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Notes on Effective Altruism

116 points by sebg 4y ago

jmcgough 4y ago
I've always been curious about EA (and espoused ideas like aggressively making money so I could donate more to non-profits)... if I wanted to participate in EA discourse, where are those conversations happening now? effectivealtruism.org?
- dotsam 4y ago
  The EA forum is active, e.g here is a discussion of this article: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JBAPssaYMMRfNqYt7/michael-nielsen-s-notes-on-effective-altruism https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JBAPssaYMMRfNqYt7/...
roenxi 4y ago
From the sideline chorus of cynics; the Achilles heel of Effective Altruism is that most alleged altruists are the usual fair-weather activists who want to be seen to be on the right side but are not actually interested in solving any real world problems. The only lens that works when viewing politics (and altruism is a form of politics) is to assume people are miscommunicating their intended outcome. We've had thousands of years of experience with cause and effect, hundreds of years experience with modern mathematics for evaluating evidence and all the resources in the world to run experiments if we cared to. If people aren't trying to deploy that beyond 3-word-slogans and "we all know what is going on here, it is obvious, no need to check the hypothesis!" style strategies then they aren't trying to improve the situation. The first thing anyone runs in to when they try to solve a problem is that nobody involved seems to change their mind after reviewing contradictory evidence and that is a huge barrier to change. There is a clear gap between how people who are interested in solving a problem act and how the average person out there to "do good" acts. If people are trying to improve a situation the strategy & understanding of that situation should keep pivoting. And there should be a steady stream of minor discoveries as apparently obvious truth turns out to be false.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  > The only lens that works when viewing politics (and altruism is a form of politics) is to assume people are miscommunicating their intended outcome. Sometimes group A and B just want all of X and neither are willing to compromise. No miscommunication.
- bcbrown 4y ago
  > The only lens that works when viewing politics (and altruism is a form of politics) is to assume people are miscommunicating their intended outcome. Could you explain what you mean by this? I'm intrigued.
  - roenxi 4y ago
    Tricky question to answer, particularly without picking specific examples and getting too political. I suppose what I'm trying to say is there is pretty overwhelming evidence that the voting public doesn't understand cause and effect of the policies they are calling for. Eg, spending 20 minutes debating politics with anyone makes it apparent that at least one and often all sides of a debate are people who don't really understand the particulars of the situation, in most cases haven't read the policies involved or done much research beyond listening to some with charisma and maybe some credentials. They don't change their minds. Then the actual politicians build up their rhetoric and positions, and they have to mirror what the voters are thinking to get votes. But the voters are often demanding incoherent or stupid policies that aren't at all aligned with expert advice. My personal favourite showcase is a combination like loose border control combined with a strong welfare state - no fair & feasible way to do both. The situation ends up with politicians who have to say things that clearly they don't believe in service of goals they cannot pursue, in order to hold office. If they were serious about what they are communicating, we'd expect them to check the evidence & maybe run a couple of trials to see how feasible the whole plan is. And if they did they would change their mind quite quickly, because there is actually quite a lot of evidence out there about what works. But they won't, because they aren't serious & that they are actually doing is mimicking the opinions of the large, oft-changing and schizophrenic opinion of a mass of voters. And the voters really don't care because big groups of people are not at all altruistic outside their in-group.
jph 4y ago
Effective Altruism discussion can be helped IMHO by introducing "Social Value Orientation" (SVO), which describes people's preferences for resource allocation (e.g. money) between the self and others. https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/social-value-orientation https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/social-value-orientat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_value_orientations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_value_orientations
- agumonkey 4y ago
  Is there a conceptualization of SV balancing ? I keep thinking about finding the right blend of proself and prosocial .. to the point of needing a new term like being proWE as you forget about others vs self but focus on a "us" enjoyment
codeflo 4y ago
When I first heard of Effective Altruism, it was all about vaccines and mosquito nets — low cost solutions with clear, positive outcomes. I found that convincing, and even donated some money to some of the recommendations. When I checked back a few years later, the community seemed to be all about surviving the Rapture, I mean “Singularity”, summoning God, I mean the “Friendly AI”, and maximizing the happiness of the expected 10 to the trillion lives in Heaven, I mean the “Simulation”. I found all of that a lot less convincing. There are several social reasons why this shift happened, but the root problem, to me, is utilitarianism taken to a dangerous extreme. Effective Altruism was arguably always rooted in some form of utilitarianism as a guiding principle. The problem is, the concept seems to have attracted some very logical, abstract thinkers who somehow didn’t realize when they started to lose contact with reality. Note that all of this is just my opinion, but here’s my point. I find it always problematic to assign a numerical goodness value (“utilons”) to a human life, though I concede that it can work as a heuristic in small, non-extreme cases. What definitely doesn’t work is to take that number, multiply it by population sizes and claim to have solved ethics. No matter how much you wish it was, ethics is simply not a subbranch a mathematics. To put it very bluntly: That road has been traveled before, and it leads to genocide. To be clear, this isn’t hyperbole. I won’t link any sources to limit exposure, but you can find articles by self-proclaimed altruists who argue that it’s better to lose a billion lives to climate change than to delay AI research by even one year. The suggested reason being that delaying the Ascent into Heaven — I mean the “Upload into the Simulation” — costs humanity a collective 10 to the gazillion utilons, compared to the mere billions of utilons potentially lost to the climate catastrophe. Just think about the implications.
- beebmam 4y ago
  Utilitarianism is the worst ethical framework, except for all the others
- hedgew 4y ago
  One reason why EA takes AI risks seriously is exactly because of how hard it is to define what is "good" or what "utility" makes humans happy.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
endominus 4y ago
> you can't really justify the arts You absolutely can. Is this actually an issue that EAs have to grapple with? It seems so obvious to me. You just have to stop thinking about art in the fuzzy, "good because other people say it's good" sense of the word. You have to actually come to grips with the function that art serves, which I gather is difficult for a lot of people because the answer doesn't gel with the cultural pacifism that they believe they believe in. Marx of all people got this right. Art is cultural warfare. >I suspect no society, ever, has been healthy that didn't invest significant time and resources in the arts. Obviously. A culture that does not invest in its art is going to be overtaken by a culture that does. Just as a nation that lacks a military is not going to be its own nation for long. The purpose of art is to define, defend, and spread the cultural values of the people that create it. Doing so ensures that those values survive to the next generation, ensuring the long-term success of the culture and movement. Thus, justifying investment and engagement with art, or raising children, is easy. Quantifying the benefits of that investment is much harder because, in contrast to mosquito nets and vaccinations, culture spread is going to be opposed by other cultures. It's PvP, rather than PvE. For those that don't believe that art affects cultural values, please consider this thought experiment; imagine