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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 fortun

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.
    - glenstein 11mo ago
      The problem is that creates a kind of epistemic closure around yourself where you can't encounter such a thing as a sincere expression of it. I actually think your charge against Libertarians is basically accurate. And I think it deserves a (limited) amount of time and attention directed at its core contentions for what they are worth. After all, Robert Nozick considered himself a libertarian and contributed some important thinking on things like justice and retribution and equality and any number of subjects, and the world wouldn't be bettered by dismissing him with twitter style ridicule. I do agree that things like EA and Libertarianism have to answer for the in-the-wild proponents they tend to attract but not to the point of epistemic closure in response to its subject matter.
      - Eisenstein 11mo ago
        When a term becomes loaded enough then people will stop using it when they don't want to be associated with the loaded aspects of the term. If they don't then they already know what the consequences are, because they will be dealing with them all the time. The first and most impactful consequence isn't 'people who are not X will think I am X' it is actually 'people who are X will think I am one of them'.
        glenstein 11mo ago
        I think social dynamics are real and must be answered for but I don't think any self-correction or lacktherof has anything to do with subject matter which can be understood independently. I will never take a proponent of The Bell Curve seriously who tries to say they're "just following the data", because I do hold them and the book responsible for their social and cultural entanglements and they would have to be blind to ignore it. But the book is wrong for reasons intrinsic to its analysis and it would be catastrophic to treat that point as moot.
  - RobinL 11mo ago
    > many of EA's most notorious supporters. The fact they're notorious makes them a biased sample. My guess is for the majority of people interested in EA - the typical supporter who is not super wealthy or well known - the two central ideas are: - For people living in wealthy countries, giving some % of your income makes little difference to your life, but can potentially make a big difference to someone else's - We should carefully decide which charities to give to, because some are far more effective than others. That's pretty much it - essentially the message in Peter Singer's book: https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/ https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/. I would describe myself as an EA, but all that means to me is really the two points above. It certainly isn't anything like an indulgence that morally offsets poor behaviour elsewhere
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 11mo ago
      I would say the problem with EA is the "E". Saying you're doing 'effective' altruism is another way of saying that everyone else's altruism is wasteful and ineffective. Which of course isn't the case. The "E" might as well stand for "Elitist" in that's the vibe it gives off. All truly altruistic acts would aim to be effective, otherwise it wouldn't be altruism - it would just be waste. Not to say there is no waste in some altruism acts, but I'm not convinced its actually any worse than EA. Given the fraud associated with some purported EA advocates, I'd say EA might even be worse. The EA movement reeks of the optimize-everything mindset of people convinced they are smarter than everyone else who just say just gives money to a charity A when they could have been 13% more effective if they sent the money directly to this particular school in country B with the condition they only spend it on X. The origins of EA may not be that, but that's what it has evolved into.
      - estearum 11mo ago
        A lot of altruism is quite literally wasteful and ineffective, in which case it's pretty hard to call it altruism. > they could have been 13% more effective If you think the difference between ineffective and effective altruism is a 13% spread, I fear you have not looked deeply enough into either standard altruistic endeavors nor EA enough to have an informed opinion. The gaps are actually astonishingly large and trivial to capitalize on (i.e. difference between clicking one Donate Here button versus a different Donate Here button). The sheer scale of the spread is the impetus behind the entire train of thought.
  - btilly 11mo ago
    The OP's interpretation is an inaccurate summary of the philosophy. But it is an excellent summary of the trap that people who try to follow EA can easily fall into. Any attempt to rationally evaluate charity work, can instead wind up rationalizing what they want to do. Settling for the convenient and self-aggrandizing "analysis", rather than a rigorous one. An even worse trap is to prioritize a future utopia. Utopian ideals are dangerous. They push people towards "the ends justify the means". If the ends are infinitely good, there is no bound on how bad the "justified means" can be. But history shows that imagined utopias seldom materialize. By contrast the damage from the attempted means is all too real. That's why all of the worst tragedies of the 20th century started with someone who was trying to create a utopia. EA circles have shown an alarming receptiveness to shysters who are trying to paint a picture of utopia. For example look at how influential someone like Samuel Bankman-Fried was able to be, before his fraud imploded.
  - cortesoft 11mo ago
    Well, in order to be a notorious supporter of EA, you have to have enough money for your charity to be noticed, which means you are very rich. If you are very rich, it means you have to have made money from a capitalistic venture, and those are inherently exploitive. So basically everyone who has a lot of money to donate has questionable morals already. The question is, are the large donators to EA groups more or less 'morally suspect' than large donors to other charity types? In other words, everyone with a lot of money is morally questionable, and EA donors are just a subset of that.
    - nl 11mo ago
      > you have to have made money from a capitalistic venture, and those are inherently exploitive. You say this like it's fact beyond dispute, but I for one strongly disagree. Not a fan of EA at all though!
      - tovej 11mo ago
        For very much money, as in, let's say, more than 1000x the median person in the wealth distribution, I'd say it's obviously true. You cannot make 1000x the average persons wealth by acting morally. Except possibly winning the lottery. A person is not capable of creating that wealth. A group of people have created that wealth, and the 1000x individual has hoarded it to themselves instead of sharing it with the people who contributed. If you are a billionaire, you own at least 5000x the median (200000k in the US). If you're a big tech CEO, you own somewhere around 50-100,000x the median. These are the biggest proponents of EA. The bottom 50% only own about 2% of the wealth anymore, the top 10% own two thirds of the wealth, the top 1% owns a whole third and it's only getting worse. Who is responsible for the wealth inequality? The people at the right edge of the Lorenz curve. They could fix it, but don't, in fact they benefit more from their workers being poorer and more desperate for a job. I hope that explains the exploitation.
