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I like the idea of Effective Altruism (EA), but it’s ironic to use EA to call out ineffective charitable spending in the wake of all the Effective Altruism ridi

I like the idea of Effective Altruism (EA), but it’s ironic to use EA to call out ineffective charitable spending in the wake of all the Effective Altruism ridiculousness of recent years. EA was a key part of SBF’s cover story to make his frauds appear to be coming from a philanthropic angle. An EA figurehead recently spent multiple millions, some of which was FTX donations, on a castle/chateau to “host events”, which they rationalized as a good use of funds for weird reasons that even the EA community isn’t buying ( https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pbe8x4AQDqftQoaT5/espr-should-return-the-ftx-funded-chateau https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pbe8x4AQDqftQoaT5/... ). When you look into the history of EA movements, a lot of the spending becomes weirdly self-serving and requires a lot of mental gymnastics to justify. One shining example that comes to mind is the $30K grant they allocated to printing Harry Potter rationalist fan fiction and distributing it (Yes, this really happened: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/long-term-future-fund-april-2019-grant-recommendations https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/... ). Hardcore EA proponents will get staunchly defensive about all of this weird spending, but then they’ll single out $300mm donations like this for not going to malaria nets. It’s getting old.

jimsimmons 4y ago
The lamest thing about EA is easily its name. Imagine if Disney came out with “Effective Avengers” tomorrow
johnfn 4y ago
> Hardcore EA proponents will get staunchly defensive about all of this weird spending, but then they’ll single out $300mm donations like this for not going to malaria nets. It’s getting old. Maybe because one is 300mm and one is 30k? It's a difference of four orders of magnitude. It's like saying "EA proponents will get weirdly upset about burning down a house, but then the very next day they'll go and light a candle." (Also, HPMoR does a great job at getting more people into EA - it isn't quite as superfluous as your comment makes it seem.)
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  The Harry Potter fan fiction thing was something they got together and voted for. It’s not something they’d criticize because they chose it themselves. I brought it forward as an example of the difference between their criticisms of other people’s donations and their own actual choices for grants. The multi million dollar castle purchase is more recent and more ridiculous. It used ill-gotten FTX funds in the process, too.
  - johnfn 4y ago
    > I brought it forward as an example of the difference between their criticisms of other people’s donations and their own actual choices for grants. As I mentioned in my previous post, there are actual reasons to sponsor HPMoR, which you seem to ignore. Perhaps you disagree with those reasons - but there are still reasons. > The multi million dollar castle purchase is more recent and more ridiculous. It used ill-gotten FTX funds in the process, too. It kind of sounds like you have an axe to grind; when you examine any large-enough organization under a microscope, you'll probably find something. Why not grind it against the millions of people who aren't donating to charity?
- atdrummond 4y ago
  HPMoR and the weird adoration of it also put a lot of people off of EA. I know that a large portion of my friend group would be intellectually likely to support EA and its objectives but find the community fairly juvenile and non-serious in a lot of their social interactions and endeavours.
- diceduckmonk 4y ago
  If you can’t manage small amounts of money, you can’t manage large ones
EamonnMR 4y ago
Somehow EA always comes back to spending money on 'working on AI risk' which somehow never produces anything but blog posts.
- jononomo 4y ago
  Funny how AI risk is seen as this big threat, but self-driving cars apparently can't avoid crashing.
  - zaroth 4y ago
    In all fairness, the human driven ones crash an awful lot too! Keep in mind that truly reliable and robust AI driving will save 10s of millions of lives and trillions of dollars of avoided economic losses. Creating AI that can drive a car that virtually never crashes will be the pinnacle of software engineering, and a turning point in our civilization. The savings in blood and money can’t come soon enough, but otherwise it’s basically a Very Good Thing it’s going to take a little while to get it really working. We’re not really ready for the implications of software that can reason that well in the real world.
  - travisjungroth 4y ago
    Consider the state of airplanes, rockets and nuclear weapons in 1923 vs 1955.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  Don’t forget the 80,000 hours organization, which started as a good idea to encourage people to go into altruistic careers but then seemingly only produced volumes of podcasts and inactionable blog posts. I recommended it to a student once who was asking about career guidance. They came back and said they couldn’t figure it out, so I went looking into it deeper. I couldn’t get anything out of it either. It was just endless rambling podcasts at the time
Galanwe 4y ago
EA is a philosophy, or a mindset. It is not defined by the actions of some group of people that pretend to follow it. There will always be some % of cheaters in whatever human system that exists.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  There are definitely EA organizations and figureheads like MacAskill operating under the EA name. You can call it an abstract philosophy, but there are actual organizations leading the charge, collecting funds, and doing things with them (like buying castles). I don’t find it compelling to argue that all of these EA orgs and people are somehow not true EA when the movement and money flow seemingly revolves around them.
