5 ms·

The Deaths of Effective Altruism

43 points by laurex 3y ago

Olesya000 3y ago
[dead]
nuc1e0n 3y ago
I've always thought of the "Effective Altruism" movement as a product of big egos. The ones following it think they know better than the ones they're 'saving'. But perhaps the EA adherents are seeking salvation for themselves rather than others. They see the ones they want to help as 'pitiful' in some way and want to provide for them. That seems a rather dehumanizing attitude to me. Maybe people don't view themselves as pitiful and want to provide for themselves rather than be dependent on handouts at some unreliable rando's discression? People on the other side of the planet can have very different societal norms that go unconsidered outside of their communities. I've always thought sticking to 1 or 2 degrees of separation avoids issues of cultural differences and long logistical chains. And who better to ask what would really help people than their friends? Then again, I think fate sometimes chooses you for a bit of charity work and it's wise to go along with it.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- llamaimperative 3y ago
  It’s obvious you’ve done zero research into what EA actually advocates in practice. Lay off the memes and secondary sources for a bit.
- joshuamorton 3y ago
  > I've always thought of the "Effective Altruism" movement as a product of big egos. The ones following it think they know better than the ones they're 'saving'. At least initially, EA was a pretty big proponent of direct aid like GiveDirectly[0], because just giving people money was seen to be more effective than most (though not all[1]) other forms of aid. As for myself, I don't see why someone on the other side of the world would be more or less pitiful than someone locally. My main reason for preferring indirect aid is that there's something morally suspicious to me about only people in my "clan" receiving my charity. Is it really charity if it goes only to people who I like and who are within knowing distance of me? Or am I trying to achieve something? (For the same reasons, I'm careful to keep most of my work anonymous) [0]: GiveWell directed a lot of funds to GiveDirectly early on (https://www.givewell.org/top-charities-fund https://www.givewell.org/top-charities-fund), though they haven't since 2016. [1]: Healthcare interventions like deworming are usually more efficient per dollar, but not by much, but they benefit from economies of scale so directing money to them direction is worthwhile.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    Versus cash, I imagine healthcare is nice because it's not like warlord/agent can seize/embezzle all the cataract surgeries or whatever.
  - human_person 3y ago
    I’ve always approached it from the other side and wondered about the appeal of altruism. Is it really so bad if you help your neighbor or someone you know? If you benefit from the improvement in your community is it some how less valuable? Your own community or clan is what you know best, what you are best positioned to help in monetary and non monetary ways. I also wonder if there is any true altruism. I think people usually benefit from their service or donation even if it’s just feeling good (or perhaps feeling superior to people who focus on supporting their own communities).
    - nuc1e0n 3y ago
      I've thought this too.
    - idiotsecant 3y ago
      > If you benefit from the improvement in your community is it some how less valuable? Yes. Its less valuable by definition because you are subtracting value from the system for yourself in the form of increased social standing. There is a reason that charity should be anonymous. Its not charity otherwise, its quid quo pro.
      - ghufran_syed 3y ago
        I think your example is pretty much the definition of zero-sum thinking - why would a benefit to you automatically "subtract value from the system". I would argue it's a positive sum transaction - the person you helped receives something of value, from a real human they know, strengthening the relationship between the two of you, others in the community see that and are encouraged to do the same, and the recipient feels a sense of obligation to at "pay it forward" any way they can leading to further "good works". Have you really never received anything of value from someone who had no obligation to do so? Not even a lead on a new job, or an introduction to someone who helped your career, or a mentor? If so, do you really feel the situation would have been better if that information had arrived in an anonymous form?
- kazinator 3y ago
  But there are no actual "ones they are saving". Effective Altruists are concerned with unrealized future values, like people thousands of years in the future who don't yet exist. An Effective Altruist is someone who would throw a current, existing person under a bus, if he believed that this would somehow cause three more people to exist sometime in the far future, or help speed up human colonization of the galaxy. Have you looked into what EA is really about?
  - nuc1e0n 3y ago
    Yes I know that. That only makes it worse.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - llamaimperative 3y ago
    Not true. Please explain this list of actually recommended problem areas which have impact today (as well as in the future): https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/cause-areas https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/cause-areas
    - kazinator 3y ago
      It looks suspiciously like the result of someone registering a domain, putting up a server and populating a page. Could be wrong.
      - llamaimperative 3y ago
        Ah yes, if you go to EA’s “official” site then click “Take Action” that’s where it’ll take you. This is as close as you’ll get to an “official” list of endorsed causes, and it’s nothing like what’s being described in this thread. https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
