What it evolved into is a bit controversial, overall they seem to be a bunch of kids who don't know what to do with the power and money they had at one point, as they all came too easy.
Maturity-wise... that's still unclear to me.
The founding idea is that giving $10,000 to save, y’know, four ailing dogs with bad livers or whatever, or a community theater, as opposed to many human lives, is fundamentally wrong.
“If you’re gonna give, you should maximize the impact as measured in human life” is fundamentally at odds with many common forms of giving, yes.
What if the friendships made at a community theater help a troubled kid through a rough patch and instead of committing suicide they go on to cure cancer? Not funding the theater would have been very sub-optimal.
Even without far-fetched hypotheticals what’s the point of saving everyone’s life if they’re just going to spend it figuring out how to make more mosquito nets or whatnot?
People are not as smart as they think and it’s important to leave room for serendipity and random associations.
I’m not claiming that all charity should be done in such an attempt-to-be-expected-utility-maximizing way, as there may be some like, component of how donations for more local causes might do more to improve the character of the person donating, and other things like that,
but I don’t see your view of “but-serendipity, and but-mosquito-nets-is-no-fun” don’t seem like compelling reasons to not look at QALYs and such.
That being said, I personally haven’t made any substantial donations, so if you’ve made even fairly inefficient donations (as long as they were at least a little effective, and not e.g. counterproductive) then your donations have likely done more good than mine have.
Obviously, this isn't to say we should donate any less to community theaters, though I think that's a different type of donation. That is partially altruistic, but on some level it fulfills the same satisfaction as a purchase.
> The idea that the moon is made out of cheese is stupid.
Agreed, but you are the only one that claimed this was the idea because clearly you are not the "arrogant and fundamentally wrong" one.
Though we cannot tell in every case what the outcome will be, that is no excuse to not consider the odds.
These people after all pursued theoretical means by which the risk of death could be reduced, and then put them into practice in order to improve their understanding.
You can die in the air. You can die on the ground! Sometimes jumping off a cliff is safer than staying there. There is no safe path, no guarantee of survival; you have to speculate, to make theories, to test them, to choose the path that seems best to you. There is nothing arrogant about this.
Public debate is, to a first approximation, nothing but arguing about which actions lead to better outcomes.
I could see an argument that the claim is that EA is insulting because it's akin to calling a chocolate brand "asbestos-free!"; you're implicitly suggesting that competitors contain asbestos. But note that this depends on whether the other brands do, in fact, contain asbestos, and EA is not shy about its claims that many charities do not effectively pursue good outcomes. It's hard to accuse EA of trying to sneak in this point when it's a central part of its rhetoric. And of course, such debate is an entirely ordinary part of discourse.
For the former I agree, seek out charities that most effectively support what you want to support.
For the latter, I don't think it's worthwhile to deride people for supporting a cause just because you think there's some other cause that might technically result in more living humans. Raw population is not a worthwhile metric to optimize for. People should be free to support things they care about and believe make the world a better place as long as it's not harming anyone.
But I just don't think it's as effective, and I don't think most people agree.
If the only available labor was teenagers, rebuilding the community theater meant hiring them, and you knew that statistically there was a risk some might die from heat stroke. What risk of death would you deem acceptable to build a community theater?
Mine was specifically to be an intuition pump to see how valuable the OP thinks a theater is when weighed against actual lives.
It's easy to say x is important where x is saving sea turtles, teaching kids to read, or repairing a community theaters.
It's harder to say x is more important than y charity when y charity saves lives effectively.
Building a community theater with good working conditions might have a big impact on the community around it and could go end up saving lives down the road, or dramatically improving the quality of life of many.
It's very hard to quantity the impact of the community theater against say feeding 100 people for one week. All these people could die the week after, was it really sustainable improvements or just temporary relief?
Anyways, I never said any specifics about where this community theater is being built. I don't know where heat stroke came from. Sure, yeah, in the straw man situation of building a community theater in an extremely hot area, where the only labor is teenagers, I would...not enlist teenagers to build a community theater in an extremely hot area? I don't want to be dismissive of your comment but I genuinely don't know what's the point here.
But repairing a community theater could easily cost $100,000 which would save the lives of ~22 people in Guinea if donated to certain bed net charities. And even the most die hard theater fans probably wouldn't save a theater if to do so it would require risking 22 lives for.