        zozbot234 11mo ago
        > You cannot make 1000x the average persons wealth by acting morally. Except possibly winning the lottery. The risk profile of early startup founders looks a lot like "winning the lottery", except that the initial investment (in terms of time, effort and lost opportunities elsewhere as well as pure monetary ones) is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of a lottery ticket. There's only a handful of successful unicorns vs. a whole lot of failed startups. Other contributors generally have a choice of sharing into the risk vs. playing it safe, and they usually pick the safe option because they know what the odds are. Nothing has been taken away from them.
  - socalgal2 11mo ago
    this feels like “the most notorious atheists/jews/blacks/whites/christian/muslims are bad therefore all atheists/jews/blacks/whites/christian/muslims are bad
  - stickfigure 11mo ago
    > tracks perfectly with many of EA's most notorious supporters Just wait until you find out about vegetarianism's most notorious supporter.
- klustregrif 11mo ago
  > EA is about donating your money effectively For most it seems EA is an argument that despite no charitable donations being made at all, and despite gaining wealth through questionable means it’s still all ethical because it’s theoretically “just more effective” if the person continues to claim that they would in the far future put some money towards these hypothetical “very effective” charitable causes, that just never seems to have materialized yet, and all of cause shouldn’t be perused “until you’ve built your fortune”.
  - Aunche 11mo ago
    If you're going to assign a discount rate for cash, you also need to assign a similar "discount rate" for future lives saved. Just like investments compound, giving malaria medicine and vitamins to kids who needs him should produce at least as much positive compounding returns.
    - faidit 11mo ago
      That future promise doesn't do much good if the planet is dead by the time these guys get around to donating, thanks to the ecological catastrophe caused by their supposedly well-intentioned greed. Also, EA proponents tend to ignore society's opportunity cost here - that money could have been taxed and put to good uses by the public in the meantime. Whatever the inefficiencies of the public sector, at least we can do something to fix it now instead of trusting the promises of billionaires that they will start giving back one day.
- ghurtado 11mo ago
  I don't see anything in your comment that directly disagrees with the one that you've replied to. Maybe you misinterpreted it? To me, It was simply saying that the flaw in the EA model is that a person can be 90% a dangerous sociopath and as long as the 10% goes to charity (effectively) they are considered morally righteous. It's the 21st century version of Papal indulgences.
  - HDThoreaun 11mo ago
    The thing is that dangerous sociopaths will be dangerous sociopaths either way. What’s the downside in convincing them to donate 10% of their income to effective causes?
- glenstein 11mo ago
  I actually think I agree with this, but nevertheless people can refer to EA and mean by it the totality of sociological dynamics surrounding it, including its population of proponents and their histories. I actually think EA is conceptually perfectly fine within its scope of analysis (once you start listing examples, e.g. mosquito nets to prevent malaria, I think they're hard to dispute), and the desire to throw out the conceptual baby with the bathwater of its adherents is an unfortunate demonstration of anti-intellectualism. I think it's like how some predatory pickup artists do the work of being proto-feminists (or perhaps more to the point, how actual feminists can nevertheless be people who engage in the very kinds of harms studied by the subject matter). I wouldn't want to make feminism answer for such creatures as definitionally built into the core concept.
- WhyOhWhyQ 11mo ago
  The op and your reply are basically guaranteed text on the page whenever EA comes up (not that your reply is unwarranted, or the op's message is either, but it is interesting that these are guaranteed comments).
- pjc50 11mo ago
  > EA is about A friend of mine used to "gotcha" any use of the expression "X is about Y", which was annoying but trained a useful intellectual habit. That may have been what EA's original stated intent was, but then you have to look at what people actually say and do under the name of EA.
  - Joeboy 11mo ago
    As per conversation elsewhere, I think you've fallen for some popular but untrue / unfair narratives about EA. But I want to take another tack. I never see anybody make the following argument. Probably that's because other people wisely understand how repulsive people find it, but I want to try anyway, possibly because I have undiagnosed autism. EA-style donations have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. I know there are people who will quibble about the numbers, but I don't think you can sensibly dispute that EA has saved a lot of lives. This never seems to appear in people's moral calculus, like at all. Most of those are people who are poor, distant, powerless and effectively invisible to you but nevertheless, do they not count for something? I know I'm doing utilitarianism and people hate it, but I just don't get how these lives don't count for something. Can you sell me on the idea that we should let more poor people die of preventable diseases in exchange for a more morally unimpeachable policy to donations?
    - nemomarx 11mo ago
      I don't think the complaint is really the donations or the impact, rather it's that the community has issues? Whether you agree that someone can put money into saving lives to make up for other moral faults or issues or so on is the core issue. And even from a utilitarian view we'd have to say that more of these donations happened than would have without the movement or with a different movement, which is difficult to measure. Consider the usaid thing - Elon musk may have wiped out most of the EA community gains by causing that defending, and was probably supported by the community in some sense. How to weigh in all these factors?
      - Joeboy 11mo ago
        > Whether you agree that someone can put money into saving lives to make up for other moral faults or issues or so on is the core issue For me the core issue is why people are so happy to advocate for the deaths of the poor because of things like "the community has issues". Of course the withdrawal of EA donations is going to cause poor people to die. I mean yes, some funding will go elsewhere, but a lot of it's just going to go away. Sorry to vent but people are so endlessly disappointing. > Elon musk may have wiped out most of the EA community gains by causing that defending For sure! > and was probably supported by the community in some sense You sound fairly under-confident about that, presumably because you're guessing. It's wildly untrue.
- JohnMakin 11mo ago
