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I 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

I 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 ago
This 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
  Helping your neighbour is a colossal waste of time and money in most of the developed world. Accelerating the development of developing countries enables us to have more minds working on actually difficult tasks like curing cancer in all of its forms, managing and curing our planet, curing diseases that plague humanity, and finally advance our civilization. If all the help you can provide is isolated to your local neighborhood, you are stuck with well off neighborhoods improving logarithmically with time and money spent because they are well past the inflection point, and everyone else struggling to improve because they lack the resources, and likely facing the same issues the well off community faced and solved before, enabling even more waste of time (and therefore money). Local improvements do not propagate further if you are isolated, and thus you miss the big picture. This by the way is a well studied phenomenon and is the core difference between "conservatives" and "progressives", where the former considers their local community, but the latter considers systematic improvements. From my experience, the latter understands that the issues faced by other communities are issues they could have faced as well, and therefore see it as their responsibility to help them.
  - germandiago 4y ago
    > Accelerating the development of developing countries enables us to have more minds working on actually difficult tasks like curing cancer in all of its forms, managing and curing our planet, curing diseases that plague humanity, and finally advance our civilization Helping the neighbour is a metaphor. It means helping to concrete people with concrete actions. It does not need to be your neighbor, you can go for missions in developing countries if you want (I live in a developing country right now). To give you an example, a group of friends here once helped a person we know with the money for heart surgery, something people here cannot pay. Instead of "oh, all we want free health care" and ask everyone else to pay the costs (to the rich!, to the blabla, etc.) and give the money to a bureaucrat so that they do with the money god knows what (you did not see the villas they own! Amazing!) what we did is to help a person we know we are really helping with their disease. Much more effective if you ask me. > Local improvements do not propagate further if you are isolated, and thus you miss the big picture. Development aids usually end up in the pocket of bureaucrats. It is better that you go do something for someone, even in a remote place and see what is going on than to just give to see what happens, which also, as I said, make people skip their worries: oh, we already give these people that, we are not bad. This is just a mechanism to feel better. It is just that it is not what happens. Bureaucrats can control the flow of money and we all know there is corruption and a lot of inefficiencies as well in how it is managed. What they cannot control is personal decisions where things do not go through them. So if we have good intentions, I think the best we can do is to do by ourselves or through the people we trust. > This by the way is a well studied phenomenon and is the core difference between "conservatives" and "progressives" No, this is a well-known thing in psychology where there have been experiments with groups of people where the more people you put, at the moment of simulating things like heart attacks, etc. to see how they reacted, when there is only one person there they try super fast to help, the more people you put the more "other will do it" happens. > where the former considers their local community, but the latter considers systematic improvements I still have to see what those systematic improvements collectivism has brought to the world in the broad sense. All of it starts in individual decisions and are usually better brought up when incentives fall on a few, not on too many. > From my experience, the latter understands that the issues faced by other communities are issues they could have faced as well, and therefore see it as their responsibility to help them This is not what happens in practice. If you are worried about others as in "progressive" as you define it, you still get your nice clothes, your Iphone and many other things as there are still people in trouble. If it is your brother or your mother or a very good friend there is a strong trend for you willing to sacrifice all those things if necessary. This is not bad or good, this is human nature, whether you like it or not. I am pretty convinced that among the people that want to "help others" in the general sense, talking about people with real ambitions to rule, not normal people with good intentions, we have the worst people. Because they put a custom on top of them for marketing, but their real intentions are not those. But even with good intentions, there is the problem of calculus from a centralized organization. So it is more inefficient than alternative mechanisms.
thinkharderdev 4y ago
I really don't understand what argument you are making here. Almost all charity is impersonal. The EA ethos is just that you should donate to charities that actually make measurable progress towards the goals that they espouse. The fundamental impulse to give to charity so that you can feel like a good, moral person is entirely unchanged. It seems like if anything it would be augmented. Now I can give with confidence that I am making a real, tangible difference rather than wondering whether the money is being wasted on unhelpful nonsense. > Then one starts questioning, what is the real motivation behind the deed? Does it really matter? Is someone donates $1M dollars to a charity and that money used effectively to save 100 lives in sub-saharan Africa (made up numbers....). does it matter whether the giver had some cynical objective? Do they people whose lives were saved care one way or another? Maybe it's just me but it strikes me as such a weird ethical view that we should withhold help from the most desperate people in the world on the off chance that the giver doesn't have "pure" motives.
- zaphar 4y ago
  What do you mean almost all charity is impersonal? I guess all almost all nationally visible charity is impersonal but I would wager that if you look a little closer to home you might see opportunities for charity that are not so impersonal. Local Food pantries and soup kitchens are a great way to find a charity with a personal connection. If you mine your personal connections you may find people you know or can get to know who are active in charitable activities abroad. I have several personal friends who run orphanages in third world countries. I give in these ways because the personal connection allows me to hold the organizations accountable in some ways and the personal connections make the giving far more fulfilling. I think perhaps that if you are trying to find a way to fund good across the world you delegate it to a large organization that makes it very difficult to know if there is any actual impact or you can look around you and find a more personal connection that can give you more confidence in the impact you provide. You are not in fact limited to the most visible charities.
  - thinkharderdev 4y ago
    > If you mine your personal connections you may find people you know or can get to know who are active in charitable activities abroad. I have several personal friends who run orphanages in third world countries. This is what I mean. Orphans in third world countries are not your neighbors and the exact sorts of communities many EA charities are trying to help. It's just they want to ask the question "of all the orphanages in developing countries, which ones do the best job of improving the lives of the children under their care?". > I think perhaps that if you are trying to find a way to fund good across the world you delegate it to a large organization that makes it very difficult to know if there is any actual impact or you can look around you and find a more personal connection that can give you more confidence in the impact you provide. The whole point of EA is to create the accountability and visibility into the impact of these charities. The whole premise is that basically: 1. People in your local community may be struggling but there are almost certainly people much worse off in the developing world. Those people also suffer from problems that are so bad that you can make a huge difference in their lives with relatively (to us affluent westerners) small amount of money. 2. We should try and evaluate rigorously which charities are most effective at their stated goals and direct money there. Like measuring anything, it's difficult and uncertain but at least at the current margin we can still extract a lot of useful information this way. And then there is a broader EA tenet which is that, if you are an affluent westerner, then you can almost certainly afford to give more money away to charitable causes. The reduction in your personal living standards will be minimal and you can make a massive difference for a lot of the world's most desperate people. And frankly a lot of the rest follows from that. Like if everyone in your community started giving 10% of their earnings to charity, is it really the case that the local food pantry would be able to use all of that money productively? Would any local charity be able to. At a certain level of giving you simply run out of opportunities to deploy the money locally and have to cast a wider net.

