Can “effective altruism” maximise the bang for each charitable buck?

> First of all, without some coordinated effort to spread out donations, won't some of the more effective charities still suffer?

This is almost certainly true. However, it's also true that this is the case in any scenario where there are less than infinite resources. The starvation issue is very real today.

With that said, I think adherents to EA hope that their movement will incentivize effectiveness in charities. Some might postulate that there are worse possible outcomes than charities competing for effectiveness.

> Second of all, who decides what is the most effective cause (or who interprets the studies that indicate which cause is most effective)? If I could spend 1 dollar and know it would save 5 lives or prevent 50 people from living with horrible mental illness, I would have trouble deciding which one to give to, even if given empirical evidence as to which is cause is the most beneficial to society.

This is another excellent point! How people pick causes is a real concern. It's also one people face today. I think it's largely still a matter of personal choice and priorities. The EA approach tries to put a framework in place for explicitly reasoning about what people currently tend to do implicitly.

It absolutely is a trolley problem with infinite tracks and infinite victims. Yet, we already live that trolley problem.

> Third of all, some of the causes that are not effective might still benefit from some amount of involvement. The example they give - volunteering at a soup kitchen - is one such example. Say giving to the homeless is effective, but volunteering at a soup kitchen is not. Someone still needs to volunteer at the soup kitchen, even if it's not many people.

Not to nitpick your example, but a sufficiently well-funded soup kitchen could likely afford to hire some of the homeless to staff it. Then it could be free of the need for volunteers and lift people off of having to live on the streets! It wouldn't be many people, but it also seems like it might be preferable to staffing the kitchen entirely with unpaid volunteers.

More broadly, you're once again absolutely right. This is a real and pressing concern in a scenario where Effective Altruism becomes literally the only way any person thinks about charity. However, some might postulate that we are not currently in that scenario.

This is not a new argument. Sister Mary Jucunda, a Zambian nun, wrote to a NASA scientist (Ernst Stuhlinger) in the early 70's with a similar critique of funding for space research.

You can read Ernst's cogent reply here: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html

My favorite excerpt follows:

> About 400 years ago, there lived a count in a small town in Germany. He was one of the benign counts, and he gave a large part of his income to the poor in his town. This was much appreciated, because poverty was abundant during medieval times, and there were epidemics of the plague which ravaged the country frequently. One day, the count met a strange man. He had a workbench and little laboratory in his house, and he labored hard during the daytime so that he could afford a few hours every evening to work in his laboratory. He ground small lenses from pieces of glass; he mounted the lenses in tubes, and he used these gadgets to look at very small objects. The count was particularly fascinated by the tiny creatures that could be observed with the strong magnification, and which he had never seen before. He invited the man to move with his laboratory to the castle, to become a member of the count's household, and to devote henceforth all his time to the development and perfection of his optical gadgets as a special employee of the count.

> The townspeople, however, became angry when they realized that the count was wasting his money, as they thought, on a stunt without purpose. "We are suffering from this plague," they said, "while he is paying that man for a useless hobby!" But the count remained firm. "I give you as much as I can afford," he said, "but I will also support this man and his work, because I know that someday something will come out of it!"

> Indeed, something very good came out of this work, and also out of similar work done by others at other places: the microscope. It is well known that the microscope has contributed more than any other invention to the progress of medicine, and that the elimination of the plague and many other contagious diseases from most parts of the world is largely a result of studies which the microscope made possible.

I think there are many parallels between AI/ML and the microscope, and I think safety research is a very reasonable inquisitive lens for developing these new technologies.

But it would not be a criticism of the general idea of risk-return optimization applied to charity, and would not exclude a rational participant from belief that allocating some capital towards AI research was part of an optimized approach.

The original comment made it seem like the generic idea of choosing to invest in AI safety as part of the EA framework was, in spirit, intrinsically "morally repugnant."

The specific repugnant actions of one party would not necessarily support that, anymore than say a pro football player's racist comments would imply that all of football is inherently morally repugnant.

It would seem valuable to separate and distinguish vitriol directed at the specific suspicious actions of one person from generic and wide-sweeping criticism of an entire framework that person happens to be associated with, especially when the framework itself attempts to be value-neutral conditioned on one's beliefs after looking at some evidence.