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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

by 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
    Nobody minds, if you spend your own time and money to make your local community nicer. It's just that this is (most likely) not the most effective way to make the world better. And if your thesis is that this is the most effective way, because of copying etc, it would be useful to run some controlled experiments.
analog31 4y ago
A similar thought I've had is that the effectiveness of personal altruism is dwarfed by that of social institutions. For this reason, at least some portion of our altruistic impulses should be directed towards strengthening and spreading those institutions.
- atlasunshrugged 4y ago
  I think plenty of people in EA believe the same thing, for instance 80,000 hours has government and policy listed as a priority area for people to work in https://80000hours.org/articles/government-policy/ https://80000hours.org/articles/government-policy/
  - m101 4y ago
    The problem with this stuff is that they are manipulating govt to take people's money in order to promote their own vision of what is good at taxpayer expense. I suppose they think their concept of good is better than everyone else's.
    - eru 4y ago
      You will find plenty of libertarians in their ranks.
- rr808 4y ago
  > dwarfed by that of social institutions & govt. A poor family on section 8 vouchers, couple of kids in school, medicaid healthcare costs the government perhaps $100k/yr, + charities for food, clothing etc. You'll never get that in donations.
- pdonis 4y ago
  > at least some portion of our altruistic impulses should be directed towards strengthening and spreading those institutions. Which in most cases is going to involve destroying the existing institutions in societies that aren't creating much wealth, since it's precisely their existing institutions--corrupt governments and low social trust--that are preventing wealth from being created.
BariumBlue 4y ago
Yes and no. Having wealth creates more opportunities to create wealth - a person who had relative wealths to be able to learn to read, and sleep & eat properly will be more able (and probably willing) to support and grow themselves, their family, and their society. In terms of people setting up a successful and prosperous society and culture, then yes that can't be moneyed into existence. Doesn't mean that thoughtful money can't help people or their society though.
steve_adams_86 4y ago
Many goals I’ve seen in the EA scene are more like… Preventing death and abject poverty; the kinds of things which statistically prevent success across a population. We can talk about difficult stages at the individual level, but if an entire population faces things like dying from mosquito bites, I don’t think we gain anything or do anyone a service by not helping. These are people who can’t pull themselves up by the bootstraps because they’re a little too busy trying not to die. Edit: you mention not liking the word “should” in this context, yet you say people should do the good deeds themselves rather than donate money. Can you articulate why without a should here? The point of donating money is that if you donate it well, it can have a greater impact than if you were to act independently. People have put a lot of thought and organization into it, and it isn’t an afterthought spurred by reluctance or laziness. I believe the philosophical goal is to maximize the reduction of unnecessary suffering. I could be wrong, but with that in mind it could make a lot of sense to donate money rather than act independently.
- m101 4y ago
  I guess my problem with Singer's should is he's telling others what to do, whereas i think I'm using the word should in telling everyone to do their own thing and make up their own concept of what is good. Own the issue themselves. We must all be the society we want to create if we are to create it. Agree on the small problems that can be solved, but again i maintain that everyone needs to work through these stages themselves imo. People can help but ultimately the biggest help is opening up to useful trade, and enabling the empowerment of people from the bottom up. It's a complex issue with no method without downsides.
Aunche 4y ago
>no country was ever made wealthy by just giving them things Presumably, if people are spending less time taking care of their family dying of malaria, they'd have more time to create wealth.
eru 4y ago
> - 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 Why?
- m101 4y ago
  Because the only good stuff done is donation of money, with everything else done by salarymen. For me that is something lost.
  - eru 4y ago
    You can donate time. It's just that unless you have professional level skills, that is less effective than donating money and letting professionals handle the work. Specialisation and division of labour really work. If, for sentimental reasons, you get a kick out of working in the soup kitchen, by all means, work in the soup kitchen. Just be aware that you are doing this for your own entertainment.
unmole 4y ago