you have a young child that wants to watch a new movie. You take a look at it, and the movie's story is of a bully and cheater winning at some competition, the entire community siding with that antagonist, and the main character eventually accepting that this is fine and normal and must simply be tolerated. The moral is clearly that liars and cheaters win, violence is a valid way of getting what you want, and everyone who disagrees will be unhappy and defeated in the end anyway. Would you want your child to watch that movie? If not, why? Of course, this view means that most forms of "high" art - the kind that exists so that people in the know can look down their nose at people who just lack taste and class[0], or so that they can commit tax evasion[1] - are not actually good art. They do not effectively communicate cultural values, or defend them. The attitude of the art world in defending this excreta widens the rift between them and the general public that they should be trying to communicate to. It lowers people's interest in engaging with art on an intellectual and philosophical level, allowing more and more pandering nonsense to be shovelled into them. The modern world has no more interest in "artists" making "art"; it wants "content creators" creating "content".The ongoing destruction of people's ability to understand or appreciate art - where it actually exists - at a high level serves only to lower natural defenses against competing cultures. "All poets are soldiers. We fight our wars across centuries." [0]: https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2021/08/the-weird-story-of-the-artist-pierre-brassau/ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2021/08/the-weird-story-of-th... [1]: https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/90-of-modern-art-is-just-tax-evasion/ https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/90-of-modern-art-is-just...
dash2 4y ago
A good companion to this piece would be John Stuart Mill's autobiography, where he describes his nervous breakdown after being raised as a utilitarian by his father: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10378/10378-h/10378-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10378/10378-h/10378-h.htm. It raises some of the same issues: > In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?" And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, "No!" At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.
- mr_luc 4y ago
  That's fantastic! Although personally, while I get a chuckle out of reading that excerpt, I can't actually understand the point of view I'm intended to chuckle at. I don't want my life's work, or anyone else's, to be engaged in a struggle to change mucky 'institutions and opinions.' Eww! Gross! Honorable, necessary, maybe. (But only 'maybe', I wouldn't assume it about those who claim to be engaged in such a struggle). It's not completely implausible that realpolitik can be creatively fulfilling, worthwhile, and life's calling. But I'd chalk that up to humans being able to imbue even the worst situations with meaning, rather than it being particularly attractive as a life's work. If I think of that question: Suppose [...] that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you? I'd answer 'yes', and I think a lot of HN readers would too (aside from "Monkey's Paw"-style unintended consequences). I wish we had a safe, abundant world for everyone, where all respected each others' rights -- so we could get on with the best parts of human life. The best parts of human life are limitless, so the Mills' thought experiment can't touch them: creating, and sharing. Creation is limitless, and there is no end-game, nor can there be. The question falls apart immediately: "imagine that everything that should be created has been created." It would be nonsensical -- whether in a cave, in the present day, in a 1950's sci-fi future or some (implausibly) transcendent Singularity, there are always things that you don't know, and thus new things you can do with the new knowledge once you acquire it. And thus there will always be new things you can experience and share with others. Edit: and as a note about EA specifically, so as not to derail one of my favorite recent HN comment sections. I'm a fan personally, and my experience is that 'expat' living is a good way to help accomplish it, without any particular misery traps (10 years out of the past 18). Specifically, I align with the 'Our World In Data' take, about how inequality globally is so much more than within rich countries -- so any 'sticky' ways of funneling your money into poorer countries is good, and you don't even need to worry too much about getting scammed, as long as the scammer legitimately lives and spends in a poorer community. And then if you're actually living in that poorer country, while working in a richer one, you're 'funneling money' there, by and large not competing with the locals (except in things in which there is already effectively global competition, like, say, oceanfront property/rentals). And you can also develop excellent 'local knowledge' in order to give more targeted help, which is rewarding -- but that kind of 'give a kidney' stuff isn't scalable, where remote work is.
jefftk 4y ago
(I'm the Jeff mentioned one the piece) This is a really good critique, but the "misery trap" section feels like it is describing a problem that EA definitely had early on, but mostly doesn't now? In early EA, people started thinking hard about this idea of doing the most good they could. Naively, this suggests doing things like giving up things that are seriously important to you (like having children), illegibily make you more productive (like a good work environment), or provide important flexibility (like having free time), and the author quotes some early EAs struggling with this conflict, like: > my inner voice in early 2016 would automatically convert all money I spent (eg on dinner) to a fractional “death counter” of lives in expectation I could have saved if I’d donated it to good charities. Most EAs I mentioned that to at the time were like ah yeah seems reasonable I really don't think many EAs would say "seems reasonable" now. If someone says this to me I'd give some of my personal history with this idea and talk about how it turns out that in practice this works terribly for people: it makes you miserable, very slightly increases how much you have available to donate, and massively decreases your likely long-term impact through burnout, depression, and short-term thinking. One piece of writing that I think was helpful in turning this around was http://www.givinggladly.com/2013/06/cheerfully.html http://www.givinggladly.com/2013/06/cheerfully.html Another was https://www.benkuhn.net/box/ https://www.benkuhn.net/box/ I think it's not a coincidence that the examples the author links are 5+ years old? If people are still getting caught in this trap, though, I'd be interested to see more? (And potentially write more on why it's not a good application of EA thinking.) In case people are curious: Julia and I now have three kids and it's been 10+ years since stress and conflict about painful trade-offs between our own happiness and making the world better were a major issue for us.
- EA_itsinthegame 4y ago
  Effective altruism is only effective if you also give altruism to yourself.
- skybrian 4y ago
  It seems like the basic trick here is setting boundaries. It’s broader than EA, but some formulations of EA (and utilitarianism in general) seem to advocate for not setting boundaries; consider Pete Singer’s drowning child thought experiment and how he advocates for treating everyone in the world as having an equal claim on your time and money. I think that practically speaking, setting boundaries is important and a philosophy that doesn’t take that into account is a bad philosophy. Real world organizations set boundaries all the time; that’s what budgeting is. But boundaries still seem philosophically suspect due to their arbitrariness: why give 10%, say, and not some other number? Does someone have a philosophical answer for people struggling with this?
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
The only issue I have with "branded" stuff, like EA (which sounds awesome. Five Stars would eat there again), is that it often establishes a "metric," that is then used to "measure" others (and usually, find them wanting). This happens in pretty much every human endeavor. The urge to be better than others is powerful, and many people dedicate enormous resources to being "better than." I've been involved with an outfit for my entire adult life, that has, as a Core Principle, "You must give it away to keep it." It's kind of a "pass/fail" test. If we pass, we keep breathing. If we fail, we die twitching, so there's definitely a measure of self-interest, involved. That said, some pretty amazing stuff gets done, with almost no fanfare, and we don't bother shaming each other with metrics.
