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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 act

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.
  - zaphar 4y ago
    The thesis of the article is that EA started out with those stated goals but because of human nature and the effects of forming a larger public organization it is probably unlikely that they still do so or will continue to do so longer term. The incentives just kind of start shoving them in a very different direction. As you see with the FTX scandal/fraud. Your response could be well that's not really EA then to which the article would say "Yeah but to keep it from happening you sort of have to limit EA to "local" low profile giving. I would posit that the level of giving where you run out of opportunities in your personal network that you can effectively give to is quite high. Far higher than most people. A final thought is that "of all the orphanages in developing countries, which ones do the best job of improving the lives of the children under their care?" is perhaps a bad question to be asking. It assumes that you can even rank such a thing which I would posit you can't. Beyond do they feed, clothe, and educate as a minimum bar there is far more to the improving the lives of children. The quantifiable stuff does little and is relatively easy to accomplish. The rest is unquantifiable and has dramatic impacts on long term outcomes. If you want to know how effective the orphanage is you can't look at the balance sheet. You have to go visit it and get to know the people running it. And frankly if I'm giving my money to an orphanage the unquantifiable but in many ways most important elements are not something I am going to trust an organization of people to get correctly assess. It's inevitable that the organization will eventually lose sight of the mission.

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.
- zaphar 4y ago
  The thesis of the article is that EA started out with those stated goals but because of human nature and the effects of forming a larger public organization it is probably unlikely that they still do so or will continue to do so longer term. The incentives just kind of start shoving them in a very different direction. As you see with the FTX scandal/fraud. Your response could be well that's not really EA then to which the article would say "Yeah but to keep it from happening you sort of have to limit EA to "local" low profile giving. I would posit that the level of giving where you run out of opportunities in your personal network that you can effectively give to is quite high. Far higher than most people. A final thought is that "of all the orphanages in developing countries, which ones do the best job of improving the lives of the children under their care?" is perhaps a bad question to be asking. It assumes that you can even rank such a thing which I would posit you can't. Beyond do they feed, clothe, and educate as a minimum bar there is far more to the improving the lives of children. The quantifiable stuff does little and is relatively easy to accomplish. The rest is unquantifiable and has dramatic impacts on long term outcomes. If you want to know how effective the orphanage is you can't look at the balance sheet. You have to go visit it and get to know the people running it. And frankly if I'm giving my money to an orphanage the unquantifiable but in many ways most important elements are not something I am going to trust an organization of people to get correctly assess. It's inevitable that the organization will eventually lose sight of the mission.