It's hard to read your comment as anything but a middlebrow dismissal. > Wealth comes from passing through the difficult stages of development oneself Is having people go blind from preventable causes or children growing up stunted supposed to build character? > 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 The point is to do good, not feel good. Specialization is the very basis of human civilization. Software engineers donating their surplus to fund salaries for trained full time teachers is going to be a lot more effective than the alternative you're suggesting.
- paganel 4y ago
  Not the OP, but those kids need parents that have a steady pay-check (we can't all be entrepreneurs). Nowadays a steady pay-check is mostly associated with making things, especially in non-Western countries, things which are later sold (on the same internal market or to export markets). Once a much bigger player from the outside comes in and gives stuff for "free", like it has happened with some of the Western aid, then that kid's parents I mentioned at the start of the comment risk losing their jobs. After all, it's not worth it anymore for their employer to keep them, well, employed, cause the market that he's targeting is getting dumped by all the free stuff coming in via Western "aid". These are, in retrospect, basic economics-related things, but which nevertheless took a while to sink in into some people's minds in the West (some are still oblivious to it all). I remember a book written by an African lady (I think she was from Botswana or from that general area), former worker at a big financial institution in the West, and imploring the West to stop "aiding" the African countries if they want to see them actually develop.
  - unmole 4y ago
    I'm sorry, what exactly does your comment have to do with effective altruism? The free stuff that EA advocates want to distribute are deworming pills and mosquito nets. That in no way precludes development of local manufacturing. Moreover, cash infusions like with GiveDirectly help kickstart a virtuous cycle of local production and consumption.
  - 4y ago
jefftk 4y ago
> 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 Let's take an example mentioned in the article, Sam Bankman-Fried. After hearing about EA in college, he decided to earn as much money as he could first in traditional finance and then in crypto, so that he would be able to fund work he thought was important that was currently not happening. He was very successful at this, and currently has about $12B he's working on donating. I think it's a pretty difficult claim to support that he would have furthered his goals more by picking one of the things he thinks needs to happen and working on it? On the other hand, a lot of early effective altruist writing is from a time when there was very little money available for some of the most valuable things, a time when even "go work as a regular software engineer and donate a large percentage" beat directly working on valuable things for a lot of people. If you look at that writing now, however, since it is assuming a very different funding environment it looks like it sets the bar way too low for how much money you need to be able to earn before earning to give is likely your best option.
- m101 4y ago
  As another comment on here has said so well - how people make their money matters. I believe that crypto generally is a massive scam, so making money from it and donating it to what you think is a good thing is still net bad. I disagree with what sbf is doing wrt political donations.
- mtremsal 4y ago
  Didn’t SBF make his fortune in the crypto space? By definition this would mean capturing real money from retail investors, right? It’s possible that this money can be reallocated more “effectively” according to some quantifiable measure identified by SBF, yet this doesn’t sit well with me. What happened to the Golden Rule? Or to Sartre’s “in choosing for himself, [each man] chooses for all men”? Surely if EA leads some to causing such wide-scale short-term pain in its name, at the very least it cannot be a humanism. I realize this isn’t a strong argument, but when I hear about an EA champion, there’s often this dynamic where how they made money doesn’t matter. They’re wealthy, so clearly what they do is valued by the market and we should ignore externalities that aren’t priced into their income. It’s like Big Oil pointing to specific green outcomes that they fund; these outcomes are quantifiable yet funded by hard to price but reprehensible practices. It all feels like Catholic indulgences… Maybe this is still a net-positive for society in that it provides people who wouldn’t be humanist anyway (e.g. libertarians) with a well-intentioned philosophy?
imtringued 4y ago
>no country was ever made wealthy by just giving them things. Wealth comes from passing through the difficult stages of development oneself It is kind of difficult to grasp but when you see a homeless man, the best thing you can do to him isn't giving away money, it is hiring him and giving him a job that pays enough to pay the bills. When you donate money to the poor, you are basically subsidizing poverty. Honestly Keynes already had the right idea, just give them a job to build commercially useless things like affordable housing.
concordDance 4y ago
> The problem with effective altruism is that it is devoid from reality: Nah, people just are rather clueless on the what and the why of effective altruism. The top causes are things like deworming, anti-malaria and AI risk. These are things that substantially increase economic productivity (the latter on account of people not being dead).