  It is a little bit though, using these lines of thinking it becomes extraordinarily easy to excuse, justify, or even paint as a good thing highly unethical or immoral actions. For instance - If I find some sort of fraud that will harm X number of users, but make me Y dollars - if Y > (harm caused), not doing (fraud making me Y dollars) could be interpreted as being "inefficient" with your resources or causing more harm. It's very easy to use the philosophy in this manner, and of course many see it as a huge perk. The types of people drawn to it are all much the same.
- cyanydeez 11mo ago
  Its a illogical theory, even if practiced in good faith. Just because the market pays for one activity does not mean ots externalitirs are equally solvedby the matkets valuation. From basic physics, its akin to saying you can drop a vase and return it to predropped state with equal effort. Entropy alone prevents EA.
- jjj123 11mo ago
  The main idea is not an excuse to be a bad person, but it does justify making an ungodly amount of money, and making even more money after you’ve already made an ungodly amount of money. And for not letting that money get taken by taxes (god forbid, how ineffective!). So I’d argue on OPs side, I don’t care what EA stated intent is, it works pretty well as a smokescreen for the types who want to get really fucking rich by any means necessary. Even better if the donation target is a North Star they never actually reach.
nxor 11mo ago
SBF has entered the chat
- AgentME 11mo ago
  I'm tired of every other discussion about EA online assuming that SBF is representative of the average EA member, instead of being an infamous outlier.
  - nxor 11mo ago
    What reasons at all do you have?
    - Sporktacular 11mo ago
      What reasons do you have to assume EA = SBF?
phantasmish 11mo ago
I’m skeptical of any consequentialist approach that doesn’t just boil down to virtue ethics. Aiming directly at consequentialist ways of operating always seems to either become impractical in a hurry, or get fucked up and kinda evil. Like, it’s so consistent that anyone thinking they’ve figured it out needs to have a good hard think about it for a several years before tentatively attempting action based on it, I’d say.
- jrochkind1 11mo ago
  What does "virtue ethics" mean?
  - keiferski 11mo ago
    One of the three traditional European philosophy approaches to ethics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_ethics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_ethics EA being a prime example of consequentialism.
    - phantasmish 11mo ago
      … and I tend to think of it as the safest route to doing OK at consequentialism, too, myself. The point is still basically good outcomes, but it short-circuits the problems that tend to come up when one starts trying to maximize utility/good, by saying “that shit’s too complicated, just be a good person” (to oversimplify and omit the “draw the rest of the fucking owl” parts) Like you’re probably not going to start with any halfway-mainstream virtue ethics text and find yourself pondering how much you’d have to be paid to donate enough to make it net-good to be a low-level worker at an extermination camp. No dude, don’t work at extermination camps, who cares how many mosquito nets you buy? Don’t do that.
      - deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
  - TimorousBestie 11mo ago
    The best statement of virtue ethics is contained in Alasdair Macintyre’s _After Virtue_. It’s a metaethical foundation that argues that both deontology and utilitarianism are incoherent and have failed to explain what some unitary “the good” is, and that ancient notions of “virtues” (some of which have filtered down to present day) can capture facets of that good better. The big advantage of virtue ethics from my point of view is that humans have unarguably evolved cognitive mechanisms for evaluating some virtues (“loyalty”, “friendship”, “moderation”, etc.) but nobody seriously argues that we have a similarly built-in notion of “utility”.
downrightmike 11mo ago
Its basically the same thing as the church selling indulgences. Didn't matter if you stole the money, pay the church and go to heaven
Aunche 11mo ago
> It's the perfect philosophy for morally questionable people with a lot of money. The perfect philosophy for morally questionable people would just be to ignore charity altogether (e.g. Russian oligarchs) or use charity to launder strategically launder their reputations (e.g. Jeffrey Epstein). SBF would fall into that second category as well.
1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago
There's the implication that some altruism may not be "effective"
- btilly 11mo ago
  What makes it absurd? If I want to give $100 to charity, some of the places that I can donate it to will do less good for the world. For example Make a Wish and Kids Wish Foundation sound very similar. But a significantly higher portion of money donated to the former goes to kids, than does money donated to the latter. If I'm donating to that cause, I want to know this. After evaluating those two charities, I would prefer to donate to the former. Sure, this may offend the other one. But I'm absolutely OK with that. Their ability to be offended does not excuse their poor results.
  - keiferski 11mo ago
    I don’t think anyone has an issue with being efficient with donation money. But it isn’t called Effective Giving. The conclusion that many EA people seemed to reach is that keeping your high-paying job and hiring 10 people to do good deeds is more ethically laudable than doing the thing yourself, even though it may be inefficient. Which really rubs a lot of people the wrong way, as it should.
    - chongli 11mo ago
      It’s another argument in favour of EA that they try to cut past arguments like this. If you’re a billionaire you can do a lot more good by investing in a mosquito net factory than you ever could by hanging mosquito nets one at a time yourself. The argument of EA is that feelings can be manipulated (and often are) by the marketing work done by charities and their proponents. If we want to actually be effective we have to cut past the pathos and look at real data.
      - keiferski 11mo ago
        Firstly, most people aren't billionaires. Nor do I think EA is somehow novel in suggesting that a billionaire should buy nets instead of help directly. Secondly, you're missing the point I'm making, which is why many people find EA distasteful: it completely focuses on outcomes and not internal character, and it arrives at these incomes by abstract formulae. This is how we ended up with increasingly absurd claims like "I'm a better person because I work at BigCo and make $250k a year, then donate 10% of it, than the person that donates their time toward helping their community directly." Or "AGI will lead to widespread utopia in the future, therefore I'm ethically superior because I'm working at an AI company today." I really don't think anyone is critical of EA because they think being inefficient with charity dollars is a good thing, so that is a strawman. People are critical of the smarmy attitude, the implication that other altruism is ineffective, and the general detached, anti-humanistic approach that the people in that movement portray. The problems with it are not much different from utilitarianism itself, which EA is just a half-baked shadow of. As someone else in this comment section said, unless you have a sense of virtue ethics underlying your calculations, you end up with absurd, anti-human conclusions that don't make much sense to anyone with common sense. There's also the very basic argument that maybe directly helping other people leads to a better world overall, and serves as an example than just spending money abstractly. That counterargument never occurs to the EA/rationalist crowd, because they're too obsessed with some master rational formula for success.
