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The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism

117 points by mitchbob 4y ago

mitchbob 4y ago
Archived: https://archive.ph/ReUYI https://archive.ph/ReUYI
civilized 4y ago
Effective altruism is great. I don't follow its precepts.
- a9h74j 4y ago
  I am certain that you are thoughtful about the meta-ethics involved, thoughtful about your own unwillingness to go all-in with EA, and that this is an elegantly abbreviated report.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  Ineffective selfishness (IS) is, logically, equivalent to EA.
  - ivalm 4y ago
    Na, the world of alternative hypothesis is vast.
jefftk 4y ago
This is a pretty good treatment. The shift from focusing on global poverty to focusing on keeping us from killing ourselves off is interesting and complex. (It's also one I took a long time to come around to. For years I agreed in theory that trying to prevent civilizational catastrophe could be the most important thing to do, but didn't agree that there were tractable projects in this area. After deciding that there are, however, I quit my 'earning to give' job to go work on trying to catch future pandemics earlier.)
- ajross 4y ago
  > The shift from [conventional human welfare issues to whackjob sci-fi apocalyptimancy] is interesting and complex. It's... actually kind of not, which is why this is so upsetting. EA seemed to have a handle on a way to get libertarian-leaning, economically privileged, inward-focused men (and, yes, that's the demographic almost to a person) to think about ways to help people they'd never otherwise have given a passing thought to. Then roll the clock forward a few years and they're all back to sci-fi fandom arguments. This nonsense is exactly what you would have expected from these people. The notable part is that for one shining moment they pretended otherwise.
  - shuckles 4y ago
    Sincere question: how much of a benefit would it have been to the global poor if COVID never had an adverse impact? What if, as a side effect, other diseases were also mitigated? How are you going from a criticism of identity to the criticism of the aims? It’s very unclear to me.
  - jefftk 4y ago
    The global response to covid was far worse than it could have been, with millions dead, tens to hundreds of millions out of work, and billions having a pretty bad couple of years. Other pandemics have been much more deadly than covid and will likely be in the future. The speed of modern transportation, and the interconnectedness of the global economy are great overall, but do increase our exposure to pandemics and their consequences. This isn't 'whackjob sci-fi apocalyptimancy', this is something that has happened many times before.
    - telotortium 4y ago
      If you go back to the old 80,000 hours blog posts, they stress not getting into the most oversubscribed fields, given that the marginal contribution of a incoming do-gooder is likely to be minimal due to the great interest in those fields already attracting a lot of intelligent people. Before COVID, I might agree that EAs should get into pandemic prevention - Bill Gates was certainly concerned. After COVID, pandemic prevention is probably only second to climate change in the level of oversubscription. What is your alpha in pandemic prevention?
a9h74j 4y ago
This is a very good article. I have only read about half of it so far. Plenty of good foundations regardless of whatever the current apparent state of EA might be.
ezekiel23 4y ago
Can someone ELI5 the motivation to worry about "runaway A.I."? To me, it just seems to be a slippery slope argument. Genuinely curious.
- finexplained 4y ago
  You decide you want to optimize for number of lives saved. You decide that future lives, those of people yet to be born, are worth as much as those currently alive. You place small, but importantly not zero, probability on existential risks to humanity, so that when you do the expected value calculation, even an infinitesimally small risk of humanity's complete extinction results in negative infinite utility. You're also very smart and realize that smart people can do damage if their objectives are misaligned, and you start to worry about something much much smarter than you with objectives misaligned to humanity's more broadly. In their defense reward specification is indeed a hard problem, RL agents find unexpected policies that maximize reward in even toy settings. At this point you're down the rabbit hole and no other problem seems to compare. Climate change will leave some people alive, pandemics leave some people alive, AIs have no such kindness.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- frgtpsswrdlame 4y ago
  Basically they're doing a utilitarian calculus. But since our calculus is basically all pretend, we can assign arbitrary importance to anything we want just by daydreaming the costs and percentages of these super unlikely, super catastrophic events.
  - NateEag 4y ago
    Thank you for so clearly and simply articulating the fundamental problem of utilitarianism.
    - Planktonne 4y ago
peterfield 4y ago
"MacAskill, however, could find nothing wrong with it." "When he met friends at the pub, he ordered only a glass of water, which he then refilled with a can of two-per-cent lager he’d bought on the corner" Well, in the second case he could not find anything wrong with his own behavior (using deceit to defraud the pub owner of using his facility), so I won't put much value in his first finding or lack thereof.
- NateEag 4y ago
  Whether his behavior at the pub was immoral is unrelated to whether his reasoning on another moral question is correct.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Well he was going to give his own money away, and in an effective manner which the landlord probably wasn't so maybe there's a Robin Hood angle on stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.
evancoop 4y ago
The NYT is taking a swing at longtermism, the New Yorker is taking a swing at effective altruism, and this begs for a little numerical reasoning on the topic. If we must consider every life (even distant lives), and most lives haven't been lived yet, and most lives not yet lived will enjoy a higher quality of life than we do (rational optimism), doesn't protecting THOSE lives trump everything else? https://ae.studio/blog/most-lives-havent-been-lived-yet#pg https://ae.studio/blog/most-lives-havent-been-lived-yet#pg
psi75 4y ago
For a time, the movement recommended that inspirited young people should, rather than work for charities, get jobs in finance and donate their income. The problem is in the assumption that paid corporate work has zero social value. This is untrue. It has negative social value. If a rich person or a corporation that operates on rich peoples' behalf is paying you to do something, the odds are high that its total social value is negative, especially because we live within a moribund economic system that turns to extreme violence--fascism is capitalism in decay--whenever it hits the skids and people start to question it.
- enticingturtle 4y ago
  This is wrong. Trading is positive sum. When companies trade with employees to buy labor or trade with consumers to sell goods, all parties are better off from the interaction — otherwise they would not trade.
  - chubot 4y ago
    Sure, but that's not the only thing involved in finance. There's also regulatory capture, privatizing profits, and socializing losses It's certainly plausible that the value of many jobs is negative, and even if you give away your entire salary, it could come out negative for society. This whole idea is also out of touch with reality and lacking in common sense, because people who aren't interested in finance aren't likely to be competitive in it.
renewiltord 4y ago
