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Maybe this is superficial, but I was put off by the name "effective altruism". By naming it such, it felt like an implicit dig that most altruism is not effecti

Maybe this is superficial, but I was put off by the name "effective altruism". By naming it such, it felt like an implicit dig that most altruism is not effective. Like oh your altruism is not that productive, but my altruism, well it's effective altruism. Especially when that notion is pushed by people who overlap with the rationalist subculture, another arrogantly named group. In general I find it concerning when technical people encroach upon non-technical areas without giving a sufficient amount of respect to the people who were in the field already. Those people, the experts, do know a lot and to have this kind of nerd savior branding of effective altruism, as if you are bringing the enlightenment that allows these poor altruists to finally be effective, well that just seems a little presumptuous.

googlryas 4y ago
I feel like real effective altruism is achieved by sites like charity navigator, which give you a sense of how well your donations to a given cause are spent by the organization.
- joindpp 4y ago
  This is not really true. Charity Navigator incentivize that charities operate on a shoestring which is not very effective: https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_charity_is_dead_wrong?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_abou...
  - googlryas 4y ago
    I haven't watched the video (yet), but for example wikipedia has a stellar near-perfect rating, but still devote 15%/$12M of their budget to salaries which surely could be cut drastically if they wanted to really be on a shoestring.
dchftcs 4y ago
Your reaction is a bit absolutist. The basic premise is that if you're capable of making 500k a year in the developed world then going to Africa to volunteer to build houses is not as effective as just donating your money to charities that send people to help, or hire people yourself. What it evolved into is a bit controversial, overall they seem to be a bunch of kids who don't know what to do with the power and money they had at one point, as they all came too easy.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  They aren’t kids any more
  - NateEag 4y ago
    Age-wise, no. Maturity-wise... that's still unclear to me.
ketzo 4y ago
I mean, I think it was a very explicit dig. The founding idea is that giving $10,000 to save, y’know, four ailing dogs with bad livers or whatever, or a community theater, as opposed to many human lives, is fundamentally wrong. “If you’re gonna give, you should maximize the impact as measured in human life” is fundamentally at odds with many common forms of giving, yes.
- schoen 4y ago
  It's worth mentioning that organized EA is much more concerned with animal welfare and animal rights than a lot of the surrounding culture, so many EAs strongly advocate giving to animal-related causes. But they would still be concerned with having as large an impact as possible, so something to help 1,000,000 animals would be favored over something to help four.
  - ketzo 4y ago
    That’s a good point, I should have picked my examples better. Thanks for the clarification.
- imgabe 4y ago
  The idea that you can precisely plan out the exact optimal path is arrogant and fundamentally wrong. What if the friendships made at a community theater help a troubled kid through a rough patch and instead of committing suicide they go on to cure cancer? Not funding the theater would have been very sub-optimal. Even without far-fetched hypotheticals what’s the point of saving everyone’s life if they’re just going to spend it figuring out how to make more mosquito nets or whatnot? People are not as smart as they think and it’s important to leave room for serendipity and random associations.
  - drdeca 4y ago
    And do you think the probability of the thing you describe (or anything analogous to it but still arising from the same intervention) is substantial? I’m not claiming that all charity should be done in such an attempt-to-be-expected-utility-maximizing way, as there may be some like, component of how donations for more local causes might do more to improve the character of the person donating, and other things like that, but I don’t see your view of “but-serendipity, and but-mosquito-nets-is-no-fun” don’t seem like compelling reasons to not look at QALYs and such. That being said, I personally haven’t made any substantial donations, so if you’ve made even fairly inefficient donations (as long as they were at least a little effective, and not e.g. counterproductive) then your donations have likely done more good than mine have.
onetimeusename 4y ago
