3 ms·

If all "effective altruism" ever meant was "avoid giving money to inefficient charities, and we'll help you figure out which ones are which", then it would be a

If all "effective altruism" ever meant was "avoid giving money to inefficient charities, and we'll help you figure out which ones are which", then it would be an unambiguously positive thing. But, from my perspective, it's like most of the people originally involved in the movement got bored with that, and went all in on all this other stuff, justified by philosophical shenanigans, resulting in not just different but often contradictory conclusions. For instance, lots of wealthy techie types who bought into EA donated heavily (and I think still do) to charities targeting things like risks to far-future humans and life extension. To me, those are also "pseudo-charities". There is no way to evaluate their effectiveness. They could be 100% effective or 0% effective, we won't know for generations or millenia... And - just like all the "pseudo-charities" researched by GiveWell - every dollar that has gone to these organizations with unknowable effectiveness could have instead gone to known-effective charities.

jjoonathan 3y ago
Rich people have been using charity to avoid taxes, rationalize power acquisition, solicit donations for dubious causes, promote blatantly self-serving policy, etc since forever. We agree on classifying those as pseudo-charities, we agree that these things happened under the EA banner, and we agree that this should trigger some self-reflection from anyone who enabled them and rebranding from anyone who didn't. However, I'm still going to do my charity through GiveWell. GiveWell makes many people with dubious pet causes very angry and these people have taken the adjacent scandal as an opportunity to attack the very idea of vetting charity. If someone wants to propose an alternative vetting strategy, I'm all ears, but I don't see the sins of SBF & co as a reason to stop vetting. I just don't. I am of the opinion that we need vetting now more than ever, and whatever we want to call that going forward I plan to support it.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > I don't see the sins of SBF & co as a reason to stop vetting. Who's arguing against vetting?
- sanderjd 3y ago
  100% agree. I just think of GiveWell as a totally different thing than "effective altruism" now, even though it is where I first heard of the concept. (And that predates the SBF scandal by quite a while!) To their credit, they never recommended these "longtermism" initiatives as effective places to direct charitable funds. So I think their credibility as an organization comes out of this intact, despite some of the people originally associated with them coming out looking much worse. But I dunno, maybe they and/or people like us who support them should be doing more to explicitly distance them from the rest of the EA movement.

jjoonathan 3y ago

Rich people have been using charity to avoid taxes, rationalize power acquisition, solicit donations for dubious causes, promote blatantly self-serving policy, etc since forever. We agree on classifying those as pseudo-charities, we agree that these things happened under the EA banner, and we agree that this should trigger some self-reflection from anyone who enabled them and rebranding from anyone who didn't. However, I'm still going to do my charity through GiveWell. GiveWell makes many people with dubious pet causes very angry and these people have taken the adjacent scandal as an opportunity to attack the very idea of vetting charity. If someone wants to propose an alternative vetting strategy, I'm all ears, but I don't see the sins of SBF & co as a reason to stop vetting. I just don't. I am of the opinion that we need vetting now more than ever, and whatever we want to call that going forward I plan to support it.

JohnFen 3y ago
> I don't see the sins of SBF & co as a reason to stop vetting. Who's arguing against vetting?
sanderjd 3y ago
100% agree. I just think of GiveWell as a totally different thing than "effective altruism" now, even though it is where I first heard of the concept. (And that predates the SBF scandal by quite a while!) To their credit, they never recommended these "longtermism" initiatives as effective places to direct charitable funds. So I think their credibility as an organization comes out of this intact, despite some of the people originally associated with them coming out looking much worse. But I dunno, maybe they and/or people like us who support them should be doing more to explicitly distance them from the rest of the EA movement.