Effective altruism is not effective

I didn't read the article.

Fwiw afaic, the reason poverty persists is a product of the market solution we've elected. It's for all practical purposes and intents necessary for poverty to exist as it creates a class of people willing to invest their time at a deficit to themselves (relatively undervalued labor). More or less kin to introducing an artificial concentration gradient, where there likely was none. Without that poverty resources would become increasingly expensive because labor supply becomes more reticent to act on a deficit because they're no longer existentially threatened. Additionally, demand increases as there is more liquidity and velocity. The most compromising feature of this is the megalithic multinationals sinking all that money which destroys the natural local circularity. All the money ends up in Amazon, Nike, and Coca-Cola's accounts.

It seems like if an NGO provided a UBI in a region that was controlled by a dictatorship, the dictatorship could simply take all the money. When taxes are not set democratically, giving money to individuals seems roughly equivalent to giving money straight to a dictator.

Effective altruism is a net positive, but it’s not a panacea. It suffers from the same problems as central planning and communism.

Donors and nonprofits think they can calculate the most “effective” way to allocate funds — if only we can pack enough phds in this boardroom we’ll end poverty! Problem is, there’s no space in the room for the experts themselves — the ppl actually in poverty.

Poverty is complex and no group of people can predict all the externalities of trying to address it — like using bed nets for fishing instead of malaria prevention or changes in behavior when the rich scientists come to town with their clipboards to conduct their RCTs.

I find it funny that capitalists are all about trusting the free market and self-interest when it comes to business and politics, but when it comes to philanthropy, they know best.

In reality, the solution is quite simple — just ask “the people in poverty” if and how they want help. Most of the time they’ll likely ask for money or a job, which seems pretty reasonable to me and can be accomplished with very little overhead.

Any time humans get together to solve a problem, band together to form a charity, coordinate over a social network to send out PPE, etc, they are not simply allocating optimally at the margins, they are aggregating resources and spending them toward a directed goal more efficiently. These are all examples of altruism. If you narrowly scope altruism to "marginal donation optimization", then yes, effective altruism is indeed a fairly trivially optimal way to allocate these resources.

My problem with EA, closely related to the points expressed by the author of this article, has always been this magical insistence on altruistic organizations that are both:

1. Extant outside the individual (e.g. "you", the reader, are not in an altruistic organization, but _somebody_ out there is, it's just not "you", so where is that somebody, and if it's not you, why do we always assume there will be a somebody) and

2. Assumed to be more efficient than the individual joining the altruistic organization. Somehow the cap on good you can do is limited to marginal income, not about joining an organization and actually attempting to move the cause forward (whether through managerial efficiency, STEM work, or more).

Sure if the choice is between doing nothing at all and donating marginal income, it should be obvious that donating marginal income helps. But that is simply drawing a trivial comparison between doing nothing and doing a very little bit .