are the ethical goals that define altruism are part of the process -- and input is not only welcome but essential in refining it.

thrower123 4y ago

The people I know who call themselves effective altruists seem to have gone beyond any actual philanthropy at this point and just go on tirades about AI risk and the singularity.

jwarden 4y ago

To summarize the argument: EA says that we should give money to the most effective causes, which implies that certain less effective but still very good causes should not be supported, so EA is harmful.

gnramires 4y ago
I consider myself part of the EA movement, and I don't donate exclusively to e.g. Givewell charities -- although I wouldn't say I don't try to make my donations most effective as a whole. The cost of saving a life for Givewell is about $3000 dollars. I think local development that is expected to truly generate productivity, like even education in higher income regions, can have an economic outcome that generates far more than what was invested (by having them produce far more than $3000, while also being charitable). Not only does the wellbeing of people around me matter (as much as everyone else), we should work to maintain the local health and productivity so it can continue its contribution to the world. I think this mindset is similar to the EA "earning to give" argument. Also, EA usually recognizes humans are not perfectly rational. If you're going to be miserable by donating most/all of your income, it may be best to cut back a little so you can be happier and more productive (or at least seek psychological support to be more comfortably altruistic).
- zozbot234 4y ago
  The usual argument though is that giving money to "save lives" by improving health in poor regions, also helps bootstrap development in those regions by boosting their income generating capacity. So even improving productivity is something that might be a lot easier in poor countries.
  - gnramires 4y ago
    Yes, that's certainly true (for the record, most of my donations are to Givewell -- I particularly admire GiveDirectly as well -- and I think most charity should go directly to where it's most needed). But there are exceptions -- for example, investing in (relatively already wealthy) health research industries (e.g. addressing pandemics) can save lives in the long run (indirectly), and I think some educational efforts and reserving a small part of your donations to local issues is effective. Diversification is a good idea in this case because I don't have time to measure some of those impacts precisely; otherwise I'd give everything to the most effective cause.

tomcatfish 4y ago

A few paragraphs in > infused with logic so cold that even Mr. Spock would cringe upon hearing it > By contrast, defective altruism is [...] an approach that [...] implements this bold claim by weighing causes and beneficiaries against one another. > Which is the “better” thing to do? To provide a guide dog to one blind American, or cure 2,000 people of blindness in developing countries? [...] it was obvious which choice Singer thought was the “better” of the two; indeed, he said the choice was “clear.” We get it, the author doesn't like comparing things using numbers. I'm not going to try to convince them they should feel otherwise, but I am going to note that an article titled "You Can't Compare Moral Things With Numbers" would have been more relevant, less inflammatory, and less likely to get accused of being mean. I've got more complaints, but they feel nitpickier than this one, and would probably be eaten in the transfer from this article to the suggested, so I'll consider them support for the above instead of separate points.

zozbot234 4y ago
I'm pretty sure that the authors would support curing 200 Americans of blindness over providing one of them with a guide dog, so their only workable objection to Singer's scenario is that people in the developing world are somehow less salient to them. Does it make sense for that different salience to outweigh a plausible 10x factor in effectiveness? For that matter, plenty of donors don't even bother to pick causes that are locally effective; they fund frivolous pursuits such as art galleries and the like. (Which is why Open Philanthropy Project, among other EA orgs, tries to also identify good oppprtunities that would be relevant to the U.S. - such as pandemic preparedness, or policy work on reforming criminal justice.)
gnramires 4y ago
Also, the point of EA is not just numbers. Numbers are a tool to help make you the most ethical, rational judgement, to help the most. If you could provide a convincing rational, ethically coherent argument that (if we have a binary choice) we should choose 1 guide dog over curing 2000 people of blindness, we should accept it. When speaking of large evils, and large impacts, I don't see how you could build an argument without numbers to support any decision, that wouldn't be obtuse, incoherent, unfounded. The only problem with numbers is oversimplification: when you use some metric (it could even be lives saved) without taking into account more complex factors like quality of life. Of course, when you can cheaply cure a person of blindness, save a man's life or address extreme poverty (hunger, lack of education, sanitary and material conditions), that seems to overwhelm fine considerations or quality of life... addressing extreme poverty is the first step in providing a rich and good life (and we should be always mindful of such goals).

pessimizer 4y ago

This might be a mean, partisan dismissal, but this essay for me is another example of wealthy liberals identifying themselves as victims by proximity. The fact that they run charities that help the weak somehow means that disagreeing with how they run them is abuse, even if that disagreement entirely consists of moving your cash to someone who is doing a better job.

zozbot234 4y ago
There's nothing about running charities that specifically applies to liberals. Many conservatives donate to charities or manage charitable efforts, especially since religious people do a lot of charity.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Absolutely true, but I don't think they would be making this argument. They'd more likely be making specific claims about their own effectiveness.