blargey 3y ago
Donate more, and donate to charities that are effective (use more of the donations for actions directly related to their mission statement instead of marketing/admin/etc). The rest is interpretation, as they say. That's all "EA" is. I won't speculate on why some people are so insistent that we must throw the baby out with the bathwater immediately, declare EA Dead, and forget it ever existed.
- tekla 3y ago
  Because its associated with bad things. And associated with bad things makes the thing bad too. No other thinking required
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    > No other thinking required I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not here. EA is just a slogan and a group of people. If those people are doing (significant amounts of) bad things in the name of EA, associating them, then EA is bad. The slogan doesn't override the people. The people doing EA are EA. Trying to make it more complicated is overthinking it. What you said is correct.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
  > Donate more, and donate to charities that are effective (use more of the donations for actions directly related to their mission statement instead of marketing/admin/etc). The rest is interpretation, as they say. That's all "EA" is. The problem with EA, isn’t that it advocates doing that - there are a lot of moral frameworks that advocate that, but it creates an ethical framework that pretty much focuses solely on that and ignores the social and moral implications of the person’s behavior outside this. So no matter how many people the person is screwing over in their pursuit of wealth, no matter how many social rules they are breaking, as long as they are donating, they are fine. It basically reduces morality to a cash flow problem and ignores the other moral and social implications of the (rich or wannabe rich) person’s pursuits and actions.
  - adamnemecek 3y ago
nolverostae 3y ago
I kind of regret reading this article. It's very long and doesn't have all that much interesting information. It starts with the author discovering that some charities are not effective, especially when rich people go to poor countries and try to do direct actions. Then it somehow uses this as an argument that trying to measure the effectiveness of charities is bad and that giving money to charities in general is bad because sometimes charities are mismanaged. Half of the article is basically complaining that charities in general are sometimes ineffective or have unintended negative side effects (for example malaria bed nets being used for fishing). Guess what - the fact that it's a difficult problem to tell how to do good is exactly why EA exists - to at least try and bring order into chaos. What's the alternative? The article just keeps complaining about collecting data and statistics and trying to estimate good by saying "but sometimes the estimates are wrong!", but it presents zero alternatives. It's basically just advocating against charity in general, saying that it should be the job of the governments. Or it's arguing that you people need to only support things they are emotionally invested in, because "unsentimental calculations" are evil. The other half of the article is citing random billionaire's opinions on the world and complaining that they are self-important and weaving in lots of random things about the SBF trial for some reason. There's some valid criticisms of effective altruism in the article, specifically: criticizing how they try to put a value on everything (even when it is a hard problem or not exact) and criticizing longtermism (because it's difficult to say whether to weigh the present or the future more). It also mentions the common discussion about doing direct action yourself versus spending more time working and donating more money. But I think those are already the obvious discussions about EA that everyone knows about.
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  > But I think those are already the obvious discussions about EA that everyone knows about. I assure you that everyone does not know about them. And more to the point, reading the EA forums, it does not appear that the EA community has even settled on any sort of strategy for addressing them; other than “hope we can minimize the issues until people run out of attention span and we can treat this as old news.”
- mif 3y ago
  I had a hunch, came to the comments first, and found your summary. Thanks for that.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
EA is basically Ethics for Assholes. Basically it allows assholes who have a single minded focus on making money a way to salve their conscience by reducing morality to a cash flow problem and ignoring any of the other social and moral implications of their behavior.
- cwillu 3y ago
  “These ideas aren’t wholly original to us or the effective altruism community. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, preached about a version of earning to give in the 18th century. He advocated the principles: “Gain all you can, save all you can, give all you can.” And he even caveated this advice with sensible constraints, saying in a sermon that we shouldn’t work so hard that we hurt ourselves and that we should “gain all we can without hurting our neighbour.”” “For this reason, many people think it’s our top recommendation for the majority of people. But it’s not.” “Might you do harm in a high-earning career? Yes, some high-earning careers can do a lot of harm. We don’t recommend taking careers you think might be harmful in order to donate. First, if the harm done by the work offsets the good done by your donations — including both direct and indirect harms — then that’s clearly overall negative for the world and bad by any lights. But even if you think the donations might outweigh the costs of a harmful career, we think doing harm “for the greater good” is almost never a good idea. And if you think you might be the exception, you’re almost certainly not. This is for many reasons, so we’ve written a separate article about why not to take a harmful career in order to do more good.”