Personally, having thought about it, there is a non-zero possibility of a Boltzmann Brain that wants to end us all even if we stop all AI and stop all Earth busters, and there is a non-zero possibility of us stopping it. Therefore we should stop all current activity on anything that is not Evil Boltzmann Brain. The problem with Evil Boltzmann Brain is that it could destroy all life in all galaxies through the infinitesimal chance that it spontaneously produces space travel. Therefore, I have dedicated my entire life to fighting EBB instead. Currently, this requires that I buy an iPhone with the money I had planned to use on GiveWell.org but it's all in the plan. I have not forgotten the goal, though. If I consume all resources on Earth, then I can stop evil AI at the same time as I increase entropy and reduce the possibility that EBB can utilize any energy differential. This requires that I consume consume consume. Which I shall do out of altruistic purposes.
- chubot 4y ago
  Yeah this is basically what I was thinking after reading the article, thanks for spelling it out concretely. My thought was that if you're going to assign infinite weight to unlikely possibilities, then why not devote your entire life to preventing time travel from being invented in the future? Someone could invent a time machine and destroy the Earth before humanity had a chance to exist, etc. It's just about as falsifiable as what they are working on. --- Also, if you're going to be so abstract about it, then why you wouldn't want to optimize for the happiness and future vigor of AIs? If you're going to be a vegan, then presumably you care about non- human consciousness. So what's wrong with a future with flourishing AI and without humanity? There are too many ridiculous things to count here, and normally I would ignore it, but it seems like people are taking it seriously and it has consequence? (And the article is pretty well written either way) --- It's weird that he had doubt that's like 1 sentence in the article, and then entire lifetimes of work that simply ignore the doubt: My No. 1 worry is: what if we’re focussed on entirely the wrong things?” he said. “What if we’re just wrong? What if A.I. is just a distraction? And as alluded to in the article, the wild swing from helping the poor to preventing AI has a huge moral hazard. With the former you can course-correct your actions based on observation of outcomes -- what happened as a result of the donations? With the latter you can justify any action today by just pushing out the hypothetical benefits further and further into the future. It resembles a religion that collects money today, promising benefits in the afterlife.
ahepp 4y ago
A relevant piece by Peter Singer, one of the philosophers who popularized effective altruism: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ethical-implications-of-focusing-on-extinction-risk-by-peter-singer-2021-10 https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ethical-implica...
m101 4y ago
The problem with effective altruism is that it is devoid from reality: - no country was ever made wealthy by just giving them things. Wealth comes from passing through the difficult stages of development oneself - you personally should do the good things you want to do in the world rather than just donating money for someone else to do it on your behalf - Peter Singer uses the word "should" too much, and it's almost offensive. His philosophy is an empty philosophy pushed through by people who believe we are no different to apes. The older religions do this all much more justice in a far more thoughtful way.
- atlasunshrugged 4y ago
  I'm relatively actively involved in EA and I don't think anyone believes just giving people things will make a whole society wealthy, nor is it practical. For certain cases like Givedirectly (direct cash transfers) the question is more about efficacy of aid. If I think of what EA really stands for, it's about doing things that are maximally effective based on a rationale view of your aims. You can question lots about the assumptions people make to get to the end goal (I personally think they prioritize too much aid vs. helping with foundations of economic development) but I don't think the first two points you make match with my experience of EA in practice. On your second point, I don't agree at all. Should you do as much as you personally can? Sure. But if you're a multi-millionaire and you want to feed people, you really are telling me it's necessary that that person hands out each piece of food for it to be moral? That doesn't make sense to me at all.
  - m101 4y ago
    Firstly, i am developing my own ideas all the time on this. I would suggest that people who want to make a difference with money do so on a local level. If they can create a local eden then perhaps someone else will notice and create another one locally where they are. It's kind of like small scale experiments which you can test and the ones that work will naturally be extended for little or no extra money.
    - eru 4y ago
Ericson2314 4y ago
This stuff really should be called anti-Keynesianism. It's obsession with scarcity and presumption of the probabilities being well-defined (or even decidable) is completely the opposite.
tunesmith 4y ago
What kind of work has been done on discounting future hypothetical lives? Kind of like time-value of money, but for future lives. Yes, valuing a future life as identical to a present-day life is compelling, but since it's just a hypothetical life, it seems it should be discounted somehow. To me it almost just seems like a "different people can have different values" sort of thing. If you want to value current lives more than future lives, you'll just come to different conclusions than someone who believes otherwise, and maybe both sets of conclusions are okay.
- atlasunshrugged 4y ago
  I don't know how much work has been done there but I think most people just do this intuitively, right? I mean when we make decisions, how often are we really thinking of the downstream effect that they will have many generations in the future. I'd say the notable exception is climate which is an area many people seem concerned about for future generations (although I'm not sure how much of it is actual concern versus the idea of telling old Senators who won't see the impact of climate change to at least think about their grandchildren which just seems like good marketing/advocacy).
- rileyphone 4y ago
  There's some stuff like https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fStCX6RXmgxkTBe73/towards-a-weaker-longtermism https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fStCX6RXmgxkTBe73/... and https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-da..., but the main work is in bullying nerds on the internet.
- Emma_Goldman 4y ago
  It's a whole subfield, 'population ethics'. A lot of effective altruists revere Derik Parfit, a rather staid Oxford philosopher who effectively founded the subject.
- jefftk 4y ago
  I think the most common view within EA is that future people and matter the same amount as current people, conditional on actually existing. So if you think there is a 50% chance the world will be destroyed by 2200, then you would discount lives in 2200 by 50%. I definitely agree with your second paragraph, however, and people who value current lives more than future lives will often come to different philosophical conclusions. It's interesting, however, that this frequently doesn't cash out into different beliefs about what we should do today. For example, I think the value of work on pandemic prevention or AI alignment does not depend on multiplying by zillions of potential future people: they're worth doing even just for people alive today. Ex: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KDjEogAqWNTdddF9g/long-termism-vs-existential-risk https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KDjEogAqWNTdddF9g/... : Let me rephrase this in a deliberately inflammatory way: if you're under ~50, unaligned AI might kill you and everyone you know. Not your great-great-(...)-great-grandchildren in the year 30,000 AD. Not even your children. You and everyone you know. As a pitch to get people to care about something, this is a pretty strong one. But right now, a lot of EA discussion about this goes through an argument that starts with "did you know you might want to assign your descendants in the year 30,000 AD exactly equal moral value to yourself? Did you know that maybe you should care about their problems exactly as much as you care about global warming and other problems happening today?"