- frickinLasers 4y ago
  I'm happy with a metric that encourages people to do good, as opposed to a metric which describes how much power one has over others, or how many yachts they can afford. Hopefully the EA community isn't terribly concerned with how they measure up against others (though, as an outsider, maybe I don't understand how important that is). By thinking about how to do good, they're already leagues ahead of 90% of humanity.
- imtringued 4y ago
  The concept of negative yields recognizes that owning capital can entail obligations to the public. It effectively turns money into a boomerang. If you have too much and don't want it, you ought to give it to someone who has too little. The way the current economic system is structured fools people into believing money is their private property, as if the people who are dependent on that money are obedient servants. Hence governments must keep deficit spending for all eternity as the boomerang isn't returning.
cheese_goddess 4y ago
> came across some stats on how safe it was to donate and it totally changed my picture. I thought, 1/3,000 risk of death in surgery is like sacrificing yourself to save 3,000 people. I want to be the kind of person who'd do that, and you just have to follow these few steps. What these noble gestures based on statstical thinking invariably omit is the fact that kidney donors have an elevated chance of suffering from kidney disease themselves. This risk is much higher than the 1/3000 risk of death in surgery reported in the article. For example: > Two studies report a higher risk of end-stage renal disease (ESRD) among donors than among healthy nondonors; however, the absolute 15-year incidence of ESRD is <1%. All-cause mortality and the risk of cardiovascular events are similar among donors and healthy nondonors, although one study provides evidence for a 5% increase in all-cause mortality after 25 years that is attributable to donation. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25941060/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25941060/ So it's not like you sacrifice yourself to save 3000 people, it's sacrificing yourself for a chance to have two kidney patients where you only had one. And while "less than 1%" sounds like a small personal risk, it is a large risk at a population level. And as more people are convinced of the altruism of donating a kidney, while alive, it will affect more people. In this, I'm speaking as a kidney patient and one who would never accept an organ from a living donor, exactly because of the above. And that's before thinking of the trade-offs in quality of life that come with transplantation, and the potential effect of "freezing" research in finding true cures for kindey disease (which is not one disease) because we can keep people alive for more than 10 years with transplants and dialysis.
- ravi-delia 4y ago
  I mean, it's pretty obvious that the expected additional kidney cases per donation is less than 1. We aren't talking about an exponential explosion of kidney transplants, it tends to a finite sum with fewer deaths.
  - cheese_goddess 4y ago
    > I mean, it's pretty obvious that the expected additional kidney cases per donation is less than 1. Why is that the important number to take into consideration, rather than the number of transplants with a living kidney donor per day, for example?
tux3 4y ago
I think this is overall a very well written article, as someone not involved with EA, it seems a good critique of EA. But! This actually makes me more interested in EA, because the criticism only really chips away small caveats in the idea it presents. It points out some inconsistency in the central principle, but a lot of things are still worth doing while having some unclear edge-cases that seem inconsistent. I think it's also easy to reject the dichotomy between "EA says you should sacrifice everything in the embrace of extreme utilitarianism" and "EA is just generic try-to-do-some-good-ism that brings nothing new". I just started reading the 80000 hours website. Their argument against the former seems to be that your continued career and income is your most important asset (unless you inherited a fortune), and not being miserable or depressed STRONGLY supports building a sustained income and career, and continuing to give. So you should allow yourself to eat ice cream sometimes not just because it's intuitively obviously okay, also because it supports your mental health, which is a continued asset that increases your capacity to keep giving. If you burn out and start giving less or stop, obviously that's not effective altruism, and I think the 80000 hour website and EA more broadly must be very aware of that. (The other side of the dichotomy seems even easier to rebuke. It's just overly reductive for the sake of making a point.) Overall this is a great article that has ruined my weekend by giving me way too many other interesting web pages to read :)
- agucova 4y ago
  > I just started reading the 80000 hours website. Their argument against the former seems to be that your continued career and income is your most important asset (unless you inherited a fortune), and not being miserable or depressed STRONGLY supports building a sustained income and career, and continuing to give. I have a fundamental problem with the argument of “mental health maximizes giving” which is that it doesn't do a good job of justifying self-care in many situations. Fundamentally, the issue is that sustainability can't be an enduring argument when you have finite time horizons (as all humans do). For example, if I ever retire or become irreparably sick, should I just donate all of my money and make my life miserable? That is, if I'm no longer productive, what's the point of caring for my mental health?
  - 4y ago
yboris 4y ago
I've been part of Effective Altruism (EA) for over a decade (joining Giving What We Can (GWWC) over 10 years ago - donating at least 10% of my income; donating 50% during one of the years of my life - https://boldergiving.org/stories.php?story=Boris-Yakubchik_137 https://boldergiving.org/stories.php?story=Boris-Yakubchik_1... ). I made a 5-minute video interviewing college students who joined GWWC. It features Nick Beckstead who later became a Program Officer for Open Philanthropy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZKh0M9x8s4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZKh0M9x8s4 The article mentions Zell Kravinsky (not explicitly an EA), who I invited to give a talk at Rutgers. You can hear his talk (an my intro at the beginning) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvUcbcUMtXw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvUcbcUMtXw I gave a 12-minute TEDxRutgers talk at my college promoting EA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPe9-OM7vgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPe9-OM7vgU As a developer, I created an open source charityware Video Hub App, most proceeds from which go to charity; It's netted almost $15,000 to the GiveWell-recommended cost-effective Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) over the last 4 years: https://videohubapp.com/en/blog https://videohubapp.com/en/blog I'm a strong proponent of Effective Altruism and would be honored to answer any questions. https://yboris.com/ https://yboris.com/
- hammock 4y ago
  You’ve given so much. What impact have you seen from your gifts?
  - yboris 4y ago
    I've now given close to $75,000 to Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) - my primary place of donations; and probably over $25,000 to other organizations (some deworming, but most of it focusing on animal welfare). In addition, I've organized some book-sales for charity at my college and had some birthday-for-charity events which together netted more some donations. The events were great opportunities to talk to many people about this cause I'm passionate about. I know for sure I've helped inspire many people to make effective giving and doing good a bigger part of their lives and that may be even a bigger positive than the direct donations I've already made. According to GiveWell, AMF is a highly cost-effective charity. A rough summary is a $2 donation results in protecting about 2 people for about 4 years (cost of nets has fluctuated over the decade). I am confident that because of my donations I have prevented thousands of cases of malaria from happening (so children can go to school, parents can go to work, etc). As a bonus it probably prevented many needless deaths. https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf Personally it makes me happy that I've been able to help avert misery and pain. If I have a bad day, it can be a very cheerful thought to remind myself of the good I've contributed to individuals (even though I'll never meet them).
