The arguments always feel to me too similar "it is good Carnegie called in the Pinkerton's to suppress labor, as it allowed him to build libraries." Yes it is good what Carnegie did later, but it doesn't completely paper over what he did earlier.
Is that an actual EA argument?
The value is all at the margins. Like Carnegie had legitimate functional businesses that would be profitable without Pinkerton's. So without Pinkerton's he'd still be able to afford probably every philanthropic thing he did so it doesn't justify it.
I don't really follow the EA space but the actual arguments I've heard are largely about working in FANG to make 3x the money outside of fang to allow them to donate 1x ~1.5x the money. Which to me is very justifiable.
But to stick with the article. I don't think taking in billions via fraud to donate some of it to charity is a net positive on society.
A janitor at the CIA in the 1960s is certainly working at an organization that is disrupting the peaceful Iranian society and turning it into a "death to America" one. But I would not agree that they're doing a net-negative for society because the janitor's marginal contribution towards that objective is 0.
It might not be the best thing the janitor could do to society (as compared to running a soup kitchen).
you missed this part: "The arguments always feel to me too similar"
> The value is all at the margins. Like Carnegie had legitimate functional businesses that would be profitable without Pinkerton's. So without Pinkerton's he'd still be able to afford probably every philanthropic thing he did so it doesn't justify it.
That isn't what OP was engaging with though, they aren't asking for you to answer the question 'what could Carnegie have done better' they are saying 'the philosophy seems to be arguing this particular thing'.
The rationalists thought they understood time discounting and thought they could correct for it. They were wrong. Then the internal contradictions of long-termism allowed EA to get suckered by the Silicon Valley crew.
Alas.
(Peter Singer’s books are also good: his Hegel: A Very Short Introduction made me feel kinda like I understood what Hegel was getting at. I probably don’t of course, but it was nice to feel that way!)
I do not believe the EA movement to be recoverable; it is built on flawed foundations and its issues are inherent. The only way I see out of it is total dissolution; it cannot be reformed.
> A paradox of effective altruism is that by seeking to overcome individual bias through rationalism, its solutions sometimes ignore the structural bias that shapes our world.
Yes, this just about sums it up. As a movement they seem to be attracting some listless contrarians that seem entirely too willing to dig up old demons of the past.
When they write "rationalism" you should read "rationalization".
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.
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.
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?
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.
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/.
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
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”.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_ethics
EA being a prime example of consequentialism.
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.
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”.
And I think the best that can be said of evolution is that it mixes moral, amoral and immoral thinking in whatever combinations it finds optimal.
I may be missing something, but I've never understood the punch of the "down the road" problem with consequentialism. I consider myself kind of neutral on it, but I think if you treat moral agency as only extending so far as consequences you can reasonably estimate, there's a limit to your moral responsibility that's basically in line with what any other moral school of thought would attest to.
You still have cause-end-effect responsibility; if you leave a coffee cup on the wrong table and the wrong Bosnian assassinates the wrong Archduke, you were causally involved, but the nature of your moral responsibility is different.
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.
Don't outsource your altruism by donating to some GiveWell-recommended nonprofit. Be a human, get to know people, and ask if/how they want help. Start close to home where you can speak the same language and connect with people.
The issues with EA all stem from the fact that the movement centralizes power into the hands of a few people who decide what is and isn't worthy of altruism. Then similar to communism, that power gets corrupted by self-interested people who use it to fund pet projects, launder reputations, etc.
Just try to help the people around you a bit more. If everyone did that, we'd be good.
Which obviously has great appeal.
This describes a generally wealthy society with some people doing better than average and others worse. Redistributing wealth/assistance from the first group to the second will work quite well for this society.
It does nothing to address the needs of a society in which almost everyone is poor compared to some other potential aid-giving society.
Supporting your friends and neighbors is wonderful. It does not, in general, address the most pressing needs in human populations worldwide.
Utilitarianism suffers from the same problems it always had: time frames. What's the best net good 10 minutes from now might be vastly different 10 days, 10 months or 10 years from now. So whatever arbitrary time frame you choose affects the outcome. Taken further, you can choose a time frame that suits your desired outcome.