that's a good way of putting it. I kind of ignored a lot of what they said but again, just like the rationalists who pretty much were all of the EA people, they came with biases they refused to admit they had. like for example, if a family member of mine needed money for a cancer treatment that had a 50% chance of working versus giving that money to save the life of someone I don't know on the other side of the planet, I will consistently try to save my family member. That is how most people would operate. I will do this because I don't know the person on the other side of the planet. If it were not for the internet and their subreddit/lesswrong style of shaming campaigns, no one would ever even know there was a person on the other side of the planet who also needed the money. Why should I be asked to ignore my own family by annoying redditors who don't give a shit about me anyways? I doubt even the EA people would do that unless they could virtue signal about how smart they are and how stupid everyone else is online. Most of the time, these people just speculated about how they might spend their money if they were in such a scenario. It was like a hobby. Although in fairness rating charities by their effectiveness is a good idea. Yes, people do blindly give cash away to corrupt charities.
- smallnamespace 4y ago
  > like for example, if a family member of mine needed money for a cancer treatment that had a 50% chance of working versus giving that money to save the life of someone I don't know on the other side of the planet, I will consistently try to save my family member. So would most people, and we wouldn’t call it altruism. Looking for an objective criterion (whether ‘number of lives saved per dollar’ or something else) is an angle that I’m happy someone is taking. If you don’t like their approach then don’t give them money.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    > So would most people, and we wouldn’t call it altruism. Most people would call helping a relative pay their medical bills altruism. It's also the selfish and rational choice. It's both simultaneously.
    - 4y ago
civilized 4y ago
Is there a term you would deem acceptable for seeking to give to others in a cost-effective manner? This seems to be a perfectly good idea. Doesn't it seem problematic that giving it a simple, straightforward name seems inherently arrogant and insufferable?
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  The article mentions its philosophical underpinnings: utilitarianism. There’s a wealth of philosophical discussion of its own merits and problems. Reading the article but having been unfamiliar with the “effective altruism” term, I immediately recognized utilitarianism in it and the rest was predictable. It seemed a perfectly good idea to me too for some time, and still does with a slew of caveats. Giving it a simple name is fine, but it has one. Giving it a manipulative name is, well, one of the potential philosophical problems with utilitarianism.
  - JamesBarney 4y ago
    What name is manipulative?
    - polygamous_bat 4y ago
      I assume the GP is talking about the name "effective altruism".
      - JamesBarney 4y ago
        I don't know what else they should have picked? It seems like a fairly straightforward name for movement that focuses on charity effectiveness. I guess you could call it "effective giving" or something like that but caring about effectiveness is it core differentiating tenant and anything related to altruism/giving/charity is going to sound good.
        zztop44 4y ago
        I think the argument is that everyone else doing charity/altruism also (ostensibly) cares about effectiveness so it’s only a differentiating tenant if you somehow think your caring about effectiveness is somehow different to everyone else’s.
nordsieck 4y ago
> Maybe this is superficial, but I was put off by the name "effective altruism". By naming it such, it felt like an implicit dig that most altruism is not effective. As an outsider, I feel the same way about "evidence based medicine". It'll be interesting to see, in 40 years, whether or not either moniker was earned.
quantumwannabe 4y ago
The founders of the Effective Altruism movement are mostly non-technical people. You can't blame their arrogance and failures on the "techbros". The people mentioned on the Effective Altruism Wikipedia page: Peter Singer: Professor of Bioethics (philosopher) Toby Ord: Philosopher. Philosophy PhD, Computer Science bachelors Hilary Greaves: Philosopher, and he double-majored in physics in undergrad William MacAskill: Philosopher/Ethicist. PhD in philosophy. Eliezer Yudkowsky: self-described autodidact, no formal education or notable work history. Runs a "AI" "Research" center called MIRI. Holden Karnofsky: Co-Founder of GiveWell, Harvard degree in Social Studies Yew-Kwang Ng: Welfare Economist, has published biology, mathematics, philosophy, cosmology, psychology, and sociology papers. Derek Parfit: Philosopher. Has a history degree. Nick Bostrom: Philosopher. BA in philosophy and math, MA in philosophy and physics. Benjamin Todd: Physics/Philosophy double major, worked at Kodak for eight months and at an investment firm for 1.25 years before joining the Centre for Effective Altruism. The financial backers are more diverse: Dustin Moskovitz: Co-Founder of Facebook, Co-Founder of Open Philanthropy Cari Tuna: Dustin's wife, previously worked as a reporter before cofounding Open Philanthropy Dan Smith: Professional poker player Liv Boeree: Professional poker player. Physics degree Sam Bankman-Fried: con-artist, thief, fraudster. Has a physics degree and a minor in math, interned/worked as a trader at Jane Street, and founded Alameda Capital and FTX.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nl 4y ago