So in this case quantification isn't failing, it's succeeding. It's correctly telling us which donations are more effective. And all our intuition agrees that the $100,000 theater is worth less than the 22 lives.
Thus by chosing to repair the community theatre you are directly causing the death of 9,978 people.
“Ah bit they are luxuries, distinct from charity…”
Ok then give me the luxury of donating to the local theatre!
Schindler's List | "I Didn't Do Enough"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9vj2Wf57rQ
In the end, nearly everyone values their life higher than the life of others. The more distant that the "others" are the less we value them.
Too bad these empathetic values privilege building an entertainment venue over saving lives or preventing suffering. /s
Every dollar you spend on a theater donation is a dollar less that you value human lives.
Of course, the same logic applies to candy bars, internet, television, and all the things that being you joy in life.
But that’s what leads to “earn to give”, which is what leads to deciding to become a billionaire and/or give away other people’s money instead.
I don't have unlimited resources. I have the privilege of having a surplus that I can redirect to making the world better. EA is a framework for trying to do the most amount of good from the limited resources that I have.
> We can do both.
So, save fewer lives for more theatre seats?
> diversification of one's "ethics portfolio"
I don't understand what that is supposed to mean.
Then you will be delighted/horrified to find out that the effective altruism community doesn't feel the need to make quantifiable justifications for how they spend their own donations, as evidenced by this $20k grant they gave someone to learn to ride a bike and think about AI[1].
That's about 3853 to 4090 mosquito nets' worth of donations, using GiveWell's numbers for the Against Malaria Foundation[2].
[1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/...
1. Your model of the world is incomplete or inconsistent (eg, forgetting to include negotiation as a strategy, forgetting long term consequences).
2. You've hit on a cognitive bias and can probably do a huge amount of good that other people will miss (eg, lending with interest -> modern industrial society, rule of law rather than letting high status people do whatever -> mass prosperity). The cognitive bias is probably well known and understood and the evidence that the emotional response leads to poor outcomes should be obvious.
I'm completely befuddled by this. My experience is that people make most decisions emotionally and then harness their brain to rationalize those irrational decisions after the fact. It's the reason that science (the process) has to exist. Because people will fool themselves to reach a conclusion they want if there are no procedural guardrails.
Surely 800,000 mosquito nets is "more effective" than 800,000 robo calls and shitty campaign ads with a moron at the end saying "I'm Joe Blow, and I endorse this bullshit"
Sorry for the cringe, but really - you're actually saying that encouraging people to do what they think is right is a problem? Especially when they've actually read the books, done the numbers, and all you have is a feeling that they may be wrong in some cases? I can't really argue with that except with caps lock and sarcasm.
Are eggplants fruits? Yes. Do you feel you should put them in a fruit cup? No.
This is called “the map is not the territory”.
It's fine to spend money on the theater, everyone spends money and time on themselves and their interests. If you consider community theater altruism though, I think it makes sense to acknowledge that it is ineffective altruism - that is, you're doing a little bit of good with your money, but not nearly as much as you might be doing.
Art in particular has a multiplicative effect that is essentially impossible to quantify. Once a work of art is out there, it can live forever and influence multiple generations. That seems like a pretty effective use of my money.
Obviously the local theatre benefits your own community, but if you live there then you are also benefiting yourself (via status and seeing plays), which seems less than altruistically pure, even if you could only build 1 theatre in Africa.
You know a lot better what a theater could bring to a neighborhood you know well.
And then, there's the question of if altruism itself is most efficient at helping others. Some would argue that helping oneself but where it benefits others as well, win/win situations, in practice produces better outcomes. The idea of self-sacrifice, or having to lose or risk something personal to help others sounds noble, but might not be most effective.
You need to contextualize the life saved, do we mean they went to live one more day, or a full long life of prosperity and comfort with a happy painless death from old age.
And did they themselves gain the means to save more lives in turn?
For example, I feel giving people the means of saving their own life, or other people's lives a much more efficient way to save lives than actually saving a life.
And finally you have to address the sacrifices you've made and the people you've hurt in pursuit of saving that life.
To me, it looks like a charade, because the claim that you can actually measure and quantify all of these complex systems to truly arrive at the real impact of all these things, I just don't believe it. It seems you've picked a simple metric to measure, because it's easy, but is it lasting impact, is really more meaningful impact, that's all all still up in the air.
