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Effective altruism is not effective

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Re: Effective altruism is not effective

#81

Post by lmm »

seoaeu wrote: post #66
skybrian wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, but the problem is that you rarely know if political advocacy will work until after it succeeds, and even afterwards, it may take a while to study the impact of the change. GiveWell did study some political advocacy groups, but apparently it’s just hard to know what to recommend with confidence. There is a spin-off organization (Open Philanthropy) that uses funds from rich philanthropists to do more exp…

You don't need to know whether a specific advocacy effort will work, only to estimate whether the overall expected value is high enough. And we know that when advocacy succeeds it can have upsides many many times the cost put in (and there aren't that many advocacy movements) so there is at least some hint that the expected value is large. It feels kind of like a cop-out to say that you shouldn't pursue political cha…

We also know that advocacy movements can have downsides many times the costs put in. Estimating the expected value of political advocacy is a good idea, but I would expect the result to be negative.

Re: Effective altruism is not effective

#82

Post by finolex1 »

mdorazio wrote: post #12

The author has a good point about traditional donation-based altruism not always being the most effective in achieving the end goal of ending poverty. For example, dumping hundreds of tons of second-hand clothes in African countries has a huge negative impact on local textile industries [1]. So while you're helping clothe people short-term, you're depressing wage opportunities long-term. I believe (could be wrong) th…

The author is not talking about traditional donation-based altruism, but about the 'effective altruism' (EA) movement, which is definitely interested in evaluating the effectiveness of different interventions. The comments you make probably place you squarely in agreement with the EA Camp. Give Directly (a UBI style setup) is in fact one of the charities recommended by Give Well (an EA organization).

Re: Effective altruism is not effective

#83

Post by lmm »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #29

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) a…

> 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).

In most fields of endeavour markets and specialisation work better than trying to do something yourself. If someone wants a boat, they can build their own boat, and they might find this fulfilling, but if they want a good boat they'd generally be much better off working to earn money and buying a boat with that money rather than building the boat themselves. (And if they're actually the rare person who's skills are more suited to boat building than any other field of endeavour, then the best-paying job they end up getting will be in boat-building).

Re: Effective altruism is not effective

#84

Post by perl4ever »

slibhb wrote: post #74
Robotbeat wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you believe the earth is overpopulated? If so, and if you cannot live in such a way as to offset the damage caused by your existence, effective altruism calls for suicide. I think that has a lot more to say about the belief the Earth is overpopulated (and the idea that living in a way to offset that damage is impossible) than EA. There are several pretty substantially misanthropic implications in this common bel…

Whether or not the earth is overpopulated (and I agree it's not), it is plausible that there are people who, no matter what they do, will increase net suffering. Peter Singer is pro-euthanasia of course. Personally, I'd pick a moral philosophy that forbids liquidating useless people but that's just me.

I'm not sure I understand what net suffering is. It seems to me that every person born increases total suffering, but net?

What do you "net" it against? I guess you can equate "increase net suffering" to a concept of "increasing the average intensity of suffering per unit time across all people". But you can't net my pleasure against your suffering, can you?

Or say I spend 80 years of a perfect life, and then die of Alzheimers or a particularly painful cancer. Did I accumulate a "balance" that can be counted against someone else's relatively miserable life? Or did my illness and death mean that my average is really no better than someone whose life sucked but died suddenly of a heart attack?

If someone has great achievements and suffers from chronic mental illness that gives them huge ups and downs, can their suffering and pleasure be compared to someone who has neither? Which increased/decreased net suffering for the world or population?

Re: Effective altruism is not effective

#85

Post by sudosysgen »

kiba wrote: post #14
jjj1232 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of your examples are individualistic, what about thousands or millions of poor people collectively fighting for something? The total impact of collective action is much greater than the sum of its individual parts.

I don't think individualist effective altruism is incompatible with collective effort.

Sure, but it doesn't fit into the traditional framework of "effective altruism". Collective efforts-based altruism is just very different in so many ways.

Re: Effective altruism is not effective

#86

Post by sudosysgen »

tsm_sf wrote: post #75
hotstickyballs wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is purely a property rights issue that we can't connect more hungry mouths with more uneaten food. There's no R&D to be done, there's no unsolved problem with a bounty on it Yes, it's a property rights issue.. and more. The problem is motivating those who are holding on to the food to distribute it to those who need it. Clearly if those who need it are providing valuable service to food producers and distributor…

> The issue is really, how do we motivate the distribution of food (and other goods and services) to those who need it but can't justify to the producers and distributors and provide for it? People shouldn't have to justify their existence based on some other group's favorite economic model. That seems weird and needlessly cruel.

