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A new book about the origins of Effective Altruism

126 points by Thevet 11mo ago

philipallstar 11mo ago
> In the past, there was nothing we could do about people in another country. Peter Singer says that’s just an evolutionary hangover, a moral error. This is sadly still true, given the percentage of money that goes to getting someone some help vs the amount dedicated to actually helping.
- weepinbell 11mo ago
  Certainly charities exist that are ineffective, but there is very strong evidence that there exist charities that do enormous amounts of direct, targeted good. givewell.org is probably the most prominent org recommended by many EAs that does and aggregates research on charitable interventions and shows with strong RCT evidence that a marginal charitable donation can save a life for between $3,000 and $5,500. This estimate has uncertainty, but there's extremely strong evidence that money to good charities like the ones GiveWell recommends massively improves people's lives. GiveDirectly is another org that's much more straightforward - giving money directly to people in extreme poverty, with very low overheads. The evidence that that improves people's lives is very very strong (https://www.givedirectly.org/gdresearch/ https://www.givedirectly.org/gdresearch/). It absolutely makes sense to be concerned about "is my hypothetical charitable donation actually doing good", which is more or less a premise of the EA movement. But the answer seems to be "emphatically, yes, there are ways to donate money that do an enormous amount of good".
  - gopher_space 11mo ago
    > giving money directly to people in extreme poverty, with very low overheads. The evidence that that improves people's lives is very very strong When you see the return on money spent this way other forms of aid start looking like gatekeeping and rent-seeking.
    - weepinbell 11mo ago
      GiveWell actually benchmarks their charity recommendations against direct cash transfers and will generally only recommend charities whose benefits are Nx cash for some N that I don't remember off the top of my head. I buy that lots of charities aren't effective, but some are! That said I also think that longer term research and investment in things like infrastructure matters too and can't easily be measured as an RCT. GiveWell style giving is great and it's awesome that the evidence is so strong (and it's most of my charitable giving), but that doesn't mean other charities with less easily researched goals are bad necessarily.
      - zozbot234 11mo ago
        The Open Philanthropy Project is one major actor in EA that focuses mostly on "less easily researched goals" and riskier giving (but potentially higher-impact on average) than GiveWell.
    - rincebrain 11mo ago
      Eventually, almost any organization distorts from its nominal goal to self-perpetuation. As the numbers get larger, it becomes easier and easier to suggest that the organization's continued existence is still a net positive as you waste more and more on the organization bloating. It's also surprisingly hard to avoid - consider how the ACA required that 85% of premiums go to care, and how that meant that the incentives became for the prices to become enormous.
      - potato3732842 11mo ago
        >consider how the ACA required that 85% of premiums go to care, and how that meant that the incentives became for the prices to become enormous. To be fair, that particular example was obvious from day 1.
        rincebrain 11mo ago
        Sure, it wasn't a surprise how the incentives for that would work out. But it's an excellent example of how something you could see some naive people in good faith claiming is a good thing can be pathologized.
  - philipallstar 11mo ago
    That's fantastic, and I think most charities start this way.
- cm2012 11mo ago
  You can pretty reliably save a life in a 3rd world country for about $5k each right now.
  - tavavex 11mo ago
    How? I'm curious because the numbers are so specific ($5000 = 1 human life), unclouded by the usual variances of getting the money to people at a macro scale and having it go through many hands and across borders. Is it related to treating a specific illness that just objectively costs that much to treat?
    - cm2012 11mo ago
      Here is a detailed methodology: https://www.givewell.org/impact-estimates https://www.givewell.org/impact-estimates. It convinced me that $5k is a reasonable estimate.
      - bombcar 11mo ago
        A weird corollary to this is that if you work for one of these charities, you’re paid in human lives (say you make $50k, that’s ten people who could have been saved).
        lmm 11mo ago
        That's an extremely weird way to think about it. The same logic applies to anyone doing any job - whatever money you spend on yourself could be spent saving lives instead, if you really want to think about it that way. There's no reason that people working for an effective charity should feel more guilty about their salaries than people working for any other job - if anything it's the opposite, since salaries usually do not reflect the full value of a person's work.
        philipallstar 11mo ago
        > That's an extremely weird way to think about it Perhaps, but it's exactly the type of thinking the article is describing.
- jimbokun 11mo ago
  Peter Singer is the LAST person I would go to for advice on morality or ethics.
zkmon 11mo ago
[flagged]
- gtowey 11mo ago
  "Shouldn't you feed the lepers, Supply Side Jesus?" "No, that would only make them lazy!" https://www.beliefnet.com/news/2003/09/the-gospel-of-supply-side-jesus.aspx https://www.beliefnet.com/news/2003/09/the-gospel-of-supply-...
jmount 11mo ago
Effective Altruism and Utilitarianism are just a couple of the presentations authoritarians sometimes make for convenience. To me the code simply as "if I had everything now, that would eventually be good for everybody." The arguments always feel to me too similar "it is good Carnegie called in the Pinkerton's to suppress labor, as it allowed him to build libraries." Yes it is good what Carnegie did later, but it doesn't completely paper over what he did earlier.
- lesuorac 11mo ago
  > The arguments always feel to me too similar "it is good Carnegie called in the Pinkerton's to suppress labor Is that an actual EA argument? The value is all at the margins. Like Carnegie had legitimate functional businesses that would be profitable without Pinkerton's. So without Pinkerton's he'd still be able to afford probably every philanthropic thing he did so it doesn't justify it. I don't really follow the EA space but the actual arguments I've heard are largely about working in FANG to make 3x the money outside of fang to allow them to donate 1x ~1.5x the money. Which to me is very justifiable. But to stick with the article. I don't think taking in billions via fraud to donate some of it to charity is a net positive on society.
  - hobs 11mo ago
    When you work for something that directly contradicts peaceful civil society you are basically saying the mass murder of today is ok because it allows you to assuage your guilt by giving to your local charity - its only effective if altruism is not your goal.
    - lesuorac 11mo ago
      It still depends on the marginal contribution. A janitor at the CIA in the 1960s is certainly working at an organization that is disrupting the peaceful Iranian society and turning it into a "death to America" one. But I would not agree that they're doing a net-negative for society because the janitor's marginal contribution towards that objective is 0. It might not be the best thing the janitor could do to society (as compared to running a soup kitchen).
TimorousBestie 11mo ago
> . . . but also what’s called long-termism, which is worrying about the future of the planet and existential risks like pandemics, nuclear war, AI, or being hit by comets. When it made that shift, it began to attract a lot of Silicon Valley types, who may not have been so dedicated to the development part of the effective altruism program. The rationalists thought they understood time discounting and thought they could correct for it. They were wrong. Then the internal contradictions of long-termism allowed EA to get suckered by the Silicon Valley crew. Alas.
libraryofbabel 11mo ago
I expect the book itself (Death in a Shallow Pond: A Philosopher, a Drowning Child, and Strangers in Need, by David Edmonds) is good, as the author has written a lot of other solid books making philosophy accessible. The title of the article though, is rather clickbaity: it’s hardly “recovering” the origins of EA to say that it owes a huge debt to Peter Singer, who is only the most famous utilitarian philosopher of the late 20th century! (Peter Singer’s books are also good: his Hegel: A Very Short Introduction made me feel kinda like I understood what Hegel was getting at. I probably don’t of course, but it was nice to feel that way!)
- dang 11mo ago
  Ok, we've de-recovered the origins in the title above.
- Viliam1234 11mo ago
  > it’s hardly “recovering” the origins of EA to say that it owes a huge debt to Peter Singer Guessing by the contents of this comment section, many people seem to believe that EA was invented by SBF, so it can be quite a shock for them to learn otherwise. (That of course assumes that they would read the article...)
CactusBlue 11mo ago
> I think they’re recovering. They’ve learned a few lessons, including not to be too in hock to a few powerful and wealthy individuals. I do not believe the EA movement to be recoverable; it is built on flawed foundations and its issues are inherent. The only way I see out of it is total dissolution; it cannot be reformed.
- flexagoon 11mo ago
  Which of the foundations is flawed, the "we have the ability to help others and should use it" or the "some ways of helping others are more effective than others"?
hexator 11mo ago
