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"effective altruism" was never either effective nor altruistic. If people are finally working that out, good for them.
by codefreeordie 4y ago
"effective altruism" was never either effective nor altruistic. If people are finally working that out, good for them.
- nuclearnice1 4y agoHow did it fall short?
- kristianov 4y agoIt justifies doing bad things for "the greater good".
- mikeyouse 4y agoSaw it referred to as "Indulgences for billionaires" which seems apt.
- unyttigfjelltol 4y agoMaximizing earnings by any means is verifiably not effectively altruistic, because if everyone did this... no one would ever engage in true charitable causes. Young people would compete simply to rip off the gullibility of older people looking to scratch the charitable itch.
- codefreeordie 4y agoIt is purely people justifying doing the evil things they personally desire by claiming some unverifiable benefit that accrues to hypothetical future people who may never even exist.
- kmeisthax 4y agoAaaand this is why time discounts exist and are steep. Not because we are incapable of or unwilling to comprehend future rewards, but because we don't know if they'll come to pass. It's a dampening parameter - if you don't do it, you fall prey to Basilisks.
- onetimeusename 4y agoidk if it's all bad, I remember reading about it maybe a decade ago when rationalists talked about it. Like one good idea is donating to charities that are more efficient. But it seems like mostly BS wrapped up in mathematics to make it seem more rational. Some assumptions are not necessarily true but if you disagreed then you were immoral and irrational. It also comes with a form of very elitist virtue signalling like forming clubs where people bloviate about this. Also a problem with charity, especially in the US, is as the IRS defines it, it's not necessarily charitable. So it's easy to confuse altruism with plain old politics, vanity, and for-profit business disguised as a tax-exempt and then argue that anyone that disagree is not rational.
- dang 4y agoOk, but please don't post shallow dismissals to Hacker News. We're hoping for something more than putdowns and supercilious swipes. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html p.s. You've unfortunately been posting a bunch of unsubstantive/baity comments lately. Can you please not? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
- codefreeordie 4y ago
- dang 4y agoThe politics of your comment completely elude me; I couldn't care less about your view or theirs, have no idea what "effective altruism" is, and learned nothing from your post since it was purely snark and swipes. All I care about is that you broke the HN guidelines. You've been doing that repeatedly (e.g. posting informationless flamebait) on lots of different topics. If you keep doing it, we'll end up having to ban you for what ought to be obvious reasons (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), so please stop.
- codefreeordie 4y ago[flagged]
- dang 4y agoIf I tell you that repetitive railing against Marxism is tedious and off-topic, does that make me a Marxist? what if I tell you that repetitive railing against capitalism is just as tedious and off-topic? Every passionate ideologue thinks that the mods are secretly against them (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=mods%20against%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). This you're-just-moderating-me-because-you-don't-like-my-opinion perception is a cognitive bias. If you don't believe me, look at the first batch of examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870. I could give you a hundred more of those. The truth is that we're bored, tired, profoundly do not care, and feel exactly the same way about all such comments—the ones you'd consider most wrong and offensive, as well as the ones you'd most passionately agree with. Why? Because they're all mirror images of each other.