It's also more self-serving for the better part of it (as your focus is to become rich), and might never reach the second part (actually becoming rich and helping others).

It's also bogus: not many can become rich, both for reasons for circumstance making from much harder to nigh impossible for billions, and also for purely logical reasons: wealth is relative, and if much bigger numbers of people were rich, it would get lost to inflation.

So this effectively gives a pie-in-the-sky idea for what to become and when to help, to most people, as opposed to encouraging them to help dozens (or just a few) here and now.

Some people are quite charitable and give 10%. I'm a little more selfish and give 1.5%, but this is already currently helping people.

Is it really pie in the sky idealism if (statistically) I've saved around 6 lives to far, (and helped many more). Still early in my career, and lots of time to go. I hope to cross 100 someday. But I started just as I graduated and have kept it up every year.

So I suppose the next question in my rebuttal would be to ask what alternative you suggest?

According to [1] OECD average is 36 %. In my EU country it is 46 %.

[1] https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/taxing-wages-brochure.pd...

  "It's also bogus: not many can become rich"

All these points are far from obviously true. In fact I can come up with many examples where they obviously are not.

Regarding (2) - There are examples of successful EA in action. See the FTX founder.

Regarding (3) - Getting rich can't make people poorer (on net) unless you're exploiting negative externalities, which we would both agree need to be addressed by government. It can transfer wealth from A to B (e.g., by deprecating one industry and replacing it with another), for sure, but I don't see that as automatically bad.

You mean, the easiest ways to get rich? You have to be pretty principled not to take those.

That said:

>Who cares if it's more self serving as long as they do get the the second part?

People like me, who don't consider it being altruistic or not as orthogonal to the success of the second part.

Are you using 'orthogonal' to mean "unrelated to", or do you mean "in opposition to"?

Because depending on which meaning you intend, your final sentence can be read in two very different ways. If it's the first, I'm not completely sure you and fighterpilot are necessarily disagreeing? If it's the second meaning, then it's a somewhat bold claim to say that personal benefit in any form invalidates altruism.

>Are you using 'orthogonal' to mean "unrelated to", or do you mean "in opposition to"?

I'm using it to mean "unrelated to" (canonical CS meaning of "orthogonal" as well).

But, here's the catch, note that I used a double negative in my phrasing. so, I'm not saying they are othogonal, I'm saying they're not orthogonal. That is, I don't consider "being altruistic or not as orthogonal to the success of the second part" (the second part being the "helping" we were discussing).

So, it's not that "personal benefit in any form invalidates altruism", it's that lack of altruism works against effectivly helping people.

Yes, uninvested wealth is zero sum (cash and cash equivalents) and that is why we have inflation, but invested wealth can be positive sum.

If you use your uninvested wealth to invest into a poor country then you end up doing more good than bad.

The modern world compared 1700 is a great example on joe wealth can (but doesn’t always, see Saudi Arabia) benefit all.

Other times the scheme is just cheating people or restricting their access to hoarded limited resource.

The “a lot” came from the search results for “gates oxford covid patent” (I'd've expected people arguing against it if there was contention in opinion – this isn't the same as “it's fact”), though further investigation (the thing I didn't do; sorry) reveals that I only found two other articles: https://criticallegalthinking.com/2021/02/09/patent-capital-... and https://criticallegalthinking.com/2021/02/09/patent-capital-... the rest of the results are mirrors.

You're right that it's a rubbish thing to write; I'll put more effort into comments in future.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/02/...

MS. GATES: Well, we, along with many other partners, supported Oxford in saying what really needs to have happened there, they had incredible science, but they had never brought a vaccine to market. And so, they needed to partner with a pharmaceutical company who had expertise bringing a vaccine to market. And so, it was us and many partners that said that's a partnership that ought to happen. Ultimately, Oxford made that decision.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/02/...

The high corporate savings rate of the last decade tells us that most of that money is just sitting somewhere doing absolutely nothing.

The total impact of collective action is much greater than the sum of its individual parts.

A legitimate argument is that not everyone can make tons of money and donate because someone has to do the work. But there are plenty of "effective" organizations that are not yet overfunded.

If all you want is to distribute, then sure. Collective movements aren't even the best at straight distribution, so someone trying to maximize the marginal utility of their dollar probably won't even donate. But collective action is generally not just about distribution, and moreso about fixing the structure of society to make distribution from rich donors unnecessary.

I think EA's would 100% want to fix the structure of society, if that method was resource efficient. If you believe that changing the structure of society is more resource efficient (in terms of time or money) than donating to AMF, GiveDirectly, or Deworm the World, please publish your analysis.

How much {money, time, etc.} would it take to convince a government or people to adopt a certain policy? What would the benefits of that policy be? How much pushback would you get from opponents? What are the risks? If you can successfully make an argument that changing a policy would be more resource efficient than current efficient charities, that would convince EAs to direct more resources to politics.

The idea of any collective, plural, outside-in action may be something, but not altruism.