anonymousiam 11mo ago
EA should be bound by some ethical constraints. Sam Bankman-Fried was all in with EA, but instead of putting his own money in, he put everybody else's in. Also his choice of "good causes" was somewhat myopic.
- jahnu 11mo ago
  Some might suggest that he wasn't an EA at all but just used it for cover.
ChadNauseam 11mo ago
You'll never find a single prominent EA saying that because it's 100% made up. Maybe they'll remark that from an academic perspective it's a consequence of some interpretations of utilitarianism, a topic some EAs are interested in, but no prominent EA has ever actually endorsed or implied the view you put forward. To an EA, what you said is as laughable of a strawman as if someone summarized your beliefs as "it makes no difference if you donate to starving children in africa or if you do nothing, because it's your decision and neither is immoral". The popularity of EA is even more obvious than what you described. Here's why it's popular. A lot of people are interested in doing good, but have limited resources. EAs tried to figure out how to do a lot of good given limited resources. ou might think this sounds too obvious to be true, but no one before EAs was doing this. The closest thing was charity rankings that just measured what percent of the money was spend on administration. (A charity that spends 100% of its donations on back massages for baby seals would be the #1 charity on that ranking.) Finding ways to do a lot of good given your budget is a pretty intuitively attractive idea. And they're really all about this too. Go read the EA forum. They're not talking about how their hands are clean now because they donated. They're talking about how to do good. They're arguing about whether malaria nets or malaria chemotreatments are more effective at stopping the spread of the disease. They're arguing about how to best mitigate the suffering of factory farmed animals (or how to convince people to go vegan). And so on. EA is just people trying to do good. Yeah, SBF was a bad actor, but how were EA charities supposed to know that when the investors that gave him millions couldn't even do that?
alsetmusic 11mo ago
That guy who went to jail believed in it, so it has to be good. I hope SBF doesn’t buy a pardon from our corrupt president, but I hope for a lot of things that don’t turn out the way I’d like. Apologies for USA-centric framing. I’m tired.
internet_points 11mo ago
"I Work For an Evil Company, but Outside Work, I’m Actually a Really Good Person" https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-work-for-an-evil-company-but-outside-work-im-actually-a-really-good-person https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-work-for-an-evil-compa...
- sershe 11mo ago
  The very first example about water use is a well known red herring, data center water use is miniscule compared to the production of everyday goods. It's really amazing when reading this kind of stuff how many people don't appear to realize others don't buy into their cult. The way I see it, "I work for a company that intellectual descendants of the 2nd (or the 1st) most evil ideology invented by man consider evil"
Sporktacular 11mo ago
That's not what it's about. Exploiting people to make money is not fine. Causing harm while mitigating it elsewhere defeats the point. Giving is already about the kind of person you are.
Joeboy 11mo ago
Similarly, the reason comments like yours get voted to the top of discussions about EA is that they imply "It's best if rich people keep their money, because the people trying to save poor people's lives are actually bad". There's a very obvious appeal to that view, especially somewhere like HN.
- pjc50 11mo ago
  No, I think this is just about the difference between Effective Altruism (tm), altruism that is actually effective, and the hidden third option (tax the rich). EA-the-brand turned into a speed run of the failure cases of utilitarianism. Because it was simply too easy to make up projections for how your spending was going to be effective in the future, without ever looking back at how your earning was damaging in the past. It was also a good lesson in how allowing thought experiments to run wild would end up distracting everyone from very real problems. In the end an agency devoted to spending money to save lives of poor people globally (USAID) got shut down by the world's richest man, and I can't remember whether EA ever had anything to say about that.
  - Joeboy 11mo ago
    The work I do is / was largely funded by USAID so I'm biased, but from literally everything I've seen EA people are unanimously horrified by the gutting of USAID. And EA people are overwhelmingly pro "tax the rich". But again, I recognize the appeal of your narrative so you're on safer ground than I am as far as HN popularity goes.
    - pjc50 11mo ago
      > EA people I have a lot of sympathy for the ideas of EA, but I do think a lot of this is down to EA-as-brand rather than whatever is happening at grassroots level. Perhaps it's in the same place as Communism; just as advocates need a good answer to "how did this go from a worker's rights movement to Stalin", EA needs an answer to "how did EA become most publicly associated with a famous fraudster".
TitaRusell 11mo ago
Just pay your taxes. I am not impressed with billionaires who dodge taxes and then give a few pennies to charity.
- chongli 11mo ago
  The ones who do so in good faith do this because they’re appalled by government waste. If you look at the government as a charity, its track record is pretty abysmal. People point to USAID but that’s like pointing to the small % of actual giving done by the worst offenders among private charities.
  - TitaRusell 11mo ago
    First of all all these clowns give money to the GOP. Which they should stop doing immediately. Then they can start advocating for universal healthcare and child benefits. The government is quite literally all of us. Do better.
- carlosjobim 11mo ago
  How does that solve anything for the victims? Giving money to a different evil organization in this case.
directevolve 11mo ago
The practice of effective altruism, as distinct from the EA movement, is good for our culture. If you have a lot of money or talent, please think critically about how to leverage it efficiently to make the world a better place. Doing that doesn’t buy you personal virtue. It doesn’t excuse heinous acts. But within the bounds of ordinary standards of good behavior, try to do the most good you can with the talents and resources at your disposal.
GardenLetter27 11mo ago
Modern day indulgences.
CyberDildonics 11mo ago
Lots of charity is just about buying something else. Buying good press, buying your way out of guilt, etc. Short sellers even count some companies' altruism as a red flag.
sershe 11mo ago
That argument applies to any charity. The difference in EA, even if one was to agree with your general framing, is that at least the money one uses on whitewashing should actually do some good and not be wasted.