I find it to be a dangerous ideology since it can effectively be used to justify anything. I joined an EA group online (from a popular YouTube channel) and the first conversation I saw was a thread by someone advocating for eugenics. And it only got worse from there. > A paradox of effective altruism is that by seeking to overcome individual bias through rationalism, its solutions sometimes ignore the structural bias that shapes our world. Yes, this just about sums it up. As a movement they seem to be attracting some listless contrarians that seem entirely too willing to dig up old demons of the past.
- nullc 11mo ago
  > through rationalism, When they write "rationalism" you should read "rationalization".
  - chrisweekly 11mo ago
    Yes! It's a crucial distinction. Rationalism is about being rational / logical -- moving closer to neutrality and "truth". Whereas to rationalize something is often about masking selfish motives, making excuses, or (self-)deception -- moving away from "truth".
  - XorNot 11mo ago
    It's a variant of how you instantly know what a government will be like depending how much democracy they put in their name.
    - potato3732842 11mo ago
      "If a state calls itself a commonwealth you know it sucks for the common man there" or something like it is one I've heard before. It's at least 50% right in my experience.
- mikkupikku 11mo ago
  Agreed. It's firmly an "ends justify the means" ideology, reliant on accurately predicting future outcomes to justify present actions. This sort of thing gives free license to any sociopath with enough creativity to spin some yarn with handwavy math about the bad outcome their malicious actions are meant to be preventing.
keiferski 11mo ago
The popularity of EA always seemed pretty obvious to me: here's a philosophy that says it doesn't matter what kind of person you are or how you make your fortune, as long as you put some amount of money toward problems. Exploiting people to make money is fine, as long as some portion of that money is going toward "a good cause." There is really no element of self virtue in the way that virtue ethics has..it's just pure calculation. It's the perfect philosophy for morally questionable people with a lot of money. Which is exactly who got involved. That's not to say that all the work they're doing/have done is bad, but it's not really surprising why bad actors attached themselves to the movement.
- nonethewiser 11mo ago
  >The popularity of EA always seemed pretty obvious to me: here's a philosophy that says it doesn't matter what kind of person you are or how you make your fortune, as long as you put some amount of money toward problems. Exploiting people to make money is fine, as long as some portion of that money is going toward "a good cause." I dont think this is a very accurate interpretation of the idea - even with how flawed the movement is. EA is about donating your money effectively. IE ensuring the donation gets used well. At it's face, that's kind of obvious. But when you take it to an extreme you blur the line between "donation" and something else. It has selected for very self-righteous people. But the idea itself is not really about excusing you being a bad person, and the donation target is definitely NOT unimportant.
  - some_guy_nobel 11mo ago
    You claim OP's interpretation is inaccurate, while it tracks perfectly with many of EA's most notorious supporters. Given that contrast, I'd ask what evidence do you have for why OP's interpretation is incorrect, and what evidence do you have that your interpretation is correct?
    - jandrese 11mo ago
      It's like libertarianism. There is a massive gulf between the written goals and the actual actions of the proponents. It might be more accurately thought of as a vehicle for plausible deniability than an actual ethos.
chaseadam17 11mo ago
Man, EA is so close to getting it. They are right that we have a moral obligation to help those in need but they are wrong about how to do it. Don't outsource your altruism by donating to some GiveWell-recommended nonprofit. Be a human, get to know people, and ask if/how they want help. Start close to home where you can speak the same language and connect with people. The issues with EA all stem from the fact that the movement centralizes power into the hands of a few people who decide what is and isn't worthy of altruism. Then similar to communism, that power gets corrupted by self-interested people who use it to fund pet projects, launder reputations, etc. Just try to help the people around you a bit more. If everyone did that, we'd be good.
- keiferski 11mo ago
  That's the thing though, if EA had said: find 10 people in your life and help them directly, it wouldn't have appealed to the well-off white collar workers that want to spend money, but not actually do anything. The movement became popular because it didn't require one to do anything other than spend money in order to be lauded.
  - phantasmish 11mo ago
    Better, it’s a small step to “being a small part of something that’s doing a little evil to a shitload of people (say, working on Google ~scams targeting the vulnerable and spying on everybody~ Ads) is not just OK, but good, as long as I spend a few grand a year buying mosquito nets to prevent malaria, saving a bunch of lives!” Which obviously has great appeal.
- PaulDavisThe1st 11mo ago
  > Just try to help the people around you a bit more. If everyone did that, we'd be good. This describes a generally wealthy society with some people doing better than average and others worse. Redistributing wealth/assistance from the first group to the second will work quite well for this society. It does nothing to address the needs of a society in which almost everyone is poor compared to some other potential aid-giving society. Supporting your friends and neighbors is wonderful. It does not, in general, address the most pressing needs in human populations worldwide.
jmyeet 11mo ago
I'm leery of any philosophy that is popular in tech circles because they all seem to lead to eugenics, hyperindividualism, ignoring systemic issues, deregulation and whatever the latest incarnation of prosperity gospel is. Utilitarianism suffers from the same problems it always had: time frames. What's the best net good 10 minutes from now might be vastly different 10 days, 10 months or 10 years from now. So whatever arbitrary time frame you choose affects the outcome. Taken further, you can choose a time frame that suits your desired outcome. "What can I do?" is a fine question to ask. This crops up a lot in anarchist schools of thought too. But you can't mutual aid your way out of systemic issues. Taken further, focusing on individual action often becomes a fig leaf to argue against any form of taxation (or even regulation) because the government is limiting your ability to be altruistic. I expect the effective altruists have largely moved on to transhumanism as that's pretty popular with the Silicon Valley elite (including Peter Thiel and many CEOs) and that's just a nicer way of arguing for eugenics.
- omnimus 11mo ago
  Effective altruism and transhumanism is kinda the same thing along with other stuff like longetermism. There is even name for the whole thing TESCREAL. Very slightly different positions invented i guess for branding.
matt3D 11mo ago
Is there a term for what I had previously understood Effective Altruism to be, since I don’t want to reference EA in a conversation and have the other person think I’m associated with these sorts of people. I had assumed it was just simple mathematics and the belief that cash is the easiest way to transfer charitable effort. If I can readily earn 50USD/hour, rather than doing a volunteering job that I could pay 25USD/hour to do, I simply do my job and pay for 2 people to volunteer.
- throw4847285 11mo ago
  That's just called utilitarianism/consequentialism. It's a perfect respectable ethical framework. Not the most popular in academic philosophy, but prominent enough that you have to at least engage with it. Effective altruism is a political movement, with all the baggage implicit in that.
  - Vinnl 11mo ago
    Is there a term for looking at the impact of your donations, rather than process (like percentage spent on "overhead")? I like discussing that, but have the same problem as GP.
    - edent 11mo ago
      "Overhead" is part of the work. It's like saying you want to look at the impact of your coding, rather than the overhead spent on documentation. An (effective) charity needs an accountant. It needs an HR team. It needs people to clean the office, order printer toner, and organise meetings.
      - lmm 11mo ago
        > An (effective) charity needs an accountant. It needs an HR team. It needs people to clean the office, order printer toner, and organise meetings. Define "needs". Some overheads are part of the costs of delivering the effective part, sure. But a lot of them are costs of fundraising, or entirely unnecessary costs.
nonethewiser 11mo ago
Man this is such a loaded term. Even in a comment section about the origins of it, everyone is silently using their own definition. I think all discussions of EA should start with a definition at the top. I'll give it a whirl: >Effective altruism: Donating with a focus on helping the most people in the most effective way, using evidence and careful reasoning, and personal values. What happens in practice is a lot worse than this may sound at first glance, so I think people are tempted to change the definition. You could argue EA in practice is just a perversion of the idea in principle, but I dont think its even that. I think the initial assumption that that definition is good and harmless is just wrong. It's basically just spending money to change the world into what you want. It's similar to regular donations except you're way more invested and strategic in advancing the outcome. It's going to invite all sorts of interests and be controversial.
- Lammy 11mo ago
  It's a layer above even that: it's a way to justify doing unethical shit to earn obscene amounts of money by convincing themselves (and attempting to convince others) that the ends justify the means because the entire world will somehow be a better place if I'm allowed to become Very Rich. Anyone who has to call themselves altruistic simply isn't lol
- pfortuny 11mo ago