- inertiatic 4y ago
  Do you think the same argument applies to communism?
  - cutemonster 4y ago
    A broken comparison. Communism is fundamentally bad, both the idea and implementations. Comparing EA with education is better. Education is a fundamentally good idea, however, there exist corrupt universities and teachers, e.g. giving students too good grades, just to attract more students and funding. Or teachers asking for bribes. But that doesn't make education as a concept, a bad idea. And EA-the-concept: thinking about how you spend any money you donate, instead of following your first impulses and feelings -- that is, like education, a fundamentally good idea. But just like there are corrupt people in the education system, there are in EA as well. And there are more in EA (or so it seems), because EA involves more money (and prestige?).
seangrogg 4y ago
In all fairness, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality was a phenomenal fanfic and if someone wants to see it syndicated at $30k that seems fine by me.
matthew9219 4y ago
30k is 0.01% of 300m, or 1 part in 10,000. It was also just a small part of 900k of grants given out to many different works. This is how art grants work. They are tiny - in the 10k to 50k range, a few thousand are given out. Some of these artists produce great works and some don't. But it's cheap as heck compared to other things, and if we spend nothing on art, we don't get any great art. Are you also one of those people that hates federal arts funding? Btw HPMOR is also pretty good. Harvard probably spent more than 30k on their sign and got a lot less.
- krainboltgreene 4y ago
  > Some of these artists produce great works and some don't. But it's cheap as heck compared to other things, and if we spend nothing on art, we don't get any great art. Are you also one of those people that hates federal arts funding? Ignoring the fact that you don't know how art grants work, you seem to be (carefully) ignoring the entire proposed idea behind Effective Altruism.
  - matthew9219 4y ago
    Why do you assume making a bunch of cheap but potentially impactful bets is an ineffective strategy?
stickfigure 4y ago
All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, all men are Socrates.
badtake828374 4y ago
That’s like saying “a scammer used logic so we should never use logic” Why would any of that stop you from trying to make effective donations? I think people like to attack EA because it makes them uncomfortable to think about how little they themselves are doing
ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
"Effective Altruism" (centered around William MacAskill), the "Rationalist Movement" (centered around Eliezer Yudkowsky), the general billionaire philanthropism (most prominent being Bill Gates), the "Universal Basic Income" crowd (of which apparently OpenAI and Sam Altman are spearheading a research project), miss the greater context in which charity takes place: all charity is fundamentally ineffective, charity is the side effect of a failed system, charity will never bring revolution and even worse charity will actively suppress revolution. In a better system there would be no need for charity. Revolution used to mean pitchforks and guillotines (the French especially loved them), but today, funnily enough, that would be ineffective even if the people would be able to close their favorite streaming channel and wake up. Even in the 1950s it would have been ineffective. A revolution in the 1950s would have probably looked like this: 100% taxation over $50 million (in today's money). Like in a memory-constrained video game, once you reach 9999 coins you can't store more. We should have capped capitalism a long time ago, give the lucky winner a medal, and that's it. We could probably try today this idea, but (i) there is no coagulated we to make it work after at least 158 years of divisiveness and (ii) it's probably too late and it would also be ineffective. A revolution today would take completely other form from the past. After all, "you can't solve today's problems with yesterday's solutions". Today's revolution, able to wake up every single human from whatever slumber and coagulate them into a we, the people would probably be raising the lifespan to 1,000 years. Not 120, not 200, but straight 1,000, an x10 improvement just like the venture capitalists enjoy. The fact that today you might die at 30 and some guy dies at 90 doesn't seem too much of an issue, and you are willing to accept the system for some minor benefit, if any. But if you might die at 30 and some guy dies at 900, now that's when you start having issues. How to get to 1,000 years lifespan? 2-3 years ago I would have said mind-uploading, thinking that biochemistry has been surpassed by our magnificent, crystalline-structured silicon. After a global pandemic and some personal eye-openings, literally looking inside myself on the operating table, I would say that we won't be near biochemistry with our toys for the next thousands of years, and it won't actually be needed, we can learn to programatically interface with the cells and just say, top-down, "you, the cells, already know how to build an eye, you did it once, rebuild one here", don't scar, regenerate [1]. 1,000 year lifespan is achievable with 100% organ, tissue regeneration, and then the revolution begins, hopefully. Coming back to the point, an "effective altruism" would put all the billions and trillions into organ regeneration research, however, oddly enough, that's not even in the general discussion. [1] Michael Levin talk on bioelectricity at Stanford Chemical Engineering Colloquium, https://youtu.be/WM8bQWfmeB8?t=470 https://youtu.be/WM8bQWfmeB8?t=470

