4 ms·
Effective Altruism is one of those things that sounds smart on the surface, but in practice is a yellow flag. The fact that he started the club is a red flag.
by jandrese 2mo ago
Effective Altruism is one of those things that sounds smart on the surface, but in practice is a yellow flag. The fact that he started the club is a red flag.
In short, Effective Altruism says you don't engage in charity until you have sufficient means to actually make a difference. Basically, you leverage capitalism to accumulate enough wealth to actually be able to solve a big problem, then you go all in on solving that problem. Sounds great right?
In the real world these people never accumulate enough wealth to actually start solving problems. Even when they become billionaires. In practice it is a convenient excuse to act like the most depraved capitalist while still pretending to sit on the high horse and talk down to people who simply try to help with the means available to them.
- skavi 2mo agocan you support those claims?
- jandrese 2mo agoOne has to only look at the actual participants to find ample examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQZWMmINqxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQZWMmINqxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S54GrXDjokg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S54GrXDjokg https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/a-mirror-for-tech-bros https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/a-mirror-for-tech-br... https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-problem-with-effective-altruism https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-problem-with-effectiv...
- TimorousBestie 2mo agoIt’s the “tractability” part of the ITN framework: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/itn-framework https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/itn-framework In practice, it can be used as a fully-general counterargument to supporting most charities, since decisively and completely solving problems in this space is rare. It’s harder to split a problem into component parts than it is to throw up one’s hands and say, “well, this isn’t tractable.”
- yorwba 2mo ago"tractability = % of a problem solved / % increase in resources" does not sound like "you have to decisively and completely solve a problem or it's not worth supporting." You can only throw up your hands and say "this isn't tractable" if tractability is 0, i.e. the charity doesn't help at all, no matter how much money you spend on it.
- TimorousBestie 2mo agoI’m describing about how the term is used by EA folks, which may not match its formal definition. (“In practice, it can be used as. . .”) > You can only throw up your hands and say "this isn't tractable" if tractability is 0, i.e. the charity doesn't help at all, no matter how much money you spend on it. Even I don’t believe this. You’ve gone too far in the other direction and made tractability a useless metric.
- yorwba 2mo agoIf tractability could only be used to filter out literally intractable charities, it would indeed not be very useful. But you can also use it to compare different approaches and pick the best ones. Then you don't throw up your hands and say "this isn't tractable" but you throw up your hands and say "why are you wasting money on this when a much more tractable approach exists."
- pingou 2mo ago"Giving What We Can" pledge is to give 10% of your income to charity.
- platinumrad 2mo agoI have a lot of problems with Aschenbrenner and the "Rationalist" community as a whole, but this is not a factually correct characterization of Effective Altruism.