  On one hand, it is an example of the total-order mentality which impregnates society, and businesses in general: “there exists a single optimum”. That is wrong on so many levels, especially with regards to charities. ETA: the real world has optimals, not an optimum. Then it easily becomes a slippery slope of “you are wrong if you are not optimizing”. ETA: it is very harmful to oneself and to society to think that one is obliged to “do the best”. The ethical rule is “do good and not bad”, no more than that. Finally, it is a receipt for whatever you want to call it: fascism, communism, totalitarianism… “There is an optimum way, hence if you are not doing it, you must be corrected”.
  - flexagoon 11mo ago
    I'm not sure where you found this idea - I don't know any EAs claiming there is a single best optimum for the world. In fact, even with regards to charities, there are a lot of different areas prioritized by EA and choosing which one to prefer is a matter of individual preference. The real world has optimums, and there's not a single best thing to do, but some charities are just obviously closer to being one of those optimums. Donating to an art museum is probably not one of the optimal things for the world, for example.
throw4847285 11mo ago
The fundamental problem is that Effective Altruism is a political movement that spun out of a philosophical one. If you want to talk about the relative strengths and weaknesses of consequentialism, go right ahead. If you want to assume consequentialism is true and discuss specific ethical questions via that framing, power to you. If you want to form a movement, you now have a movement, with all that entails: leaders, policies, politics, contradictions, internecine struggles, money, money, more money, goals, success at your goals, failure at your goals, etc.
- directevolve 11mo ago
  This is historically inaccurate. EA’s origins are in charity evalutions to quantify the marginal impact of a donation. This motivated philosophical debate about how to operationalize “good,” and later became influential enough to have political impact. Obviously EAs were inspired by philosophical ideas or even were philosophers. But that is not the same as it being the downstream practice of a uniform set of pre-existing philosophical commitments.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
jimbokun 11mo ago
> Inspired by Singer, Oxford philosophers Toby Ord and Will MacAskill launched Giving What We Can in 2009, which encouraged members to pledge 10 percent of their incomes to charity. Congratulations you rediscovered tithing.
- skybrian 11mo ago
  They deliberately copied tithing.
  - noname120 11mo ago
    Is that a bad thing though?
    - Viliam1234 11mo ago
      A copyright violation?
mvkel 11mo ago
The ends do not justify the means
cassepipe 11mo ago
I never expected EA to get so much flak in this comment section. Most comments read like a version of "Who do you think you are?". Apparently it is very bad to try to think rationally about how and where to give out your money I mean if rich people want to give out their money for good and beyond are actually trying to do work of researching whether it has an impact instead of just enjoying the high-status feeling of the optics of giving to a good cause (see The Anonymous Donor episode of Curb your enthusiasm), what is it to you all ? It feels to me like some parents wanting to plan the birth of their children and all the people around are like "Nooo, you have to let Nature decide, don't try to calculate where you are in your cycle !!! " Apparently this is "authoritarian", "can be used to justify anything" like eugenics but also will end up "similar to communism" but also leads to "hyperindividualism ? The only way I can explain it is no one wants to give out 1% of their money away and hate the people who make them feel guilty by doing so and saying it would be a good thing so everyone is lashing out
- Sporktacular 11mo ago
  I think it's a case of judging a band by its fans. Enough dodgy billionaires have jumped on to create a poor image. Singer never said donating buys you a license to be evil.
  - cassepipe 11mo ago
    I only know about SBF but SBF was a scammer. Are we surprised that scammers try to use anything that could give them a positive image in order to, you know, scam people ? Also I don't see Elon Musk giving out his money to save non-white people's lives anytime soon So who are we talking about here ?
- TitaRusell 11mo ago
  Yes it is bad. You start to think about who deserves your help. I don't think much of Christians but I love the Salvation army. They patrol the streets picking up whoever they find and help them. Regardless of background, nationality, religion or IQ. It goes against everything tech bros believe in.
m463 11mo ago
You know, I wonder if this is an idea that has been twisted a bit from people who "took over" the idea, like Sam Bankman-Fried. I remember reading the original founder of (MADD) Mothers Against Drunk Driving, left because of this kind of thing. "Lightner stated that MADD "has become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever wanted or envisioned … I didn't start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothers_Against_Drunk_Driving#Positions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothers_Against_Drunk_Driving#...
metalcrow 11mo ago
A lot of these EA comments seem to be using their own definition of EA that they've imagined. It really sounds a lot like people judging Judaism because of what Bernie Madoff did.
- Sporktacular 11mo ago
  Yes! Commenters seem to have jumper onto The Guardian's vibes about it rather than Singer's entirely reasonable logic.
protocolture 11mo ago
>here's a philosophy that says it doesn't matter what kind of person you are or how you make your fortune, as long as you put some amount of money toward problems. TBH I am not like, 100% involved, but my first exposure to EA was a blog post from a notorious rich person, describing how he chose to drop a big chunk of his wealth on a particular charity because it could realistically claim to save more lives per dollar than any other. Now, that might seem like a perfect ahole excuse. But having done time in the NFP/Charity trenches, it immediately made a heap of sense to me. I worked for one that saved 0 lives per dollar, refused to agitate for political change that might save people time and money, and spent an inordinate amount of money on lavish gifts for its own board members. While EA might stink of capitalism, to me, it always seemed obvious. Charities that waste money should be overlooked in favor of ones that help the most people. It seems to me that EA has a bad rap because of the people who champion it, but criticism of EA as a whole seems like cover for extremely shitty charities that should absolutely be starved of money. YMMV
skybrian 11mo ago
The book is titled "Death in a Shallow Pond" and seems to be all about Peter Singer. (I don't see a table of contents online.) The way I first heard of Effective Altruism, I think before it was called that, took a rather different approach. It was from a talk given by the founders of GiveWell at Google. (This is going off of memory so this is approximate.) Their background was people working for a hedge fund who were interested in charity. They had formed a committee to decide where best to donate their money. The way they explained it was that there are lots of rigorous approaches to finding and evaluating for-profit investments. At least in hindsight, you can say which investments earned the most. But there's very little for charities, so they wanted to figure out a rigorous way to evaluate charities so they could pick the best ones to donate to. And unlike what most charitable foundations do, they wanted to publish their recommendations and reasoning. There are philosophical issues involved, but they are inherent in the problem. You have some money and you want to donate it, but don't know which charity to give it to. What do you mean by the best charity? What's a good metric for that? "Lives saved" is a pretty crude metric, but it's better than nothing. "Quality-adjusted life years" is another common one. Unfortunately, when you make a spreadsheet to try to determine these things, there are a lot of uncertain inputs, so doing numeric calculations only provides rough estimates. GiveWell readily admits that, but they still do a lot of research along these lines to determine which charities are the best. There's been a lot of philosophical nonsense associated with Effective Altruism since then, but I think the basic approach still makes sense. Deciding where to donate money is a decision many people have! It doesn't require much in the way of philosophical commitments to decide that it's helpful to do what you can to optimize it. Why wouldn't you want to do a better job of it? GiveWell's approach has evolved quite a bit since then, but it's still about optimizing charitable donations. Here's recent blog post that goes into their decision-making: https://blog.givewell.org/2025/07/17/apples-oranges-and-outcomes/ https://blog.givewell.org/2025/07/17/apples-oranges-and-outc...
- nonameiguess 11mo ago