Aunche 4y ago
I don't understand how Effective Altruism has anything to do with AI risk. It's a relatively straightforward to prove that $4000 worth of mosquito nets can save one life, but how can you do the same for AI risk? It's handwavy just to quantify the risk of a rogue AGI, let alone quantify the benefit of developing countermeasures to rogue AI. It sounds very much like a garbage in, garbage out scenario.
- kalkin 4y ago
  It does feel like more of a sociological than a philosophical overlap, aside maybe from consequentialism. The best argument for GiveDirectly and mosquito nets over structural change is that nobody honestly knows how to move the likelihood of the latter with a few thousand dollars, so you can reasonably choose to definitely do something that will at least really help someone over trying to fix an alleged root cause but most likely having no effect at all. But then our understanding of how to invest in AI alignment is even worse than our understanding of how to invest in reducing root causes of violence and inequality.
- polrjoy 4y ago
  I don't understand how $4000 worth of mosquito nets save one life. Don't those people's survival also need to eat, drink, treat other diseases, etc.? In the same spirit, I might as well claim my after-meal $2 ice cream relieved me from hunger.
  - Aunche 4y ago
    It's a basic experiment. Give one group of people mosquito nets. Let another group of people be a control group. Compare the mortality rates of both groups.
    - jefftk 4y ago
      GiveWell's summary of the research: https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/insecticide-treated-nets https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/in...
Barrin92 4y ago
"The philosopher Nick Bostrom contended that, if humanity successfully colonized the planets within its “light cone”—the plausibly reachable regions of the universe—and harnessed the computational power of the stars to run servers upon which the lives of digital consciousnesses might be staged, this could result in the efflorescence of approximately ten to the power of fifty-eight beings." It's hilarious how much this sounds, and the science-fiction writer Charles Stross has pointed this out in the past, Russian cosmism [1], a weird offshoot of Christianity dressed in secularism and rationalism. That something like this emerged so quickly out of the decidedly pragmatic and genuinely secular altruism of Singer is in my opinion evidence of the weakness of Effective Altruism as a philosophical system. It's such a bureaucratic, mechanical system that it's already started to branch off into weirder, less utilitarian schools. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorovich_Fyodorov#Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorovich_Fyodorov#P...
- imtringued 4y ago
  That is long termism. Think about it, some dude tells you he has every right to exploit you today for the sake of people an unbelievable number of people that only exist in some fake statistic. This is basically utilitarianism turned into a parody. Let's turn this into a trolley experiment, 1 million planets colonized with 8 billion humans each living the same lives we live today vs 10^58 humans of which the majority don't exist and are just made up. The extreme utilitarianists and long termists will pick the 10^58 fake humans even if there is a near 99% chance that none of the humans actually exist. That 1% chance would by far outweigh any lesser goal despite the fact that it is unlikely to happen in your universe. Another problematic aspect is that if there were actually 10^58 flesh and blood humans, there wouldn't be any planets left for potential alien neighbours, by aliens I do not necessarily mean independently evolved intelligence, it could simply be a new human space race that develops in some quiet corner of the galaxy isolated from everyone else.
Teafling 4y ago
I think what a lot of people here are missing is that the priorities of E.A. are fluid by design. Yes, existential risk of general AI might be small; but even fewer people are working on it: only about one hundred, worldwide. Similarly, the reason E.A. stepped off the climate change train is because it was a popular issue, which means the marginal benefit of one person contributing decreases. When more people direct attention to AI safety, another area will be the one where E.A. can contribute most, and the focus will shift.
- jefftk 4y ago
  > Yes, existential risk of general AI might be small; but even fewer people are working on it: only about one hundred, worldwide. You can make that argument, but I think the median view among people working on AI alignment is that the risk is quite high, in the range of >20% chance of disaster within their lifetime.
- gnramires 4y ago
  Indeed not only fluid, but also open to criticism. I've been always quite unsure of how to quantify AI risk. My conclusion at the moment is that it's a complex risk. I don't think singularity is plausible in any way or FOOM. Still, the changes to society are absolutely hard to grasp. Humans may face (economical) obsolescence in a few decades[1] (humans need not apply[2]). That puts us in a delicate situation: if humans are economically obsolete, a society that only values economic value (and not consciousness per se) will have all reasons to slowly but surely get rid of humans (and animals). We need a revolution of meaning and ethical understanding: the understanding of the fundamental value of consciousness, and to structure our lives and all institutions around it (each individual needs to have a good understanding of such ethics and meaning so that society as a whole is robust). I think formalization of ethics (which I'm a proponent of) and progress in metaphysics is going to contribute as well to this end. I think EA is simply part of this new understanding of ourselves and the Universe, a sort of coming out of a dark age -- and there's the opportunity to create a lasting society amazing for everyone. [1] My personal guess-estimate is about 50(-20/+40) years to complete obsolescence, although various researchers have wildly different estimates. [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
leonhard 4y ago
A bit off-topic but as a non-native, what are the rules the New Yorker is following with the spelling of some words? reëntry, coöperation, teen-ager Have never seen that before
- renewiltord 4y ago
  The diaeresis explained here https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-the-diaeresis https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...
- Nimitz14 4y ago
  Big newspapers have a styleguide they themselves created that they follow. Should be googleable.
hoseja 4y ago
The only situation where I would like to save a kid in Bangladesh from dying is if it somehow led to people having less kids in Bangladesh. Which isn't a very straightforward implication. I kinda see utilitarianism as a step on the horrifying path to human eusociality. Have these people not learned yet that when you save a poor child they will just make fourteen other poor children in short time? Maybe the best form of charity is lobbying for over-regulation of child-rearing goods to the point of near unaffordability, as is currently happening in developed countries. These people seem oversocialized.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Bangladeshi fertility rate is currently below replacement and has been dropping for decades. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/BGD/bangladesh/fertility-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/BGD/bangladesh/fertili... And ironically, a key driver of birth rates falling is when children stop dying so much. https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