jimsimmons 4y ago

The lamest thing about EA is easily its name. Imagine if Disney came out with “Effective Avengers” tomorrow

johnfn 4y ago

> Hardcore EA proponents will get staunchly defensive about all of this weird spending, but then they’ll single out $300mm donations like this for not going to malaria nets. It’s getting old. Maybe because one is 300mm and one is 30k? It's a difference of four orders of magnitude. It's like saying "EA proponents will get weirdly upset about burning down a house, but then the very next day they'll go and light a candle." (Also, HPMoR does a great job at getting more people into EA - it isn't quite as superfluous as your comment makes it seem.)

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
The Harry Potter fan fiction thing was something they got together and voted for. It’s not something they’d criticize because they chose it themselves. I brought it forward as an example of the difference between their criticisms of other people’s donations and their own actual choices for grants. The multi million dollar castle purchase is more recent and more ridiculous. It used ill-gotten FTX funds in the process, too.
- johnfn 4y ago
  > I brought it forward as an example of the difference between their criticisms of other people’s donations and their own actual choices for grants. As I mentioned in my previous post, there are actual reasons to sponsor HPMoR, which you seem to ignore. Perhaps you disagree with those reasons - but there are still reasons. > The multi million dollar castle purchase is more recent and more ridiculous. It used ill-gotten FTX funds in the process, too. It kind of sounds like you have an axe to grind; when you examine any large-enough organization under a microscope, you'll probably find something. Why not grind it against the millions of people who aren't donating to charity?
atdrummond 4y ago
HPMoR and the weird adoration of it also put a lot of people off of EA. I know that a large portion of my friend group would be intellectually likely to support EA and its objectives but find the community fairly juvenile and non-serious in a lot of their social interactions and endeavours.
diceduckmonk 4y ago
If you can’t manage small amounts of money, you can’t manage large ones

EamonnMR 4y ago

Somehow EA always comes back to spending money on 'working on AI risk' which somehow never produces anything but blog posts.

jononomo 4y ago
Funny how AI risk is seen as this big threat, but self-driving cars apparently can't avoid crashing.
- zaroth 4y ago
  In all fairness, the human driven ones crash an awful lot too! Keep in mind that truly reliable and robust AI driving will save 10s of millions of lives and trillions of dollars of avoided economic losses. Creating AI that can drive a car that virtually never crashes will be the pinnacle of software engineering, and a turning point in our civilization. The savings in blood and money can’t come soon enough, but otherwise it’s basically a Very Good Thing it’s going to take a little while to get it really working. We’re not really ready for the implications of software that can reason that well in the real world.
- travisjungroth 4y ago
  Consider the state of airplanes, rockets and nuclear weapons in 1923 vs 1955.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
Don’t forget the 80,000 hours organization, which started as a good idea to encourage people to go into altruistic careers but then seemingly only produced volumes of podcasts and inactionable blog posts. I recommended it to a student once who was asking about career guidance. They came back and said they couldn’t figure it out, so I went looking into it deeper. I couldn’t get anything out of it either. It was just endless rambling podcasts at the time

Galanwe 4y ago

EA is a philosophy, or a mindset. It is not defined by the actions of some group of people that pretend to follow it. There will always be some % of cheaters in whatever human system that exists.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
There are definitely EA organizations and figureheads like MacAskill operating under the EA name. You can call it an abstract philosophy, but there are actual organizations leading the charge, collecting funds, and doing things with them (like buying castles). I don’t find it compelling to argue that all of these EA orgs and people are somehow not true EA when the movement and money flow seemingly revolves around them.
inertiatic 4y ago
Do you think the same argument applies to communism?
- cutemonster 4y ago
  A broken comparison. Communism is fundamentally bad, both the idea and implementations. Comparing EA with education is better. Education is a fundamentally good idea, however, there exist corrupt universities and teachers, e.g. giving students too good grades, just to attract more students and funding. Or teachers asking for bribes. But that doesn't make education as a concept, a bad idea. And EA-the-concept: thinking about how you spend any money you donate, instead of following your first impulses and feelings -- that is, like education, a fundamentally good idea. But just like there are corrupt people in the education system, there are in EA as well. And there are more in EA (or so it seems), because EA involves more money (and prestige?).