  As always, topics like this end up becoming a chance for HN commenters to get on soapboxes. Origins of some movement or school of thought or whatever will have many threads. I worked in charity fundraising over 20 years ago as one of the first things I did after first getting out of college, and the first organization I am aware of that did public publishing of charity evaluations was GuideStar, founded in 1994. This is the kind of thing that had always been happening in public foundations and government funding agencies, but they tended not to publish or well organize the results such that any individual donor could query. GuideStar largely collected and published data that was legally required to be public but not easy to collate and query, allowing donors to see what proportion of a donation went to programs versus overhead and how effective each charity was at producing the outcomes it was designed to produce. GiveWell went beyond that to making explicit attempts at ranking impact across possible outcomes, judging some to be more important than others. As I recall from the times, taking this idea to places like Google and hedge funds came from the observation that rich people were giving the most money, but also giving to causes that didn't need the money or weren't really "charitable" by most understanding. Think of Phil Knight almost single handledly turning the University of Oregon into a national football power, places like the Mozilla Foundation or New York Met having chairpersons earning 7 or 8 figure salaries, or the ever popular "give money to get your name on a hospital wing," which usually involves giving money to hospitals that already had a lot of money. Parallel to that is guys like Singer trying to make a more rationally coherent form of consequentialism that doesn't bias the proximate over the distant. Eventually, LessWrong latches onto it, it merges with the "earn to give" folks, and decades later you end up with SBF and that becomes the public view of EA. Fair enough and understandable, but it doesn't mean there were never any good ideas there, and even among rich people, whatever you think of them, I'd say Bill and Melinda Gates helped more with their charity than Phil Knight and the Koch brothers. To me, the basic problem is people, no matter how otherwise rational they may be, don't deal well with being able to grok directionality without being able to precisely quantify, and morality involves a lot of that. We also don't do well with incommensurate goods. Saving the life of a starving child is probably almost always better than making more art, but that doesn't reduce to we want or should want a world with no art, and GiveWell's attempts at measuring impact in dollars clearly doesn't mean we can just spend $5000 x <number of people who die in an average year> and we can achieve zero deaths, or even just zero from malaria and parasitic worms. These are fuzzy categories that involve uncertain value judgments and moving targets with both diminishingly marginal utility and diminishing marginal effectiveness. Likewise, earning to give clearly breaks down if you imagine a world with nothing but hedge fund managers and no nurses. Funding is important, but someone still has to actually do the work and they're "good" people, too, maybe even better. In any case, I at least feel confident in stating that becoming a deca-billionaire at all costs, including fraud and crime, so you can helicopter cash onto poor people later in life, is not the morally optimal human pursuit. But I don't know what actually is.
renewiltord 11mo ago
People get wrapped up in a lot of emotion about this but the idea seemed sound: you want to make some change in the world? It makes sense to spend your money to maximize the change you desire. The GiveWell objective is lives saved or QALYs or whatever. Others have qualia maximized or whatever. But the idea is entirely logical. I think part of the problem with popularization is that many people have complex objective functions, not all of which are socially acceptable to say. As an example, I want to be charitable in a way that grants me status in my social circle, where spending on guinea worm is less impressive than, say, buying ingredients for cookies, baking them, and giving the cookies to the poor. Personally I think that’s fine too. I know that some aspect of the charity I do (which is not effective, I must admit) has a desire for recognition and I think it’s good to encourage this because it leads to more charity. But for many people, encouraging stating one’s objective function is seen as a way to “unearth the objective functions of the ones with lesser motives” and some number of EA people do that. To say nothing of the fact that lots of people get very upset about the idea that “you think you’re so much better than me?” and so on. It’s an uphill climb, and I wouldn’t do it, but I do enjoy watching them do it because I get the appeal.
- skybrian 11mo ago
  Looks like GiveWell uses “moral weights” now: https://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/our-criteria/cost-effectiveness/moral-weights https://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/our-criteria/cost-effec...
Sporktacular 11mo ago
The origins of EA were never in question, nothing new there. It was Peter Singer's work on maximising value for charitable outcomes. Comment section seems to be about something else altogether. Maybe a book clarifying what it really is is a good idea.
hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago
The idea that effective altruism has attracted particularly bad actors only seems to be the case because effective altruism is still new enough to be newsworthy. For example, the most prominent scandal in the U.S. right now is the Epstein saga. A massive scandal that likely involves the President, a former President, one of the richest men in the world, and a member of the UK royal family. And in a nutshell, Eostein’s job and source of power was his role as a philanthropist. No one is using that example to say that regular philanthropy and charity has something wrong with it (even though there are a lot of issues with it…).
noname120 11mo ago
In this thread: Bingo card (and their rebuttals): – Effective altruists donate money and think it’s the most effective way to do good. [1][2] – They think that exploiting people is fine if money is given to a good cause. [3][4][5] – They think they are so much morally-superior/better than us. [3] – Sam Bankman-Fried is a thief and he self-identified as an EA, so EA must be bad as a whole. [4][6] – It’s dangerous because it’s an “end justifies the means” philosophy. [4][5] – If it’s not perfect then it’s terrible and has no merit whatsoever. [7][8][9] – They think they are so smart but they just stole the idea of donating part of the income from Christians. [10][11] —————————— [1] https://www.effectivealtruism.org/faqs#objectionsto-effective-altruism https://www.effectivealtruism.org/faqs#objectionsto-effectiv... [2] “80,000 Hours thinks that only a small proportion of people should earn to give long term”: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/80000-hours-thinks-that-only-a-small-proportion-of-people-should-earn-to-give-long-term/ https://80000hours.org/2015/07/80000-hours-thinks-that-only-... [3] What We Owe The Future (EA book): “naive calculations that justify some harmful action because it has good consequences are, in practice, almost never correct.” and “it's wrong to do harm even when doing so will bring about the best outcome.” [4] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1591218028381102081.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1591218028381102081.html / https://xcancel.com/willmacaskill/status/1591218028381102081 https://xcancel.com/willmacaskill/status/1591218028381102081 [5] The Precipice (EA book): “Don't act without integrity. When something immensely important is at stake and others are dragging their feet, people feel licensed to do whatever it takes to succeed. We must never give in to such temptation. A single person acting without integrity could stain the whole cause and damage everything we hope to achieve.” [6] “Bankman-Fried agreed his ethically driven approach was "mostly a front".”: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20231009-ftxs-sam-bankman-fried-believed-in-effective-altruism-what-is-it https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20231009-ftxs-sam-bankm... [7] “It’s perfectly okay to be an imperfect effective altruist”: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog/its-perfectly-okay-to-be-an-imperfect-effective-altruist https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog/its-perfectly-okay-to-b... [8] “Mistakes we’ve made”: https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/our-mistakes https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/our-mistakes [9] “GiveWell's Impact”: https://www.givewell.org/about/impact https://www.givewell.org/about/impact [10] There is a large Christian community within EA. “We are Christians excited about doing the most good possible.”: https://www.eaforchristians.org/ https://www.eaforchristians.org/ [11] Many EAs consider Christian charity to be one of the seeds of EA. “A potential criticism or weakness of effective altruism is that it appeals only to a narrow spectrum of society, and exhibits a ‘monoculture’ of ideas. I introduce Dorothea Brooke, a literary character who I argue was an advocate for the principles of effective altruism -- as early as 1871 -- in a Christian ethical tradition”: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TsbLgD4HHpT5vrFQC/dorothea-brooke-an-alternative-origin-story-for-effective https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TsbLgD4HHpT5vrFQC/...
aklemm 11mo ago
The angle that has always perturbed me about EA is the implication (or outright accusation, really) that the entire philanthropy world is full of useless bozos ineffectually stumbling around failing to help people. While greater efficiencies are always welcome, it seem immature or unwise to bring the “Well I tell ya what I’d do…” attitude to incredibly complex messy human endeavors like philanthropy. Ditto for politics. Rather get in there and learn why these systems are so messy…that’s life, really.
- HDThoreaun 11mo ago
  I wouldnt call them bozos, but they are largely ineffective. The goal of many NGOs is to raise money and sustain themselves, not maximizing impact. The ones that have their heart in the right place are commonly not effective at accomplishing their goals. This is plain to see and the entire reason the EA movement came to be. Homelessness NGOs in CA have largely made the entire situation worse by refusing to advocate for anything other than insanely expensive publicly paid for apartments. This is not an effective situation and actively harms the population they are trying to serve. This type of situation shows up over and over again in the NGO game
__MatrixMan__ 11mo ago
The project of taking one's values and deriving from them a numerical notion of value that you can play number-go-up games with was doomed to be incredibility lossy from the start. I think people fall into that trap because our economic programming suggests that money has something to do with merit. A mind that took that programming well will have already made whatever sacrifices are necessary to also see altruism as an optimization problem.
PawPatroler 11mo ago
[flagged]

