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Effective Altruism and Its Future
- nickdothutton 4y agoThe best time to figure this out about charities is when you are young, before you’ve started earning. The second best time is now.
- pixodaros 4y agoA lot of citations to Razib Khan and Scott Alexander in his other posts! Effective Altruism was founded to evade the two dynamics he describes (donors who do what their friends will admire them for not what helps poor strangers, and charities which spend most of their donations on themselves or on raising money). It sounds like part of it was hijacked by the Lesswrong / AI Risk crowd and by cryptocurrency swindlers.
- d12bb 4y agoIt is a blog, why would I subscribe to your fckin newsletter, and why doesn't the pop-up have a close button?
- esrh 4y agohuh? it's just substack... the whole point is this half blog/half newsletter thing. It does have a close button, called "Let me read it first"
- matheusmoreira 4y ago> It does have a close button, called "Let me read it first" Why do websites have these "cute" labels these days? We have to beg the site to let us read what's written on it now? Are they trying to plant ideas and emotions in our minds or something? "Let me read it first" implies I'm gonna decide later. I've already decided not to subscribe, reading the article won't change a thing. Where's the "don't bother me ever again" button?
- thinkingemote 4y agoThe idea is not at all to get people to subscribe to a newsletter, it's to get them to read the selected page. That's the intention of the annoyance. Most people will bounce from pages. This encourages more people to stay and read. If this cute label wasn't there most of us wouldn't want to read it, of those who do visit it we would scan the page, maybe scroll once, then bounce. This annoyance is twofold. It makes the user invest something (the time, brain power needed to find the correct link) and the user will want to at least get something back from that investment. Secondly the "let me read it first" is a kind of suggestive NLPish language. It says to the user "I will read it before deciding", the "first" bit is important. We promise to hold off of some activity (deciding if its worth it) by reading more than we would normally. it's a trap. The words "let me read it first" could be written as "I won't subscribe" or "Just let me read it" but these other two won't get as many views and time on the page. It's not at all cute, it's manipulative and it actually appear to work.
- luckylion 4y agoI can imagine the setup for the user to "read it first before deciding" with that message (but they're missing a CTA after you've read it, or does that only come up when you return to another page and haven't cleared your cookies?), but is there actual data on an interstitial increasing time on page and other metrics by more than the time it takes to click on the close-button (or link in this case)?
- bheadmaster 4y ago> The idea is not at all to get people to subscribe to a newsletter, it's to get them to read the selected page. That's the intention of the annoyance. I sincerely doubt that is the intention. A simpler explanation would be that they want just you to subscribe, so they nag you.
- thinkingemote 4y agoedits: Yes, it is the stated and obvious intention. However, no user is going to subscribe (and go through the time costly action of giving their email to get a newsletter) to a blog where they haven't read it before, it's never going to happen. About 99% of users to that page will be first time visitors to the page.
- chewz 4y agoWhy are you using javascript on substack?
- stillkicking 4y agoThis injected CSS will remove the popup: body article.newsletter-post.post .subscribe-dialog, body article.newsletter-post.post .subscribe-dialog-scroll-modal-scroll-capture { display: none !important; } Isn't it sad how phones have normalized the idea that you no longer have control over the webpages you read? It's not like this was even necessary, it's the exact same browser, just with a dumber front-end.
- matheusmoreira 4y agoAgreed. Why are mobile browsers so limited? Only Firefox has extensions, can't even inspect elements. It's like we're going backwards.
- googlryas 4y agoBecause people check their email every day, but may forget or not feel like checking back frequently on a number of blogs they read. This is supposed to be what RSS was for, but it never really achieved the adoption required to let it be the sole solution for pushing updates to users. Ergo, email.
- joenot443 4y agoThis is a pretty common Substack pattern, it’s not something Eigen implemented themself.
- w1nst0nsm1th 4y ago> Financial fraud is an old story and not really worth writing about Yeah, it worths it. In fact, it should be the very first thing to read about when you contemplate investing.
- encryptluks2 4y agoIt doesn't address the root of the issue though, which are we've created a society that has normalized crime, cheating and corruption. You shouldn't trust most people, let alone believe without any research that crypto exchanges have your best interests in mind.
- skrebbel 4y agoI love Eigenrobot’s writing, but daamn so cynical. I think if you put 300m people together who are this cynical about man’s wish to do good vs man’s wish to gain money and status, and let them run a country, you get the US of A. One day I hope that even an American manages to Do Some Good without being shot down by the local regressive left for not Doing Good Enough and simultaneously by the libertarian right for just doing it for status and book sales.
- skrebbel 4y agoI think there’s a huge survival bias that the people who do good for status are all over the media and people who don’t, aren’t.
- blacksmithgu 4y agoThere is definite survivorship bias; I suspect it's so strong that virtually all "do-gooding" you see on social media is for gaining status. It makes me extremely cynical of charities; perhaps just trying to do good "in the small" for the people around you is the best that one can do.
- skrebbel 4y agoThe corollary to your observation is that the do-gooding you don't see on social media is likely not for gaining status. Does that also make you extremely cynical of charities?
- blacksmithgu 4y agoI messed up the wording on the above comment - I'm only skeptical of all the "performative charity" that you see on social medial.