germandiago 4y ago

This 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
Helping your neighbour is a colossal waste of time and money in most of the developed world. Accelerating the development of developing countries enables us to have more minds working on actually difficult tasks like curing cancer in all of its forms, managing and curing our planet, curing diseases that plague humanity, and finally advance our civilization. If all the help you can provide is isolated to your local neighborhood, you are stuck with well off neighborhoods improving logarithmically with time and money spent because they are well past the inflection point, and everyone else struggling to improve because they lack the resources, and likely facing the same issues the well off community faced and solved before, enabling even more waste of time (and therefore money). Local improvements do not propagate further if you are isolated, and thus you miss the big picture. This by the way is a well studied phenomenon and is the core difference between "conservatives" and "progressives", where the former considers their local community, but the latter considers systematic improvements. From my experience, the latter understands that the issues faced by other communities are issues they could have faced as well, and therefore see it as their responsibility to help them.
- germandiago 4y ago
  > Accelerating the development of developing countries enables us to have more minds working on actually difficult tasks like curing cancer in all of its forms, managing and curing our planet, curing diseases that plague humanity, and finally advance our civilization Helping the neighbour is a metaphor. It means helping to concrete people with concrete actions. It does not need to be your neighbor, you can go for missions in developing countries if you want (I live in a developing country right now). To give you an example, a group of friends here once helped a person we know with the money for heart surgery, something people here cannot pay. Instead of "oh, all we want free health care" and ask everyone else to pay the costs (to the rich!, to the blabla, etc.) and give the money to a bureaucrat so that they do with the money god knows what (you did not see the villas they own! Amazing!) what we did is to help a person we know we are really helping with their disease. Much more effective if you ask me. > Local improvements do not propagate further if you are isolated, and thus you miss the big picture. Development aids usually end up in the pocket of bureaucrats. It is better that you go do something for someone, even in a remote place and see what is going on than to just give to see what happens, which also, as I said, make people skip their worries: oh, we already give these people that, we are not bad. This is just a mechanism to feel better. It is just that it is not what happens. Bureaucrats can control the flow of money and we all know there is corruption and a lot of inefficiencies as well in how it is managed. What they cannot control is personal decisions where things do not go through them. So if we have good intentions, I think the best we can do is to do by ourselves or through the people we trust. > This by the way is a well studied phenomenon and is the core difference between "conservatives" and "progressives" No, this is a well-known thing in psychology where there have been experiments with groups of people where the more people you put, at the moment of simulating things like heart attacks, etc. to see how they reacted, when there is only one person there they try super fast to help, the more people you put the more "other will do it" happens. > where the former considers their local community, but the latter considers systematic improvements I still have to see what those systematic improvements collectivism has brought to the world in the broad sense. All of it starts in individual decisions and are usually better brought up when incentives fall on a few, not on too many. > From my experience, the latter understands that the issues faced by other communities are issues they could have faced as well, and therefore see it as their responsibility to help them This is not what happens in practice. If you are worried about others as in "progressive" as you define it, you still get your nice clothes, your Iphone and many other things as there are still people in trouble. If it is your brother or your mother or a very good friend there is a strong trend for you willing to sacrifice all those things if necessary. This is not bad or good, this is human nature, whether you like it or not. I am pretty convinced that among the people that want to "help others" in the general sense, talking about people with real ambitions to rule, not normal people with good intentions, we have the worst people. Because they put a custom on top of them for marketing, but their real intentions are not those. But even with good intentions, there is the problem of calculus from a centralized organization. So it is more inefficient than alternative mechanisms.