One way to think about effective altruism is that it's trying to get you to apply whatever moral intuitions you would use in a concrete scenario to an abstract scenario. To any individual apart from it, it's abstract to know that mothers in some poor country can't adequately nourish their children, or that mosquito nets reduce malaria deaths, and so on. But, the reality is that those people are actually real, are actually suffering, and actually could be helped. If you take that message to heart then it won't make sense to send your charity to the community theater - by all means, send the theater money if you want, but it's a selfish thing, not an altruistic thing.
If there was a crypto trade available to make a billion dollars available for the next 15 minutes only - but you have to chose between the community theater, the bus of X people on fire or giving 10% of your gainz to a charity to save X*2 ...
In practice, I think people coming from a starting point of "I'm going to focus on solving friendly AI because it fits with my interests and computer science background and I think I'll be able to help the process along a bit" are being more honest with themselves than people dressing up their preferences in magical utilitarian numbers which conclude they're more efficient than merely feeding people or giving them goats...
I'm honestly not sure. Spending your money back into the economy contributes to a system with a proven track record, part of it goes to taxes, the rest pays for jobs, creates value for the owner, who'll pay some more taxes on their income, and then spend the rest elsewhere, etc.
Donating 10k to a charity has many practical flaws, the charity itself isn't incentivized to maximize the use of the 10k, it can be corrupt, or might operate in a corrupt and inefficient environment, etc.
Would you still argue that it still does no harm? You have just squandered 100b worth of society's resources - people's time, physical materials, engineering effort etc. for your own entertainment.
Say there was a 100 billion yacht, it still served as a means to redistribute flow of funds to others. Those engineers, material extractors, workers, staff, all that contributed to people being given some of that money.
This goes towards creating an economy, and good economies can sustain countries and lift many people out of poverty, saving many lives.
Creating a demand for people's labor and resources helps with creating an economy.
This isn't money wasted, the money went to many people, it was a way to redistribute the money to others.
So I don't see the harm at all, at least not from a financial standpoint, you could argue about environmental harm though.
Now what about opportunity cost? Sure, maybe that 100 billion could have been used in ways that redistribute it more evenly, more fairly, or to people who needs the money most, or towards an endeavor that has longer term uplifting outcomes, etc, there might be a better use, though it becomes hard to figure out what use is truly better.
The way I see it, there's two dimensions:
- Redistributing money, who gets it? Split amongst how many people?
- Potential for future returns, is the money spent in a way that gives people the means to produce more?
The yacht definitely redistributes money, but maybe you disagree about the distribution of it, who got the money.
Arguably the yacht could bring future returns. Creating a demand for engineers pushed more people into engineering, now more people have the engineering know how, they go on to use that to build other projects, creating an infrastructure that others can then leverage to make other things more efficient and build on top, etc.
Basically, I just don't think it's as black and white as you claim, even in this extreme example.
I believe your focus on money obscures that fact. Money is just a mechanism for a (good, efficient, fair?) way of using the resources available. Money is not real wealth.
What lifts people out of poverty is not money, it is ultimately useful stuff - food, shelter etc. produced so efficiently that people also are able to specialise and spend time on teaching, medicating, investing into producing not just the bare necessities but things that make them even more efficient and productive etc. In the yacht example, such scarce resources are squandered! The 'economy' created is quite literally destructive - it is geared towards consumption (i.e. destruction) of many resources - materials to build the yacht, countless peoples' time - for the mere entertainment of the person who then sinks the yacht.
Yes, the people that were involved in building the yacht now have bigger claims on a shrinking share of resources. They personally win; the person who enjoyed sinking the yacht wins; overall society greatly looses and is now much poorer.
So overall, society would be better off if that person just hoarded the money, buried it in their back yard, and preserved the scarce resources. That outcome is better than personal luxury consumption. Even better, of course, if they used it to get other people to do something productive that benefits wider society.
Ok, so your argument is in the actual materials consumed? The water, metal, and all that being "wasted" for a yacht, as opposed to used for life critical purposes instead?
So, that's kind of the environmental aspect I mentioned, I'm not opposed here, sustainable resource use is important.
But donating to a charity can similarly be a temporary waste of resources with no sustainability improvements made.
Just feeding people food for an extra week for example, is very different from investing in sustainable farming methods that can guarantee us renewable and long lasting sources of food.
And on that topic, it's surprising how in practice discoveries that can help us with sustainability and production methods are discovered through various other ventures, often military for example, but it can happen anywhere.