126 points by Thevet 11mo ago

> In the past, there was nothing we could do about people in another country. Peter Singer says that’s just an evolutionary hangover, a moral error. This is sadly still true, given the percentage of money that goes to getting someone some help vs the amount dedicated to actually helping.

weepinbell 11mo ago
Certainly charities exist that are ineffective, but there is very strong evidence that there exist charities that do enormous amounts of direct, targeted good. givewell.org is probably the most prominent org recommended by many EAs that does and aggregates research on charitable interventions and shows with strong RCT evidence that a marginal charitable donation can save a life for between $3,000 and $5,500. This estimate has uncertainty, but there's extremely strong evidence that money to good charities like the ones GiveWell recommends massively improves people's lives. GiveDirectly is another org that's much more straightforward - giving money directly to people in extreme poverty, with very low overheads. The evidence that that improves people's lives is very very strong (https://www.givedirectly.org/gdresearch/ https://www.givedirectly.org/gdresearch/). It absolutely makes sense to be concerned about "is my hypothetical charitable donation actually doing good", which is more or less a premise of the EA movement. But the answer seems to be "emphatically, yes, there are ways to donate money that do an enormous amount of good".
- gopher_space 11mo ago
  > giving money directly to people in extreme poverty, with very low overheads. The evidence that that improves people's lives is very very strong When you see the return on money spent this way other forms of aid start looking like gatekeeping and rent-seeking.
  - weepinbell 11mo ago
    GiveWell actually benchmarks their charity recommendations against direct cash transfers and will generally only recommend charities whose benefits are Nx cash for some N that I don't remember off the top of my head. I buy that lots of charities aren't effective, but some are! That said I also think that longer term research and investment in things like infrastructure matters too and can't easily be measured as an RCT. GiveWell style giving is great and it's awesome that the evidence is so strong (and it's most of my charitable giving), but that doesn't mean other charities with less easily researched goals are bad necessarily.
    - zozbot234 11mo ago
      The Open Philanthropy Project is one major actor in EA that focuses mostly on "less easily researched goals" and riskier giving (but potentially higher-impact on average) than GiveWell.
  - rincebrain 11mo ago
    Eventually, almost any organization distorts from its nominal goal to self-perpetuation. As the numbers get larger, it becomes easier and easier to suggest that the organization's continued existence is still a net positive as you waste more and more on the organization bloating. It's also surprisingly hard to avoid - consider how the ACA required that 85% of premiums go to care, and how that meant that the incentives became for the prices to become enormous.
    - potato3732842 11mo ago
      >consider how the ACA required that 85% of premiums go to care, and how that meant that the incentives became for the prices to become enormous. To be fair, that particular example was obvious from day 1.
      - rincebrain 11mo ago
        Sure, it wasn't a surprise how the incentives for that would work out. But it's an excellent example of how something you could see some naive people in good faith claiming is a good thing can be pathologized.
- philipallstar 11mo ago
  That's fantastic, and I think most charities start this way.
cm2012 11mo ago
You can pretty reliably save a life in a 3rd world country for about $5k each right now.
- tavavex 11mo ago
  How? I'm curious because the numbers are so specific ($5000 = 1 human life), unclouded by the usual variances of getting the money to people at a macro scale and having it go through many hands and across borders. Is it related to treating a specific illness that just objectively costs that much to treat?
  - cm2012 11mo ago
    Here is a detailed methodology: https://www.givewell.org/impact-estimates https://www.givewell.org/impact-estimates. It convinced me that $5k is a reasonable estimate.
    - bombcar 11mo ago
      A weird corollary to this is that if you work for one of these charities, you’re paid in human lives (say you make $50k, that’s ten people who could have been saved).
      - lmm 11mo ago
        That's an extremely weird way to think about it. The same logic applies to anyone doing any job - whatever money you spend on yourself could be spent saving lives instead, if you really want to think about it that way. There's no reason that people working for an effective charity should feel more guilty about their salaries than people working for any other job - if anything it's the opposite, since salaries usually do not reflect the full value of a person's work.
        philipallstar 11mo ago
        > That's an extremely weird way to think about it Perhaps, but it's exactly the type of thinking the article is describing.
jimbokun 11mo ago
Peter Singer is the LAST person I would go to for advice on morality or ethics.

zkmon 11mo ago

[flagged]

gtowey 11mo ago
"Shouldn't you feed the lepers, Supply Side Jesus?" "No, that would only make them lazy!" https://www.beliefnet.com/news/2003/09/the-gospel-of-supply-side-jesus.aspx https://www.beliefnet.com/news/2003/09/the-gospel-of-supply-...

jmount 11mo ago

Effective Altruism and Utilitarianism are just a couple of the presentations authoritarians sometimes make for convenience. To me the code simply as "if I had everything now, that would eventually be good for everybody." The arguments always feel to me too similar "it is good Carnegie called in the Pinkerton's to suppress labor, as it allowed him to build libraries." Yes it is good what Carnegie did later, but it doesn't completely paper over what he did earlier.

lesuorac 11mo ago
> The arguments always feel to me too similar "it is good Carnegie called in the Pinkerton's to suppress labor Is that an actual EA argument? The value is all at the margins. Like Carnegie had legitimate functional businesses that would be profitable without Pinkerton's. So without Pinkerton's he'd still be able to afford probably every philanthropic thing he did so it doesn't justify it. I don't really follow the EA space but the actual arguments I've heard are largely about working in FANG to make 3x the money outside of fang to allow them to donate 1x ~1.5x the money. Which to me is very justifiable. But to stick with the article. I don't think taking in billions via fraud to donate some of it to charity is a net positive on society.
- hobs 11mo ago
  When you work for something that directly contradicts peaceful civil society you are basically saying the mass murder of today is ok because it allows you to assuage your guilt by giving to your local charity - its only effective if altruism is not your goal.
  - lesuorac 11mo ago
    It still depends on the marginal contribution. A janitor at the CIA in the 1960s is certainly working at an organization that is disrupting the peaceful Iranian society and turning it into a "death to America" one. But I would not agree that they're doing a net-negative for society because the janitor's marginal contribution towards that objective is 0. It might not be the best thing the janitor could do to society (as compared to running a soup kitchen).

TimorousBestie 11mo ago

> . . . but also what’s called long-termism, which is worrying about the future of the planet and existential risks like pandemics, nuclear war, AI, or being hit by comets. When it made that shift, it began to attract a lot of Silicon Valley types, who may not have been so dedicated to the development part of the effective altruism program. The rationalists thought they understood time discounting and thought they could correct for it. They were wrong. Then the internal contradictions of long-termism allowed EA to get suckered by the Silicon Valley crew. Alas.

libraryofbabel 11mo ago

I expect the book itself (Death in a Shallow Pond: A Philosopher, a Drowning Child, and Strangers in Need, by David Edmonds) is good, as the author has written a lot of other solid books making philosophy accessible. The title of the article though, is rather clickbaity: it’s hardly “recovering” the origins of EA to say that it owes a huge debt to Peter Singer, who is only the most famous utilitarian philosopher of the late 20th century! (Peter Singer’s books are also good: his Hegel: A Very Short Introduction made me feel kinda like I understood what Hegel was getting at. I probably don’t of course, but it was nice to feel that way!)

dang 11mo ago
Ok, we've de-recovered the origins in the title above.
Viliam1234 11mo ago
> it’s hardly “recovering” the origins of EA to say that it owes a huge debt to Peter Singer Guessing by the contents of this comment section, many people seem to believe that EA was invented by SBF, so it can be quite a shock for them to learn otherwise. (That of course assumes that they would read the article...)