"What can I do?" is a fine question to ask. This crops up a lot in anarchist schools of thought too. But you can't mutual aid your way out of systemic issues. Taken further, focusing on individual action often becomes a fig leaf to argue against any form of taxation (or even regulation) because the government is limiting your ability to be altruistic.
I expect the effective altruists have largely moved on to transhumanism as that's pretty popular with the Silicon Valley elite (including Peter Thiel and many CEOs) and that's just a nicer way of arguing for eugenics.
I had assumed it was just simple mathematics and the belief that cash is the easiest way to transfer charitable effort. If I can readily earn 50USD/hour, rather than doing a volunteering job that I could pay 25USD/hour to do, I simply do my job and pay for 2 people to volunteer.
Effective altruism is a political movement, with all the baggage implicit in that.
>Effective altruism: Donating with a focus on helping the most people in the most effective way, using evidence and careful reasoning, and personal values.
What happens in practice is a lot worse than this may sound at first glance, so I think people are tempted to change the definition. You could argue EA in practice is just a perversion of the idea in principle, but I dont think its even that. I think the initial assumption that that definition is good and harmless is just wrong. It's basically just spending money to change the world into what you want. It's similar to regular donations except you're way more invested and strategic in advancing the outcome. It's going to invite all sorts of interests and be controversial.
Anyone who has to call themselves altruistic simply isn't lol
Then it easily becomes a slippery slope of “you are wrong if you are not optimizing”.
ETA: it is very harmful to oneself and to society to think that one is obliged to “do the best”. The ethical rule is “do good and not bad”, no more than that.
Finally, it is a receipt for whatever you want to call it: fascism, communism, totalitarianism… “There is an optimum way, hence if you are not doing it, you must be corrected”.
Why? The alternative is to donate to sexy causes that make you feel good:
- disaster relief and then forget about once it's not in the news anymore
- school uniforms for children when they can't even do their homework because they can't afford lighting at home
- literal team of full time body guards for the last member of some species
The problem with "helping the most people in the most effective way" is these two goals are often at odds with each other.
If you donate to a local / neighborhood cause, you are helping few people, but you your donation may make an outsized difference: it might be the make-or-break for a local library or shelter. If you donate to a global cause, you might have helped a million people, but each of them is helped in such a vanishingly small way that the impact of your donation can't be measured at all.
The AE movement is built around the idea that you can somehow, scientifically, mathematically, compare these benefits - and that the math works out to the latter case being objectively better. Which leads to really weird value systems, including various "longtermist" stances: "you shouldn't be helping the people alive today, you should be maximizing the happiness for the people living in the far future instead". Preferably by working on AI or blogging about AI.
And that's before we get into a myriad of other problems with global aid schemes, including the near-impossibly of actually, honestly understanding how they're spending money and how effective their actions really are.
If you want to form a movement, you now have a movement, with all that entails: leaders, policies, politics, contradictions, internecine struggles, money, money, more money, goals, success at your goals, failure at your goals, etc.
Congratulations you rediscovered tithing.
philipallstar•1h ago
This is sadly still true, given the percentage of money that goes to getting someone some help vs the amount dedicated to actually helping.
weepinbell•1h ago
givewell.org is probably the most prominent org recommended by many EAs that does and aggregates research on charitable interventions and shows with strong RCT evidence that a marginal charitable donation can save a life for between $3,000 and $5,500. This estimate has uncertainty, but there's extremely strong evidence that money to good charities like the ones GiveWell recommends massively improves people's lives.
GiveDirectly is another org that's much more straightforward - giving money directly to people in extreme poverty, with very low overheads. The evidence that that improves people's lives is very very strong (https://www.givedirectly.org/gdresearch/).
It absolutely makes sense to be concerned about "is my hypothetical charitable donation actually doing good", which is more or less a premise of the EA movement. But the answer seems to be "emphatically, yes, there are ways to donate money that do an enormous amount of good".
gopher_space•42m ago
When you see the return on money spent this way other forms of aid start looking like gatekeeping and rent-seeking.
cm2012•1h ago
tavavex•48m ago
cm2012•42m ago
jimbokun•45m ago