The person who invented ammonia was researching chemical warfare, now it's used for fertilizer and dramatically helped boost our food production efficiency.
These second order effects I think are hard to predict, similarly hard to predict what the workers that got money from building the yacht than go on to use that money for themselves, maybe they spend it investing in food production efficiencies.
Not wrong or bad as people in this thread seem to universally interpret it, but if you want to optimize for animal welfare, you might be better off doing something about farm animals rather than donating to a local shelter. If that turns out to be too far removed from your personal situation to care about, okay then apparently that's not your priority and that is fine. But between the things you spend effort or money on, it's worth looking into what is the most effective means to your end.
I am not involved in this whole thing in any way but that's what I thought the underlying idea was. Not an explicit dig at those who already try to do good, not at all... (Edit: realization: and that method of making people feel bad wouldn't be very altruistic nor effective right?)
like for example, if a family member of mine needed money for a cancer treatment that had a 50% chance of working versus giving that money to save the life of someone I don't know on the other side of the planet, I will consistently try to save my family member. That is how most people would operate. I will do this because I don't know the person on the other side of the planet. If it were not for the internet and their subreddit/lesswrong style of shaming campaigns, no one would ever even know there was a person on the other side of the planet who also needed the money. Why should I be asked to ignore my own family by annoying redditors who don't give a shit about me anyways?
I doubt even the EA people would do that unless they could virtue signal about how smart they are and how stupid everyone else is online. Most of the time, these people just speculated about how they might spend their money if they were in such a scenario. It was like a hobby.
Although in fairness rating charities by their effectiveness is a good idea. Yes, people do blindly give cash away to corrupt charities.
You shouldn't; doing so would be irrational. There is a fairly decent chance that your relative, if they survive, will be in a position to help you in the future. But the random person on the other side of the planet? The chance of them randomly helping you in the future is about one in a few billion. Particularly if they don't know who their benefactor was, so they couldn't deliberately repay the favor to you.
So the rational/selfish position is to always put family and friends first, before strangers.
Honestly I don't think there's any realistic way to decide in general whether giving assistance to person A vs person B is more "rational" or even more "effective", but it's good to at least be aware that some charities/NGOs/etc. are at least trustworthy and ensure a high % of donations do actively go towards providing help, rather being swallowed in marketing and admin budgets.
It's counterproductive to insist that nonprofits operate without operations budgets.
I pay them money. Charity pays consultants to turn that into more money (plus admins to manage the consultants). Consultants determine that a fraction of that money should be used to solicit more donations. Research indicates best source of new donations is in fact existing donors.
At this point charity is spending money I gave them to extract further donations from me. The ice-cream cone is now licking itself :/
For instance; if everybody sticks to the principle of murder being wrong despite the consequences, then there will be fewer misguided mass murderers, and this is better for society in the long run than everybody going around committing murders they believe to be justified by some end.
So would most people, and we wouldn’t call it altruism. Looking for an objective criterion (whether ‘number of lives saved per dollar’ or something else) is an angle that I’m happy someone is taking. If you don’t like their approach then don’t give them money.
Most people would call helping a relative pay their medical bills altruism. It's also the selfish and rational choice. It's both simultaneously.
Altruism is the disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others. Helping your family is not altruism.
Not necessarily altruism.
It absolutely could be.
Knowing the true motives of another human is very difficult, perhaps impossible (without a predictive biological model of consciousness we can't be sure we're reading minds correctly, and it's still an open question whether such a thing can exist).
Essentially EA tells not "let's save as many lives as possible" but "let's improve the world according to our values as much as possible". And values might differ among the people.
In your example with cure for relative working with only X probability Vs definitely curing stranger in the other side of the world there should be value X for which you will prefer to cure the stranger. Whether it 10% , 1% or maybe 0.01% I will not blame you. But it worth to know you values like value of your family member life over the stranger's life to act accordingly.
Dive into activities starts with exploring your values. How do you value lives of animals in comparison to lives of people? Do you prefer improving people well being now or reducing existential risks like wars and epidemies? EA literally made a tool to estimate one's values and promote this tool on the front page.
If EA is improving the world according to your values, is it really distinct as a concept? Like, to me, the reason why I think almost anything is because it improves the world according to my values.