CactusBlue 11mo ago

> I think they’re recovering. They’ve learned a few lessons, including not to be too in hock to a few powerful and wealthy individuals. I do not believe the EA movement to be recoverable; it is built on flawed foundations and its issues are inherent. The only way I see out of it is total dissolution; it cannot be reformed.

flexagoon 11mo ago
Which of the foundations is flawed, the "we have the ability to help others and should use it" or the "some ways of helping others are more effective than others"?

hexator 11mo ago

I find it to be a dangerous ideology since it can effectively be used to justify anything. I joined an EA group online (from a popular YouTube channel) and the first conversation I saw was a thread by someone advocating for eugenics. And it only got worse from there. > A paradox of effective altruism is that by seeking to overcome individual bias through rationalism, its solutions sometimes ignore the structural bias that shapes our world. Yes, this just about sums it up. As a movement they seem to be attracting some listless contrarians that seem entirely too willing to dig up old demons of the past.

nullc 11mo ago
> through rationalism, When they write "rationalism" you should read "rationalization".
- chrisweekly 11mo ago
  Yes! It's a crucial distinction. Rationalism is about being rational / logical -- moving closer to neutrality and "truth". Whereas to rationalize something is often about masking selfish motives, making excuses, or (self-)deception -- moving away from "truth".
- XorNot 11mo ago
  It's a variant of how you instantly know what a government will be like depending how much democracy they put in their name.
  - potato3732842 11mo ago
    "If a state calls itself a commonwealth you know it sucks for the common man there" or something like it is one I've heard before. It's at least 50% right in my experience.
mikkupikku 11mo ago
Agreed. It's firmly an "ends justify the means" ideology, reliant on accurately predicting future outcomes to justify present actions. This sort of thing gives free license to any sociopath with enough creativity to spin some yarn with handwavy math about the bad outcome their malicious actions are meant to be preventing.

keiferski 11mo ago

The popularity of EA always seemed pretty obvious to me: here's a philosophy that says it doesn't matter what kind of person you are or how you make your fortune, as long as you put some amount of money toward problems. Exploiting people to make money is fine, as long as some portion of that money is going toward "a good cause." There is really no element of self virtue in the way that virtue ethics has..it's just pure calculation. It's the perfect philosophy for morally questionable people with a lot of money. Which is exactly who got involved. That's not to say that all the work they're doing/have done is bad, but it's not really surprising why bad actors attached themselves to the movement.

nonethewiser 11mo ago
>The popularity of EA always seemed pretty obvious to me: here's a philosophy that says it doesn't matter what kind of person you are or how you make your fortune, as long as you put some amount of money toward problems. Exploiting people to make money is fine, as long as some portion of that money is going toward "a good cause." I dont think this is a very accurate interpretation of the idea - even with how flawed the movement is. EA is about donating your money effectively. IE ensuring the donation gets used well. At it's face, that's kind of obvious. But when you take it to an extreme you blur the line between "donation" and something else. It has selected for very self-righteous people. But the idea itself is not really about excusing you being a bad person, and the donation target is definitely NOT unimportant.
- some_guy_nobel 11mo ago
  You claim OP's interpretation is inaccurate, while it tracks perfectly with many of EA's most notorious supporters. Given that contrast, I'd ask what evidence do you have for why OP's interpretation is incorrect, and what evidence do you have that your interpretation is correct?
  - jandrese 11mo ago
    It's like libertarianism. There is a massive gulf between the written goals and the actual actions of the proponents. It might be more accurately thought of as a vehicle for plausible deniability than an actual ethos.

chaseadam17 11mo ago

Man, EA is so close to getting it. They are right that we have a moral obligation to help those in need but they are wrong about how to do it. Don't outsource your altruism by donating to some GiveWell-recommended nonprofit. Be a human, get to know people, and ask if/how they want help. Start close to home where you can speak the same language and connect with people. The issues with EA all stem from the fact that the movement centralizes power into the hands of a few people who decide what is and isn't worthy of altruism. Then similar to communism, that power gets corrupted by self-interested people who use it to fund pet projects, launder reputations, etc. Just try to help the people around you a bit more. If everyone did that, we'd be good.

keiferski 11mo ago
That's the thing though, if EA had said: find 10 people in your life and help them directly, it wouldn't have appealed to the well-off white collar workers that want to spend money, but not actually do anything. The movement became popular because it didn't require one to do anything other than spend money in order to be lauded.
- phantasmish 11mo ago
  Better, it’s a small step to “being a small part of something that’s doing a little evil to a shitload of people (say, working on Google ~scams targeting the vulnerable and spying on everybody~ Ads) is not just OK, but good, as long as I spend a few grand a year buying mosquito nets to prevent malaria, saving a bunch of lives!” Which obviously has great appeal.
PaulDavisThe1st 11mo ago
> Just try to help the people around you a bit more. If everyone did that, we'd be good. This describes a generally wealthy society with some people doing better than average and others worse. Redistributing wealth/assistance from the first group to the second will work quite well for this society. It does nothing to address the needs of a society in which almost everyone is poor compared to some other potential aid-giving society. Supporting your friends and neighbors is wonderful. It does not, in general, address the most pressing needs in human populations worldwide.

jmyeet 11mo ago

I'm leery of any philosophy that is popular in tech circles because they all seem to lead to eugenics, hyperindividualism, ignoring systemic issues, deregulation and whatever the latest incarnation of prosperity gospel is. Utilitarianism suffers from the same problems it always had: time frames. What's the best net good 10 minutes from now might be vastly different 10 days, 10 months or 10 years from now. So whatever arbitrary time frame you choose affects the outcome. Taken further, you can choose a time frame that suits your desired outcome. "What can I do?" is a fine question to ask. This crops up a lot in anarchist schools of thought too. But you can't mutual aid your way out of systemic issues. Taken further, focusing on individual action often becomes a fig leaf to argue against any form of taxation (or even regulation) because the government is limiting your ability to be altruistic. I expect the effective altruists have largely moved on to transhumanism as that's pretty popular with the Silicon Valley elite (including Peter Thiel and many CEOs) and that's just a nicer way of arguing for eugenics.

omnimus 11mo ago
Effective altruism and transhumanism is kinda the same thing along with other stuff like longetermism. There is even name for the whole thing TESCREAL. Very slightly different positions invented i guess for branding.

matt3D 11mo ago

Is there a term for what I had previously understood Effective Altruism to be, since I don’t want to reference EA in a conversation and have the other person think I’m associated with these sorts of people. I had assumed it was just simple mathematics and the belief that cash is the easiest way to transfer charitable effort. If I can readily earn 50USD/hour, rather than doing a volunteering job that I could pay 25USD/hour to do, I simply do my job and pay for 2 people to volunteer.

throw4847285 11mo ago
That's just called utilitarianism/consequentialism. It's a perfect respectable ethical framework. Not the most popular in academic philosophy, but prominent enough that you have to at least engage with it. Effective altruism is a political movement, with all the baggage implicit in that.
- Vinnl 11mo ago
  Is there a term for looking at the impact of your donations, rather than process (like percentage spent on "overhead")? I like discussing that, but have the same problem as GP.
  - edent 11mo ago
    "Overhead" is part of the work. It's like saying you want to look at the impact of your coding, rather than the overhead spent on documentation. An (effective) charity needs an accountant. It needs an HR team. It needs people to clean the office, order printer toner, and organise meetings.
    - lmm 11mo ago
      > An (effective) charity needs an accountant. It needs an HR team. It needs people to clean the office, order printer toner, and organise meetings. Define "needs". Some overheads are part of the costs of delivering the effective part, sure. But a lot of them are costs of fundraising, or entirely unnecessary costs.

nonethewiser 11mo ago

Man this is such a loaded term. Even in a comment section about the origins of it, everyone is silently using their own definition. I think all discussions of EA should start with a definition at the top. I'll give it a whirl: >Effective altruism: Donating with a focus on helping the most people in the most effective way, using evidence and careful reasoning, and personal values. What happens in practice is a lot worse than this may sound at first glance, so I think people are tempted to change the definition. You could argue EA in practice is just a perversion of the idea in principle, but I dont think its even that. I think the initial assumption that that definition is good and harmless is just wrong. It's basically just spending money to change the world into what you want. It's similar to regular donations except you're way more invested and strategic in advancing the outcome. It's going to invite all sorts of interests and be controversial.

