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

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

#181

Post by emodendroket »

jopsen wrote: post #146
emodendroket wrote: post #135

Well, measuring overhead isn't a great way to measure efficacy (trying to game this metric often leads to behaviors that are penny-wise and pound-foolish), but I don't find utilitarianism a compelling moral philosophy and really find the idea of trying to quantify how much good a charity does kind of silly.

Obviously, it's impossible to capture all the variables, but in quantifying the good we do, we value all lives the same, and strive to maximize the good we do. If the EA movement forces big charities to focus a bit more on bang for buck, then that's a win. Perfect efficiency will never be possible anyways.

I have some experience in the nonprofit sector. While you obviously don't want to see people being cavalier with donor dollars, nonprofits that are obsessed with cost cutting are more effective at scolding people for wanting a chair that isn't falling apart or making a few too many photocopies than they are at their missions.

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

#182

Post by samatman »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #161
gowld wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blanket example reminds me of all the handwringing about people "misusing" LLINs as a fishing aid, as though fighting malaria is more important than not starving. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2532690/

This study investigated the extent of bed net misuse in fishing villages. Wow. There is something incredibly fucked up about funding a study into bed net misuse rather than a study on the dire need for more help with meeting basic necessities like adequate nourishment as evidenced by so-called bed net misuse. Or, you know, the sarcastic reply: If you die of starvation, I guess you no longer need to worry about detail…

This seems like a good study that will save lives.

Using malarial nets to dry fish means not using them to prevent malaria.

Ok, good chance the answer is "give more nets". How are you supposed to know that without this study?

The insecticides might also be fish poison, this could lead to a collapse of an important food source. A study like this could help surface that before it becomes a disaster.

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

#183

Post by abvdasker »

ggm wrote: post #110
abvdasker wrote: post #107

I first heard of this movement in the book Strangers Drowning . The book is structured as a varied series of accounts of extreme altruism along with some philosophical discussion of cultural attitudes towards it. This movement appears in one chapter about members of Giving What We Can, an organization of individuals donating at least 10% of their income to charity. The chapter follows one woman who gives away almost…

One of the best points the book makes is the surprisingly cynical views towards altruism which prevail in the US. This comment echoes something I have felt for some time. I feel that aspects of the US economic development which root in 'self reliance' have encouraged this. Ayn Randian world views?

The book talks about Ayn Rand a bit, but spends more time discussing the damage done to altruistic ideals by Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and much of Freud's work. Freud considered altruism and philanthropy a form of masochistic pathology.

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

#184

Post by DoreenMichele »

samatman wrote: post #182
DoreenMichele wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This study investigated the extent of bed net misuse in fishing villages. Wow. There is something incredibly fucked up about funding a study into bed net misuse rather than a study on the dire need for more help with meeting basic necessities like adequate nourishment as evidenced by so-called bed net misuse. Or, you know, the sarcastic reply: If you die of starvation, I guess you no longer need to worry about detail…

This seems like a good study that will save lives. Using malarial nets to dry fish means not using them to prevent malaria. Ok, good chance the answer is "give more nets". How are you supposed to know that without this study? The insecticides might also be fish poison, this could lead to a collapse of an important food source. A study like this could help surface that before it becomes a disaster.

My problem is not with them trying to determine what is being done with bed nets and why. My problem is with the framing. It is incredibly judgy and it is the kind of language that goes along with policies that boil down to "the beatings shall continue until morale improves."

Such language tends to point to an agenda and to an underlying hostile attitude towards the population supposedly being served. I was homeless for a few years. A lot of homeless programs are actively hostile to homeless individuals. This helped sharpen my existing tendency to be critical of such details.

If you think how it is framed doesn't matter, perhaps we can discuss some choice words for you or your profession or your demographic and see if you still think details of that ilk don't matter. Hint: When you say it matters if it is done to you, but it is irrelevant when done to some downtrodden group receiving "assistance" (often of the "Please stop helping me!" variety), then you are prejudiced and the existence of this prejudice out in the world is likely one of the root causes of the group in question being downtrodden and unable to make their lives work.

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

#185

Post by emodendroket »

rhaps0dy wrote: post #138
emodendroket wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems pretty tractable to not build such a thing as a hostile AI.

I'm not so sure. Even prosaic, current AI, can be very unpredictable. See this blog post http://aiweirdness.com/post/172894792687/when-algorithms-sur... , which is a somewhat more causal summary of this paper "The Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution: A Collection of Anecdotes from the Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Life Research Communities" https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03453v2 The authors of the paper…

That's an amusing read, and sure, AI can do things we don't expect. I think we're more on the order of a bridge failure and less on the order of Skynet here, though. To end up in that kind of nightmare scenario we have to entrust some AI with capabilities we could just elect not to.

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

#186

Post by pjscott »

jonny_eh wrote: post #172
pas wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you link/cite where they insist that it's the Right Thing?

It's called "Effective Altruism"

That's an aspirational statement, not a claim to have attained perfection.