I think in most things you need an extremist or fanatical element, so I'm not totally against doing some sums to demonstrate that something unintuitive might be more moral and/or cost-effective. But I might look up the EA take on some other vaguely parallel things, like Quaker businesses, worker co-operatives, fair-trade, progressive taxation, banning billionaires, revolutionary communism, bringing democracy to the middle East, nuking Russia, installing a benevolent world dictator etc. Would help me understand them to see how they position themselves against these things as I think you could make a half-assed attempt to prove that any of them was better with their own maths if you wanted to. e.g. if there's any billionaires then the chance of a billionaire buying elections and installing their own benevolent world dictator that believes in the wrong type of EA is a small but still existential risk (since only the true EA can save the future galactic empire). Tweak numbers as necessary until you arrive at your pre-ordained conclusion. edit: EA take on fair trade: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog/how-effective-fair-trade https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog/how-effective-fair-trad... EA take on renewables, climate change, developing nations: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/johannes-ackva-an-update-to-our-thinking-on-climate-change https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/johannes-ackva-an... An attempt to reconcile EA and anti-capitalism by a fan of both: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/81665058.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/81665058.pdf EA take on Socialism (tl;dr central planning is bad, which seems slightly counter to the whole EA thing): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ktEfsoGfBFGsaiY46/overview-of-capitalism-and-socialism-for-effective-altruism https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ktEfsoGfBFGsaiY46/...
- imtringued 4y ago
  The problem with longtermism is the circular logic. Longtermism rewards avoiding existential risk, so longtermism must reward longtermism i.e. one of the worst things you could do to raise existential risk is to criticize longtermism or even abolish it entirely, no matter which flavor of longtermism.
  - smk_ 4y ago
    Longtermism in a moral context rewards thinking about the value of future beings that do not yet exist. Existential risk is important in this consideration, because it is an event that severely limits the amount of future beings that could exists. The strongest argument against longtermism is a flavour of a person-affecting moral view.
russnewcomer 4y ago
This article seems to carp at the downsides of institutionalizing any movement (which are legion) without touching the other (to me obvious, and clearly deteriorating) downside features of the EA community, to someone solely an outside observer to that community (but not to development or charity work): It doesn't care about individuals, does not seem to think about culture, and seems to have an unexamined savior complex and egotism that leads it down bad rabbit holes. EA people have their hearts in good places. But when you start to look at 'maximum impact' and at the metrics used to define it, EA only focuses on statistically testable social group problems, and not on individual issues. So the way that EA philosophy seems to me to regularly be expressed is that an EA proponent would say something like, "unquestionably, we should give $50k to fund mosquito nets to raise the quality of life for 5k people" and not even consider something like "we should give 50k to train local trauma counselors to help 500 people be more mentally stable and whole" and the vibe that I have sometimes gotten from reading blogs EA advocates that individuals are not worth helping because that's not impactful or impactful enough. We see the understandable precursor of this in the article, where Matt Wage talks about the idea of it being more impactful to cure 200-4000 people from glaucoma. It gets a pass because it is framed around minor improvement to QOL in the West versus significant improvement in QOL in a developing country, but also, look at the quote just proceeding that, around saving people from a burning building. See, the work that EA advocates do is important. But when we only try to fix societal problems from the top down by addressing them at a society level, we often ignore or damage the individuals that we are nominally helping. I'm not saying that mosquito nets, for example, are bad and shouldn't be given to. I am saying there is also a down and dirty component of individual attention and flourishing that has to be looked for and addressed. I'm not saying that EA as a movement or as a set of goals is fundamentally wrong, just that it needs to have some temper with personal and individual care. I see EA advocates looking down on people that "do things that don't scale" in YC parlance, in areas of the world where there are plenty of people doing things that don't scale because doing things that do scale is almost impossible to do well. EA also seems, again from the outside perspective, to really focus on things that play well to Western mindsets, and doesn't really consider community-versus-individualism or guilt/innocence-versus-honor/shame cultural paradigms. It seems obvious to me that in 100 years, that the hands-off, Western-directed action promoted by EA will be seen as colonialism 5.0. There are also really not a lot of prominent non-Western voices in the EA sphere, nobody that seems to have been raised to leadership levels, and that also is concerning for the long-term health of the institution. In the quest to make the most impact, the savior complex and all the corrosives that come from it can easily permeate the movement (and indeed seem to be starting from the article), justifying institutions, power, prestige, and rank. It's easy to see MacAskill falling into that (see the braces/teeth gap aside), and when I often read EA advocates, I note that many of them do not seem to spend any time doing thankless, individual work (like as a trivial example volunteering at a homeless shelter, let alone be in a developing country or war zone) and the ones that have seem to quickly burn out and decide that it is more proper/moral for them to 'earn-to-give' and donate more. It is entirely possible that, not being in the EA community, I don't know the people that do this well since they are not blogging/community building. All this may be a pot-calling-the-kettle-black since I too struggle with working with humans instead of developing systems, and in some ways I have chosen to earn to give instead of earning less money while doing more direct individual work. But I think that this actually helps me lend some criticism that can be seen as "I have thought about what you do, and see some weaknesses" if any EA advocates read and consider this post. The other struggle I have with EA is that there is a recycling of stoicism with early 20th Century progressivism there, tinged with monasticism and moral superiority. I have worked with and have good friends who were in war zones or developing countries for years, and spent some time in one myself. The personality types who seem to gravitate toward EA often seemed, when overseas or in impoverished communities, to burn out or be ineffective in building personal relationships or unable to have fun in the work. EA needs to, in my personal estimation, figure out how to address some of these weaknesses if it is going to be able to be effective by outside measures. (NB, I interact with development work mostly in Protestant Evangelical religious spaces, which has its own set of difficulties and pathologies that I am not entirely unaware of, but that also can provide some color to my critique)
arisAlexis 4y ago
I hate it that it's very obvious from the beginning that the journalist is impartial and clearly thinks EA is bs and Will is pretentious.
Noosphere89 4y ago
An interesting read of the EA movement with surprising nuance and dives into it's messy complexity.

