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EA continues to look like moral cover for good old-fashioned profit maximization. The "Effective" part is immediate and drives short-term incentives like maxim

atlasunshrugged 3y ago
I think this is more about the longtermism branch of EA in particular. There are many EAs who are still focused on solving more concrete problems (like malaria, extreme poverty) and directing millions of dollars in charity to Against Malaria, Give Directly, lobbying for stricter lead regulations, etc.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  That's fair. Most of what I know of EA is the stuff that makes the "news" here on HN, which is generally not flattering.
- stillwithit 3y ago
  EA/longtermerism smell a lot like “intelligent design”; yet another attempt at belief in divine mandates for man. Like the PR teams got together and intentionally conjured semantics that tickle the same biological responses seen in religious true believers. Consider “religion” as a biological state, not an abstract philosophical framework. Behavioral economics has been leveraged to embed the hallucination that is American Civic Life similarly to embedding religious mind viruses. Given what we know now in neuroscience, how we brainwave sync with rooms of people just by being there, the leadership class reinforces among themselves hallucinations of their right to reach into all of our lives and claim them for themselves, just like the church.
  - Jeff_Brown 3y ago
    For EA to tickle the same nerve that religion does seems like a feature, not a bug. Channel that urge into doing something meaningful, important and bigger than oneself.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- kdmccormick 3y ago
  Yup. I give to the extreme poverty and animal welfare funds, because they seem like a great way to give to well-vetted high-impact charities. The longtermism stuff has always struck me oddly alongside those other obviously-beneficial causes. It's a bummer that's all some people think of when they hear EA.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Maybe because if all you want to do is to support things like that, there is no need for something like the EA movement in the first place?
    - kdmccormick 3y ago
      I still find valuable the idea of evaluating charities based on their effectiveness, but I guess you could rely on charity evaluators for that without taking on the entire conceptual burden of EA.
    - kiba 3y ago
      Donating to causes that resonates with you isn't the same thing as donating to causes that work on the most necessary and urgent problem of humanity.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        It is if what resonates with you is whatever you consider "the most necessary and urgent problem of humanity."
        kiba 3y ago
        That's why there's a whole movement of people dedicated to convincing people to donate to the most necessary and urgent problem of humanity and trying to decide what exactly is that. What we chose to donate to are organizations like churches, museum, theaters, makerspaces, and the like. They enrich our lives in the neighborhoods we live in, but they're not exactly urgent as someone on the other side of the world dying to something perfectly preventable like cholera.
kiba 3y ago
EA continues to look like moral cover for good old-fashioned profit maximization. The "Effective" part is immediate and drives short-term incentives like maximizing profit. The "Altruism" part is hypothetical and delegated to a future date where the resources acquired "effectively" are deployed for the benefit of humanity. In the gap between the two are fallible human beings, not necessarily more virtuous than average, that task themselves with making decisions about what's important. I do not agree that we should try to maximize our profit and then only help people at a nebulous distant point in time. We all make priorities about things important to us. Some of that shows in what we chose to donate to. A lot of charities we donate to are not fundamentally urgent because they do not work on saving lives. A lot of EA is simply prioritizing what saves the most lives, right here, and right now. The focus on hypothetical dangers like GAI is telling here. If you can invent an apocalyptic boogeyman that you're "addressing" by funding thinktanks and sitting on company boards you don't actually have to spend anything on addressing immediate issues. They can be sincerely strongly held belief. The fact that OpenAI is actually...not doing anything remotely about it makes me discount OpenAI as a serious organization, regardless of the nebulous and hypothetical nature of GAI. For the record, I don't think we are able to even remotely approach the problem if we can't take of issues of alignments of human actors. Once we figure that out, maybe we'll have a concrete path for aligning GAI should that or when it becomes a technological possibility.
- unyttigfjelltol 3y ago
  > The "Altruism" part is hypothetical and delegated to a future date The only resources we as people have are our actions. So, if you want to do some good, do it today. There's no shortcut and no reason to think anyone in the future will act other than precisely as you do now.
- jwestbury 3y ago
  > A lot of EA is simply prioritizing what saves the most lives, right here, and right now. Is this altruism, or just utilitarianism by a different name? This is obviously a serious ethics question, and one that likely has no objective answer - but utilitarianism has run contrary to the morals of most societies, generally.
adleyjulian 3y ago
I think the EA community is very open about the uncertainties around the risks of AGI and the difficulty in addressing them. The point is that if there is even a 0.01% chance that AGI could threaten the existence of humanity then it's worth spending time and thought addressing it. NASA has the Sentry program to look out for asteroids, with a budget of around $35 million, and the odds of a "big one" hitting in our life time is less than 1 in 10,000. That said, the majority of EA spending is on global health and development to address immediate issues, on programs like Against Malaria.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > The point is that if there is even a 0.01% chance that AGI could threaten the existence of humanity then it's worth spending time and thought addressing it. The disconnect I see is that if there is even a 0.01% chance that is could threaten the existence of humanity, then why in the world would anyone actively pursue making it happen before figuring out a way to mitigate that risk?
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
    I think it’s arms race logic. “If we don’t pursue it before figuring out risk, worse people will pursue it without figuring out the risk.”
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      That's not logical, though. Assuming that "worse people" will develop it anyway, wouldn't it make more sense to let them, and focus entirely on how to mitigate the risk instead?
      - 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
        I mean, yeah. I phrased it in a weak way intentionally.

atlasunshrugged 3y ago

I think this is more about the longtermism branch of EA in particular. There are many EAs who are still focused on solving more concrete problems (like malaria, extreme poverty) and directing millions of dollars in charity to Against Malaria, Give Directly, lobbying for stricter lead regulations, etc.