photochemsyn 4y ago
I for one absolutely distrust self-styled altruistic do-gooder organizations, with good historical reasons, and always will. One fundamental problem is their desire to project that image of 'goodness', which leads to their own internal corruption, as they don't deal with internal problems transparently, because exposure of such corruption tarnishes their image, and protecting that image then becomes their central goal. The Catholic Church is a controversial example (as there are many Catholics, mostly nice decent people), with its legacy of child abuse of many forms. Exposure of this activity, conducted largely by individuals within the Church without official Church sanction, would clearly tarnish the image of this altruistic organization, so the leadership covered it up, thereby allowing the abuse to persist. Image rapidly becomes more important than substance. Secondly, the members of such organizations, convinced of their moral rightness, tend to seek to seize political power in order to enforce their vision of goodness on the overall human population. Many just hop on the bandwagon because they see it as a route to wealth and power - as long as they sing the song of moral purity, they can become rich and influential, and live lives of luxury and pleasure. Thirdly, their 'moral stance' is typically influenced by low-quality information. The author mentions the Nazis as an extreme example, but they had indeed absorbed fraudulent claims of genetic superiority of ill-defined racial groups, and so to them ethnic cleansing and genocide were the responsible thing to do, for the long-term health of the Aryan people. The author believes they knew what they were doing was morally wrong, but I doubt this - at most, they'd have called it a short-term necessary evil for the long-term greater good. So, what's the right thing to do? My view is, accurate information should be the basis of all decision making, and the only way humans have found to come up with accurate information (about things like risks of global warming, causes of disease, etc.) is the rational scientific process, so that's what we should be spending our time and energy on developing, more than anything else. Others may disagree and wish to devote themselves to the creation of art, literature, music, architecture, etc. and that's fine too. Maybe they want to sit around and do nothing, like monks in a monastery. That doesn't bother me either, as long as they're not trying to control society in the name of their moral purity. As far as moral behavior, this great quandry has the simple solution that you should simply treat others with the same consideration and respect that you'd like them to treat you with, assuming you're not some kind of masochist who craves abuse, right?
- 4y ago
mynameishere 4y ago
To me, "effective altruism" would be ordinary altruism--which is an instinct, and not something you can teach or unteach--but with practices and guards for identifying and avoiding parasites. Skimming through this article, it would seem that they mean the opposite.
- pjscott 4y ago
  No, what you said in your first sentence is a pretty good description of EA as it's typically practiced. The article's emphasis on non-core stuff can give a misleading impression.
cheese_goddess 4y ago
> Quoting scientific studies that show the risk of dying as a result of making a kidney donation to be only 1 in 4,000, he says that not making the donation would have meant he valued his life at 4,000 times that of a stranger, a valuation he finds totally unjustified. Well that's some real dodgy use of numbers, right there. In "1 in 4000", "1" is the number of people who died as a result of donating a kidney and "4000" are the number of people who didn't, counted over some sample of living kidney donors. These two numbers, "1" and "4000" have no obvious relation to the value one places on one's life compared to the lives of others. For example, "4000" is not the number of others lives saved by donating one kidney. By donating one kidney one can "save" one other person's life at most (and it's not really "saving" as it is delaying the inevitable). Equally dodgy is the calculation of "1/3,000 risk of death in surgery is like sacrificing yourself to save 3,000 people" earlier in the article. Where does this dodgy statistical thinking (like magical thinking, but with statistics) come from I know not, but, anecdotally it's very common in discussions about doing good with numbers and it seems to be designed to shut down debate by claiming "sciense says". Btw, if I wanted to know how much I value my life over that of a stranger all I'd have to do is ask myself: how many people would I sacrifice to save my life? I am guessing that for the majority of people on the planet the answer is "0". Simple question, simple answer, and no dodgy "maths".
- sohdas 4y ago
  I think it comes from the statistical expectation. Like, if you were able to donate your kidney any amount of times, you would on average expect to lose your life on the 3,000th donation. So the question is, do you want to be the kind of person who would do that at the cost of your own life?
- civilized 4y ago
  You've used a lot of value-laden words here (dodgy, magical) and made a lot of meta-claims about how bad this kind of thinking is, but I don't think you've shown any actual fallacy in the person's thinking. These folks are saying they see an opportunity to save a life at very low risk to themselves. I don't see the specific problem with this reasoning. Yes, the donation is not guaranteed to save a life and everyone still dies, but these are not compelling objections from a starting point of 1 in 4,000.
draw_down 4y ago
imtringued 4y ago
One problem with effective altruism is that it is highly utilitarian leading to hijacking of utility metrics as mentioned in the article. However, the author only talked about people making arguments in good faith, hoping to improve metrics. What about people acting in bad faith? Longtermism has hijacked it's utility metric by assuming endless exponential growth of the human population in the future and therefore giving future lives more value, overriding all short term concerns which is then used to justify authoritarianism. It falls into the same trap as any ideology. People think it is going to save the world, so it must be adopted at any cost, even if people are going to starve and die. This has lead to the downfall of communism for example. The height of irony is that longtermism is purely about short term thinking.
dgreensp 4y ago
Incredible article! What strikes me about EA is the lack of values around family, community, or civics. If you value the life and happiness of every human on the planet equally, except maybe yourself, I’d venture to say you are not ok. You have no friends/family/connections/support/village/etc). Math and abstract virtue in the mind can’t replace that. I don’t know that I’d sacrifice my life for any number of others. But I care about my friends and acquaintances. Some of them are not ok. I’d rather lift them out of poverty, or get them decent healthcare, than save a life on the other side of the planet. I’d rather try to influence voters and the political process in my own state and country, or help house the homeless in my town. I have about 400 Facebook friends, and some are billionaires, some are broke, maybe a few are homeless or on the edge of homelessness. You can’t save the world if you can’t create a microcosm of the world you want to live in, around yourself, with real heartfelt connections.
season2episode3 4y ago
[Serious] Change my view: EA is moral laundering for accumulating wealth. For the record, I am skeptical of philanthropy to begin with, but I am nonetheless interested in what followers of EA might have to say to counter this assertion ^.
- edanm 4y ago
  I'm not a huge EA person, but, here is what I'd say: 1. You seem to be under the assumption that accumulating wealth is bad. I don't think it is. I don't know what the consensus view is among EA-people, but I assume at least some of them are fairly ok with capitalism in general, and likewise agree that most wealth accumulation is perfectly ok. I'd even go one step further and say that wealth accumulation is usually a sign of doing good in and of itself - you're creating value for society, which is how you're accumulating wealth. (Again, for the most part - there are edge cases.) 2. Even if it is "moral laundering", is that a bad thing? EA biggest focus is probably on the idea that what we give to matters. All things being equal, it's better for wealthy individuals to donate to the Against Malaria Foundation, rather than to building a new wing of a museum. Both can be a form of "moral laundering", but one is morally superior.

