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> [Effective Altruism] is self-righteous in the most literal sense. Effective altruism as distinct from what? Well, all of the rest of us, presumably—the ineffe

by gizmo 3y ago

> [Effective Altruism] is self-righteous in the most literal sense. Effective altruism as distinct from what? Well, all of the rest of us, presumably—the ineffective and un-altruistic, we who either do not care about other human beings or are practicing our compassion incorrectly. > We all tend to presume our own moral positions are the right ones, but the person who brands themselves an Effective Altruist goes so far as to adopt “being better than other people” as an identity. Those are the opening paragraphs from a much better article on the same subject: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/09/defective-altruism https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/09/defective-altruism Where this article meekly claims that "utilitarian calculations can be co-opted to justify extremely weird and potentially harmful positions" Nathan J Robinson correctly skewers the very fundamentals of utilitarianism: > Patching up utilitarianism with a bunch of moral nonnegotiables is what everyone ends up having to do unless they want to sound like a maniac, as Peter Singer does with his appalling utilitarian takes on disability. (“It’s not true that I think that disabled infants ought to be killed. I think the parents ought to have that option.”) As Robinson observes, the EA movement’s intellectual core is so poisoned by bad philosophy as to be unsalvageable.

bambax 3y ago
> Effective altruism as distinct from what? Well, all of the rest of us, presumably—the ineffective and un-altruistic That's exactly right. All those ineffective doctors risking their lives being parachuted in the jungle or working in war zones, they're losers! And the bankers in their private jets, those are the altruists! EA is a thought experiment in putting morals upside-down. It's ridiculous; what's fascinating is that it almost worked. We have to thank SBF for having shown the world what EA actually is. A sinister joke.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  SBF also has very publicly very strange set of ideals. He believed that almost any amount of risk is good as long as he can convince himself that it’s somehow “morally net positive”
- sanderjd 3y ago
  I mean, when the concept of "effective altruism" first came onto my radar, when GiveWell came onto the scene, it was very clear what it meant to be distinct from: charities that use barely any of the funds they raise on their core charitable work. Those charities were "altruistic", but also ineffective, so the idea was, let's keep the altruism, but improve the effectiveness. This was then and still is a very good idea! But then it's like that good but humble mission wasn't enough for a lot of the people interested in this, and they (in my view) sort of disappeared into a black hole of inscrutable philosophizing.
jprete 3y ago
EA has the same philosophical core as SV at large - find everything measurable and optimize the hell out of them. The philosophy ignores that something can be valuable even if it’s hard to measure. I think the deep underlying desire is to make the world maximally comprehensible, but it all eventually becomes nightmarish entropy-maximizing humanity-destroying mechanistic systematization.
- pksebben 3y ago
  That maximally comprehensible bit is so relevant. We are limited by the modes with which we communicate, each of which trades some amount of expressiveness for some amount of signal speed. The unfortunate truth is that in the competition between systems, those that achieve higher speeds frequently win in the battle to spread the signal. The executive report that reduces the business to a set of metrics one page long, the tweet that gets shared millions of times, the quippy campaign promise. I've been ruminating on this problem for a long time, and I don't have any answers that I'm satisfied with. The closest I've come to identifying what-to-do is that perhaps if we manage to somehow reduce the global liquidity of communication and reintroduce friction into how ideas spread, perhaps the harder ideas will become more competitive relative to the fast and easy. Put more simply, if everything is made a little more hard, it would benefit the stuff that's already hard. That said, I say it's the "best" idea I've come up with because I recognize that it's still really fraught with disastrous side effects, potentially impossible, and leagues away from actionable. The more I see, the more I understand Hanson's "Great Filter" argument. It all feels pretty bleak.
monero-xmr 3y ago
Effective Altruists are sociopaths. Never hire them, don’t be friends with them, protect your family and wealth. Very very dangerous people. They have programmed themselves into sociopathy as a moral justification and life philosophy. Unbelievably poisonous and dangerous.
- meowface 3y ago
  I'd personally preferentially hire and befriend effective altruists and go out of my way to avoid people who say things like this (particularly with usernames like that).
  - monero-xmr 3y ago
    The EV calculation of hiring sociopaths is too low
epivosism 3y ago
Imagine an article: "Our organization found a better light bulb" interpretation 1: (as in the quoted line) Oh, you think you're better than me, and you're criticizing my light bulb? Also you guys are super weird and I am disgusted by you, [other attempts at status-lowering] interpretation 2: hmm, let me look at the data. If that bulb is better, I might use it! If not, maybe there's a way to fix it, or maybe I don't care. No big deal either way. But like, who cares if some nerd philosopher writes an article? If they're wrong, the truth will come out. It's not hurting you. And if they're right, how about reading it and checking if you agree? And we already know social manipulators, psychopaths etc are attracted to intense new social movements. It doesn't mean the movement is bad.
- burkaman 3y ago
  The whole point is that you can't compare charity like you can lightbulbs. You can objectively state that a lightbulb is better because it produces the exact same light with half the electricity, but you can't objectively say that a charity helping children is better than one helping disabled adults, for example. That is a subjective moral decision, and it's fine to discuss it and debate it, but not fine to say "mine is objectively more effective, just look at my quality-adjusted life years spreadsheet". This is not to say that all charity is perfectly interchangeable - for example, you can make very strong arguments that donating to a university with a $50 billion endowment is ineffective. Again there is nothing wrong with discussing these things, you just can't make a blanket statement that your particular philosophical framework is the best one.
  - roywiggins 3y ago
    And even lightbulbs have to make tradeoffs between efficiency and lifespan. Yeah, all else being equal the efficient bulb is better, but it's quite rare that all else actually is equal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY
  - henryaj 3y ago
    > The whole point is that you can't compare charity like you can lightbulbs. Often you can. Even charities that are attempting to do the same thing (e.g. stop people dying of malaria) vary wildly in their 'effectiveness' - which is really just a fancy way of saying e.g. 'how many people we prevented dying of malaria per $ spent'. > but not fine to say "mine is objectively more effective, just look at my quality-adjusted life years spreadsheet". ...because? QALYs are an attempt to make these comparisons possible; it's not clear what your objection here actually is.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
> Effective altruism as distinct from what? As its most prosaic, effective altruism as in 20M mosquito nets instead of 2000 organ tranplants. As the article makes clear, a strictly utilitarian approach to assessing "effective" is at severe risk of going off the rails.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
Most people are innefective altruists. I don't see how mocking that EA's feel that way makes it untrue. Almost everyone wants to do good, but they don't put very much thought about how to do so effectively. EA the philosophy is only about encouraging those people to put a bit more effort into being effective.

