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?)
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.