  "TechBros" doesn't mean "programmers". It broadly means something like "people who think tech will solve everything but don't think very deeply"
  - dchftcs 4y ago
    And yet Effective Altruism in itself is not technology focused. There's no evidence that list of people (many philosophers) think tech will solve everything.
    - 4y ago
bena 4y ago
They've effectively poisoned the terms "effective", "altruism", "longterm", "rational", and "utilitarian". Because it was all a hustle to continue doing exactly whatever they wanted to do. Here is a good book that talks about the mindset: https://www.amazon.com/Winners-Take-All-Charade-Changing/dp/0451493249 https://www.amazon.com/Winners-Take-All-Charade-Changing/dp/... It's easy to say you're doing things "longterm" for "future generations". The non-existent are the easiest people to advocate for. They demand absolutely nothing of you. And if your projected "altruism" will only really be felt well after you're dead, you aren't on the hook to show results now. They claim this is utilitarian, but it's not. It never was. What is known is that small real changes now can affect large changes later. Doing things to improve today will improve tomorrow, next year, next decade, etc. If you are looking to be effective with your altruism, the most rational, utilitarian thing you can do is solve the problems of today. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to separate you from your money.
- concordDance 4y ago
  This is very wrong. Most effective altruists are working on relatively near term things, like education in India or parasitic worms in Nigeria, those just aren't controversial and so get discussed less. But long term projects like switching away from CO2 and to renewables can still be worth doing.
Izkata 4y ago
> By naming it such, it felt like an implicit dig that most altruism is not effective. Like oh your altruism is not that productive, but my altruism, well it's effective altruism. Pretty much. A subset of altruism is effective, a subset is ineffective. And there's another term for a third subset that overlaps with both: virtue signaling. Usually people treat the term like aligns closer to ineffective altruism though, like "oh that's just virtue signaling", even though it can be both effective and virtue signaling.
npteljes 4y ago
>most altruism is not effective. Like oh your altruism is not that productive, but my altruism, well it's effective altruism. I unironically think this. In Hungary where I live, if you don't care about these things much but still want to contribute somewhat to society by charity, the first lines of contact will mostly be crooks that feed on goodwill. There will be beggars, organized into groups, charities that don't exist or have such an overhead that only a single percent goes to the actual cause, corporations that take your donation and then boast with the amount as if they were the ones giving it, and charities that are popular but are actually fronts for ideologies, or churches, and frauds like people collecting clothes for the poor, only to sell them abroad. These entities grind up a large amount of goodwill, while producing little or negative value for mankind. So yes - the altruism of the people donating to entities like this does fuck-all, while I imagine that if someone researches a bit, they will be more likely to give to entities that contribute more. With that being said, I don't like the EA people either. But the concept is valid.
- concordDance 4y ago
  > I don't like the EA people either. Do you actually know any? The ones I know in real life are wonderful people. Intelligent, caring and hard working.
  - npteljes 4y ago
    I'm a bit ashamed because of the wording, I don't actually know any, not even online. I only have experience with the expression of the ideas, gathered from various websites.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Sakos 4y ago
> By naming it such, it felt like an implicit dig that most altruism is not effective. Like oh your altruism is not that productive, but my altruism, well it's effective altruism. But ... that's where effective altruism comes from. Have you not noticed the eroding trust in charities (https://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2015/sep/17/how-charities-can-win-back-public-trust https://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2015/se...) over the past decade? Effective altruism is just a counter-movement against wasteful charities and engenders a growing realization that not all donations are good and even that donations might not always be the best solution. It wasn't about lecturing anybody, it was about (for example) figuring out which charities are most effective and least wasteful with the money that they receive.