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
    > John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, preached about a version of earning to give in the 18th century. He advocated the principles Yes, he did. However, his advocacy was in the context within the larger of Christian morality and inherited a lot from it. The modern version of effective altruism does not exist within a larger ethical/religious framework which makes it more prone to go wrong.
reducesuffering 3y ago
It's an interesting time when Stanford Professors are putting out weak mudslinging articles like this. Note the difference: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-effective https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-eff...
skybrian 3y ago
There's some detailed criticism of this article in the comments on the EA forum: > The overwhelmingly thrust of Wenar's article -- from the opening jab about asking EAs "how many people they’ve killed", to the conditional I bolded above -- seems to be to frame charitable giving as a morally risky endeavor, in contrast to the implicit safety of just doing nothing and letting people die. ... > (If he just wants to advocate for more GiveDirectly-style anti-paternalistic interventions that "shift our power to them", that seems fine but obviously doesn't justify the other 95% of the article.) https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cfwxiG8ovaAA9us6t/linkpost-leif-wenar-s-the-deaths-of-effective-altruism https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cfwxiG8ovaAA9us6t/... And here's a link to GiveWell's comments on the article (that Wired sent them for review). https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WfBvF7N4Z1VyQcqtQmqJPY59J33IjHKOwVlRH6gTwzM/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WfBvF7N4Z1VyQcqtQmqJPY59...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bitwize 3y ago
I thought effective altruism was based on the work of Peter Singer. Like, as long as you have resources to spare, you are morally obligated to use those resources in the most effective way possible to help people and other living beings -- a perspective kind of aligned with Kropotkin's mutual aid. With Sam Bankman-Fried we're looking at the libertarian techbro version of that, which is basically "get rich first, then help people". Or, in the extreme case, "sure, I'd like to help, but I'm not rich enough to do so... effectively."
cowthulhu 3y ago
I always feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I see how vitriolic the discussion around EA gets. I’m sure you can find some crazies in who adhere to EA in wacky ways (as with any other group), but the brunt of the focus of EA has always clearly been to do the most good per dollar, or to be effective with your altruism. Maybe a secondary belief is that you should donate 10% of your income to charity. These seem like obviously good things, to the point that I don’t understand how people can be so against while maintaining a straight face.
- adamnemecek 3y ago
  The idea itself is fine, but the people who are drawn to it are a weird bunch. It feels very culty too.
  - cowthulhu 3y ago
    I’ll admit that’s a pretty fair criticism :)
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  For me it’s the unspoken assumption that “step 0” (attain wealth in the first place) is left as an exercise to the reader. A given. It’s all so self aggrandizing and tone deaf.
- kromem 3y ago
  The movement kind of got co-opted by some strong personalities who somewhat went down their own rabbit hole of utilitarianism. Also, SBF wasn't good optics.
  - jakobnissen 3y ago
    Did it get co-opted, or are you only exposed to the extremely online segment of EA that talks about AI and future generations and Roko's Basilisk? From what I can tell, EA is still alive and well I the real world, donating bed nets to combat malaria and other very real, worldly tasks.
Dylan16807 3y ago
> The teachers gave your kids the pills this morning without asking you. By the next day your kids are feeling better—but how do you feel? How do you feel about the teachers and the superintendent? What do you think about those Chinese trillionaires, now bragging back home about how they’ve helped the poor foreigners? Uh, I feel pretty happy about it? I'd also be somewhat annoyed at the superintendent, the one that actually did the scheduling if this reaction wasn't a total fluke. But much happier than annoyed. I mean, you just told me the pill adds a month of life expectancy. Am I supposed to not think that's true a couple sentences later? The way this analogy is explained is a mess.
brcmthrowaway 3y ago
Just join Jane Street and be quiet already!
geonaut 3y ago
I don’t find anything offensive about carefully considering how to do good, or taking a longer term view of humanity. I think the thing that is irritating about EA is that it often feels like this generation’s ‘post-colonial guilt’. Many people with the privilege to act on their EA sentiments are the beneficiaries of financial inequality, either via inheritance or VC froth, and can afford to absorb the risks. To be honest, EA feels like church without the beardy cloud man, and IMO is a better use of the philosophy brain-trust than metaphysics, so I have no desire to see it fail. The cultish part is more a Silicon Valley thing than an EA thing.
indigo0086 3y ago
Effective altruism = ineffective autism.