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.
  - glenstein 11mo ago
    The problem is that creates a kind of epistemic closure around yourself where you can't encounter such a thing as a sincere expression of it. I actually think your charge against Libertarians is basically accurate. And I think it deserves a (limited) amount of time and attention directed at its core contentions for what they are worth. After all, Robert Nozick considered himself a libertarian and contributed some important thinking on things like justice and retribution and equality and any number of subjects, and the world wouldn't be bettered by dismissing him with twitter style ridicule. I do agree that things like EA and Libertarianism have to answer for the in-the-wild proponents they tend to attract but not to the point of epistemic closure in response to its subject matter.
    - Eisenstein 11mo ago
      When a term becomes loaded enough then people will stop using it when they don't want to be associated with the loaded aspects of the term. If they don't then they already know what the consequences are, because they will be dealing with them all the time. The first and most impactful consequence isn't 'people who are not X will think I am X' it is actually 'people who are X will think I am one of them'.
      - glenstein 11mo ago
        I think social dynamics are real and must be answered for but I don't think any self-correction or lacktherof has anything to do with subject matter which can be understood independently. I will never take a proponent of The Bell Curve seriously who tries to say they're "just following the data", because I do hold them and the book responsible for their social and cultural entanglements and they would have to be blind to ignore it. But the book is wrong for reasons intrinsic to its analysis and it would be catastrophic to treat that point as moot.
- RobinL 11mo ago
  > many of EA's most notorious supporters. The fact they're notorious makes them a biased sample. My guess is for the majority of people interested in EA - the typical supporter who is not super wealthy or well known - the two central ideas are: - For people living in wealthy countries, giving some % of your income makes little difference to your life, but can potentially make a big difference to someone else's - We should carefully decide which charities to give to, because some are far more effective than others. That's pretty much it - essentially the message in Peter Singer's book: https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/ https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/. I would describe myself as an EA, but all that means to me is really the two points above. It certainly isn't anything like an indulgence that morally offsets poor behaviour elsewhere
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 11mo ago
    I would say the problem with EA is the "E". Saying you're doing 'effective' altruism is another way of saying that everyone else's altruism is wasteful and ineffective. Which of course isn't the case. The "E" might as well stand for "Elitist" in that's the vibe it gives off. All truly altruistic acts would aim to be effective, otherwise it wouldn't be altruism - it would just be waste. Not to say there is no waste in some altruism acts, but I'm not convinced its actually any worse than EA. Given the fraud associated with some purported EA advocates, I'd say EA might even be worse. The EA movement reeks of the optimize-everything mindset of people convinced they are smarter than everyone else who just say just gives money to a charity A when they could have been 13% more effective if they sent the money directly to this particular school in country B with the condition they only spend it on X. The origins of EA may not be that, but that's what it has evolved into.
    - estearum 11mo ago
      A lot of altruism is quite literally wasteful and ineffective, in which case it's pretty hard to call it altruism. > they could have been 13% more effective If you think the difference between ineffective and effective altruism is a 13% spread, I fear you have not looked deeply enough into either standard altruistic endeavors nor EA enough to have an informed opinion. The gaps are actually astonishingly large and trivial to capitalize on (i.e. difference between clicking one Donate Here button versus a different Donate Here button). The sheer scale of the spread is the impetus behind the entire train of thought.
- btilly 11mo ago
  The OP's interpretation is an inaccurate summary of the philosophy. But it is an excellent summary of the trap that people who try to follow EA can easily fall into. Any attempt to rationally evaluate charity work, can instead wind up rationalizing what they want to do. Settling for the convenient and self-aggrandizing "analysis", rather than a rigorous one. An even worse trap is to prioritize a future utopia. Utopian ideals are dangerous. They push people towards "the ends justify the means". If the ends are infinitely good, there is no bound on how bad the "justified means" can be. But history shows that imagined utopias seldom materialize. By contrast the damage from the attempted means is all too real. That's why all of the worst tragedies of the 20th century started with someone who was trying to create a utopia. EA circles have shown an alarming receptiveness to shysters who are trying to paint a picture of utopia. For example look at how influential someone like Samuel Bankman-Fried was able to be, before his fraud imploded.
- cortesoft 11mo ago
  Well, in order to be a notorious supporter of EA, you have to have enough money for your charity to be noticed, which means you are very rich. If you are very rich, it means you have to have made money from a capitalistic venture, and those are inherently exploitive. So basically everyone who has a lot of money to donate has questionable morals already. The question is, are the large donators to EA groups more or less 'morally suspect' than large donors to other charity types? In other words, everyone with a lot of money is morally questionable, and EA donors are just a subset of that.
  - nl 11mo ago
    > you have to have made money from a capitalistic venture, and those are inherently exploitive. You say this like it's fact beyond dispute, but I for one strongly disagree. Not a fan of EA at all though!
    - tovej 11mo ago
      For very much money, as in, let's say, more than 1000x the median person in the wealth distribution, I'd say it's obviously true. You cannot make 1000x the average persons wealth by acting morally. Except possibly winning the lottery. A person is not capable of creating that wealth. A group of people have created that wealth, and the 1000x individual has hoarded it to themselves instead of sharing it with the people who contributed. If you are a billionaire, you own at least 5000x the median (200000k in the US). If you're a big tech CEO, you own somewhere around 50-100,000x the median. These are the biggest proponents of EA. The bottom 50% only own about 2% of the wealth anymore, the top 10% own two thirds of the wealth, the top 1% owns a whole third and it's only getting worse. Who is responsible for the wealth inequality? The people at the right edge of the Lorenz curve. They could fix it, but don't, in fact they benefit more from their workers being poorer and more desperate for a job. I hope that explains the exploitation.
      - zozbot234 11mo ago
        > You cannot make 1000x the average persons wealth by acting morally. Except possibly winning the lottery. The risk profile of early startup founders looks a lot like "winning the lottery", except that the initial investment (in terms of time, effort and lost opportunities elsewhere as well as pure monetary ones) is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of a lottery ticket. There's only a handful of successful unicorns vs. a whole lot of failed startups. Other contributors generally have a choice of sharing into the risk vs. playing it safe, and they usually pick the safe option because they know what the odds are. Nothing has been taken away from them.