seangrogg 4y ago

In all fairness, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality was a phenomenal fanfic and if someone wants to see it syndicated at $30k that seems fine by me.

matthew9219 4y ago

30k is 0.01% of 300m, or 1 part in 10,000. It was also just a small part of 900k of grants given out to many different works. This is how art grants work. They are tiny - in the 10k to 50k range, a few thousand are given out. Some of these artists produce great works and some don't. But it's cheap as heck compared to other things, and if we spend nothing on art, we don't get any great art. Are you also one of those people that hates federal arts funding? Btw HPMOR is also pretty good. Harvard probably spent more than 30k on their sign and got a lot less.

krainboltgreene 4y ago
> Some of these artists produce great works and some don't. But it's cheap as heck compared to other things, and if we spend nothing on art, we don't get any great art. Are you also one of those people that hates federal arts funding? Ignoring the fact that you don't know how art grants work, you seem to be (carefully) ignoring the entire proposed idea behind Effective Altruism.
- matthew9219 4y ago
  Why do you assume making a bunch of cheap but potentially impactful bets is an ineffective strategy?

stickfigure 4y ago

All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, all men are Socrates.

badtake828374 4y ago

That’s like saying “a scammer used logic so we should never use logic” Why would any of that stop you from trying to make effective donations? I think people like to attack EA because it makes them uncomfortable to think about how little they themselves are doing

ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago

"Effective Altruism" (centered around William MacAskill), the "Rationalist Movement" (centered around Eliezer Yudkowsky), the general billionaire philanthropism (most prominent being Bill Gates), the "Universal Basic Income" crowd (of which apparently OpenAI and Sam Altman are spearheading a research project), miss the greater context in which charity takes place: all charity is fundamentally ineffective, charity is the side effect of a failed system, charity will never bring revolution and even worse charity will actively suppress revolution. In a better system there would be no need for charity. Revolution used to mean pitchforks and guillotines (the French especially loved them), but today, funnily enough, that would be ineffective even if the people would be able to close their favorite streaming channel and wake up. Even in the 1950s it would have been ineffective. A revolution in the 1950s would have probably looked like this: 100% taxation over $50 million (in today's money). Like in a memory-constrained video game, once you reach 9999 coins you can't store more. We should have capped capitalism a long time ago, give the lucky winner a medal, and that's it. We could probably try today this idea, but (i) there is no coagulated we to make it work after at least 158 years of divisiveness and (ii) it's probably too late and it would also be ineffective. A revolution today would take completely other form from the past. After all, "you can't solve today's problems with yesterday's solutions". Today's revolution, able to wake up every single human from whatever slumber and coagulate them into a we, the people would probably be raising the lifespan to 1,000 years. Not 120, not 200, but straight 1,000, an x10 improvement just like the venture capitalists enjoy. The fact that today you might die at 30 and some guy dies at 90 doesn't seem too much of an issue, and you are willing to accept the system for some minor benefit, if any. But if you might die at 30 and some guy dies at 900, now that's when you start having issues. How to get to 1,000 years lifespan? 2-3 years ago I would have said mind-uploading, thinking that biochemistry has been surpassed by our magnificent, crystalline-structured silicon. After a global pandemic and some personal eye-openings, literally looking inside myself on the operating table, I would say that we won't be near biochemistry with our toys for the next thousands of years, and it won't actually be needed, we can learn to programatically interface with the cells and just say, top-down, "you, the cells, already know how to build an eye, you did it once, rebuild one here", don't scar, regenerate [1]. 1,000 year lifespan is achievable with 100% organ, tissue regeneration, and then the revolution begins, hopefully. Coming back to the point, an "effective altruism" would put all the billions and trillions into organ regeneration research, however, oddly enough, that's not even in the general discussion. [1] Michael Levin talk on bioelectricity at Stanford Chemical Engineering Colloquium, https://youtu.be/WM8bQWfmeB8?t=470 https://youtu.be/WM8bQWfmeB8?t=470