thinkharderdev 4y ago

I really don't understand what argument you are making here. Almost all charity is impersonal. The EA ethos is just that you should donate to charities that actually make measurable progress towards the goals that they espouse. The fundamental impulse to give to charity so that you can feel like a good, moral person is entirely unchanged. It seems like if anything it would be augmented. Now I can give with confidence that I am making a real, tangible difference rather than wondering whether the money is being wasted on unhelpful nonsense. > Then one starts questioning, what is the real motivation behind the deed? Does it really matter? Is someone donates $1M dollars to a charity and that money used effectively to save 100 lives in sub-saharan Africa (made up numbers....). does it matter whether the giver had some cynical objective? Do they people whose lives were saved care one way or another? Maybe it's just me but it strikes me as such a weird ethical view that we should withhold help from the most desperate people in the world on the off chance that the giver doesn't have "pure" motives.

zaphar 4y ago
What do you mean almost all charity is impersonal? I guess all almost all nationally visible charity is impersonal but I would wager that if you look a little closer to home you might see opportunities for charity that are not so impersonal. Local Food pantries and soup kitchens are a great way to find a charity with a personal connection. If you mine your personal connections you may find people you know or can get to know who are active in charitable activities abroad. I have several personal friends who run orphanages in third world countries. I give in these ways because the personal connection allows me to hold the organizations accountable in some ways and the personal connections make the giving far more fulfilling. I think perhaps that if you are trying to find a way to fund good across the world you delegate it to a large organization that makes it very difficult to know if there is any actual impact or you can look around you and find a more personal connection that can give you more confidence in the impact you provide. You are not in fact limited to the most visible charities.
- thinkharderdev 4y ago
  > If you mine your personal connections you may find people you know or can get to know who are active in charitable activities abroad. I have several personal friends who run orphanages in third world countries. This is what I mean. Orphans in third world countries are not your neighbors and the exact sorts of communities many EA charities are trying to help. It's just they want to ask the question "of all the orphanages in developing countries, which ones do the best job of improving the lives of the children under their care?". > I think perhaps that if you are trying to find a way to fund good across the world you delegate it to a large organization that makes it very difficult to know if there is any actual impact or you can look around you and find a more personal connection that can give you more confidence in the impact you provide. The whole point of EA is to create the accountability and visibility into the impact of these charities. The whole premise is that basically: 1. People in your local community may be struggling but there are almost certainly people much worse off in the developing world. Those people also suffer from problems that are so bad that you can make a huge difference in their lives with relatively (to us affluent westerners) small amount of money. 2. We should try and evaluate rigorously which charities are most effective at their stated goals and direct money there. Like measuring anything, it's difficult and uncertain but at least at the current margin we can still extract a lot of useful information this way. And then there is a broader EA tenet which is that, if you are an affluent westerner, then you can almost certainly afford to give more money away to charitable causes. The reduction in your personal living standards will be minimal and you can make a massive difference for a lot of the world's most desperate people. And frankly a lot of the rest follows from that. Like if everyone in your community started giving 10% of their earnings to charity, is it really the case that the local food pantry would be able to use all of that money productively? Would any local charity be able to. At a certain level of giving you simply run out of opportunities to deploy the money locally and have to cast a wider net.