116 points by sebg 4y ago

I've always been curious about EA (and espoused ideas like aggressively making money so I could donate more to non-profits)... if I wanted to participate in EA discourse, where are those conversations happening now? effectivealtruism.org?

dotsam 4y ago
The EA forum is active, e.g here is a discussion of this article: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JBAPssaYMMRfNqYt7/michael-nielsen-s-notes-on-effective-altruism https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JBAPssaYMMRfNqYt7/...

roenxi 4y ago

From the sideline chorus of cynics; the Achilles heel of Effective Altruism is that most alleged altruists are the usual fair-weather activists who want to be seen to be on the right side but are not actually interested in solving any real world problems. The only lens that works when viewing politics (and altruism is a form of politics) is to assume people are miscommunicating their intended outcome. We've had thousands of years of experience with cause and effect, hundreds of years experience with modern mathematics for evaluating evidence and all the resources in the world to run experiments if we cared to. If people aren't trying to deploy that beyond 3-word-slogans and "we all know what is going on here, it is obvious, no need to check the hypothesis!" style strategies then they aren't trying to improve the situation. The first thing anyone runs in to when they try to solve a problem is that nobody involved seems to change their mind after reviewing contradictory evidence and that is a huge barrier to change. There is a clear gap between how people who are interested in solving a problem act and how the average person out there to "do good" acts. If people are trying to improve a situation the strategy & understanding of that situation should keep pivoting. And there should be a steady stream of minor discoveries as apparently obvious truth turns out to be false.

avgcorrection 4y ago
> The only lens that works when viewing politics (and altruism is a form of politics) is to assume people are miscommunicating their intended outcome. Sometimes group A and B just want all of X and neither are willing to compromise. No miscommunication.
bcbrown 4y ago
> The only lens that works when viewing politics (and altruism is a form of politics) is to assume people are miscommunicating their intended outcome. Could you explain what you mean by this? I'm intrigued.
- roenxi 4y ago
  Tricky question to answer, particularly without picking specific examples and getting too political. I suppose what I'm trying to say is there is pretty overwhelming evidence that the voting public doesn't understand cause and effect of the policies they are calling for. Eg, spending 20 minutes debating politics with anyone makes it apparent that at least one and often all sides of a debate are people who don't really understand the particulars of the situation, in most cases haven't read the policies involved or done much research beyond listening to some with charisma and maybe some credentials. They don't change their minds. Then the actual politicians build up their rhetoric and positions, and they have to mirror what the voters are thinking to get votes. But the voters are often demanding incoherent or stupid policies that aren't at all aligned with expert advice. My personal favourite showcase is a combination like loose border control combined with a strong welfare state - no fair & feasible way to do both. The situation ends up with politicians who have to say things that clearly they don't believe in service of goals they cannot pursue, in order to hold office. If they were serious about what they are communicating, we'd expect them to check the evidence & maybe run a couple of trials to see how feasible the whole plan is. And if they did they would change their mind quite quickly, because there is actually quite a lot of evidence out there about what works. But they won't, because they aren't serious & that they are actually doing is mimicking the opinions of the large, oft-changing and schizophrenic opinion of a mass of voters. And the voters really don't care because big groups of people are not at all altruistic outside their in-group.

jph 4y ago

Effective Altruism discussion can be helped IMHO by introducing "Social Value Orientation" (SVO), which describes people's preferences for resource allocation (e.g. money) between the self and others. https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/social-value-orientation https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/social-value-orientat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_value_orientations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_value_orientations

agumonkey 4y ago
Is there a conceptualization of SV balancing ? I keep thinking about finding the right blend of proself and prosocial .. to the point of needing a new term like being proWE as you forget about others vs self but focus on a "us" enjoyment

codeflo 4y ago

When I first heard of Effective Altruism, it was all about vaccines and mosquito nets — low cost solutions with clear, positive outcomes. I found that convincing, and even donated some money to some of the recommendations. When I checked back a few years later, the community seemed to be all about surviving the Rapture, I mean “Singularity”, summoning God, I mean the “Friendly AI”, and maximizing the happiness of the expected 10 to the trillion lives in Heaven, I mean the “Simulation”. I found all of that a lot less convincing. There are several social reasons why this shift happened, but the root problem, to me, is utilitarianism taken to a dangerous extreme. Effective Altruism was arguably always rooted in some form of utilitarianism as a guiding principle. The problem is, the concept seems to have attracted some very logical, abstract thinkers who somehow didn’t realize when they started to lose contact with reality. Note that all of this is just my opinion, but here’s my point. I find it always problematic to assign a numerical goodness value (“utilons”) to a human life, though I concede that it can work as a heuristic in small, non-extreme cases. What definitely doesn’t work is to take that number, multiply it by population sizes and claim to have solved ethics. No matter how much you wish it was, ethics is simply not a subbranch a mathematics. To put it very bluntly: That road has been traveled before, and it leads to genocide. To be clear, this isn’t hyperbole. I won’t link any sources to limit exposure, but you can find articles by self-proclaimed altruists who argue that it’s better to lose a billion lives to climate change than to delay AI research by even one year. The suggested reason being that delaying the Ascent into Heaven — I mean the “Upload into the Simulation” — costs humanity a collective 10 to the gazillion utilons, compared to the mere billions of utilons potentially lost to the climate catastrophe. Just think about the implications.

beebmam 4y ago
Utilitarianism is the worst ethical framework, except for all the others
hedgew 4y ago
One reason why EA takes AI risks seriously is exactly because of how hard it is to define what is "good" or what "utility" makes humans happy.
avgcorrection 4y ago

