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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 commun

• 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.
  • unmole 4y ago
    So, we should fund entertainment venues for privileged people instead of saving lives or preventing suffering?
  • JamesBarney 4y ago
    EA does not need the assumption that you can precisely plan out an optimal path. Just that simply accounting for the good you do and comparing it to other outlets will give you better outcomes than not. Which is a far weaker premise than you can precisely plan out every optimal path.
  • Aunche 4y ago
    Several orders of magnitude more children would be saved from mosquito nets than community theater, and each of them has a chance to find a cure to cancer. Then there's a couple orders of magnitude of children who wouldn't die, but whose lives would have otherwise been significantly disrupted by malaria, hookworm or vitamin A deficiency. All these children could go on to find cures to cancer or at the very least live more meaningful lives. Obviously, this isn't to say we should donate any less to community theaters, though I think that's a different type of donation. That is partially altruistic, but on some level it fulfills the same satisfaction as a purchase.
  • diffeomorphism 4y ago
    What if closing the community theater caused them to drop art, pursue biology and then cure cancer? > The idea that the moon is made out of cheese is stupid. Agreed, but you are the only one that claimed this was the idea because clearly you are not the "arrogant and fundamentally wrong" one.
  • FeepingCreature 4y ago
    What if when jumping off a roof, I spontaneously developed the ability to fly? And yet I will not attempt it, and worse, strongly evangelize that roofhopping should be avoided by everyone. How arrogant of me, how presumptuous! Though we cannot tell in every case what the outcome will be, that is no excuse to not consider the odds.
    • imgabe 4y ago
      But lots of people did jump off of things with various contraptions and we did eventually develop the ability to fly that way.
      • FeepingCreature 4y ago
        Almost like we should try to make advance predictions about outcomes given particular circumstances and continuously test them against reality :) These people after all pursued theoretical means by which the risk of death could be reduced, and then put them into practice in order to improve their understanding. You can die in the air. You can die on the ground! Sometimes jumping off a cliff is safer than staying there. There is no safe path, no guarantee of survival; you have to speculate, to make theories, to test them, to choose the path that seems best to you. There is nothing arrogant about this.
        • imgabe 4y ago
          By all means speculate all you like about your own actions and act accordingly. The original comment was about how effective altruism is intentionally looking down on others (as they are implicitly ineffective) and holding themselves up as the ideal that everyone should follow.
          • FeepingCreature 4y ago
            Aren't you making a general point here against public arguments that certain things lead to better outcomes than others? Do you reserve the same rancor for these little warning labels printed on packs of cigarettes about cancer risk? (Look at these non-smokers looking down on others...) Public debate is, to a first approximation, nothing but arguing about which actions lead to better outcomes. I could see an argument that the claim is that EA is insulting because it's akin to calling a chocolate brand "asbestos-free!"; you're implicitly suggesting that competitors contain asbestos. But note that this depends on whether the other brands do, in fact, contain asbestos, and EA is not shy about its claims that many charities do not effectively pursue good outcomes. It's hard to accuse EA of trying to sneak in this point when it's a central part of its rhetoric. And of course, such debate is an entirely ordinary part of discourse.
• hardwaregeek 4y ago
  The example of a community theater highlights another issue I have with effective altruism. It effectively encourages you to only donate to things you can make a quantifiable case for. And in a lot of situations, quantification fails. The arts have an immense value in developing philosophical, emotional, empathetic values. A theater may not show up in a balance sheet but it can have a massive effect. And it does concern me deeply that the flippant example for "non-effective altruism" is community theater. It reflects the attitude of SBF that a book is not worth reading. That is a profoundly destructive mindset.
  • JamesBarney 4y ago
    Let me preface this with I know this is a mugging, I think community theater is great, and I don't think it's good to divert all societal resources to nets in Africa. But I just don't think it's as effective, and I don't think most people agree. If the only available labor was teenagers, rebuilding the community theater meant hiring them, and you knew that statistically there was a risk some might die from heat stroke. What risk of death would you deem acceptable to build a community theater?