Another way to put it is that to me it kind of sounds like someone is saying, “we believe in doing the best thing”, but I don’t want to put words in your mouth. I also hope everyone wants to do the best thing ;)
If you want to save lives in general, look for the most _effective_ charity like that, which may be something like mosquito nets rather than a cancer research foundation. Don't just donate money to whatever is the most obvious charity advertised on television.
If you had a family member with cancer, look at which of N cancer foundations spend the money most effectively and donate there.
Often, altruism comes down to people giving money to the 'obvious' causes, which don't necessarily use the money effectively.
The whole concept just seems to assume you know everything, present and future, and have infinite calculation power.
The choices that people make with giving often have no framework for deciding good, let alone better. The moral question is not is X better than Y, but what of all the choices I am going to make can I make better?
If everyone made better choices, not perfect just better, there is a LOT we could improve.
Indeed my wording was too broad and over-compassing. Effective altruism was kick started from comparison of different organizations collecting money for whatever altruistic means. And comparison showed that these initiatives are vastly different in effectiveness which prompted an idea that we should take into account effectiveness of particular initiative before giving it money.
EA seems to focus on reducing suffering over improving happiness. Giving a hand to a stranger who have stumbled and have fallen to the ground near you is out of the scope: EA is about strategic long lasting calculated stuff.
I took this passage from effectivealtruism.org but I was mostly referring to the EA community online which seemed to mostly be the rationalists like the OP said. It's worth pointing out that Eliezer Yudkowsky was mentioned ITT.
Impartial altruism: We believe that all people count equally. Of course it's reasonable to have special concern for one's own family, friends and life. But, when trying to do as much good as possible, we aim to give everyone's interests equal weight, no matter where or when they live. Thi s means focusing on the groups who are most neglected, which usually means focusing on those who don’t have as much power to protect their own interests.
So this is not saying all EA people think the same thing or have the same values or are on that site but I do think this is a common viewpoint among them. I just question why that should be and whether or not a lot of EA people are even altruistic or just virtue signalling on the internet.
I toned down some of the language in this post. I am not being meticulous I am just freestyling my thoughts because it's fun and there is a dose of humor I am putting in here but usually it's not appreciated on HN. Anyways, I don't know if there is a counter criticism to EA officially by some philosopher, and I actually agree with some of what they say because I remember a lot of discussion about choosing charities wisely and not wasting charitable resources. So I don't want to write a formal argument but nevertheless I think what I wrote is a summary of why I am skeptical.
Sure, but that's because we all prefer living in a society where everyone abides by their obligations to the people closest to them - nothing wrong with this. That's special pleading, though.
I think it's clear you don't know any EA people in real life.
I just want to point out that:
1. Just because this is how most people operate does not mean this is the ethical choice. Slavery was normal at one time remember.
2. You say EA people have biases they refuse to admit to, but your argument is showing that you are exhibiting the bias, namely the bias towards preferring your family member over general human life. Arguably a position that does not prefer one human life over another is less biased, no?
I don't think assuming an equal weighting is being unbiased though. It could be a result of a political bias. As I said I don't know why people should assume this. The digital era of social media and digital banking enable this viewpoint so I think that is another angle to discuss regarding how to weigh these issues.
But the specific bias I was accusing some in the EA community of having is virtue signalling as having superior ethics, morals, and intelligence. I think that is a real bias. I don't want to accuse everyone in the community of not being altruistic but claiming to be an effective altruist could certainly be a career enhancer if you are an ethicist. Also, my experience with this community is some of them come off as misanthropes. A misanthrope might be motivated to argue elaborate contrarian viewpoints in order to cause harm or annoy people.
I'm not sure they would. They might adopt instead of having their own kids, for instance.
> So the needs of random strangers would almost always outweigh the needs of your children assuming they are healthy and you live comfortably.
Not necessarily. Divide and conquer is one of our most effective problem solving strategies, and family units fall under this umbrella of dividing the work of raising the next generation.
> But the specific bias I was accusing some in the EA community of having is virtue signalling as having superior ethics, morals, and intelligence. I think that is a real bias.
It could be. It's also possible that they are more ethical and intelligent though. Not in the sense that becoming an EA makes you more intelligent, but in the sense that maybe EA attracts more intelligent and ethical people. This self-sorting effect would diminish as EA spreads in popularity of course.
Ultimately, whether they are more ethical or intelligent is an empirical claim that you can validate, and while it's reasonable to think it's implausible for it to be true, that's not a proof that it isn't true.