endominus 4y ago

> you can't really justify the arts You absolutely can. Is this actually an issue that EAs have to grapple with? It seems so obvious to me. You just have to stop thinking about art in the fuzzy, "good because other people say it's good" sense of the word. You have to actually come to grips with the function that art serves, which I gather is difficult for a lot of people because the answer doesn't gel with the cultural pacifism that they believe they believe in. Marx of all people got this right. Art is cultural warfare. >I suspect no society, ever, has been healthy that didn't invest significant time and resources in the arts. Obviously. A culture that does not invest in its art is going to be overtaken by a culture that does. Just as a nation that lacks a military is not going to be its own nation for long. The purpose of art is to define, defend, and spread the cultural values of the people that create it. Doing so ensures that those values survive to the next generation, ensuring the long-term success of the culture and movement. Thus, justifying investment and engagement with art, or raising children, is easy. Quantifying the benefits of that investment is much harder because, in contrast to mosquito nets and vaccinations, culture spread is going to be opposed by other cultures. It's PvP, rather than PvE. For those that don't believe that art affects cultural values, please consider this thought experiment; imagine you have a young child that wants to watch a new movie. You take a look at it, and the movie's story is of a bully and cheater winning at some competition, the entire community siding with that antagonist, and the main character eventually accepting that this is fine and normal and must simply be tolerated. The moral is clearly that liars and cheaters win, violence is a valid way of getting what you want, and everyone who disagrees will be unhappy and defeated in the end anyway. Would you want your child to watch that movie? If not, why? Of course, this view means that most forms of "high" art - the kind that exists so that people in the know can look down their nose at people who just lack taste and class[0], or so that they can commit tax evasion[1] - are not actually good art. They do not effectively communicate cultural values, or defend them. The attitude of the art world in defending this excreta widens the rift between them and the general public that they should be trying to communicate to. It lowers people's interest in engaging with art on an intellectual and philosophical level, allowing more and more pandering nonsense to be shovelled into them. The modern world has no more interest in "artists" making "art"; it wants "content creators" creating "content".The ongoing destruction of people's ability to understand or appreciate art - where it actually exists - at a high level serves only to lower natural defenses against competing cultures. "All poets are soldiers. We fight our wars across centuries." [0]: https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2021/08/the-weird-story-of-the-artist-pierre-brassau/ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2021/08/the-weird-story-of-th... [1]: https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/90-of-modern-art-is-just-tax-evasion/ https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/90-of-modern-art-is-just...

dash2 4y ago

A good companion to this piece would be John Stuart Mill's autobiography, where he describes his nervous breakdown after being raised as a utilitarian by his father: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10378/10378-h/10378-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10378/10378-h/10378-h.htm. It raises some of the same issues: > In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?" And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, "No!" At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

mr_luc 4y ago
That's fantastic! Although personally, while I get a chuckle out of reading that excerpt, I can't actually understand the point of view I'm intended to chuckle at. I don't want my life's work, or anyone else's, to be engaged in a struggle to change mucky 'institutions and opinions.' Eww! Gross! Honorable, necessary, maybe. (But only 'maybe', I wouldn't assume it about those who claim to be engaged in such a struggle). It's not completely implausible that realpolitik can be creatively fulfilling, worthwhile, and life's calling. But I'd chalk that up to humans being able to imbue even the worst situations with meaning, rather than it being particularly attractive as a life's work. If I think of that question: Suppose [...] that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you? I'd answer 'yes', and I think a lot of HN readers would too (aside from "Monkey's Paw"-style unintended consequences). I wish we had a safe, abundant world for everyone, where all respected each others' rights -- so we could get on with the best parts of human life. The best parts of human life are limitless, so the Mills' thought experiment can't touch them: creating, and sharing. Creation is limitless, and there is no end-game, nor can there be. The question falls apart immediately: "imagine that everything that should be created has been created." It would be nonsensical -- whether in a cave, in the present day, in a 1950's sci-fi future or some (implausibly) transcendent Singularity, there are always things that you don't know, and thus new things you can do with the new knowledge once you acquire it. And thus there will always be new things you can experience and share with others. Edit: and as a note about EA specifically, so as not to derail one of my favorite recent HN comment sections. I'm a fan personally, and my experience is that 'expat' living is a good way to help accomplish it, without any particular misery traps (10 years out of the past 18). Specifically, I align with the 'Our World In Data' take, about how inequality globally is so much more than within rich countries -- so any 'sticky' ways of funneling your money into poorer countries is good, and you don't even need to worry too much about getting scammed, as long as the scammer legitimately lives and spends in a poorer community. And then if you're actually living in that poorer country, while working in a richer one, you're 'funneling money' there, by and large not competing with the locals (except in things in which there is already effectively global competition, like, say, oceanfront property/rentals). And you can also develop excellent 'local knowledge' in order to give more targeted help, which is rewarding -- but that kind of 'give a kidney' stuff isn't scalable, where remote work is.

jefftk 4y ago

(I'm the Jeff mentioned one the piece) This is a really good critique, but the "misery trap" section feels like it is describing a problem that EA definitely had early on, but mostly doesn't now? In early EA, people started thinking hard about this idea of doing the most good they could. Naively, this suggests doing things like giving up things that are seriously important to you (like having children), illegibily make you more productive (like a good work environment), or provide important flexibility (like having free time), and the author quotes some early EAs struggling with this conflict, like: > my inner voice in early 2016 would automatically convert all money I spent (eg on dinner) to a fractional “death counter” of lives in expectation I could have saved if I’d donated it to good charities. Most EAs I mentioned that to at the time were like ah yeah seems reasonable I really don't think many EAs would say "seems reasonable" now. If someone says this to me I'd give some of my personal history with this idea and talk about how it turns out that in practice this works terribly for people: it makes you miserable, very slightly increases how much you have available to donate, and massively decreases your likely long-term impact through burnout, depression, and short-term thinking. One piece of writing that I think was helpful in turning this around was http://www.givinggladly.com/2013/06/cheerfully.html http://www.givinggladly.com/2013/06/cheerfully.html Another was https://www.benkuhn.net/box/ https://www.benkuhn.net/box/ I think it's not a coincidence that the examples the author links are 5+ years old? If people are still getting caught in this trap, though, I'd be interested to see more? (And potentially write more on why it's not a good application of EA thinking.) In case people are curious: Julia and I now have three kids and it's been 10+ years since stress and conflict about painful trade-offs between our own happiness and making the world better were a major issue for us.

EA_itsinthegame 4y ago
Effective altruism is only effective if you also give altruism to yourself.
skybrian 4y ago
It seems like the basic trick here is setting boundaries. It’s broader than EA, but some formulations of EA (and utilitarianism in general) seem to advocate for not setting boundaries; consider Pete Singer’s drowning child thought experiment and how he advocates for treating everyone in the world as having an equal claim on your time and money. I think that practically speaking, setting boundaries is important and a philosophy that doesn’t take that into account is a bad philosophy. Real world organizations set boundaries all the time; that’s what budgeting is. But boundaries still seem philosophically suspect due to their arbitrariness: why give 10%, say, and not some other number? Does someone have a philosophical answer for people struggling with this?