by gizmo 3y ago

bambax 3y ago

> Effective altruism as distinct from what? Well, all of the rest of us, presumably—the ineffective and un-altruistic That's exactly right. All those ineffective doctors risking their lives being parachuted in the jungle or working in war zones, they're losers! And the bankers in their private jets, those are the altruists! EA is a thought experiment in putting morals upside-down. It's ridiculous; what's fascinating is that it almost worked. We have to thank SBF for having shown the world what EA actually is. A sinister joke.

coffeebeqn 3y ago
SBF also has very publicly very strange set of ideals. He believed that almost any amount of risk is good as long as he can convince himself that it’s somehow “morally net positive”
sanderjd 3y ago
I mean, when the concept of "effective altruism" first came onto my radar, when GiveWell came onto the scene, it was very clear what it meant to be distinct from: charities that use barely any of the funds they raise on their core charitable work. Those charities were "altruistic", but also ineffective, so the idea was, let's keep the altruism, but improve the effectiveness. This was then and still is a very good idea! But then it's like that good but humble mission wasn't enough for a lot of the people interested in this, and they (in my view) sort of disappeared into a black hole of inscrutable philosophizing.

jprete 3y ago

EA has the same philosophical core as SV at large - find everything measurable and optimize the hell out of them. The philosophy ignores that something can be valuable even if it’s hard to measure. I think the deep underlying desire is to make the world maximally comprehensible, but it all eventually becomes nightmarish entropy-maximizing humanity-destroying mechanistic systematization.