This seems to be a perfectly good idea. Doesn't it seem problematic that giving it a simple, straightforward name seems inherently arrogant and insufferable?
Giving it a simple name is fine, but it has one. Giving it a manipulative name is, well, one of the potential philosophical problems with utilitarianism.
They don't care about effectiveness in the sense that they are doing the math on how effective different outreach is, comparing that against other uses of the money, and sharing that with their donors.
I've been to 9-10 charity events and none of them talked about effectiveness in a dollar and cents way like the way givewell does. It's a real change from the status quo.
Not the OP but State-imposed socialism might do the trick. Free housing, free decent education, free healthcare, what's there not to like?
The only thing is that you wouldn't be the one "doing" the giving as an individual, because that's not your job to do (again, as an individual).
As an outsider, I feel the same way about "evidence based medicine". It'll be interesting to see, in 40 years, whether or not either moniker was earned.
The people mentioned on the Effective Altruism Wikipedia page:
Peter Singer: Professor of Bioethics (philosopher)
Toby Ord: Philosopher. Philosophy PhD, Computer Science bachelors
Hilary Greaves: Philosopher, and he double-majored in physics in undergrad
William MacAskill: Philosopher/Ethicist. PhD in philosophy.
Eliezer Yudkowsky: self-described autodidact, no formal education or notable work history. Runs a "AI" "Research" center called MIRI.
Holden Karnofsky: Co-Founder of GiveWell, Harvard degree in Social Studies
Yew-Kwang Ng: Welfare Economist, has published biology, mathematics, philosophy, cosmology, psychology, and sociology papers.
Derek Parfit: Philosopher. Has a history degree.
Nick Bostrom: Philosopher. BA in philosophy and math, MA in philosophy and physics.
Benjamin Todd: Physics/Philosophy double major, worked at Kodak for eight months and at an investment firm for 1.25 years before joining the Centre for Effective Altruism.
The financial backers are more diverse:
Dustin Moskovitz: Co-Founder of Facebook, Co-Founder of Open Philanthropy
Cari Tuna: Dustin's wife, previously worked as a reporter before cofounding Open Philanthropy
Dan Smith: Professional poker player
Liv Boeree: Professional poker player. Physics degree
Sam Bankman-Fried: con-artist, thief, fraudster. Has a physics degree and a minor in math, interned/worked as a trader at Jane Street, and founded Alameda Capital and FTX.
It's more or less a term one would use to signal to others to dogpile the person and get them to leave the conversation/topic, mostly by being absurdly obtuse and misconstruing their words to it's most literal meaning with nothing left to deem charitable if engaging, or just speaking to other people entirely and not towards the subject whatsoever. Kind of like how most insults devolve into in pretty much all social media, just another word to pull out of the ad-hom bag.
> Many longtermists reckon that the antidote to the threat from technology is more technology; mastering artificial intelligence will forestall a malevolent AI from enslaving us. They also believe that technological acceleration is morally good in its own right, as it enables the universe to sustain more people. Bostrom laments the lives lost every second that technological advances are delayed. In a paper from 2003 he invites readers to imagine all the “unused energy…being flushed down black holes”, and all the suns beyond our own that are “illuminating and heating empty rooms”, because we lack the means to populate the planets orbiting them
And longtermism has taken over much of the EA movement:
> Disillusioned effective altruists are dismayed by the increasing predominance of “strong longtermism” ..[snip].. According to Benjamin Todd, a founder of 80,000 Hours, longtermism “might well turn out to be one of the most important discoveries of effective altruism so far” ..[snip].. Projects devoted to global health and poverty still garner the most funding, but their share of the total allocation is shrinking as long-term-risk research attracts more cash.
Both quotes from the linked article.
Show me the money. Sci-Fi/Fantasy longtermst nerd concerns get a disproportionate amount of attention. But from what I can tell, most donations still go to charities dealing with malaria, deficiencies and vaccines: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/2021-allocation-to...
Sure, some people are getting paid thousands of dollars for navel gazing. But more than a billion dollars was donated to directly improve global health.
But the highest ever grant was $55M for "potential risks from AI". The 4th and 6th highest grants were similar.[1]
More recently[2] the highest ($10.7M) grant was for "Potential Risks from Advanced AI" and third highest grant ($2.3M) was for "longtermism" and there were 4 other similar grants on the first page.