googlryas 4y ago

I feel like real effective altruism is achieved by sites like charity navigator, which give you a sense of how well your donations to a given cause are spent by the organization.

joindpp 4y ago
This is not really true. Charity Navigator incentivize that charities operate on a shoestring which is not very effective: https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_charity_is_dead_wrong?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_abou...
- googlryas 4y ago
  I haven't watched the video (yet), but for example wikipedia has a stellar near-perfect rating, but still devote 15%/$12M of their budget to salaries which surely could be cut drastically if they wanted to really be on a shoestring.

dchftcs 4y ago

Your reaction is a bit absolutist. The basic premise is that if you're capable of making 500k a year in the developed world then going to Africa to volunteer to build houses is not as effective as just donating your money to charities that send people to help, or hire people yourself. What it evolved into is a bit controversial, overall they seem to be a bunch of kids who don't know what to do with the power and money they had at one point, as they all came too easy.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
skinnymuch 4y ago
They aren’t kids any more
- NateEag 4y ago
  Age-wise, no. Maturity-wise... that's still unclear to me.

ketzo 4y ago

I mean, I think it was a very explicit dig. The founding idea is that giving $10,000 to save, y’know, four ailing dogs with bad livers or whatever, or a community theater, as opposed to many human lives, is fundamentally wrong. “If you’re gonna give, you should maximize the impact as measured in human life” is fundamentally at odds with many common forms of giving, yes.

schoen 4y ago
It's worth mentioning that organized EA is much more concerned with animal welfare and animal rights than a lot of the surrounding culture, so many EAs strongly advocate giving to animal-related causes. But they would still be concerned with having as large an impact as possible, so something to help 1,000,000 animals would be favored over something to help four.
- ketzo 4y ago
  That’s a good point, I should have picked my examples better. Thanks for the clarification.
imgabe 4y ago
The idea that you can precisely plan out the exact optimal path is arrogant and fundamentally wrong. What if the friendships made at a community theater help a troubled kid through a rough patch and instead of committing suicide they go on to cure cancer? Not funding the theater would have been very sub-optimal. Even without far-fetched hypotheticals what’s the point of saving everyone’s life if they’re just going to spend it figuring out how to make more mosquito nets or whatnot? People are not as smart as they think and it’s important to leave room for serendipity and random associations.
- drdeca 4y ago
  And do you think the probability of the thing you describe (or anything analogous to it but still arising from the same intervention) is substantial? I’m not claiming that all charity should be done in such an attempt-to-be-expected-utility-maximizing way, as there may be some like, component of how donations for more local causes might do more to improve the character of the person donating, and other things like that, but I don’t see your view of “but-serendipity, and but-mosquito-nets-is-no-fun” don’t seem like compelling reasons to not look at QALYs and such. That being said, I personally haven’t made any substantial donations, so if you’ve made even fairly inefficient donations (as long as they were at least a little effective, and not e.g. counterproductive) then your donations have likely done more good than mine have.

onetimeusename 4y ago

that's a good way of putting it. I kind of ignored a lot of what they said but again, just like the rationalists who pretty much were all of the EA people, they came with biases they refused to admit they had. like for example, if a family member of mine needed money for a cancer treatment that had a 50% chance of working versus giving that money to save the life of someone I don't know on the other side of the planet, I will consistently try to save my family member. That is how most people would operate. I will do this because I don't know the person on the other side of the planet. If it were not for the internet and their subreddit/lesswrong style of shaming campaigns, no one would ever even know there was a person on the other side of the planet who also needed the money. Why should I be asked to ignore my own family by annoying redditors who don't give a shit about me anyways? I doubt even the EA people would do that unless they could virtue signal about how smart they are and how stupid everyone else is online. Most of the time, these people just speculated about how they might spend their money if they were in such a scenario. It was like a hobby. Although in fairness rating charities by their effectiveness is a good idea. Yes, people do blindly give cash away to corrupt charities.