- socalgal2 11mo ago
  this feels like “the most notorious atheists/jews/blacks/whites/christian/muslims are bad therefore all atheists/jews/blacks/whites/christian/muslims are bad
- stickfigure 11mo ago
  > tracks perfectly with many of EA's most notorious supporters Just wait until you find out about vegetarianism's most notorious supporter.
klustregrif 11mo ago
> EA is about donating your money effectively For most it seems EA is an argument that despite no charitable donations being made at all, and despite gaining wealth through questionable means it’s still all ethical because it’s theoretically “just more effective” if the person continues to claim that they would in the far future put some money towards these hypothetical “very effective” charitable causes, that just never seems to have materialized yet, and all of cause shouldn’t be perused “until you’ve built your fortune”.
- Aunche 11mo ago
  If you're going to assign a discount rate for cash, you also need to assign a similar "discount rate" for future lives saved. Just like investments compound, giving malaria medicine and vitamins to kids who needs him should produce at least as much positive compounding returns.
  - faidit 11mo ago
    That future promise doesn't do much good if the planet is dead by the time these guys get around to donating, thanks to the ecological catastrophe caused by their supposedly well-intentioned greed. Also, EA proponents tend to ignore society's opportunity cost here - that money could have been taxed and put to good uses by the public in the meantime. Whatever the inefficiencies of the public sector, at least we can do something to fix it now instead of trusting the promises of billionaires that they will start giving back one day.
ghurtado 11mo ago
I don't see anything in your comment that directly disagrees with the one that you've replied to. Maybe you misinterpreted it? To me, It was simply saying that the flaw in the EA model is that a person can be 90% a dangerous sociopath and as long as the 10% goes to charity (effectively) they are considered morally righteous. It's the 21st century version of Papal indulgences.
- HDThoreaun 11mo ago
  The thing is that dangerous sociopaths will be dangerous sociopaths either way. What’s the downside in convincing them to donate 10% of their income to effective causes?
glenstein 11mo ago
I actually think I agree with this, but nevertheless people can refer to EA and mean by it the totality of sociological dynamics surrounding it, including its population of proponents and their histories. I actually think EA is conceptually perfectly fine within its scope of analysis (once you start listing examples, e.g. mosquito nets to prevent malaria, I think they're hard to dispute), and the desire to throw out the conceptual baby with the bathwater of its adherents is an unfortunate demonstration of anti-intellectualism. I think it's like how some predatory pickup artists do the work of being proto-feminists (or perhaps more to the point, how actual feminists can nevertheless be people who engage in the very kinds of harms studied by the subject matter). I wouldn't want to make feminism answer for such creatures as definitionally built into the core concept.
WhyOhWhyQ 11mo ago
The op and your reply are basically guaranteed text on the page whenever EA comes up (not that your reply is unwarranted, or the op's message is either, but it is interesting that these are guaranteed comments).
pjc50 11mo ago
> EA is about A friend of mine used to "gotcha" any use of the expression "X is about Y", which was annoying but trained a useful intellectual habit. That may have been what EA's original stated intent was, but then you have to look at what people actually say and do under the name of EA.
- Joeboy 11mo ago
  As per conversation elsewhere, I think you've fallen for some popular but untrue / unfair narratives about EA. But I want to take another tack. I never see anybody make the following argument. Probably that's because other people wisely understand how repulsive people find it, but I want to try anyway, possibly because I have undiagnosed autism. EA-style donations have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. I know there are people who will quibble about the numbers, but I don't think you can sensibly dispute that EA has saved a lot of lives. This never seems to appear in people's moral calculus, like at all. Most of those are people who are poor, distant, powerless and effectively invisible to you but nevertheless, do they not count for something? I know I'm doing utilitarianism and people hate it, but I just don't get how these lives don't count for something. Can you sell me on the idea that we should let more poor people die of preventable diseases in exchange for a more morally unimpeachable policy to donations?
  - nemomarx 11mo ago
    I don't think the complaint is really the donations or the impact, rather it's that the community has issues? Whether you agree that someone can put money into saving lives to make up for other moral faults or issues or so on is the core issue. And even from a utilitarian view we'd have to say that more of these donations happened than would have without the movement or with a different movement, which is difficult to measure. Consider the usaid thing - Elon musk may have wiped out most of the EA community gains by causing that defending, and was probably supported by the community in some sense. How to weigh in all these factors?
    - Joeboy 11mo ago
      > Whether you agree that someone can put money into saving lives to make up for other moral faults or issues or so on is the core issue For me the core issue is why people are so happy to advocate for the deaths of the poor because of things like "the community has issues". Of course the withdrawal of EA donations is going to cause poor people to die. I mean yes, some funding will go elsewhere, but a lot of it's just going to go away. Sorry to vent but people are so endlessly disappointing. > Elon musk may have wiped out most of the EA community gains by causing that defending For sure! > and was probably supported by the community in some sense You sound fairly under-confident about that, presumably because you're guessing. It's wildly untrue.
JohnMakin 11mo ago
It is a little bit though, using these lines of thinking it becomes extraordinarily easy to excuse, justify, or even paint as a good thing highly unethical or immoral actions. For instance - If I find some sort of fraud that will harm X number of users, but make me Y dollars - if Y > (harm caused), not doing (fraud making me Y dollars) could be interpreted as being "inefficient" with your resources or causing more harm. It's very easy to use the philosophy in this manner, and of course many see it as a huge perk. The types of people drawn to it are all much the same.
cyanydeez 11mo ago
Its a illogical theory, even if practiced in good faith. Just because the market pays for one activity does not mean ots externalitirs are equally solvedby the matkets valuation. From basic physics, its akin to saying you can drop a vase and return it to predropped state with equal effort. Entropy alone prevents EA.
jjj123 11mo ago
The main idea is not an excuse to be a bad person, but it does justify making an ungodly amount of money, and making even more money after you’ve already made an ungodly amount of money. And for not letting that money get taken by taxes (god forbid, how ineffective!). So I’d argue on OPs side, I don’t care what EA stated intent is, it works pretty well as a smokescreen for the types who want to get really fucking rich by any means necessary. Even better if the donation target is a North Star they never actually reach.