by m101 4y ago

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
  Nobody minds, if you spend your own time and money to make your local community nicer. It's just that this is (most likely) not the most effective way to make the world better. And if your thesis is that this is the most effective way, because of copying etc, it would be useful to run some controlled experiments.

analog31 4y ago

A similar thought I've had is that the effectiveness of personal altruism is dwarfed by that of social institutions. For this reason, at least some portion of our altruistic impulses should be directed towards strengthening and spreading those institutions.

atlasunshrugged 4y ago
I think plenty of people in EA believe the same thing, for instance 80,000 hours has government and policy listed as a priority area for people to work in https://80000hours.org/articles/government-policy/ https://80000hours.org/articles/government-policy/
- m101 4y ago
  The problem with this stuff is that they are manipulating govt to take people's money in order to promote their own vision of what is good at taxpayer expense. I suppose they think their concept of good is better than everyone else's.
  - eru 4y ago
    You will find plenty of libertarians in their ranks.
rr808 4y ago
> dwarfed by that of social institutions & govt. A poor family on section 8 vouchers, couple of kids in school, medicaid healthcare costs the government perhaps $100k/yr, + charities for food, clothing etc. You'll never get that in donations.
pdonis 4y ago
> at least some portion of our altruistic impulses should be directed towards strengthening and spreading those institutions. Which in most cases is going to involve destroying the existing institutions in societies that aren't creating much wealth, since it's precisely their existing institutions--corrupt governments and low social trust--that are preventing wealth from being created.

BariumBlue 4y ago

Yes and no. Having wealth creates more opportunities to create wealth - a person who had relative wealths to be able to learn to read, and sleep & eat properly will be more able (and probably willing) to support and grow themselves, their family, and their society. In terms of people setting up a successful and prosperous society and culture, then yes that can't be moneyed into existence. Doesn't mean that thoughtful money can't help people or their society though.

steve_adams_86 4y ago

Many goals I’ve seen in the EA scene are more like… Preventing death and abject poverty; the kinds of things which statistically prevent success across a population. We can talk about difficult stages at the individual level, but if an entire population faces things like dying from mosquito bites, I don’t think we gain anything or do anyone a service by not helping. These are people who can’t pull themselves up by the bootstraps because they’re a little too busy trying not to die. Edit: you mention not liking the word “should” in this context, yet you say people should do the good deeds themselves rather than donate money. Can you articulate why without a should here? The point of donating money is that if you donate it well, it can have a greater impact than if you were to act independently. People have put a lot of thought and organization into it, and it isn’t an afterthought spurred by reluctance or laziness. I believe the philosophical goal is to maximize the reduction of unnecessary suffering. I could be wrong, but with that in mind it could make a lot of sense to donate money rather than act independently.

m101 4y ago
I guess my problem with Singer's should is he's telling others what to do, whereas i think I'm using the word should in telling everyone to do their own thing and make up their own concept of what is good. Own the issue themselves. We must all be the society we want to create if we are to create it. Agree on the small problems that can be solved, but again i maintain that everyone needs to work through these stages themselves imo. People can help but ultimately the biggest help is opening up to useful trade, and enabling the empowerment of people from the bottom up. It's a complex issue with no method without downsides.

Aunche 4y ago

>no country was ever made wealthy by just giving them things Presumably, if people are spending less time taking care of their family dying of malaria, they'd have more time to create wealth.

eru 4y ago

> - 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 Why?

m101 4y ago
Because the only good stuff done is donation of money, with everything else done by salarymen. For me that is something lost.
- eru 4y ago
  You can donate time. It's just that unless you have professional level skills, that is less effective than donating money and letting professionals handle the work. Specialisation and division of labour really work. If, for sentimental reasons, you get a kick out of working in the soup kitchen, by all means, work in the soup kitchen. Just be aware that you are doing this for your own entertainment.

unmole 4y ago

It's hard to read your comment as anything but a middlebrow dismissal. > Wealth comes from passing through the difficult stages of development oneself Is having people go blind from preventable causes or children growing up stunted supposed to build character? > 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 The point is to do good, not feel good. Specialization is the very basis of human civilization. Software engineers donating their surplus to fund salaries for trained full time teachers is going to be a lot more effective than the alternative you're suggesting.