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

The only issue I have with "branded" stuff, like EA (which sounds awesome. Five Stars would eat there again), is that it often establishes a "metric," that is then used to "measure" others (and usually, find them wanting). This happens in pretty much every human endeavor. The urge to be better than others is powerful, and many people dedicate enormous resources to being "better than." I've been involved with an outfit for my entire adult life, that has, as a Core Principle, "You must give it away to keep it." It's kind of a "pass/fail" test. If we pass, we keep breathing. If we fail, we die twitching, so there's definitely a measure of self-interest, involved. That said, some pretty amazing stuff gets done, with almost no fanfare, and we don't bother shaming each other with metrics.

frickinLasers 4y ago
I'm happy with a metric that encourages people to do good, as opposed to a metric which describes how much power one has over others, or how many yachts they can afford. Hopefully the EA community isn't terribly concerned with how they measure up against others (though, as an outsider, maybe I don't understand how important that is). By thinking about how to do good, they're already leagues ahead of 90% of humanity.
imtringued 4y ago
The concept of negative yields recognizes that owning capital can entail obligations to the public. It effectively turns money into a boomerang. If you have too much and don't want it, you ought to give it to someone who has too little. The way the current economic system is structured fools people into believing money is their private property, as if the people who are dependent on that money are obedient servants. Hence governments must keep deficit spending for all eternity as the boomerang isn't returning.

cheese_goddess 4y ago

> came across some stats on how safe it was to donate and it totally changed my picture. I thought, 1/3,000 risk of death in surgery is like sacrificing yourself to save 3,000 people. I want to be the kind of person who'd do that, and you just have to follow these few steps. What these noble gestures based on statstical thinking invariably omit is the fact that kidney donors have an elevated chance of suffering from kidney disease themselves. This risk is much higher than the 1/3000 risk of death in surgery reported in the article. For example: > Two studies report a higher risk of end-stage renal disease (ESRD) among donors than among healthy nondonors; however, the absolute 15-year incidence of ESRD is <1%. All-cause mortality and the risk of cardiovascular events are similar among donors and healthy nondonors, although one study provides evidence for a 5% increase in all-cause mortality after 25 years that is attributable to donation. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25941060/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25941060/ So it's not like you sacrifice yourself to save 3000 people, it's sacrificing yourself for a chance to have two kidney patients where you only had one. And while "less than 1%" sounds like a small personal risk, it is a large risk at a population level. And as more people are convinced of the altruism of donating a kidney, while alive, it will affect more people. In this, I'm speaking as a kidney patient and one who would never accept an organ from a living donor, exactly because of the above. And that's before thinking of the trade-offs in quality of life that come with transplantation, and the potential effect of "freezing" research in finding true cures for kindey disease (which is not one disease) because we can keep people alive for more than 10 years with transplants and dialysis.

ravi-delia 4y ago
I mean, it's pretty obvious that the expected additional kidney cases per donation is less than 1. We aren't talking about an exponential explosion of kidney transplants, it tends to a finite sum with fewer deaths.
- cheese_goddess 4y ago
  > I mean, it's pretty obvious that the expected additional kidney cases per donation is less than 1. Why is that the important number to take into consideration, rather than the number of transplants with a living kidney donor per day, for example?

tux3 4y ago

I think this is overall a very well written article, as someone not involved with EA, it seems a good critique of EA. But! This actually makes me more interested in EA, because the criticism only really chips away small caveats in the idea it presents. It points out some inconsistency in the central principle, but a lot of things are still worth doing while having some unclear edge-cases that seem inconsistent. I think it's also easy to reject the dichotomy between "EA says you should sacrifice everything in the embrace of extreme utilitarianism" and "EA is just generic try-to-do-some-good-ism that brings nothing new". I just started reading the 80000 hours website. Their argument against the former seems to be that your continued career and income is your most important asset (unless you inherited a fortune), and not being miserable or depressed STRONGLY supports building a sustained income and career, and continuing to give. So you should allow yourself to eat ice cream sometimes not just because it's intuitively obviously okay, also because it supports your mental health, which is a continued asset that increases your capacity to keep giving. If you burn out and start giving less or stop, obviously that's not effective altruism, and I think the 80000 hour website and EA more broadly must be very aware of that. (The other side of the dichotomy seems even easier to rebuke. It's just overly reductive for the sake of making a point.) Overall this is a great article that has ruined my weekend by giving me way too many other interesting web pages to read :)

agucova 4y ago
> I just started reading the 80000 hours website. Their argument against the former seems to be that your continued career and income is your most important asset (unless you inherited a fortune), and not being miserable or depressed STRONGLY supports building a sustained income and career, and continuing to give. I have a fundamental problem with the argument of “mental health maximizes giving” which is that it doesn't do a good job of justifying self-care in many situations. Fundamentally, the issue is that sustainability can't be an enduring argument when you have finite time horizons (as all humans do). For example, if I ever retire or become irreparably sick, should I just donate all of my money and make my life miserable? That is, if I'm no longer productive, what's the point of caring for my mental health?
- 4y ago

yboris 4y ago

I've been part of Effective Altruism (EA) for over a decade (joining Giving What We Can (GWWC) over 10 years ago - donating at least 10% of my income; donating 50% during one of the years of my life - https://boldergiving.org/stories.php?story=Boris-Yakubchik_137 https://boldergiving.org/stories.php?story=Boris-Yakubchik_1... ). I made a 5-minute video interviewing college students who joined GWWC. It features Nick Beckstead who later became a Program Officer for Open Philanthropy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZKh0M9x8s4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZKh0M9x8s4 The article mentions Zell Kravinsky (not explicitly an EA), who I invited to give a talk at Rutgers. You can hear his talk (an my intro at the beginning) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvUcbcUMtXw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvUcbcUMtXw I gave a 12-minute TEDxRutgers talk at my college promoting EA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPe9-OM7vgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPe9-OM7vgU As a developer, I created an open source charityware Video Hub App, most proceeds from which go to charity; It's netted almost $15,000 to the GiveWell-recommended cost-effective Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) over the last 4 years: https://videohubapp.com/en/blog https://videohubapp.com/en/blog I'm a strong proponent of Effective Altruism and would be honored to answer any questions. https://yboris.com/ https://yboris.com/

hammock 4y ago
You’ve given so much. What impact have you seen from your gifts?
- yboris 4y ago
  I've now given close to $75,000 to Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) - my primary place of donations; and probably over $25,000 to other organizations (some deworming, but most of it focusing on animal welfare). In addition, I've organized some book-sales for charity at my college and had some birthday-for-charity events which together netted more some donations. The events were great opportunities to talk to many people about this cause I'm passionate about. I know for sure I've helped inspire many people to make effective giving and doing good a bigger part of their lives and that may be even a bigger positive than the direct donations I've already made. According to GiveWell, AMF is a highly cost-effective charity. A rough summary is a $2 donation results in protecting about 2 people for about 4 years (cost of nets has fluctuated over the decade). I am confident that because of my donations I have prevented thousands of cases of malaria from happening (so children can go to school, parents can go to work, etc). As a bonus it probably prevented many needless deaths. https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf Personally it makes me happy that I've been able to help avert misery and pain. If I have a bad day, it can be a very cheerful thought to remind myself of the good I've contributed to individuals (even though I'll never meet them).