smallnamespace 4y ago
> like for example, if a family member of mine needed money for a cancer treatment that had a 50% chance of working versus giving that money to save the life of someone I don't know on the other side of the planet, I will consistently try to save my family member. So would most people, and we wouldn’t call it altruism. Looking for an objective criterion (whether ‘number of lives saved per dollar’ or something else) is an angle that I’m happy someone is taking. If you don’t like their approach then don’t give them money.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  > So would most people, and we wouldn’t call it altruism. Most people would call helping a relative pay their medical bills altruism. It's also the selfish and rational choice. It's both simultaneously.
  - 4y ago

civilized 4y ago

Is there a term you would deem acceptable for seeking to give to others in a cost-effective manner? This seems to be a perfectly good idea. Doesn't it seem problematic that giving it a simple, straightforward name seems inherently arrogant and insufferable?

eyelidlessness 4y ago
The article mentions its philosophical underpinnings: utilitarianism. There’s a wealth of philosophical discussion of its own merits and problems. Reading the article but having been unfamiliar with the “effective altruism” term, I immediately recognized utilitarianism in it and the rest was predictable. It seemed a perfectly good idea to me too for some time, and still does with a slew of caveats. Giving it a simple name is fine, but it has one. Giving it a manipulative name is, well, one of the potential philosophical problems with utilitarianism.
- JamesBarney 4y ago
  What name is manipulative?
  - polygamous_bat 4y ago
    I assume the GP is talking about the name "effective altruism".
    - JamesBarney 4y ago
      I don't know what else they should have picked? It seems like a fairly straightforward name for movement that focuses on charity effectiveness. I guess you could call it "effective giving" or something like that but caring about effectiveness is it core differentiating tenant and anything related to altruism/giving/charity is going to sound good.
      - zztop44 4y ago
        I think the argument is that everyone else doing charity/altruism also (ostensibly) cares about effectiveness so it’s only a differentiating tenant if you somehow think your caring about effectiveness is somehow different to everyone else’s.

nordsieck 4y ago

> Maybe this is superficial, but I was put off by the name "effective altruism". By naming it such, it felt like an implicit dig that most altruism is not effective. As an outsider, I feel the same way about "evidence based medicine". It'll be interesting to see, in 40 years, whether or not either moniker was earned.

quantumwannabe 4y ago

The founders of the Effective Altruism movement are mostly non-technical people. You can't blame their arrogance and failures on the "techbros". The people mentioned on the Effective Altruism Wikipedia page: Peter Singer: Professor of Bioethics (philosopher) Toby Ord: Philosopher. Philosophy PhD, Computer Science bachelors Hilary Greaves: Philosopher, and he double-majored in physics in undergrad William MacAskill: Philosopher/Ethicist. PhD in philosophy. Eliezer Yudkowsky: self-described autodidact, no formal education or notable work history. Runs a "AI" "Research" center called MIRI. Holden Karnofsky: Co-Founder of GiveWell, Harvard degree in Social Studies Yew-Kwang Ng: Welfare Economist, has published biology, mathematics, philosophy, cosmology, psychology, and sociology papers. Derek Parfit: Philosopher. Has a history degree. Nick Bostrom: Philosopher. BA in philosophy and math, MA in philosophy and physics. Benjamin Todd: Physics/Philosophy double major, worked at Kodak for eight months and at an investment firm for 1.25 years before joining the Centre for Effective Altruism. The financial backers are more diverse: Dustin Moskovitz: Co-Founder of Facebook, Co-Founder of Open Philanthropy Cari Tuna: Dustin's wife, previously worked as a reporter before cofounding Open Philanthropy Dan Smith: Professional poker player Liv Boeree: Professional poker player. Physics degree Sam Bankman-Fried: con-artist, thief, fraudster. Has a physics degree and a minor in math, interned/worked as a trader at Jane Street, and founded Alameda Capital and FTX.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nl 4y ago
"TechBros" doesn't mean "programmers". It broadly means something like "people who think tech will solve everything but don't think very deeply"
- dchftcs 4y ago
  And yet Effective Altruism in itself is not technology focused. There's no evidence that list of people (many philosophers) think tech will solve everything.
  - 4y ago