AlexandrB 3y ago
That's fair. Most of what I know of EA is the stuff that makes the "news" here on HN, which is generally not flattering.
stillwithit 3y ago
EA/longtermerism smell a lot like “intelligent design”; yet another attempt at belief in divine mandates for man. Like the PR teams got together and intentionally conjured semantics that tickle the same biological responses seen in religious true believers. Consider “religion” as a biological state, not an abstract philosophical framework. Behavioral economics has been leveraged to embed the hallucination that is American Civic Life similarly to embedding religious mind viruses. Given what we know now in neuroscience, how we brainwave sync with rooms of people just by being there, the leadership class reinforces among themselves hallucinations of their right to reach into all of our lives and claim them for themselves, just like the church.
- Jeff_Brown 3y ago
  For EA to tickle the same nerve that religion does seems like a feature, not a bug. Channel that urge into doing something meaningful, important and bigger than oneself.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
kdmccormick 3y ago
Yup. I give to the extreme poverty and animal welfare funds, because they seem like a great way to give to well-vetted high-impact charities. The longtermism stuff has always struck me oddly alongside those other obviously-beneficial causes. It's a bummer that's all some people think of when they hear EA.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Maybe because if all you want to do is to support things like that, there is no need for something like the EA movement in the first place?
  - kdmccormick 3y ago
    I still find valuable the idea of evaluating charities based on their effectiveness, but I guess you could rely on charity evaluators for that without taking on the entire conceptual burden of EA.
  - kiba 3y ago
    Donating to causes that resonates with you isn't the same thing as donating to causes that work on the most necessary and urgent problem of humanity.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      It is if what resonates with you is whatever you consider "the most necessary and urgent problem of humanity."
      - kiba 3y ago
        That's why there's a whole movement of people dedicated to convincing people to donate to the most necessary and urgent problem of humanity and trying to decide what exactly is that. What we chose to donate to are organizations like churches, museum, theaters, makerspaces, and the like. They enrich our lives in the neighborhoods we live in, but they're not exactly urgent as someone on the other side of the world dying to something perfectly preventable like cholera.

kiba 3y ago

EA continues to look like moral cover for good old-fashioned profit maximization. The "Effective" part is immediate and drives short-term incentives like maximizing profit. The "Altruism" part is hypothetical and delegated to a future date where the resources acquired "effectively" are deployed for the benefit of humanity. In the gap between the two are fallible human beings, not necessarily more virtuous than average, that task themselves with making decisions about what's important. I do not agree that we should try to maximize our profit and then only help people at a nebulous distant point in time. We all make priorities about things important to us. Some of that shows in what we chose to donate to. A lot of charities we donate to are not fundamentally urgent because they do not work on saving lives. A lot of EA is simply prioritizing what saves the most lives, right here, and right now. The focus on hypothetical dangers like GAI is telling here. If you can invent an apocalyptic boogeyman that you're "addressing" by funding thinktanks and sitting on company boards you don't actually have to spend anything on addressing immediate issues. They can be sincerely strongly held belief. The fact that OpenAI is actually...not doing anything remotely about it makes me discount OpenAI as a serious organization, regardless of the nebulous and hypothetical nature of GAI. For the record, I don't think we are able to even remotely approach the problem if we can't take of issues of alignments of human actors. Once we figure that out, maybe we'll have a concrete path for aligning GAI should that or when it becomes a technological possibility.

unyttigfjelltol 3y ago
> The "Altruism" part is hypothetical and delegated to a future date The only resources we as people have are our actions. So, if you want to do some good, do it today. There's no shortcut and no reason to think anyone in the future will act other than precisely as you do now.
jwestbury 3y ago
> A lot of EA is simply prioritizing what saves the most lives, right here, and right now. Is this altruism, or just utilitarianism by a different name? This is obviously a serious ethics question, and one that likely has no objective answer - but utilitarianism has run contrary to the morals of most societies, generally.

adleyjulian 3y ago

I think the EA community is very open about the uncertainties around the risks of AGI and the difficulty in addressing them. The point is that if there is even a 0.01% chance that AGI could threaten the existence of humanity then it's worth spending time and thought addressing it. NASA has the Sentry program to look out for asteroids, with a budget of around $35 million, and the odds of a "big one" hitting in our life time is less than 1 in 10,000. That said, the majority of EA spending is on global health and development to address immediate issues, on programs like Against Malaria.

JohnFen 3y ago
> The point is that if there is even a 0.01% chance that AGI could threaten the existence of humanity then it's worth spending time and thought addressing it. The disconnect I see is that if there is even a 0.01% chance that is could threaten the existence of humanity, then why in the world would anyone actively pursue making it happen before figuring out a way to mitigate that risk?
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
  I think it’s arms race logic. “If we don’t pursue it before figuring out risk, worse people will pursue it without figuring out the risk.”
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    That's not logical, though. Assuming that "worse people" will develop it anyway, wouldn't it make more sense to let them, and focus entirely on how to mitigate the risk instead?
    - 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
      I mean, yeah. I phrased it in a weak way intentionally.