Lammy 11mo ago
It's a layer above even that: it's a way to justify doing unethical shit to earn obscene amounts of money by convincing themselves (and attempting to convince others) that the ends justify the means because the entire world will somehow be a better place if I'm allowed to become Very Rich. Anyone who has to call themselves altruistic simply isn't lol
pfortuny 11mo ago
On one hand, it is an example of the total-order mentality which impregnates society, and businesses in general: “there exists a single optimum”. That is wrong on so many levels, especially with regards to charities. ETA: the real world has optimals, not an optimum. Then it easily becomes a slippery slope of “you are wrong if you are not optimizing”. ETA: it is very harmful to oneself and to society to think that one is obliged to “do the best”. The ethical rule is “do good and not bad”, no more than that. Finally, it is a receipt for whatever you want to call it: fascism, communism, totalitarianism… “There is an optimum way, hence if you are not doing it, you must be corrected”.
- flexagoon 11mo ago
  I'm not sure where you found this idea - I don't know any EAs claiming there is a single best optimum for the world. In fact, even with regards to charities, there are a lot of different areas prioritized by EA and choosing which one to prefer is a matter of individual preference. The real world has optimums, and there's not a single best thing to do, but some charities are just obviously closer to being one of those optimums. Donating to an art museum is probably not one of the optimal things for the world, for example.

throw4847285 11mo ago

The fundamental problem is that Effective Altruism is a political movement that spun out of a philosophical one. If you want to talk about the relative strengths and weaknesses of consequentialism, go right ahead. If you want to assume consequentialism is true and discuss specific ethical questions via that framing, power to you. If you want to form a movement, you now have a movement, with all that entails: leaders, policies, politics, contradictions, internecine struggles, money, money, more money, goals, success at your goals, failure at your goals, etc.

directevolve 11mo ago
This is historically inaccurate. EA’s origins are in charity evalutions to quantify the marginal impact of a donation. This motivated philosophical debate about how to operationalize “good,” and later became influential enough to have political impact. Obviously EAs were inspired by philosophical ideas or even were philosophers. But that is not the same as it being the downstream practice of a uniform set of pre-existing philosophical commitments.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

jimbokun 11mo ago

> Inspired by Singer, Oxford philosophers Toby Ord and Will MacAskill launched Giving What We Can in 2009, which encouraged members to pledge 10 percent of their incomes to charity. Congratulations you rediscovered tithing.

skybrian 11mo ago
They deliberately copied tithing.
- noname120 11mo ago
  Is that a bad thing though?
  - Viliam1234 11mo ago
    A copyright violation?

mvkel 11mo ago

The ends do not justify the means

cassepipe 11mo ago

I never expected EA to get so much flak in this comment section. Most comments read like a version of "Who do you think you are?". Apparently it is very bad to try to think rationally about how and where to give out your money I mean if rich people want to give out their money for good and beyond are actually trying to do work of researching whether it has an impact instead of just enjoying the high-status feeling of the optics of giving to a good cause (see The Anonymous Donor episode of Curb your enthusiasm), what is it to you all ? It feels to me like some parents wanting to plan the birth of their children and all the people around are like "Nooo, you have to let Nature decide, don't try to calculate where you are in your cycle !!! " Apparently this is "authoritarian", "can be used to justify anything" like eugenics but also will end up "similar to communism" but also leads to "hyperindividualism ? The only way I can explain it is no one wants to give out 1% of their money away and hate the people who make them feel guilty by doing so and saying it would be a good thing so everyone is lashing out

Sporktacular 11mo ago
I think it's a case of judging a band by its fans. Enough dodgy billionaires have jumped on to create a poor image. Singer never said donating buys you a license to be evil.
- cassepipe 11mo ago
  I only know about SBF but SBF was a scammer. Are we surprised that scammers try to use anything that could give them a positive image in order to, you know, scam people ? Also I don't see Elon Musk giving out his money to save non-white people's lives anytime soon So who are we talking about here ?
TitaRusell 11mo ago
Yes it is bad. You start to think about who deserves your help. I don't think much of Christians but I love the Salvation army. They patrol the streets picking up whoever they find and help them. Regardless of background, nationality, religion or IQ. It goes against everything tech bros believe in.

m463 11mo ago

You know, I wonder if this is an idea that has been twisted a bit from people who "took over" the idea, like Sam Bankman-Fried. I remember reading the original founder of (MADD) Mothers Against Drunk Driving, left because of this kind of thing. "Lightner stated that MADD "has become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever wanted or envisioned … I didn't start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothers_Against_Drunk_Driving#Positions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothers_Against_Drunk_Driving#...

metalcrow 11mo ago

A lot of these EA comments seem to be using their own definition of EA that they've imagined. It really sounds a lot like people judging Judaism because of what Bernie Madoff did.

Sporktacular 11mo ago
Yes! Commenters seem to have jumper onto The Guardian's vibes about it rather than Singer's entirely reasonable logic.

protocolture 11mo ago

>here's a philosophy that says it doesn't matter what kind of person you are or how you make your fortune, as long as you put some amount of money toward problems. TBH I am not like, 100% involved, but my first exposure to EA was a blog post from a notorious rich person, describing how he chose to drop a big chunk of his wealth on a particular charity because it could realistically claim to save more lives per dollar than any other. Now, that might seem like a perfect ahole excuse. But having done time in the NFP/Charity trenches, it immediately made a heap of sense to me. I worked for one that saved 0 lives per dollar, refused to agitate for political change that might save people time and money, and spent an inordinate amount of money on lavish gifts for its own board members. While EA might stink of capitalism, to me, it always seemed obvious. Charities that waste money should be overlooked in favor of ones that help the most people. It seems to me that EA has a bad rap because of the people who champion it, but criticism of EA as a whole seems like cover for extremely shitty charities that should absolutely be starved of money. YMMV

skybrian 11mo ago

The book is titled "Death in a Shallow Pond" and seems to be all about Peter Singer. (I don't see a table of contents online.) The way I first heard of Effective Altruism, I think before it was called that, took a rather different approach. It was from a talk given by the founders of GiveWell at Google. (This is going off of memory so this is approximate.) Their background was people working for a hedge fund who were interested in charity. They had formed a committee to decide where best to donate their money. The way they explained it was that there are lots of rigorous approaches to finding and evaluating for-profit investments. At least in hindsight, you can say which investments earned the most. But there's very little for charities, so they wanted to figure out a rigorous way to evaluate charities so they could pick the best ones to donate to. And unlike what most charitable foundations do, they wanted to publish their recommendations and reasoning. There are philosophical issues involved, but they are inherent in the problem. You have some money and you want to donate it, but don't know which charity to give it to. What do you mean by the best charity? What's a good metric for that? "Lives saved" is a pretty crude metric, but it's better than nothing. "Quality-adjusted life years" is another common one. Unfortunately, when you make a spreadsheet to try to determine these things, there are a lot of uncertain inputs, so doing numeric calculations only provides rough estimates. GiveWell readily admits that, but they still do a lot of research along these lines to determine which charities are the best. There's been a lot of philosophical nonsense associated with Effective Altruism since then, but I think the basic approach still makes sense. Deciding where to donate money is a decision many people have! It doesn't require much in the way of philosophical commitments to decide that it's helpful to do what you can to optimize it. Why wouldn't you want to do a better job of it? GiveWell's approach has evolved quite a bit since then, but it's still about optimizing charitable donations. Here's recent blog post that goes into their decision-making: https://blog.givewell.org/2025/07/17/apples-oranges-and-outcomes/ https://blog.givewell.org/2025/07/17/apples-oranges-and-outc...