[1] https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/?sort=high-to-low#ca...
[2] https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/?sort=recent#categor...
Yes, that's a logical conclusion, but it's not right because of the weird "longtermist" logic. Their "AI risk research" is about AI alignment, which is a "longtermist" priority.
To repost my previous quote:
> Many longtermists reckon that the antidote to the threat from technology is more technology; mastering artificial intelligence will forestall a malevolent AI from enslaving us. They also believe that technological acceleration is morally good in its own right.
This is the "acceleratist view" of AI research, of which Nick Bostrom is a prominent proponent: basically he views progress as inevitable, so it's best to accelerate AI that is aligned with human values. See https://nickbostrom.com/papers/openness.pdf
He also values future lives equally to existing lives (the "longtermist" view) so any timme where we aren't expanding to the stars is morally repugnant:
> One recent paper speculates, using loose theoretical considerations based on the rate of increase of entropy, that the loss of potential human lives in our own galactic supercluster is at least ~10^46 per century of delayed colonization. [snip] The effect on total value, then, seems greater for actions that accelerate technological development than for practically any other possible action.
Let me requote that:
The effect on total value, then, seems greater for actions that accelerate technological development than for practically any other possible action.
https://nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste
I'd highly recommend you read the linked article this discussion is about. It goes into some depth about on these points.
Because it was all a hustle to continue doing exactly whatever they wanted to do. Here is a good book that talks about the mindset:
https://www.amazon.com/Winners-Take-All-Charade-Changing/dp/...
It's easy to say you're doing things "longterm" for "future generations". The non-existent are the easiest people to advocate for. They demand absolutely nothing of you. And if your projected "altruism" will only really be felt well after you're dead, you aren't on the hook to show results now. They claim this is utilitarian, but it's not. It never was.
What is known is that small real changes now can affect large changes later. Doing things to improve today will improve tomorrow, next year, next decade, etc. If you are looking to be effective with your altruism, the most rational, utilitarian thing you can do is solve the problems of today. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to separate you from your money.
Most effective altruists are working on relatively near term things, like education in India or parasitic worms in Nigeria, those just aren't controversial and so get discussed less.
But long term projects like switching away from CO2 and to renewables can still be worth doing.
Pretty much. A subset of altruism is effective, a subset is ineffective. And there's another term for a third subset that overlaps with both: virtue signaling. Usually people treat the term like aligns closer to ineffective altruism though, like "oh that's just virtue signaling", even though it can be both effective and virtue signaling.
I unironically think this. In Hungary where I live, if you don't care about these things much but still want to contribute somewhat to society by charity, the first lines of contact will mostly be crooks that feed on goodwill. There will be beggars, organized into groups, charities that don't exist or have such an overhead that only a single percent goes to the actual cause, corporations that take your donation and then boast with the amount as if they were the ones giving it, and charities that are popular but are actually fronts for ideologies, or churches, and frauds like people collecting clothes for the poor, only to sell them abroad. These entities grind up a large amount of goodwill, while producing little or negative value for mankind. So yes - the altruism of the people donating to entities like this does fuck-all, while I imagine that if someone researches a bit, they will be more likely to give to entities that contribute more.
With that being said, I don't like the EA people either. But the concept is valid.
Do you actually know any? The ones I know in real life are wonderful people. Intelligent, caring and hard working.
The problem is that effective altruism seems to be pure utilitarianism in disguise. That philosophy is to me intuitively messed up. (See The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas and similar thought experiments.)
People use EA in place of actually defining their philosophy, either because of laziness, or hubris, or they don't want you to know what it is, or they themselves are scared to look deeply into what it is because it would cause them to recoil.
But ... that's where effective altruism comes from. Have you not noticed the eroding trust in charities (https://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2015/se...) over the past decade? Effective altruism is just a counter-movement against wasteful charities and engenders a growing realization that not all donations are good and even that donations might not always be the best solution. It wasn't about lecturing anybody, it was about (for example) figuring out which charities are most effective and least wasteful with the money that they receive.
In general I find it concerning when technical people encroach upon non-technical areas without giving a sufficient amount of respect to the people who were in the field already. Those people, the experts, do know a lot and to have this kind of nerd savior branding of effective altruism, as if you are bringing the enlightenment that allows these poor altruists to finally be effective, well that just seems a little presumptuous.