nxor 11mo ago

SBF has entered the chat

AgentME 11mo ago
I'm tired of every other discussion about EA online assuming that SBF is representative of the average EA member, instead of being an infamous outlier.
- nxor 11mo ago
  What reasons at all do you have?
  - Sporktacular 11mo ago
    What reasons do you have to assume EA = SBF?

phantasmish 11mo ago

I’m skeptical of any consequentialist approach that doesn’t just boil down to virtue ethics. Aiming directly at consequentialist ways of operating always seems to either become impractical in a hurry, or get fucked up and kinda evil. Like, it’s so consistent that anyone thinking they’ve figured it out needs to have a good hard think about it for a several years before tentatively attempting action based on it, I’d say.

jrochkind1 11mo ago
What does "virtue ethics" mean?
- keiferski 11mo ago
  One of the three traditional European philosophy approaches to ethics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_ethics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_ethics EA being a prime example of consequentialism.
  - phantasmish 11mo ago
    … and I tend to think of it as the safest route to doing OK at consequentialism, too, myself. The point is still basically good outcomes, but it short-circuits the problems that tend to come up when one starts trying to maximize utility/good, by saying “that shit’s too complicated, just be a good person” (to oversimplify and omit the “draw the rest of the fucking owl” parts) Like you’re probably not going to start with any halfway-mainstream virtue ethics text and find yourself pondering how much you’d have to be paid to donate enough to make it net-good to be a low-level worker at an extermination camp. No dude, don’t work at extermination camps, who cares how many mosquito nets you buy? Don’t do that.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
- TimorousBestie 11mo ago
  The best statement of virtue ethics is contained in Alasdair Macintyre’s _After Virtue_. It’s a metaethical foundation that argues that both deontology and utilitarianism are incoherent and have failed to explain what some unitary “the good” is, and that ancient notions of “virtues” (some of which have filtered down to present day) can capture facets of that good better. The big advantage of virtue ethics from my point of view is that humans have unarguably evolved cognitive mechanisms for evaluating some virtues (“loyalty”, “friendship”, “moderation”, etc.) but nobody seriously argues that we have a similarly built-in notion of “utility”.

downrightmike 11mo ago

Its basically the same thing as the church selling indulgences. Didn't matter if you stole the money, pay the church and go to heaven

Aunche 11mo ago

> It's the perfect philosophy for morally questionable people with a lot of money. The perfect philosophy for morally questionable people would just be to ignore charity altogether (e.g. Russian oligarchs) or use charity to launder strategically launder their reputations (e.g. Jeffrey Epstein). SBF would fall into that second category as well.

1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago

There's the implication that some altruism may not be "effective"

btilly 11mo ago
What makes it absurd? If I want to give $100 to charity, some of the places that I can donate it to will do less good for the world. For example Make a Wish and Kids Wish Foundation sound very similar. But a significantly higher portion of money donated to the former goes to kids, than does money donated to the latter. If I'm donating to that cause, I want to know this. After evaluating those two charities, I would prefer to donate to the former. Sure, this may offend the other one. But I'm absolutely OK with that. Their ability to be offended does not excuse their poor results.
- keiferski 11mo ago
  I don’t think anyone has an issue with being efficient with donation money. But it isn’t called Effective Giving. The conclusion that many EA people seemed to reach is that keeping your high-paying job and hiring 10 people to do good deeds is more ethically laudable than doing the thing yourself, even though it may be inefficient. Which really rubs a lot of people the wrong way, as it should.
  - chongli 11mo ago
    It’s another argument in favour of EA that they try to cut past arguments like this. If you’re a billionaire you can do a lot more good by investing in a mosquito net factory than you ever could by hanging mosquito nets one at a time yourself. The argument of EA is that feelings can be manipulated (and often are) by the marketing work done by charities and their proponents. If we want to actually be effective we have to cut past the pathos and look at real data.
    - keiferski 11mo ago
      Firstly, most people aren't billionaires. Nor do I think EA is somehow novel in suggesting that a billionaire should buy nets instead of help directly. Secondly, you're missing the point I'm making, which is why many people find EA distasteful: it completely focuses on outcomes and not internal character, and it arrives at these incomes by abstract formulae. This is how we ended up with increasingly absurd claims like "I'm a better person because I work at BigCo and make $250k a year, then donate 10% of it, than the person that donates their time toward helping their community directly." Or "AGI will lead to widespread utopia in the future, therefore I'm ethically superior because I'm working at an AI company today." I really don't think anyone is critical of EA because they think being inefficient with charity dollars is a good thing, so that is a strawman. People are critical of the smarmy attitude, the implication that other altruism is ineffective, and the general detached, anti-humanistic approach that the people in that movement portray. The problems with it are not much different from utilitarianism itself, which EA is just a half-baked shadow of. As someone else in this comment section said, unless you have a sense of virtue ethics underlying your calculations, you end up with absurd, anti-human conclusions that don't make much sense to anyone with common sense. There's also the very basic argument that maybe directly helping other people leads to a better world overall, and serves as an example than just spending money abstractly. That counterargument never occurs to the EA/rationalist crowd, because they're too obsessed with some master rational formula for success.

anonymousiam 11mo ago

EA should be bound by some ethical constraints. Sam Bankman-Fried was all in with EA, but instead of putting his own money in, he put everybody else's in. Also his choice of "good causes" was somewhat myopic.

jahnu 11mo ago
Some might suggest that he wasn't an EA at all but just used it for cover.