117 points by mitchbob 4y ago

mitchbob 4y ago

Archived: https://archive.ph/ReUYI https://archive.ph/ReUYI

civilized 4y ago

Effective altruism is great. I don't follow its precepts.

a9h74j 4y ago
I am certain that you are thoughtful about the meta-ethics involved, thoughtful about your own unwillingness to go all-in with EA, and that this is an elegantly abbreviated report.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
BurningFrog 4y ago
Ineffective selfishness (IS) is, logically, equivalent to EA.
- ivalm 4y ago
  Na, the world of alternative hypothesis is vast.

jefftk 4y ago

This is a pretty good treatment. The shift from focusing on global poverty to focusing on keeping us from killing ourselves off is interesting and complex. (It's also one I took a long time to come around to. For years I agreed in theory that trying to prevent civilizational catastrophe could be the most important thing to do, but didn't agree that there were tractable projects in this area. After deciding that there are, however, I quit my 'earning to give' job to go work on trying to catch future pandemics earlier.)

ajross 4y ago
> The shift from [conventional human welfare issues to whackjob sci-fi apocalyptimancy] is interesting and complex. It's... actually kind of not, which is why this is so upsetting. EA seemed to have a handle on a way to get libertarian-leaning, economically privileged, inward-focused men (and, yes, that's the demographic almost to a person) to think about ways to help people they'd never otherwise have given a passing thought to. Then roll the clock forward a few years and they're all back to sci-fi fandom arguments. This nonsense is exactly what you would have expected from these people. The notable part is that for one shining moment they pretended otherwise.
- shuckles 4y ago
  Sincere question: how much of a benefit would it have been to the global poor if COVID never had an adverse impact? What if, as a side effect, other diseases were also mitigated? How are you going from a criticism of identity to the criticism of the aims? It’s very unclear to me.
- jefftk 4y ago
  The global response to covid was far worse than it could have been, with millions dead, tens to hundreds of millions out of work, and billions having a pretty bad couple of years. Other pandemics have been much more deadly than covid and will likely be in the future. The speed of modern transportation, and the interconnectedness of the global economy are great overall, but do increase our exposure to pandemics and their consequences. This isn't 'whackjob sci-fi apocalyptimancy', this is something that has happened many times before.
  - telotortium 4y ago
    If you go back to the old 80,000 hours blog posts, they stress not getting into the most oversubscribed fields, given that the marginal contribution of a incoming do-gooder is likely to be minimal due to the great interest in those fields already attracting a lot of intelligent people. Before COVID, I might agree that EAs should get into pandemic prevention - Bill Gates was certainly concerned. After COVID, pandemic prevention is probably only second to climate change in the level of oversubscription. What is your alpha in pandemic prevention?

a9h74j 4y ago

This is a very good article. I have only read about half of it so far. Plenty of good foundations regardless of whatever the current apparent state of EA might be.

ezekiel23 4y ago

Can someone ELI5 the motivation to worry about "runaway A.I."? To me, it just seems to be a slippery slope argument. Genuinely curious.

finexplained 4y ago
You decide you want to optimize for number of lives saved. You decide that future lives, those of people yet to be born, are worth as much as those currently alive. You place small, but importantly not zero, probability on existential risks to humanity, so that when you do the expected value calculation, even an infinitesimally small risk of humanity's complete extinction results in negative infinite utility. You're also very smart and realize that smart people can do damage if their objectives are misaligned, and you start to worry about something much much smarter than you with objectives misaligned to humanity's more broadly. In their defense reward specification is indeed a hard problem, RL agents find unexpected policies that maximize reward in even toy settings. At this point you're down the rabbit hole and no other problem seems to compare. Climate change will leave some people alive, pandemics leave some people alive, AIs have no such kindness.
- deleted 4y ago
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frgtpsswrdlame 4y ago
Basically they're doing a utilitarian calculus. But since our calculus is basically all pretend, we can assign arbitrary importance to anything we want just by daydreaming the costs and percentages of these super unlikely, super catastrophic events.
- NateEag 4y ago
  Thank you for so clearly and simply articulating the fundamental problem of utilitarianism.
  - Planktonne 4y ago

peterfield 4y ago

"MacAskill, however, could find nothing wrong with it." "When he met friends at the pub, he ordered only a glass of water, which he then refilled with a can of two-per-cent lager he’d bought on the corner" Well, in the second case he could not find anything wrong with his own behavior (using deceit to defraud the pub owner of using his facility), so I won't put much value in his first finding or lack thereof.

NateEag 4y ago
Whether his behavior at the pub was immoral is unrelated to whether his reasoning on another moral question is correct.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Well he was going to give his own money away, and in an effective manner which the landlord probably wasn't so maybe there's a Robin Hood angle on stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.

evancoop 4y ago

The NYT is taking a swing at longtermism, the New Yorker is taking a swing at effective altruism, and this begs for a little numerical reasoning on the topic. If we must consider every life (even distant lives), and most lives haven't been lived yet, and most lives not yet lived will enjoy a higher quality of life than we do (rational optimism), doesn't protecting THOSE lives trump everything else? https://ae.studio/blog/most-lives-havent-been-lived-yet#pg https://ae.studio/blog/most-lives-havent-been-lived-yet#pg

psi75 4y ago

For a time, the movement recommended that inspirited young people should, rather than work for charities, get jobs in finance and donate their income. The problem is in the assumption that paid corporate work has zero social value. This is untrue. It has negative social value. If a rich person or a corporation that operates on rich peoples' behalf is paying you to do something, the odds are high that its total social value is negative, especially because we live within a moribund economic system that turns to extreme violence--fascism is capitalism in decay--whenever it hits the skids and people start to question it.

enticingturtle 4y ago
This is wrong. Trading is positive sum. When companies trade with employees to buy labor or trade with consumers to sell goods, all parties are better off from the interaction — otherwise they would not trade.
- chubot 4y ago
  Sure, but that's not the only thing involved in finance. There's also regulatory capture, privatizing profits, and socializing losses It's certainly plausible that the value of many jobs is negative, and even if you give away your entire salary, it could come out negative for society. This whole idea is also out of touch with reality and lacking in common sense, because people who aren't interested in finance aren't likely to be competitive in it.