This is something that becomes truer when you start really thinking about it. Private property the way we have it right now is just a social construct, for it not to be simply theft it has to be socially efficient. That is to say, if people are given stewardship over land that really isn't inherently anyone's, it's a reasonable expectation that they don't use it to make food for it to be thrown out.

Re: Effective altruism is not effective

#87

Post by slibhb »

perl4ever wrote: post #84
slibhb wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether or not the earth is overpopulated (and I agree it's not), it is plausible that there are people who, no matter what they do, will increase net suffering. Peter Singer is pro-euthanasia of course. Personally, I'd pick a moral philosophy that forbids liquidating useless people but that's just me.

I'm not sure I understand what net suffering is. It seems to me that every person born increases total suffering, but net? What do you "net" it against? I guess you can equate "increase net suffering" to a concept of "increasing the average intensity of suffering per unit time across all people". But you can't net my pleasure against your suffering, can you? Or say I spend 80 years of a perfect life, and then die of…

> I'm not sure I understand what net suffering is. It seems to me that every person born increases total suffering, but net?

Utilitarians say there is only one moral dimension, utility. Suffering is negative utility. If you create more utility than you consume you decrease total suffering (or increase total utility, which amounts to the same thing).

> But you can't net my pleasure against your suffering, can you?

According to Peter Singer you can. An objection to this kind of thinking is utility monsters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster

> Or say I spend 80 years of a perfect life, and then die of Alzheimers or a particularly painful cancer. Did I accumulate a "balance" that can be counted against someone else's relatively miserable life? Or did my illness and death mean that my average is really no better than someone whose life sucked but died suddenly of a heart attack?

> If someone has great achievements and suffers from chronic mental illness that gives them huge ups and downs, can their suffering and pleasure be compared to someone who has neither? Which increased/decreased net suffering for the world or population?

I agree with these objections. To me, this kind of utilitarianism seems like a bizarre simplification. How can you weigh a sunny day against a panic attack?

Re: Effective altruism is not effective

#88

Post by z77dj3kl »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #49

I think the biggest problem with the Effective Altruism movement is that it has become too tied up with people who like to debate things, especially topics like AI Risk. Optimizing the effectiveness of one's charitable donations is a reasonable goal. Doing basic research to choose efficient and effective charities makes sense. However, there are large parts of the EA community that have gone off the deep end of debat…

I agree, I think the image of Effective Altruism is largely shaped by the somewhat unique group of people who flock to it — in particular those who are very vocal about it.

Re: Effective altruism is not effective

#89

Post by Karrot_Kream »

lmm wrote: post #83
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #29

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) a…

> 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). In most fields of endeavour markets and specialisation work better than trying to do something yourself. If someone wa…

How do you know this? The usual market assumptions involve perfect knowledge and efficient market clearing. It’s unclear to me that charitable initiatives have anything even close to perfect information, and the labor market is famous for being inefficient, especially given that careers are driven by many inelastic factors, and are often driven by Veblenian effects more than actual efficiency. Sure, assuming a perfect market, this would be true, but I’d argue that charity labor is specifically a case where markets are far from perfect. There’s a reason most capitalist governments offer so many tax incentives for charitable firms.

Re: Effective altruism is not effective

#90

Post by orangecat »

Uehreka wrote: post #61
pcstl wrote: post #43

This article illustrates a big issue with people opposed to EA - they severely underestimate the risks associated with political change. Of course, we can just assume everything goes well, we agitate for political change, we get a change for the better, everything is great. But the risk of a different outcome never seems to be taken into consideration. For instance: We believe the conditions in our country are unfair…

I'd push back that a lot of the anti-political-activism stuff I see from EA people seems even more hand-wavy. Political activism has such enormous potential that any argument against it needs to be exceptionally strong. Now don't get me wrong, there are totally bits of conventional wisdom in political activism that I think are the exact kind of ineffective-but-makes-me-feel-good stuff that drive EA people nuts. I hav…

Political activism has such enormous potential

For good and bad, and it's rarely obvious which policies are "correct". For example, it's possible for two entirely well-meaning people to come to opposite conclusions on issues like nuclear power or international trade. They could both spend their time and money trying to influence governments and end up with a net effect of zero (really negative after transaction costs), or they could pay for malaria nets and almost certainly save lives.

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