- anfelor 4y agoI am not sure the "Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths" model applies here since the most significant actors in this development came from the geek phase. SBF started out earning to give and was even featured on the homepage of 80.000 hours in 2015! [1] This probably had some part in the glowing coverage he received; for example the interview with 80.000 hours founder Will McAskill [2] makes more sense when you realize that they had known each other for nine years at that point. This suggests that the FTX fraud is not a story about new people that joined EA late but goes back to the roots of the movement. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20150717034849/https://80000hours.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150717034849/https://80000hour... h/t DonyChristie [2]: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/sam-bankman-fried-high-risk-approach-to-crypto-and-doing-good/ https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/sam-bankman-fried-hi...
- FormerBandmate 4y agoEA orgs have always been funding esoteric stuff that doesn’t comport with its mission. There is no way printing out Harry Potter fanfiction and giving it to math Olympiad winners in any way helps anyone but the leaders of the movement.
- goethes_kind 4y agoI think the problem is that by removing the human element from "good doing", you end up also removing the personal selfish reason for "good doing", and that is then a very cynical worldview to have, that rightfully arouses suspicion. Then one starts questioning, what is the real motivation behind the deed? The other problem is that treating people like statistics is ugly, even if you are doing it for a good cause.
- germandiago 4y agoThis has been studied again and again. Our motivation to help is because we know the neighbour, because someone is in trouble, because I would like someone to do it for me in the same situation... and other things like that. At the moment you impersonalize this, all the game changes. But the worst part of this game is that there are a group of "well-intentioned" people that tell you what is good or bad not for your neighbour, but for human kind or the like. These people are usually the worst of all because they play this game with personal incentives to manage the lives/wealth of others. There is a very big difference between "helping others" and "helping your neighbour", where the latter is, surprisingly, quite better than the former. When you think everyone should "help others" what we do is to delegate responsibility in impersonal organizations, often the state, and we feel no responsibility for it, after all, we already do our job by paying taxes. I assert this is the wrong approach: we have to go back to thinking on helping our immediate environment. Why? Because if all of us do that, we have a bit better world and by human nature we do have more incentive to help in this way than through a central organization that often does not want to help, but that it is also very inefficient in helping. If we all delegate, we skip responsibility and the people who are responsible for it, for them you are just a number and they have their own incentives. Also let me tell you that I do not think they are really worried about helping, but about benefiting themselves more than anything else with a custom of good will on top of them. There are even experiments about these things. Human nature has incentive. If you change the incentives, you change the behaviors. This is one of the fundamental reasons why I am against taxes or, more in general, making others paying the price of the decisions of others, not necessarily taxes.
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
- SilverBirch 4y agoThis was a strange mix because despite the misanthropic explanation of events, the suggested solutions were oddly naive. I think the author's principle argument is that there is a societal dynamic that inevitably leads to movements being co-opted. However, the solutions proposed just amount to "don't let yourself be co-opted", and then a glib line that if your movement then fails, that's an indictment of charity itself. The proposals to prevent the movement being co-opted are proposals that also prevent the movement functioning. The proposals seem to be to prioritize being ideologically pure over being effective. Which is odd, because it's literally meant to be effective. There's a tension here that the author thinks that it's bad to allow this certain class of people use your movement for influence, but in doing so essentially legislates against the movement being able to use influence itself. EA isn't just about making sure your money is effective, it's also about incentivizing charities to be more effective - that's exactly what GiveWell. You can view GiveWell donating to CHAI as a corrupt revolving door, or you can say GiveWell successfully has managed to drive EA into the broader industry, and now, with someone versed in how EA works is able to drive money into that charity. The optimist view is as valid as the cynical view, and the EA view would be neither, it would be to focus on what actually happens with that donation.
- barry-cotter 4y agoCongratulations, you made the obvious and obviously correct responses to the essay. Except the last two sentences. Those are needlessly optimistic.
- snapcaster 4y agoDo you have a non-obvious take on the article?
- nl 4y agoMeh. A self-important nihlist's take on effective altruism. Effective altruism has issues, but you won't read anything interesting about them here.
- vintermann 4y agoSome good points here in criticizing utilitarianism. But the dividing into "geeks, noobs and sociopaths" is bad and might even point to some of the questionable ideas in so-called virtue ethics. Obviously, if someone says "I only want what's best for everyone", you shouldn't necessarily trust them. Especially if most of the people in their "everyone" live in some far off future. But what's less obvious, but more important, is that you shouldn't even trust yourself when you say such things. Corruption isn't a property that comes with sociopaths moving in and gentrifying the place. Corruption starts at home. We do NOT always want what's best for everyone, if we're honest with ourselves. We want all sorts of things, be it penthouses in Bahamas or polycules, that probably aren't for the best of everyone involved (let alone everyone). And you can't "correct" for it by, say, assigning a probability of self-deception, or creating some sort of market to estimate it (which is the sort of things EAs tend to reach for when met with fundamental criticism). You are only opening up more avenues for rationalization with such things. Your cleverness is not fully on your side in the fight to be honest with yourself.
- JonnyB 4y ago"Charity is the drowning of justice in the craphole of mercy." - Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi
- polygamous_bat 4y ago