renewiltord 4y ago

Personally, having thought about it, there is a non-zero possibility of a Boltzmann Brain that wants to end us all even if we stop all AI and stop all Earth busters, and there is a non-zero possibility of us stopping it. Therefore we should stop all current activity on anything that is not Evil Boltzmann Brain. The problem with Evil Boltzmann Brain is that it could destroy all life in all galaxies through the infinitesimal chance that it spontaneously produces space travel. Therefore, I have dedicated my entire life to fighting EBB instead. Currently, this requires that I buy an iPhone with the money I had planned to use on GiveWell.org but it's all in the plan. I have not forgotten the goal, though. If I consume all resources on Earth, then I can stop evil AI at the same time as I increase entropy and reduce the possibility that EBB can utilize any energy differential. This requires that I consume consume consume. Which I shall do out of altruistic purposes.

chubot 4y ago
Yeah this is basically what I was thinking after reading the article, thanks for spelling it out concretely. My thought was that if you're going to assign infinite weight to unlikely possibilities, then why not devote your entire life to preventing time travel from being invented in the future? Someone could invent a time machine and destroy the Earth before humanity had a chance to exist, etc. It's just about as falsifiable as what they are working on. --- Also, if you're going to be so abstract about it, then why you wouldn't want to optimize for the happiness and future vigor of AIs? If you're going to be a vegan, then presumably you care about non- human consciousness. So what's wrong with a future with flourishing AI and without humanity? There are too many ridiculous things to count here, and normally I would ignore it, but it seems like people are taking it seriously and it has consequence? (And the article is pretty well written either way) --- It's weird that he had doubt that's like 1 sentence in the article, and then entire lifetimes of work that simply ignore the doubt: My No. 1 worry is: what if we’re focussed on entirely the wrong things?” he said. “What if we’re just wrong? What if A.I. is just a distraction? And as alluded to in the article, the wild swing from helping the poor to preventing AI has a huge moral hazard. With the former you can course-correct your actions based on observation of outcomes -- what happened as a result of the donations? With the latter you can justify any action today by just pushing out the hypothetical benefits further and further into the future. It resembles a religion that collects money today, promising benefits in the afterlife.

ahepp 4y ago

A relevant piece by Peter Singer, one of the philosophers who popularized effective altruism: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ethical-implications-of-focusing-on-extinction-risk-by-peter-singer-2021-10 https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ethical-implica...

m101 4y ago

The problem with effective altruism is that it is devoid from reality: - no country was ever made wealthy by just giving them things. Wealth comes from passing through the difficult stages of development oneself - you personally should do the good things you want to do in the world rather than just donating money for someone else to do it on your behalf - Peter Singer uses the word "should" too much, and it's almost offensive. His philosophy is an empty philosophy pushed through by people who believe we are no different to apes. The older religions do this all much more justice in a far more thoughtful way.

atlasunshrugged 4y ago
I'm relatively actively involved in EA and I don't think anyone believes just giving people things will make a whole society wealthy, nor is it practical. For certain cases like Givedirectly (direct cash transfers) the question is more about efficacy of aid. If I think of what EA really stands for, it's about doing things that are maximally effective based on a rationale view of your aims. You can question lots about the assumptions people make to get to the end goal (I personally think they prioritize too much aid vs. helping with foundations of economic development) but I don't think the first two points you make match with my experience of EA in practice. On your second point, I don't agree at all. Should you do as much as you personally can? Sure. But if you're a multi-millionaire and you want to feed people, you really are telling me it's necessary that that person hands out each piece of food for it to be moral? That doesn't make sense to me at all.
- m101 4y ago
  Firstly, i am developing my own ideas all the time on this. I would suggest that people who want to make a difference with money do so on a local level. If they can create a local eden then perhaps someone else will notice and create another one locally where they are. It's kind of like small scale experiments which you can test and the ones that work will naturally be extended for little or no extra money.
  - eru 4y ago

Ericson2314 4y ago

This stuff really should be called anti-Keynesianism. It's obsession with scarcity and presumption of the probabilities being well-defined (or even decidable) is completely the opposite.

tunesmith 4y ago

What kind of work has been done on discounting future hypothetical lives? Kind of like time-value of money, but for future lives. Yes, valuing a future life as identical to a present-day life is compelling, but since it's just a hypothetical life, it seems it should be discounted somehow. To me it almost just seems like a "different people can have different values" sort of thing. If you want to value current lives more than future lives, you'll just come to different conclusions than someone who believes otherwise, and maybe both sets of conclusions are okay.

atlasunshrugged 4y ago
I don't know how much work has been done there but I think most people just do this intuitively, right? I mean when we make decisions, how often are we really thinking of the downstream effect that they will have many generations in the future. I'd say the notable exception is climate which is an area many people seem concerned about for future generations (although I'm not sure how much of it is actual concern versus the idea of telling old Senators who won't see the impact of climate change to at least think about their grandchildren which just seems like good marketing/advocacy).
rileyphone 4y ago
There's some stuff like https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fStCX6RXmgxkTBe73/towards-a-weaker-longtermism https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fStCX6RXmgxkTBe73/... and https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-da..., but the main work is in bullying nerds on the internet.
Emma_Goldman 4y ago
It's a whole subfield, 'population ethics'. A lot of effective altruists revere Derik Parfit, a rather staid Oxford philosopher who effectively founded the subject.
jefftk 4y ago
I think the most common view within EA is that future people and matter the same amount as current people, conditional on actually existing. So if you think there is a 50% chance the world will be destroyed by 2200, then you would discount lives in 2200 by 50%. I definitely agree with your second paragraph, however, and people who value current lives more than future lives will often come to different philosophical conclusions. It's interesting, however, that this frequently doesn't cash out into different beliefs about what we should do today. For example, I think the value of work on pandemic prevention or AI alignment does not depend on multiplying by zillions of potential future people: they're worth doing even just for people alive today. Ex: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KDjEogAqWNTdddF9g/long-termism-vs-existential-risk https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KDjEogAqWNTdddF9g/... : Let me rephrase this in a deliberately inflammatory way: if you're under ~50, unaligned AI might kill you and everyone you know. Not your great-great-(...)-great-grandchildren in the year 30,000 AD. Not even your children. You and everyone you know. As a pitch to get people to care about something, this is a pretty strong one. But right now, a lot of EA discussion about this goes through an argument that starts with "did you know you might want to assign your descendants in the year 30,000 AD exactly equal moral value to yourself? Did you know that maybe you should care about their problems exactly as much as you care about global warming and other problems happening today?"