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

#187

Post by Vinnl »

danielbigham wrote: post #149
jaggederest wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I've loosely held an EA-like philosophy for about a decade and I think that OpenPhil orientation towards AI is pretty disappointing. I account for my time in terms of things like number of people saved from blindness or death due to malaria, and I definitely do not count future simulated persons as worthy of any of the same concern as actual humans who exist today.

I watched a debate involving William Macaskill last summer and he poses the hypothetical question: "You are outside a burning building and are told that inside one room is a child and inside another is a painting by Picasso. You can save one of them. To do the most good, which do you choose?" The point he's trying to illustrate is that, if you knew for certain that you could turn around and sell the Picaso for millio…

> But the question in a hypothetical sense does seem quite valid and hard.

I appreciate this sentiment, and tend to think likewise. However, the situation is a hypothetical. In the end, perhaps most important is the practical decisions we make, which is almost never situations like the ones you describe above, but more like "what cause should I donate to"? In that sense, it might be hard to discern between different causes in the Givewell top lists, but picking either of those at random is probably a good heuristic that already beats a fairly widespread heuristic of just giving to something like Make-A-Wish, if you're starting from the point of donating €x to a charity.

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

#188

Post by Vinnl »

emodendroket wrote: post #135

Well, measuring overhead isn't a great way to measure efficacy (trying to game this metric often leads to behaviors that are penny-wise and pound-foolish), but I don't find utilitarianism a compelling moral philosophy and really find the idea of trying to quantify how much good a charity does kind of silly.

> I don't find utilitarianism a compelling moral philosophy

Could you expand on this some more? The primary argument against utilitarianism I recall is the hypothetical situation of there being that gets infinitely happy if you donate to it, so that the maximally useful thing would always be to donate to that being (or something like that, but you get the gist).

But such a being does not exist, and if we accept that our utilitarian gifts are not going to be perfect, isn't it a reasonable assumption that by trying to maximise the amount of good that can be done for our bucks, on average, the amount of good that will be done for our bucks will be higher than if we did not approach it like that?

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

#189

Post by T2_t2 »

monadgonad wrote: post #45

I think the Effective Altruism movement really belies its own values and cause with the fact that one of its own funds is for supporting: > organizations that work on improving long-term outcomes for humanity. Grants will likely go to organizations that seek to reduce global catastrophic risks, especially those relating to advanced artificial intelligence. [1] Yes, an argument can be made that it's important to fund…

I think your reply is interesting, as it exactly the sort of thing that Effective Altruism talks about.

The example you gave is endemic of the way we think of charity precisely because it deals with both emotion and things we can individually see. Effective Altruism aims to make charity about things that don't directly affect us, that we can't see, and find areas that where the "bang per buck" is high.

Seattle spent $195 million on the homelessness according to this: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/how-much-..., to help a group that this advocacy organisation http://www.homelessinfo.org/what_we_do/one_night_count/ puts at 10,000 people. I wonder how a person can rationally look at that - $195 million at ~$19.5K per person and think they can make a dent. Compare that to https://www.givedirectly.org/basic-income and doubling the poorest of the poor's daily income by giving them $1 a day for 12 years. These are people I can't see and don't have to think about, yet for less than $5000 I can provide someone with security and an income for over a decade. If I give $70 a week for 12 years, I can take 10 people out of abject poverty for 12 years. That's fractionally above my coffee budget.

That's the question Effective Altruism wants people to ask themselves. How can I, with the amount of money I have, do the most tangible good in the world, and what is an equation that helps me decide.

Far from being "absolutely morally repugnant" to walk past a homeless person and preference things we can't see, I think it is morally honest to look at the risks humanity faces, and preference things that are under funded, where $1 can go far. That takes several forms, both immediate - like the Give Directly example - versus long term, where risks that could wipe out our species are considered. I think a strong argument can be made that, for minimal expense, it would be possible to have an affect on a potentially species destroying technology like AI, and that the money spent there is more likely to do good than adding that to an already well funded area.

That's catastrophic risk, minimal expense vs human suffering and high cost. How you solve for the equilibrium there.

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

#190

Post by Veedrac »

the_af wrote: post #150
nordsieck wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Either AI is going to be peaceful, or its going to kill us and there is nothing we can do to stop it. Have you heard of the AI Box experiments? http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox/ The problem of containing a hostile AI does not seem to be particularly tractable to me.

My comment is going to be unpopular, and I'll admit my bias upfront: I think Yudkowsky is a crank, and is neither a psychology nor an AI expert (he's a self-proclaimed expert, but he's not actually engaged in academic research on AI, because of reasons ). His "experiment" is hard to control or reproduce, its goals are ill-defined, its results are hidden (really, which sort of experiment hides its results and merely a…

I am aware of one reproduction of the experiment, the goals seem pretty darn explicit, and its results are public. He has stated the rules of engagement, and has said that he did it "the hard way". If nothing else, one should at least be confident that Yudkowsky is honest.

His claim that "a transhuman mind will likely be able to convince a human mind" is what his experiment demonstrates, not what is assumes, and frankly it is absurd to make it sound like he has not repeatedly given justifications for the statement.

What actual misinterpretations or other issues are you worried about?

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