43 points by laurex 3y ago

[dead]

I've always thought of the "Effective Altruism" movement as a product of big egos. The ones following it think they know better than the ones they're 'saving'. But perhaps the EA adherents are seeking salvation for themselves rather than others. They see the ones they want to help as 'pitiful' in some way and want to provide for them. That seems a rather dehumanizing attitude to me. Maybe people don't view themselves as pitiful and want to provide for themselves rather than be dependent on handouts at some unreliable rando's discression? People on the other side of the planet can have very different societal norms that go unconsidered outside of their communities. I've always thought sticking to 1 or 2 degrees of separation avoids issues of cultural differences and long logistical chains. And who better to ask what would really help people than their friends? Then again, I think fate sometimes chooses you for a bit of charity work and it's wise to go along with it.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
llamaimperative 3y ago
It’s obvious you’ve done zero research into what EA actually advocates in practice. Lay off the memes and secondary sources for a bit.
joshuamorton 3y ago
> I've always thought of the "Effective Altruism" movement as a product of big egos. The ones following it think they know better than the ones they're 'saving'. At least initially, EA was a pretty big proponent of direct aid like GiveDirectly[0], because just giving people money was seen to be more effective than most (though not all[1]) other forms of aid. As for myself, I don't see why someone on the other side of the world would be more or less pitiful than someone locally. My main reason for preferring indirect aid is that there's something morally suspicious to me about only people in my "clan" receiving my charity. Is it really charity if it goes only to people who I like and who are within knowing distance of me? Or am I trying to achieve something? (For the same reasons, I'm careful to keep most of my work anonymous) [0]: GiveWell directed a lot of funds to GiveDirectly early on (https://www.givewell.org/top-charities-fund https://www.givewell.org/top-charities-fund), though they haven't since 2016. [1]: Healthcare interventions like deworming are usually more efficient per dollar, but not by much, but they benefit from economies of scale so directing money to them direction is worthwhile.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  Versus cash, I imagine healthcare is nice because it's not like warlord/agent can seize/embezzle all the cataract surgeries or whatever.
- human_person 3y ago
  I’ve always approached it from the other side and wondered about the appeal of altruism. Is it really so bad if you help your neighbor or someone you know? If you benefit from the improvement in your community is it some how less valuable? Your own community or clan is what you know best, what you are best positioned to help in monetary and non monetary ways. I also wonder if there is any true altruism. I think people usually benefit from their service or donation even if it’s just feeling good (or perhaps feeling superior to people who focus on supporting their own communities).
  - nuc1e0n 3y ago
    I've thought this too.
  - idiotsecant 3y ago
    > If you benefit from the improvement in your community is it some how less valuable? Yes. Its less valuable by definition because you are subtracting value from the system for yourself in the form of increased social standing. There is a reason that charity should be anonymous. Its not charity otherwise, its quid quo pro.
    - ghufran_syed 3y ago
      I think your example is pretty much the definition of zero-sum thinking - why would a benefit to you automatically "subtract value from the system". I would argue it's a positive sum transaction - the person you helped receives something of value, from a real human they know, strengthening the relationship between the two of you, others in the community see that and are encouraged to do the same, and the recipient feels a sense of obligation to at "pay it forward" any way they can leading to further "good works". Have you really never received anything of value from someone who had no obligation to do so? Not even a lead on a new job, or an introduction to someone who helped your career, or a mentor? If so, do you really feel the situation would have been better if that information had arrived in an anonymous form?
kazinator 3y ago
But there are no actual "ones they are saving". Effective Altruists are concerned with unrealized future values, like people thousands of years in the future who don't yet exist. An Effective Altruist is someone who would throw a current, existing person under a bus, if he believed that this would somehow cause three more people to exist sometime in the far future, or help speed up human colonization of the galaxy. Have you looked into what EA is really about?
- nuc1e0n 3y ago
  Yes I know that. That only makes it worse.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- llamaimperative 3y ago
  Not true. Please explain this list of actually recommended problem areas which have impact today (as well as in the future): https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/cause-areas https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/cause-areas
  - kazinator 3y ago
    It looks suspiciously like the result of someone registering a domain, putting up a server and populating a page. Could be wrong.
    - llamaimperative 3y ago
      Ah yes, if you go to EA’s “official” site then click “Take Action” that’s where it’ll take you. This is as close as you’ll get to an “official” list of endorsed causes, and it’s nothing like what’s being described in this thread. https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

blargey 3y ago

Donate more, and donate to charities that are effective (use more of the donations for actions directly related to their mission statement instead of marketing/admin/etc). The rest is interpretation, as they say. That's all "EA" is. I won't speculate on why some people are so insistent that we must throw the baby out with the bathwater immediately, declare EA Dead, and forget it ever existed.