photochemsyn 4y ago

I for one absolutely distrust self-styled altruistic do-gooder organizations, with good historical reasons, and always will. One fundamental problem is their desire to project that image of 'goodness', which leads to their own internal corruption, as they don't deal with internal problems transparently, because exposure of such corruption tarnishes their image, and protecting that image then becomes their central goal. The Catholic Church is a controversial example (as there are many Catholics, mostly nice decent people), with its legacy of child abuse of many forms. Exposure of this activity, conducted largely by individuals within the Church without official Church sanction, would clearly tarnish the image of this altruistic organization, so the leadership covered it up, thereby allowing the abuse to persist. Image rapidly becomes more important than substance. Secondly, the members of such organizations, convinced of their moral rightness, tend to seek to seize political power in order to enforce their vision of goodness on the overall human population. Many just hop on the bandwagon because they see it as a route to wealth and power - as long as they sing the song of moral purity, they can become rich and influential, and live lives of luxury and pleasure. Thirdly, their 'moral stance' is typically influenced by low-quality information. The author mentions the Nazis as an extreme example, but they had indeed absorbed fraudulent claims of genetic superiority of ill-defined racial groups, and so to them ethnic cleansing and genocide were the responsible thing to do, for the long-term health of the Aryan people. The author believes they knew what they were doing was morally wrong, but I doubt this - at most, they'd have called it a short-term necessary evil for the long-term greater good. So, what's the right thing to do? My view is, accurate information should be the basis of all decision making, and the only way humans have found to come up with accurate information (about things like risks of global warming, causes of disease, etc.) is the rational scientific process, so that's what we should be spending our time and energy on developing, more than anything else. Others may disagree and wish to devote themselves to the creation of art, literature, music, architecture, etc. and that's fine too. Maybe they want to sit around and do nothing, like monks in a monastery. That doesn't bother me either, as long as they're not trying to control society in the name of their moral purity. As far as moral behavior, this great quandry has the simple solution that you should simply treat others with the same consideration and respect that you'd like them to treat you with, assuming you're not some kind of masochist who craves abuse, right?

4y ago

mynameishere 4y ago

To me, "effective altruism" would be ordinary altruism--which is an instinct, and not something you can teach or unteach--but with practices and guards for identifying and avoiding parasites. Skimming through this article, it would seem that they mean the opposite.

pjscott 4y ago
No, what you said in your first sentence is a pretty good description of EA as it's typically practiced. The article's emphasis on non-core stuff can give a misleading impression.

cheese_goddess 4y ago

> Quoting scientific studies that show the risk of dying as a result of making a kidney donation to be only 1 in 4,000, he says that not making the donation would have meant he valued his life at 4,000 times that of a stranger, a valuation he finds totally unjustified. Well that's some real dodgy use of numbers, right there. In "1 in 4000", "1" is the number of people who died as a result of donating a kidney and "4000" are the number of people who didn't, counted over some sample of living kidney donors. These two numbers, "1" and "4000" have no obvious relation to the value one places on one's life compared to the lives of others. For example, "4000" is not the number of others lives saved by donating one kidney. By donating one kidney one can "save" one other person's life at most (and it's not really "saving" as it is delaying the inevitable). Equally dodgy is the calculation of "1/3,000 risk of death in surgery is like sacrificing yourself to save 3,000 people" earlier in the article. Where does this dodgy statistical thinking (like magical thinking, but with statistics) come from I know not, but, anecdotally it's very common in discussions about doing good with numbers and it seems to be designed to shut down debate by claiming "sciense says". Btw, if I wanted to know how much I value my life over that of a stranger all I'd have to do is ask myself: how many people would I sacrifice to save my life? I am guessing that for the majority of people on the planet the answer is "0". Simple question, simple answer, and no dodgy "maths".

sohdas 4y ago
I think it comes from the statistical expectation. Like, if you were able to donate your kidney any amount of times, you would on average expect to lose your life on the 3,000th donation. So the question is, do you want to be the kind of person who would do that at the cost of your own life?
civilized 4y ago
You've used a lot of value-laden words here (dodgy, magical) and made a lot of meta-claims about how bad this kind of thinking is, but I don't think you've shown any actual fallacy in the person's thinking. These folks are saying they see an opportunity to save a life at very low risk to themselves. I don't see the specific problem with this reasoning. Yes, the donation is not guaranteed to save a life and everyone still dies, but these are not compelling objections from a starting point of 1 in 4,000.

draw_down 4y ago

imtringued 4y ago

One problem with effective altruism is that it is highly utilitarian leading to hijacking of utility metrics as mentioned in the article. However, the author only talked about people making arguments in good faith, hoping to improve metrics. What about people acting in bad faith? Longtermism has hijacked it's utility metric by assuming endless exponential growth of the human population in the future and therefore giving future lives more value, overriding all short term concerns which is then used to justify authoritarianism. It falls into the same trap as any ideology. People think it is going to save the world, so it must be adopted at any cost, even if people are going to starve and die. This has lead to the downfall of communism for example. The height of irony is that longtermism is purely about short term thinking.

dgreensp 4y ago

Incredible article! What strikes me about EA is the lack of values around family, community, or civics. If you value the life and happiness of every human on the planet equally, except maybe yourself, I’d venture to say you are not ok. You have no friends/family/connections/support/village/etc). Math and abstract virtue in the mind can’t replace that. I don’t know that I’d sacrifice my life for any number of others. But I care about my friends and acquaintances. Some of them are not ok. I’d rather lift them out of poverty, or get them decent healthcare, than save a life on the other side of the planet. I’d rather try to influence voters and the political process in my own state and country, or help house the homeless in my town. I have about 400 Facebook friends, and some are billionaires, some are broke, maybe a few are homeless or on the edge of homelessness. You can’t save the world if you can’t create a microcosm of the world you want to live in, around yourself, with real heartfelt connections.

season2episode3 4y ago

[Serious] Change my view: EA is moral laundering for accumulating wealth. For the record, I am skeptical of philanthropy to begin with, but I am nonetheless interested in what followers of EA might have to say to counter this assertion ^.

edanm 4y ago
I'm not a huge EA person, but, here is what I'd say: 1. You seem to be under the assumption that accumulating wealth is bad. I don't think it is. I don't know what the consensus view is among EA-people, but I assume at least some of them are fairly ok with capitalism in general, and likewise agree that most wealth accumulation is perfectly ok. I'd even go one step further and say that wealth accumulation is usually a sign of doing good in and of itself - you're creating value for society, which is how you're accumulating wealth. (Again, for the most part - there are edge cases.) 2. Even if it is "moral laundering", is that a bad thing? EA biggest focus is probably on the idea that what we give to matters. All things being equal, it's better for wealthy individuals to donate to the Against Malaria Foundation, rather than to building a new wing of a museum. Both can be a form of "moral laundering", but one is morally superior.