bena 4y ago

They've effectively poisoned the terms "effective", "altruism", "longterm", "rational", and "utilitarian". Because it was all a hustle to continue doing exactly whatever they wanted to do. Here is a good book that talks about the mindset: https://www.amazon.com/Winners-Take-All-Charade-Changing/dp/0451493249 https://www.amazon.com/Winners-Take-All-Charade-Changing/dp/... It's easy to say you're doing things "longterm" for "future generations". The non-existent are the easiest people to advocate for. They demand absolutely nothing of you. And if your projected "altruism" will only really be felt well after you're dead, you aren't on the hook to show results now. They claim this is utilitarian, but it's not. It never was. What is known is that small real changes now can affect large changes later. Doing things to improve today will improve tomorrow, next year, next decade, etc. If you are looking to be effective with your altruism, the most rational, utilitarian thing you can do is solve the problems of today. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to separate you from your money.

concordDance 4y ago
This is very wrong. Most effective altruists are working on relatively near term things, like education in India or parasitic worms in Nigeria, those just aren't controversial and so get discussed less. But long term projects like switching away from CO2 and to renewables can still be worth doing.

Izkata 4y ago

> By naming it such, it felt like an implicit dig that most altruism is not effective. Like oh your altruism is not that productive, but my altruism, well it's effective altruism. Pretty much. A subset of altruism is effective, a subset is ineffective. And there's another term for a third subset that overlaps with both: virtue signaling. Usually people treat the term like aligns closer to ineffective altruism though, like "oh that's just virtue signaling", even though it can be both effective and virtue signaling.

npteljes 4y ago

>most altruism is not effective. Like oh your altruism is not that productive, but my altruism, well it's effective altruism. I unironically think this. In Hungary where I live, if you don't care about these things much but still want to contribute somewhat to society by charity, the first lines of contact will mostly be crooks that feed on goodwill. There will be beggars, organized into groups, charities that don't exist or have such an overhead that only a single percent goes to the actual cause, corporations that take your donation and then boast with the amount as if they were the ones giving it, and charities that are popular but are actually fronts for ideologies, or churches, and frauds like people collecting clothes for the poor, only to sell them abroad. These entities grind up a large amount of goodwill, while producing little or negative value for mankind. So yes - the altruism of the people donating to entities like this does fuck-all, while I imagine that if someone researches a bit, they will be more likely to give to entities that contribute more. With that being said, I don't like the EA people either. But the concept is valid.

concordDance 4y ago
> I don't like the EA people either. Do you actually know any? The ones I know in real life are wonderful people. Intelligent, caring and hard working.
- npteljes 4y ago
  I'm a bit ashamed because of the wording, I don't actually know any, not even online. I only have experience with the expression of the ideas, gathered from various websites.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Sakos 4y ago

> By naming it such, it felt like an implicit dig that most altruism is not effective. Like oh your altruism is not that productive, but my altruism, well it's effective altruism. But ... that's where effective altruism comes from. Have you not noticed the eroding trust in charities (https://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2015/sep/17/how-charities-can-win-back-public-trust https://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2015/se...) over the past decade? Effective altruism is just a counter-movement against wasteful charities and engenders a growing realization that not all donations are good and even that donations might not always be the best solution. It wasn't about lecturing anybody, it was about (for example) figuring out which charities are most effective and least wasteful with the money that they receive.