nonameiguess 11mo ago
As always, topics like this end up becoming a chance for HN commenters to get on soapboxes. Origins of some movement or school of thought or whatever will have many threads. I worked in charity fundraising over 20 years ago as one of the first things I did after first getting out of college, and the first organization I am aware of that did public publishing of charity evaluations was GuideStar, founded in 1994. This is the kind of thing that had always been happening in public foundations and government funding agencies, but they tended not to publish or well organize the results such that any individual donor could query. GuideStar largely collected and published data that was legally required to be public but not easy to collate and query, allowing donors to see what proportion of a donation went to programs versus overhead and how effective each charity was at producing the outcomes it was designed to produce. GiveWell went beyond that to making explicit attempts at ranking impact across possible outcomes, judging some to be more important than others. As I recall from the times, taking this idea to places like Google and hedge funds came from the observation that rich people were giving the most money, but also giving to causes that didn't need the money or weren't really "charitable" by most understanding. Think of Phil Knight almost single handledly turning the University of Oregon into a national football power, places like the Mozilla Foundation or New York Met having chairpersons earning 7 or 8 figure salaries, or the ever popular "give money to get your name on a hospital wing," which usually involves giving money to hospitals that already had a lot of money. Parallel to that is guys like Singer trying to make a more rationally coherent form of consequentialism that doesn't bias the proximate over the distant. Eventually, LessWrong latches onto it, it merges with the "earn to give" folks, and decades later you end up with SBF and that becomes the public view of EA. Fair enough and understandable, but it doesn't mean there were never any good ideas there, and even among rich people, whatever you think of them, I'd say Bill and Melinda Gates helped more with their charity than Phil Knight and the Koch brothers. To me, the basic problem is people, no matter how otherwise rational they may be, don't deal well with being able to grok directionality without being able to precisely quantify, and morality involves a lot of that. We also don't do well with incommensurate goods. Saving the life of a starving child is probably almost always better than making more art, but that doesn't reduce to we want or should want a world with no art, and GiveWell's attempts at measuring impact in dollars clearly doesn't mean we can just spend $5000 x <number of people who die in an average year> and we can achieve zero deaths, or even just zero from malaria and parasitic worms. These are fuzzy categories that involve uncertain value judgments and moving targets with both diminishingly marginal utility and diminishing marginal effectiveness. Likewise, earning to give clearly breaks down if you imagine a world with nothing but hedge fund managers and no nurses. Funding is important, but someone still has to actually do the work and they're "good" people, too, maybe even better. In any case, I at least feel confident in stating that becoming a deca-billionaire at all costs, including fraud and crime, so you can helicopter cash onto poor people later in life, is not the morally optimal human pursuit. But I don't know what actually is.

renewiltord 11mo ago

People get wrapped up in a lot of emotion about this but the idea seemed sound: you want to make some change in the world? It makes sense to spend your money to maximize the change you desire. The GiveWell objective is lives saved or QALYs or whatever. Others have qualia maximized or whatever. But the idea is entirely logical. I think part of the problem with popularization is that many people have complex objective functions, not all of which are socially acceptable to say. As an example, I want to be charitable in a way that grants me status in my social circle, where spending on guinea worm is less impressive than, say, buying ingredients for cookies, baking them, and giving the cookies to the poor. Personally I think that’s fine too. I know that some aspect of the charity I do (which is not effective, I must admit) has a desire for recognition and I think it’s good to encourage this because it leads to more charity. But for many people, encouraging stating one’s objective function is seen as a way to “unearth the objective functions of the ones with lesser motives” and some number of EA people do that. To say nothing of the fact that lots of people get very upset about the idea that “you think you’re so much better than me?” and so on. It’s an uphill climb, and I wouldn’t do it, but I do enjoy watching them do it because I get the appeal.

skybrian 11mo ago
Looks like GiveWell uses “moral weights” now: https://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/our-criteria/cost-effectiveness/moral-weights https://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/our-criteria/cost-effec...

Sporktacular 11mo ago

The origins of EA were never in question, nothing new there. It was Peter Singer's work on maximising value for charitable outcomes. Comment section seems to be about something else altogether. Maybe a book clarifying what it really is is a good idea.

hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago

The idea that effective altruism has attracted particularly bad actors only seems to be the case because effective altruism is still new enough to be newsworthy. For example, the most prominent scandal in the U.S. right now is the Epstein saga. A massive scandal that likely involves the President, a former President, one of the richest men in the world, and a member of the UK royal family. And in a nutshell, Eostein’s job and source of power was his role as a philanthropist. No one is using that example to say that regular philanthropy and charity has something wrong with it (even though there are a lot of issues with it…).

noname120 11mo ago

In this thread: Bingo card (and their rebuttals): – Effective altruists donate money and think it’s the most effective way to do good. [1][2] – They think that exploiting people is fine if money is given to a good cause. [3][4][5] – They think they are so much morally-superior/better than us. [3] – Sam Bankman-Fried is a thief and he self-identified as an EA, so EA must be bad as a whole. [4][6] – It’s dangerous because it’s an “end justifies the means” philosophy. [4][5] – If it’s not perfect then it’s terrible and has no merit whatsoever. [7][8][9] – They think they are so smart but they just stole the idea of donating part of the income from Christians. [10][11] —————————— [1] https://www.effectivealtruism.org/faqs#objectionsto-effective-altruism https://www.effectivealtruism.org/faqs#objectionsto-effectiv... [2] “80,000 Hours thinks that only a small proportion of people should earn to give long term”: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/80000-hours-thinks-that-only-a-small-proportion-of-people-should-earn-to-give-long-term/ https://80000hours.org/2015/07/80000-hours-thinks-that-only-... [3] What We Owe The Future (EA book): “naive calculations that justify some harmful action because it has good consequences are, in practice, almost never correct.” and “it's wrong to do harm even when doing so will bring about the best outcome.” [4] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1591218028381102081.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1591218028381102081.html / https://xcancel.com/willmacaskill/status/1591218028381102081 https://xcancel.com/willmacaskill/status/1591218028381102081 [5] The Precipice (EA book): “Don't act without integrity. When something immensely important is at stake and others are dragging their feet, people feel licensed to do whatever it takes to succeed. We must never give in to such temptation. A single person acting without integrity could stain the whole cause and damage everything we hope to achieve.” [6] “Bankman-Fried agreed his ethically driven approach was "mostly a front".”: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20231009-ftxs-sam-bankman-fried-believed-in-effective-altruism-what-is-it https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20231009-ftxs-sam-bankm... [7] “It’s perfectly okay to be an imperfect effective altruist”: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog/its-perfectly-okay-to-be-an-imperfect-effective-altruist https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog/its-perfectly-okay-to-b... [8] “Mistakes we’ve made”: https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/our-mistakes https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/our-mistakes [9] “GiveWell's Impact”: https://www.givewell.org/about/impact https://www.givewell.org/about/impact [10] There is a large Christian community within EA. “We are Christians excited about doing the most good possible.”: https://www.eaforchristians.org/ https://www.eaforchristians.org/ [11] Many EAs consider Christian charity to be one of the seeds of EA. “A potential criticism or weakness of effective altruism is that it appeals only to a narrow spectrum of society, and exhibits a ‘monoculture’ of ideas. I introduce Dorothea Brooke, a literary character who I argue was an advocate for the principles of effective altruism -- as early as 1871 -- in a Christian ethical tradition”: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TsbLgD4HHpT5vrFQC/dorothea-brooke-an-alternative-origin-story-for-effective https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TsbLgD4HHpT5vrFQC/...

aklemm 11mo ago

The angle that has always perturbed me about EA is the implication (or outright accusation, really) that the entire philanthropy world is full of useless bozos ineffectually stumbling around failing to help people. While greater efficiencies are always welcome, it seem immature or unwise to bring the “Well I tell ya what I’d do…” attitude to incredibly complex messy human endeavors like philanthropy. Ditto for politics. Rather get in there and learn why these systems are so messy…that’s life, really.

HDThoreaun 11mo ago
I wouldnt call them bozos, but they are largely ineffective. The goal of many NGOs is to raise money and sustain themselves, not maximizing impact. The ones that have their heart in the right place are commonly not effective at accomplishing their goals. This is plain to see and the entire reason the EA movement came to be. Homelessness NGOs in CA have largely made the entire situation worse by refusing to advocate for anything other than insanely expensive publicly paid for apartments. This is not an effective situation and actively harms the population they are trying to serve. This type of situation shows up over and over again in the NGO game

__MatrixMan__ 11mo ago

The project of taking one's values and deriving from them a numerical notion of value that you can play number-go-up games with was doomed to be incredibility lossy from the start. I think people fall into that trap because our economic programming suggests that money has something to do with merit. A mind that took that programming well will have already made whatever sacrifices are necessary to also see altruism as an optimization problem.

PawPatroler 11mo ago

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