pksebben 3y ago
That maximally comprehensible bit is so relevant. We are limited by the modes with which we communicate, each of which trades some amount of expressiveness for some amount of signal speed. The unfortunate truth is that in the competition between systems, those that achieve higher speeds frequently win in the battle to spread the signal. The executive report that reduces the business to a set of metrics one page long, the tweet that gets shared millions of times, the quippy campaign promise. I've been ruminating on this problem for a long time, and I don't have any answers that I'm satisfied with. The closest I've come to identifying what-to-do is that perhaps if we manage to somehow reduce the global liquidity of communication and reintroduce friction into how ideas spread, perhaps the harder ideas will become more competitive relative to the fast and easy. Put more simply, if everything is made a little more hard, it would benefit the stuff that's already hard. That said, I say it's the "best" idea I've come up with because I recognize that it's still really fraught with disastrous side effects, potentially impossible, and leagues away from actionable. The more I see, the more I understand Hanson's "Great Filter" argument. It all feels pretty bleak.

monero-xmr 3y ago

Effective Altruists are sociopaths. Never hire them, don’t be friends with them, protect your family and wealth. Very very dangerous people. They have programmed themselves into sociopathy as a moral justification and life philosophy. Unbelievably poisonous and dangerous.

meowface 3y ago
I'd personally preferentially hire and befriend effective altruists and go out of my way to avoid people who say things like this (particularly with usernames like that).
- monero-xmr 3y ago
  The EV calculation of hiring sociopaths is too low

epivosism 3y ago

Imagine an article: "Our organization found a better light bulb" interpretation 1: (as in the quoted line) Oh, you think you're better than me, and you're criticizing my light bulb? Also you guys are super weird and I am disgusted by you, [other attempts at status-lowering] interpretation 2: hmm, let me look at the data. If that bulb is better, I might use it! If not, maybe there's a way to fix it, or maybe I don't care. No big deal either way. But like, who cares if some nerd philosopher writes an article? If they're wrong, the truth will come out. It's not hurting you. And if they're right, how about reading it and checking if you agree? And we already know social manipulators, psychopaths etc are attracted to intense new social movements. It doesn't mean the movement is bad.

burkaman 3y ago
The whole point is that you can't compare charity like you can lightbulbs. You can objectively state that a lightbulb is better because it produces the exact same light with half the electricity, but you can't objectively say that a charity helping children is better than one helping disabled adults, for example. That is a subjective moral decision, and it's fine to discuss it and debate it, but not fine to say "mine is objectively more effective, just look at my quality-adjusted life years spreadsheet". This is not to say that all charity is perfectly interchangeable - for example, you can make very strong arguments that donating to a university with a $50 billion endowment is ineffective. Again there is nothing wrong with discussing these things, you just can't make a blanket statement that your particular philosophical framework is the best one.
- roywiggins 3y ago
  And even lightbulbs have to make tradeoffs between efficiency and lifespan. Yeah, all else being equal the efficient bulb is better, but it's quite rare that all else actually is equal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY
- henryaj 3y ago
  > The whole point is that you can't compare charity like you can lightbulbs. Often you can. Even charities that are attempting to do the same thing (e.g. stop people dying of malaria) vary wildly in their 'effectiveness' - which is really just a fancy way of saying e.g. 'how many people we prevented dying of malaria per $ spent'. > but not fine to say "mine is objectively more effective, just look at my quality-adjusted life years spreadsheet". ...because? QALYs are an attempt to make these comparisons possible; it's not clear what your objection here actually is.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago

> Effective altruism as distinct from what? As its most prosaic, effective altruism as in 20M mosquito nets instead of 2000 organ tranplants. As the article makes clear, a strictly utilitarian approach to assessing "effective" is at severe risk of going off the rails.

HDThoreaun 3y ago

Most people are innefective altruists. I don't see how mocking that EA's feel that way makes it untrue. Almost everyone wants to do good, but they don't put very much thought about how to do so effectively. EA the philosophy is only about encouraging those people to put a bit more effort into being effective.