Aunche 4y ago

I don't understand how Effective Altruism has anything to do with AI risk. It's a relatively straightforward to prove that $4000 worth of mosquito nets can save one life, but how can you do the same for AI risk? It's handwavy just to quantify the risk of a rogue AGI, let alone quantify the benefit of developing countermeasures to rogue AI. It sounds very much like a garbage in, garbage out scenario.

kalkin 4y ago
It does feel like more of a sociological than a philosophical overlap, aside maybe from consequentialism. The best argument for GiveDirectly and mosquito nets over structural change is that nobody honestly knows how to move the likelihood of the latter with a few thousand dollars, so you can reasonably choose to definitely do something that will at least really help someone over trying to fix an alleged root cause but most likely having no effect at all. But then our understanding of how to invest in AI alignment is even worse than our understanding of how to invest in reducing root causes of violence and inequality.
polrjoy 4y ago
I don't understand how $4000 worth of mosquito nets save one life. Don't those people's survival also need to eat, drink, treat other diseases, etc.? In the same spirit, I might as well claim my after-meal $2 ice cream relieved me from hunger.
- Aunche 4y ago
  It's a basic experiment. Give one group of people mosquito nets. Let another group of people be a control group. Compare the mortality rates of both groups.
  - jefftk 4y ago
    GiveWell's summary of the research: https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/insecticide-treated-nets https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/in...

Barrin92 4y ago

"The philosopher Nick Bostrom contended that, if humanity successfully colonized the planets within its “light cone”—the plausibly reachable regions of the universe—and harnessed the computational power of the stars to run servers upon which the lives of digital consciousnesses might be staged, this could result in the efflorescence of approximately ten to the power of fifty-eight beings." It's hilarious how much this sounds, and the science-fiction writer Charles Stross has pointed this out in the past, Russian cosmism [1], a weird offshoot of Christianity dressed in secularism and rationalism. That something like this emerged so quickly out of the decidedly pragmatic and genuinely secular altruism of Singer is in my opinion evidence of the weakness of Effective Altruism as a philosophical system. It's such a bureaucratic, mechanical system that it's already started to branch off into weirder, less utilitarian schools. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorovich_Fyodorov#Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorovich_Fyodorov#P...

imtringued 4y ago
That is long termism. Think about it, some dude tells you he has every right to exploit you today for the sake of people an unbelievable number of people that only exist in some fake statistic. This is basically utilitarianism turned into a parody. Let's turn this into a trolley experiment, 1 million planets colonized with 8 billion humans each living the same lives we live today vs 10^58 humans of which the majority don't exist and are just made up. The extreme utilitarianists and long termists will pick the 10^58 fake humans even if there is a near 99% chance that none of the humans actually exist. That 1% chance would by far outweigh any lesser goal despite the fact that it is unlikely to happen in your universe. Another problematic aspect is that if there were actually 10^58 flesh and blood humans, there wouldn't be any planets left for potential alien neighbours, by aliens I do not necessarily mean independently evolved intelligence, it could simply be a new human space race that develops in some quiet corner of the galaxy isolated from everyone else.

Teafling 4y ago

I think what a lot of people here are missing is that the priorities of E.A. are fluid by design. Yes, existential risk of general AI might be small; but even fewer people are working on it: only about one hundred, worldwide. Similarly, the reason E.A. stepped off the climate change train is because it was a popular issue, which means the marginal benefit of one person contributing decreases. When more people direct attention to AI safety, another area will be the one where E.A. can contribute most, and the focus will shift.

jefftk 4y ago
> Yes, existential risk of general AI might be small; but even fewer people are working on it: only about one hundred, worldwide. You can make that argument, but I think the median view among people working on AI alignment is that the risk is quite high, in the range of >20% chance of disaster within their lifetime.
gnramires 4y ago
Indeed not only fluid, but also open to criticism. I've been always quite unsure of how to quantify AI risk. My conclusion at the moment is that it's a complex risk. I don't think singularity is plausible in any way or FOOM. Still, the changes to society are absolutely hard to grasp. Humans may face (economical) obsolescence in a few decades[1] (humans need not apply[2]). That puts us in a delicate situation: if humans are economically obsolete, a society that only values economic value (and not consciousness per se) will have all reasons to slowly but surely get rid of humans (and animals). We need a revolution of meaning and ethical understanding: the understanding of the fundamental value of consciousness, and to structure our lives and all institutions around it (each individual needs to have a good understanding of such ethics and meaning so that society as a whole is robust). I think formalization of ethics (which I'm a proponent of) and progress in metaphysics is going to contribute as well to this end. I think EA is simply part of this new understanding of ourselves and the Universe, a sort of coming out of a dark age -- and there's the opportunity to create a lasting society amazing for everyone. [1] My personal guess-estimate is about 50(-20/+40) years to complete obsolescence, although various researchers have wildly different estimates. [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

leonhard 4y ago

A bit off-topic but as a non-native, what are the rules the New Yorker is following with the spelling of some words? reëntry, coöperation, teen-ager Have never seen that before

renewiltord 4y ago
The diaeresis explained here https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-the-diaeresis https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...
Nimitz14 4y ago
Big newspapers have a styleguide they themselves created that they follow. Should be googleable.

hoseja 4y ago

The only situation where I would like to save a kid in Bangladesh from dying is if it somehow led to people having less kids in Bangladesh. Which isn't a very straightforward implication. I kinda see utilitarianism as a step on the horrifying path to human eusociality. Have these people not learned yet that when you save a poor child they will just make fourteen other poor children in short time? Maybe the best form of charity is lobbying for over-regulation of child-rearing goods to the point of near unaffordability, as is currently happening in developed countries. These people seem oversocialized.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Bangladeshi fertility rate is currently below replacement and has been dropping for decades. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/BGD/bangladesh/fertility-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/BGD/bangladesh/fertili... And ironically, a key driver of birth rates falling is when children stop dying so much. https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