tekla 3y ago
Because its associated with bad things. And associated with bad things makes the thing bad too. No other thinking required
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  > No other thinking required I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not here. EA is just a slogan and a group of people. If those people are doing (significant amounts of) bad things in the name of EA, associating them, then EA is bad. The slogan doesn't override the people. The people doing EA are EA. Trying to make it more complicated is overthinking it. What you said is correct.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
> Donate more, and donate to charities that are effective (use more of the donations for actions directly related to their mission statement instead of marketing/admin/etc). The rest is interpretation, as they say. That's all "EA" is. The problem with EA, isn’t that it advocates doing that - there are a lot of moral frameworks that advocate that, but it creates an ethical framework that pretty much focuses solely on that and ignores the social and moral implications of the person’s behavior outside this. So no matter how many people the person is screwing over in their pursuit of wealth, no matter how many social rules they are breaking, as long as they are donating, they are fine. It basically reduces morality to a cash flow problem and ignores the other moral and social implications of the (rich or wannabe rich) person’s pursuits and actions.
- adamnemecek 3y ago

nolverostae 3y ago

I kind of regret reading this article. It's very long and doesn't have all that much interesting information. It starts with the author discovering that some charities are not effective, especially when rich people go to poor countries and try to do direct actions. Then it somehow uses this as an argument that trying to measure the effectiveness of charities is bad and that giving money to charities in general is bad because sometimes charities are mismanaged. Half of the article is basically complaining that charities in general are sometimes ineffective or have unintended negative side effects (for example malaria bed nets being used for fishing). Guess what - the fact that it's a difficult problem to tell how to do good is exactly why EA exists - to at least try and bring order into chaos. What's the alternative? The article just keeps complaining about collecting data and statistics and trying to estimate good by saying "but sometimes the estimates are wrong!", but it presents zero alternatives. It's basically just advocating against charity in general, saying that it should be the job of the governments. Or it's arguing that you people need to only support things they are emotionally invested in, because "unsentimental calculations" are evil. The other half of the article is citing random billionaire's opinions on the world and complaining that they are self-important and weaving in lots of random things about the SBF trial for some reason. There's some valid criticisms of effective altruism in the article, specifically: criticizing how they try to put a value on everything (even when it is a hard problem or not exact) and criticizing longtermism (because it's difficult to say whether to weigh the present or the future more). It also mentions the common discussion about doing direct action yourself versus spending more time working and donating more money. But I think those are already the obvious discussions about EA that everyone knows about.

matthewdgreen 3y ago
> But I think those are already the obvious discussions about EA that everyone knows about. I assure you that everyone does not know about them. And more to the point, reading the EA forums, it does not appear that the EA community has even settled on any sort of strategy for addressing them; other than “hope we can minimize the issues until people run out of attention span and we can treat this as old news.”
mif 3y ago
I had a hunch, came to the comments first, and found your summary. Thanks for that.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

EA is basically Ethics for Assholes. Basically it allows assholes who have a single minded focus on making money a way to salve their conscience by reducing morality to a cash flow problem and ignoring any of the other social and moral implications of their behavior.

cwillu 3y ago
“These ideas aren’t wholly original to us or the effective altruism community. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, preached about a version of earning to give in the 18th century. He advocated the principles: “Gain all you can, save all you can, give all you can.” And he even caveated this advice with sensible constraints, saying in a sermon that we shouldn’t work so hard that we hurt ourselves and that we should “gain all we can without hurting our neighbour.”” “For this reason, many people think it’s our top recommendation for the majority of people. But it’s not.” “Might you do harm in a high-earning career? Yes, some high-earning careers can do a lot of harm. We don’t recommend taking careers you think might be harmful in order to donate. First, if the harm done by the work offsets the good done by your donations — including both direct and indirect harms — then that’s clearly overall negative for the world and bad by any lights. But even if you think the donations might outweigh the costs of a harmful career, we think doing harm “for the greater good” is almost never a good idea. And if you think you might be the exception, you’re almost certainly not. This is for many reasons, so we’ve written a separate article about why not to take a harmful career in order to do more good.”
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
  > John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, preached about a version of earning to give in the 18th century. He advocated the principles Yes, he did. However, his advocacy was in the context within the larger of Christian morality and inherited a lot from it. The modern version of effective altruism does not exist within a larger ethical/religious framework which makes it more prone to go wrong.