    • hardwaregeek 4y ago
      Sorry, I'm confused as to what you mean by a mugging? Genuinely not sure what you meant by that. Anyways, I never said any specifics about where this community theater is being built. I don't know where heat stroke came from. Sure, yeah, in the straw man situation of building a community theater in an extremely hot area, where the only labor is teenagers, I would...not enlist teenagers to build a community theater in an extremely hot area? I don't want to be dismissive of your comment but I genuinely don't know what's the point here.
      • JamesBarney 4y ago
        The point is you wouldn't endanger the lives of teenagers to build a community theater because you believe the lives of teenagers are more valuable than a community theater. But repairing a community theater could easily cost $100,000 which would save the lives of ~22 people in Guinea if donated to certain bed net charities. And even the most die hard theater fans probably wouldn't save a theater if to do so it would require risking 22 lives for. So in this case quantification isn't failing, it's succeeding. It's correctly telling us which donations are more effective. And all our intuition agrees that the $100,000 theater is worth less than the 22 lives.
• deleted 4y ago
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• zozbot234 4y ago
  I mean, it's not fundamentally wrong. It's better than wasting $10,000 on, e.g. luxuries for yourself that probably won't even make you happier. But it's literally orders of magnitude worse than what you could do, even if you only ever care about your fellow citizens (not people in distant poor countries) in a generation near to your own (as opposed to mankind's long-term progeny).
  • didibus 4y ago
    > It's better than wasting $10,000 on, e.g. luxuries for yourself I'm honestly not sure. Spending your money back into the economy contributes to a system with a proven track record, part of it goes to taxes, the rest pays for jobs, creates value for the owner, who'll pay some more taxes on their income, and then spend the rest elsewhere, etc. Donating 10k to a charity has many practical flaws, the charity itself isn't incentivized to maximize the use of the 10k, it can be corrupt, or might operate in a corrupt and inefficient environment, etc.
    • agent008t 4y ago
      Let us make the example more extreme. Let's make it spending 100 billion on building a supermassive yacht, that you then proceed to sink for your own entertainment. Which is not dissimilar from 10 million people spending $10k each on luxury consumption for themselves. Would you still argue that it still does no harm? You have just squandered 100b worth of society's resources - people's time, physical materials, engineering effort etc. for your own entertainment.
      • didibus 4y ago
        That's a bit of an extreme made up example, which wouldn't be very representative of the common case, but I'll entertain it. Just keep in mind what's true of an extreme edge case, is not necessarily true of the common case, and you can't extrapolate like that. Say there was a 100 billion yacht, it still served as a means to redistribute flow of funds to others. Those engineers, material extractors, workers, staff, all that contributed to people being given some of that money. This goes towards creating an economy, and good economies can sustain countries and lift many people out of poverty, saving many lives. Creating a demand for people's labor and resources helps with creating an economy. This isn't money wasted, the money went to many people, it was a way to redistribute the money to others. So I don't see the harm at all, at least not from a financial standpoint, you could argue about environmental harm though. Now what about opportunity cost? Sure, maybe that 100 billion could have been used in ways that redistribute it more evenly, more fairly, or to people who needs the money most, or towards an endeavor that has longer term uplifting outcomes, etc, there might be a better use, though it becomes hard to figure out what use is truly better. The way I see it, there's two dimensions: - Redistributing money, who gets it? Split amongst how many people? - Potential for future returns, is the money spent in a way that gives people the means to produce more? The yacht definitely redistributes money, but maybe you disagree about the distribution of it, who got the money. Arguably the yacht could bring future returns. Creating a demand for engineers pushed more people into engineering, now more people have the engineering know how, they go on to use that to build other projects, creating an infrastructure that others can then leverage to make other things more efficient and build on top, etc. Basically, I just don't think it's as black and white as you claim, even in this extreme example.
• Aachen 4y ago
  I thought the idea was that, provided you want to achieve X in the world, it's likely suboptimal. Not wrong or bad as people in this thread seem to universally interpret it, but if you want to optimize for animal welfare, you might be better off doing something about farm animals rather than donating to a local shelter. If that turns out to be too far removed from your personal situation to care about, okay then apparently that's not your priority and that is fine. But between the things you spend effort or money on, it's worth looking into what is the most effective means to your end. I am not involved in this whole thing in any way but that's what I thought the underlying idea was. Not an explicit dig at those who already try to do good, not at all... (Edit: realization: and that method of making people feel bad wouldn't be very altruistic nor effective right?)