I think in most things you need an extremist or fanatical element, so I'm not totally against doing some sums to demonstrate that something unintuitive might be more moral and/or cost-effective. But I might look up the EA take on some other vaguely parallel things, like Quaker businesses, worker co-operatives, fair-trade, progressive taxation, banning billionaires, revolutionary communism, bringing democracy to the middle East, nuking Russia, installing a benevolent world dictator etc. Would help me understand them to see how they position themselves against these things as I think you could make a half-assed attempt to prove that any of them was better with their own maths if you wanted to. e.g. if there's any billionaires then the chance of a billionaire buying elections and installing their own benevolent world dictator that believes in the wrong type of EA is a small but still existential risk (since only the true EA can save the future galactic empire). Tweak numbers as necessary until you arrive at your pre-ordained conclusion. edit: EA take on fair trade: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog/how-effective-fair-trade https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog/how-effective-fair-trad... EA take on renewables, climate change, developing nations: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/johannes-ackva-an-update-to-our-thinking-on-climate-change https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/johannes-ackva-an... An attempt to reconcile EA and anti-capitalism by a fan of both: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/81665058.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/81665058.pdf EA take on Socialism (tl;dr central planning is bad, which seems slightly counter to the whole EA thing): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ktEfsoGfBFGsaiY46/overview-of-capitalism-and-socialism-for-effective-altruism https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ktEfsoGfBFGsaiY46/...

imtringued 4y ago
The problem with longtermism is the circular logic. Longtermism rewards avoiding existential risk, so longtermism must reward longtermism i.e. one of the worst things you could do to raise existential risk is to criticize longtermism or even abolish it entirely, no matter which flavor of longtermism.
- smk_ 4y ago
  Longtermism in a moral context rewards thinking about the value of future beings that do not yet exist. Existential risk is important in this consideration, because it is an event that severely limits the amount of future beings that could exists. The strongest argument against longtermism is a flavour of a person-affecting moral view.

russnewcomer 4y ago

This article seems to carp at the downsides of institutionalizing any movement (which are legion) without touching the other (to me obvious, and clearly deteriorating) downside features of the EA community, to someone solely an outside observer to that community (but not to development or charity work): It doesn't care about individuals, does not seem to think about culture, and seems to have an unexamined savior complex and egotism that leads it down bad rabbit holes. EA people have their hearts in good places. But when you start to look at 'maximum impact' and at the metrics used to define it, EA only focuses on statistically testable social group problems, and not on individual issues. So the way that EA philosophy seems to me to regularly be expressed is that an EA proponent would say something like, "unquestionably, we should give $50k to fund mosquito nets to raise the quality of life for 5k people" and not even consider something like "we should give 50k to train local trauma counselors to help 500 people be more mentally stable and whole" and the vibe that I have sometimes gotten from reading blogs EA advocates that individuals are not worth helping because that's not impactful or impactful enough. We see the understandable precursor of this in the article, where Matt Wage talks about the idea of it being more impactful to cure 200-4000 people from glaucoma. It gets a pass because it is framed around minor improvement to QOL in the West versus significant improvement in QOL in a developing country, but also, look at the quote just proceeding that, around saving people from a burning building. See, the work that EA advocates do is important. But when we only try to fix societal problems from the top down by addressing them at a society level, we often ignore or damage the individuals that we are nominally helping. I'm not saying that mosquito nets, for example, are bad and shouldn't be given to. I am saying there is also a down and dirty component of individual attention and flourishing that has to be looked for and addressed. I'm not saying that EA as a movement or as a set of goals is fundamentally wrong, just that it needs to have some temper with personal and individual care. I see EA advocates looking down on people that "do things that don't scale" in YC parlance, in areas of the world where there are plenty of people doing things that don't scale because doing things that do scale is almost impossible to do well. EA also seems, again from the outside perspective, to really focus on things that play well to Western mindsets, and doesn't really consider community-versus-individualism or guilt/innocence-versus-honor/shame cultural paradigms. It seems obvious to me that in 100 years, that the hands-off, Western-directed action promoted by EA will be seen as colonialism 5.0. There are also really not a lot of prominent non-Western voices in the EA sphere, nobody that seems to have been raised to leadership levels, and that also is concerning for the long-term health of the institution. In the quest to make the most impact, the savior complex and all the corrosives that come from it can easily permeate the movement (and indeed seem to be starting from the article), justifying institutions, power, prestige, and rank. It's easy to see MacAskill falling into that (see the braces/teeth gap aside), and when I often read EA advocates, I note that many of them do not seem to spend any time doing thankless, individual work (like as a trivial example volunteering at a homeless shelter, let alone be in a developing country or war zone) and the ones that have seem to quickly burn out and decide that it is more proper/moral for them to 'earn-to-give' and donate more. It is entirely possible that, not being in the EA community, I don't know the people that do this well since they are not blogging/community building. All this may be a pot-calling-the-kettle-black since I too struggle with working with humans instead of developing systems, and in some ways I have chosen to earn to give instead of earning less money while doing more direct individual work. But I think that this actually helps me lend some criticism that can be seen as "I have thought about what you do, and see some weaknesses" if any EA advocates read and consider this post. The other struggle I have with EA is that there is a recycling of stoicism with early 20th Century progressivism there, tinged with monasticism and moral superiority. I have worked with and have good friends who were in war zones or developing countries for years, and spent some time in one myself. The personality types who seem to gravitate toward EA often seemed, when overseas or in impoverished communities, to burn out or be ineffective in building personal relationships or unable to have fun in the work. EA needs to, in my personal estimation, figure out how to address some of these weaknesses if it is going to be able to be effective by outside measures. (NB, I interact with development work mostly in Protestant Evangelical religious spaces, which has its own set of difficulties and pathologies that I am not entirely unaware of, but that also can provide some color to my critique)

arisAlexis 4y ago

I hate it that it's very obvious from the beginning that the journalist is impartial and clearly thinks EA is bs and Will is pretentious.

Noosphere89 4y ago

An interesting read of the EA movement with surprising nuance and dives into it's messy complexity.