paganel 4y ago
Not the OP, but those kids need parents that have a steady pay-check (we can't all be entrepreneurs). Nowadays a steady pay-check is mostly associated with making things, especially in non-Western countries, things which are later sold (on the same internal market or to export markets). Once a much bigger player from the outside comes in and gives stuff for "free", like it has happened with some of the Western aid, then that kid's parents I mentioned at the start of the comment risk losing their jobs. After all, it's not worth it anymore for their employer to keep them, well, employed, cause the market that he's targeting is getting dumped by all the free stuff coming in via Western "aid". These are, in retrospect, basic economics-related things, but which nevertheless took a while to sink in into some people's minds in the West (some are still oblivious to it all). I remember a book written by an African lady (I think she was from Botswana or from that general area), former worker at a big financial institution in the West, and imploring the West to stop "aiding" the African countries if they want to see them actually develop.
- unmole 4y ago
  I'm sorry, what exactly does your comment have to do with effective altruism? The free stuff that EA advocates want to distribute are deworming pills and mosquito nets. That in no way precludes development of local manufacturing. Moreover, cash infusions like with GiveDirectly help kickstart a virtuous cycle of local production and consumption.
- 4y ago

jefftk 4y ago

> 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 Let's take an example mentioned in the article, Sam Bankman-Fried. After hearing about EA in college, he decided to earn as much money as he could first in traditional finance and then in crypto, so that he would be able to fund work he thought was important that was currently not happening. He was very successful at this, and currently has about $12B he's working on donating. I think it's a pretty difficult claim to support that he would have furthered his goals more by picking one of the things he thinks needs to happen and working on it? On the other hand, a lot of early effective altruist writing is from a time when there was very little money available for some of the most valuable things, a time when even "go work as a regular software engineer and donate a large percentage" beat directly working on valuable things for a lot of people. If you look at that writing now, however, since it is assuming a very different funding environment it looks like it sets the bar way too low for how much money you need to be able to earn before earning to give is likely your best option.

m101 4y ago
As another comment on here has said so well - how people make their money matters. I believe that crypto generally is a massive scam, so making money from it and donating it to what you think is a good thing is still net bad. I disagree with what sbf is doing wrt political donations.
mtremsal 4y ago
Didn’t SBF make his fortune in the crypto space? By definition this would mean capturing real money from retail investors, right? It’s possible that this money can be reallocated more “effectively” according to some quantifiable measure identified by SBF, yet this doesn’t sit well with me. What happened to the Golden Rule? Or to Sartre’s “in choosing for himself, [each man] chooses for all men”? Surely if EA leads some to causing such wide-scale short-term pain in its name, at the very least it cannot be a humanism. I realize this isn’t a strong argument, but when I hear about an EA champion, there’s often this dynamic where how they made money doesn’t matter. They’re wealthy, so clearly what they do is valued by the market and we should ignore externalities that aren’t priced into their income. It’s like Big Oil pointing to specific green outcomes that they fund; these outcomes are quantifiable yet funded by hard to price but reprehensible practices. It all feels like Catholic indulgences… Maybe this is still a net-positive for society in that it provides people who wouldn’t be humanist anyway (e.g. libertarians) with a well-intentioned philosophy?

imtringued 4y ago

>no country was ever made wealthy by just giving them things. Wealth comes from passing through the difficult stages of development oneself It is kind of difficult to grasp but when you see a homeless man, the best thing you can do to him isn't giving away money, it is hiring him and giving him a job that pays enough to pay the bills. When you donate money to the poor, you are basically subsidizing poverty. Honestly Keynes already had the right idea, just give them a job to build commercially useless things like affordable housing.

concordDance 4y ago

> The problem with effective altruism is that it is devoid from reality: Nah, people just are rather clueless on the what and the why of effective altruism. The top causes are things like deworming, anti-malaria and AI risk. These are things that substantially increase economic productivity (the latter on account of people not being dead).