- total anonymity, or

- ultimate sacrifice, as in the mother or warrior who lays it down for another.

Anything less is open to the usual questions of motive.

As with Dada, altruism doesn't survive intellectual evaluation.

Sure and I'm not as interested in discussing the philosophical ideal of altruism. My interest in charitable work, as I suspect many interested in EA feel, stems from trying to do the greatest good with my limited allocation of resources, be that money, time, knowledge, manual labor, or otherwise. In that regard I'm unconcerned about the usual moral philosophical questions about motive and goodness.

(Plus, people who helped the right cause and did not died have done more good then those who died for bad cause. Ultimate sacrifice for something bad does not make you better.)

> Anything less is open to the usual questions of motive.

But then the focus is on "if someone theoretically learned about me existing, do I leave a space for that person to attribute to me some intentions?" And the answer to that should be "who cares".

The impact that you have when you are close to the person is far more likely to be a good one than if you're disconnected from them

But again, both paths should be encouraged. There will always be relatively few 'rich' people with the means to help millions.

Is it though? E.g. Bill Gates got insanely rich because his company engaged in anti-competitive behavior, thus causing lots of harm. You can easily make a point that often the damage that is caused to others if larger than the gain for the individual, so even if they spent 100% of their wealth, they couldn't make up for the damage they have caused.

In that case, maybe it's better to look at medicine and the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm.

When a hedge fund analyst meddles with food supply in Ethiopia and makes a killing while a few thousand starve, but then builds a school to educate a hundred kids in Ethiopia... how much good has he done?

> It is a research field which uses high-quality evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to help others as much as possible.

This assumes that reasoning and evidence are sufficient to determine what will be most effective. Compare this to the Buddhists, for example, who believe that the networks of causality are so complex and intricate that trying to make such determinations (at least, on any humanly reasonable scale) are doomed due to missing a lot of the picture as well as generally incorporating many faulty assumptions.

In other words, what is ultimately most effective at ending suffering may not fit into the metaphysical framework that EA implicitly adopts.

Axiom 1: Human life has value, saving a life is thus positive utility.

Assumption 1: We know nothing of the people tied to the trolley -> All humans are probabilistically equal.

Thus, the utilitarian presses the button and saves 3 at the cost of 1.

And even if you had some suspicions, once you honestly factor in your certainty about predictive value of your suspicions, it multiplies down to nothing - so in practice, an uniform prior is a pretty good choice.

Yes, it's true that all this stuff is not computable in practice, that it's too complex - but it's not really an obstacle! Everything in life is like that. When you're cooking and a recipe calls for 200g of an ingredient, you're fine with anything between 180g or 220g, and don't care how much of it is water. A restaurant may need to do 200g ± 5g. A chemical plant may want to do 200g ± 0.5g, after first demoisturizing. Nobody tries to hit 200g to ± 1 dalton, because that would be ridiculously complex to do, and require to control for phenomena that most people don't even know exist.

We've been trading precision for compute time ever since humans first figured out that things can be measured. The solution is what it's always been: calculating using heuristics and approximations, while keeping tracks of the bounds of those heuristics and approximations.

Does it? You seem to be marginalizing across the entire population, but it's eminently obvious that most humans do _not_ see a human and erase all aspects of their being and then consider them to be one human in a uniformly distributed pool. Humans make snap judgements based on hundreds of subconscious factors all the time. Most humans look at a person and immediately bucket them into a cohort using some mix of physical attributes and prior beliefs of these attributes. Once we're in a cohort, relative probabilities can change. In this particular example, what happens if one of the 3 happens to be wearing military fatigues? What if they have a well-known authoritarian political symbol on their clothing?

Anyway, lots of intelligent philosophers have argued against utilitarianism and have brought up flaws in utilitarianism, such as Utility Monsters, and then there's the issue of even being able to impose a utility-based order between disparate things such as "tasty candy" and "rocks underneath my feet". Feel free to read those on the internet.

That indeed happens, but going by the gut isn't a bullet-proof moral philosophy. Snap judgements are something we can evaluate and consciously calibrate when we're not in the heat of the moment.

> lots of intelligent philosophers have argued against utilitarianism and have brought up flaws in utilitarianism

Yeah, I read some of those, many are really solid objections. I'm not arguing that utilitarianism is the be-all, end-all moral philosophy - just that it's a surprisingly good heuristic that can be pushed quite far before it starts to go "off the rails". And primarily, I'm arguing that working with approximations and heuristics is something we know how to do - not being able to compute a perfectly precise answer isn't a valid argument against a method.

Presumably by this logic, you'd have no opinion on whether a midwife should save a newborn baby's life, as it's unknowable whether the baby will one day orchestrate a genocide?

Regardless, there are lots of criticisms of utilitarianism, and utilitarianism is far from the ascendant moral philosophy, so feel free to find others online.

The very low chance of a future genocide does not weigh highly in this decision.