reducesuffering 3y ago

It's an interesting time when Stanford Professors are putting out weak mudslinging articles like this. Note the difference: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-effective https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-eff...

skybrian 3y ago

There's some detailed criticism of this article in the comments on the EA forum: > The overwhelmingly thrust of Wenar's article -- from the opening jab about asking EAs "how many people they’ve killed", to the conditional I bolded above -- seems to be to frame charitable giving as a morally risky endeavor, in contrast to the implicit safety of just doing nothing and letting people die. ... > (If he just wants to advocate for more GiveDirectly-style anti-paternalistic interventions that "shift our power to them", that seems fine but obviously doesn't justify the other 95% of the article.) https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cfwxiG8ovaAA9us6t/linkpost-leif-wenar-s-the-deaths-of-effective-altruism https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cfwxiG8ovaAA9us6t/... And here's a link to GiveWell's comments on the article (that Wired sent them for review). https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WfBvF7N4Z1VyQcqtQmqJPY59J33IjHKOwVlRH6gTwzM/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WfBvF7N4Z1VyQcqtQmqJPY59...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bitwize 3y ago

I thought effective altruism was based on the work of Peter Singer. Like, as long as you have resources to spare, you are morally obligated to use those resources in the most effective way possible to help people and other living beings -- a perspective kind of aligned with Kropotkin's mutual aid. With Sam Bankman-Fried we're looking at the libertarian techbro version of that, which is basically "get rich first, then help people". Or, in the extreme case, "sure, I'd like to help, but I'm not rich enough to do so... effectively."

cowthulhu 3y ago

I always feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I see how vitriolic the discussion around EA gets. I’m sure you can find some crazies in who adhere to EA in wacky ways (as with any other group), but the brunt of the focus of EA has always clearly been to do the most good per dollar, or to be effective with your altruism. Maybe a secondary belief is that you should donate 10% of your income to charity. These seem like obviously good things, to the point that I don’t understand how people can be so against while maintaining a straight face.

adamnemecek 3y ago
The idea itself is fine, but the people who are drawn to it are a weird bunch. It feels very culty too.
- cowthulhu 3y ago
  I’ll admit that’s a pretty fair criticism :)
ShamelessC 3y ago
For me it’s the unspoken assumption that “step 0” (attain wealth in the first place) is left as an exercise to the reader. A given. It’s all so self aggrandizing and tone deaf.
kromem 3y ago
The movement kind of got co-opted by some strong personalities who somewhat went down their own rabbit hole of utilitarianism. Also, SBF wasn't good optics.
- jakobnissen 3y ago
  Did it get co-opted, or are you only exposed to the extremely online segment of EA that talks about AI and future generations and Roko's Basilisk? From what I can tell, EA is still alive and well I the real world, donating bed nets to combat malaria and other very real, worldly tasks.

Dylan16807 3y ago

> The teachers gave your kids the pills this morning without asking you. By the next day your kids are feeling better—but how do you feel? How do you feel about the teachers and the superintendent? What do you think about those Chinese trillionaires, now bragging back home about how they’ve helped the poor foreigners? Uh, I feel pretty happy about it? I'd also be somewhat annoyed at the superintendent, the one that actually did the scheduling if this reaction wasn't a total fluke. But much happier than annoyed. I mean, you just told me the pill adds a month of life expectancy. Am I supposed to not think that's true a couple sentences later? The way this analogy is explained is a mess.

brcmthrowaway 3y ago

Just join Jane Street and be quiet already!

geonaut 3y ago

I don’t find anything offensive about carefully considering how to do good, or taking a longer term view of humanity. I think the thing that is irritating about EA is that it often feels like this generation’s ‘post-colonial guilt’. Many people with the privilege to act on their EA sentiments are the beneficiaries of financial inequality, either via inheritance or VC froth, and can afford to absorb the risks. To be honest, EA feels like church without the beardy cloud man, and IMO is a better use of the philosophy brain-trust than metaphysics, so I have no desire to see it fail. The cultish part is more a Silicon Valley thing than an EA thing.

indigo0086 3y ago

Effective altruism = ineffective autism.