ChadNauseam 11mo ago

You'll never find a single prominent EA saying that because it's 100% made up. Maybe they'll remark that from an academic perspective it's a consequence of some interpretations of utilitarianism, a topic some EAs are interested in, but no prominent EA has ever actually endorsed or implied the view you put forward. To an EA, what you said is as laughable of a strawman as if someone summarized your beliefs as "it makes no difference if you donate to starving children in africa or if you do nothing, because it's your decision and neither is immoral". The popularity of EA is even more obvious than what you described. Here's why it's popular. A lot of people are interested in doing good, but have limited resources. EAs tried to figure out how to do a lot of good given limited resources. ou might think this sounds too obvious to be true, but no one before EAs was doing this. The closest thing was charity rankings that just measured what percent of the money was spend on administration. (A charity that spends 100% of its donations on back massages for baby seals would be the #1 charity on that ranking.) Finding ways to do a lot of good given your budget is a pretty intuitively attractive idea. And they're really all about this too. Go read the EA forum. They're not talking about how their hands are clean now because they donated. They're talking about how to do good. They're arguing about whether malaria nets or malaria chemotreatments are more effective at stopping the spread of the disease. They're arguing about how to best mitigate the suffering of factory farmed animals (or how to convince people to go vegan). And so on. EA is just people trying to do good. Yeah, SBF was a bad actor, but how were EA charities supposed to know that when the investors that gave him millions couldn't even do that?

alsetmusic 11mo ago

That guy who went to jail believed in it, so it has to be good. I hope SBF doesn’t buy a pardon from our corrupt president, but I hope for a lot of things that don’t turn out the way I’d like. Apologies for USA-centric framing. I’m tired.

internet_points 11mo ago

"I Work For an Evil Company, but Outside Work, I’m Actually a Really Good Person" https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-work-for-an-evil-company-but-outside-work-im-actually-a-really-good-person https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-work-for-an-evil-compa...

sershe 11mo ago
The very first example about water use is a well known red herring, data center water use is miniscule compared to the production of everyday goods. It's really amazing when reading this kind of stuff how many people don't appear to realize others don't buy into their cult. The way I see it, "I work for a company that intellectual descendants of the 2nd (or the 1st) most evil ideology invented by man consider evil"

Sporktacular 11mo ago

That's not what it's about. Exploiting people to make money is not fine. Causing harm while mitigating it elsewhere defeats the point. Giving is already about the kind of person you are.

Joeboy 11mo ago

Similarly, the reason comments like yours get voted to the top of discussions about EA is that they imply "It's best if rich people keep their money, because the people trying to save poor people's lives are actually bad". There's a very obvious appeal to that view, especially somewhere like HN.

pjc50 11mo ago
No, I think this is just about the difference between Effective Altruism (tm), altruism that is actually effective, and the hidden third option (tax the rich). EA-the-brand turned into a speed run of the failure cases of utilitarianism. Because it was simply too easy to make up projections for how your spending was going to be effective in the future, without ever looking back at how your earning was damaging in the past. It was also a good lesson in how allowing thought experiments to run wild would end up distracting everyone from very real problems. In the end an agency devoted to spending money to save lives of poor people globally (USAID) got shut down by the world's richest man, and I can't remember whether EA ever had anything to say about that.
- Joeboy 11mo ago
  The work I do is / was largely funded by USAID so I'm biased, but from literally everything I've seen EA people are unanimously horrified by the gutting of USAID. And EA people are overwhelmingly pro "tax the rich". But again, I recognize the appeal of your narrative so you're on safer ground than I am as far as HN popularity goes.
  - pjc50 11mo ago
    > EA people I have a lot of sympathy for the ideas of EA, but I do think a lot of this is down to EA-as-brand rather than whatever is happening at grassroots level. Perhaps it's in the same place as Communism; just as advocates need a good answer to "how did this go from a worker's rights movement to Stalin", EA needs an answer to "how did EA become most publicly associated with a famous fraudster".

TitaRusell 11mo ago

Just pay your taxes. I am not impressed with billionaires who dodge taxes and then give a few pennies to charity.

chongli 11mo ago
The ones who do so in good faith do this because they’re appalled by government waste. If you look at the government as a charity, its track record is pretty abysmal. People point to USAID but that’s like pointing to the small % of actual giving done by the worst offenders among private charities.
- TitaRusell 11mo ago
  First of all all these clowns give money to the GOP. Which they should stop doing immediately. Then they can start advocating for universal healthcare and child benefits. The government is quite literally all of us. Do better.
carlosjobim 11mo ago
How does that solve anything for the victims? Giving money to a different evil organization in this case.

directevolve 11mo ago

The practice of effective altruism, as distinct from the EA movement, is good for our culture. If you have a lot of money or talent, please think critically about how to leverage it efficiently to make the world a better place. Doing that doesn’t buy you personal virtue. It doesn’t excuse heinous acts. But within the bounds of ordinary standards of good behavior, try to do the most good you can with the talents and resources at your disposal.

GardenLetter27 11mo ago

Modern day indulgences.

CyberDildonics 11mo ago

Lots of charity is just about buying something else. Buying good press, buying your way out of guilt, etc. Short sellers even count some companies' altruism as a red flag.

sershe 11mo ago

That argument applies to any charity. The difference in EA, even if one was to agree with your general framing, is that at least the money one uses on whitewashing should actually do some good and not be wasted.