Effective altruism is not effective • Hacker News Board

Re: Effective altruism is not effective

#121

Post by medlyyy » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 6:23 AM UTC

monktastic1 wrote: post #36

vecplane wrote: post #4

This reads like a strawman perspective on the concept of 'effective altruism.' The 'effective' part in the term is doing a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to the definition. It seems reasonable to focus on actually 'effective' actions with good outcomes, rather than comparatively ineffective virtual signalling or martyrdom. Becoming rich and then helping millions of people with your means is more impactful tha…

But the "effective" part means more than just that. From their site: > It is a research field which uses high-quality evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to help others as much as possible. This assumes that reasoning and evidence are sufficient to determine what will be most effective. Compare this to the Buddhists, for example, who believe that the networks of causality are so complex and intricate that…

Why the fuck are you worrying about "metaphysical frameworks?" The things EA mostly focuses on are people dying of easily preventable starvation and disease. There is no need to bring up highly abstract ideas about "metaphysics" (whatever you mean by that - morality isn't generally considered to be in the field of metaphysics) when the suffering is so blatantly concrete.

Re: Effective altruism is not effective

#122

Post by morsch » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 6:23 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #111

morsch wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument of EA is closer to: doing more of the things that currently feed 95% of the world is the way to feed 100%. How do you know it's not doing more of the things that currently leave 5% without food?

By actually looking at how food gets produced.

So this is not a general property of EA, but only true for this field, as verified by a domain expert?

Re: Effective altruism is not effective

#123

Post by pjscott » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 6:24 AM UTC

johnisgood wrote: post #76

kiba wrote: post #13

The blog seems to assume a linear approach to progress. For example, if I donate 1,000 dollars to a person's yearly income. That person purchases capitals to make money or improve standard of living which leads to better fed children who can improve their own lives. It doesn't only touch that person's live, but the community around them. The community can do more now that certain goods are more available, or that the…

That may not be so, they may gamble it all away or use it for whatever else that you would call "throwing money out the window".

Some will, some won't. I prefer to think in terms of the expected value. Each dollar I donate might be useful or it might be entirely wasted, but (if I've chosen a good enough charity) dollars like it are probably doing a lot of good on average.

Re: Effective altruism is not effective

#124

Post by watwut » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 6:26 AM UTC

smitty1e wrote: post #46

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I accept that your definition is a common one, but one of two attributes strike me as crucial for an unambiguously pure altruism: - total anonymity, or - ultimate sacrifice, as in the mother or warrior who lays it down for another. Anything less is open to the usual questions of motive. As with Dada, altruism doesn't survive intellectual evaluation.

Neither of these requirements make sense. First, with activism, being known pretty often costs you. And with second, you are not altruistic if you dont die?

(Plus, people who helped the right cause and did not died have done more good then those who died for bad cause. Ultimate sacrifice for something bad does not make you better.)

> Anything less is open to the usual questions of motive.

But then the focus is on "if someone theoretically learned about me existing, do I leave a space for that person to attribute to me some intentions?" And the answer to that should be "who cares".

Re: Effective altruism is not effective

#125

Post by medlyyy » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 6:26 AM UTC

benlivengood wrote: post #16

A solution to 90% of the article is maximizing average expected utility which avoids several flaws with traditional utilitarianism. GiveDirectly is a ground-up solution to the long-term problem of poverty. Now I get very political, but I think it's also empirically true: global capitalism is the major force for extreme poverty in this century. Cheap labor is highly desirable and economically efficient for everyone ex…

>global capitalism is the major force for extreme poverty in this century.

The complete opposite. Where do you think globalised capitalism gets cheap labour from? Hint: it's not developed countries. Then to get them to work for them, they have to pay them something, and people aren't going to accept the jobs if it's not enough to live on.

The empirical data also bears this out, as the other reply notes.

Now, whether capitalism is a force for increasing wealth gap and relative poverty in developed countries is a different question; but the "poverty" in that case is certainly much less "extreme."

Re: Effective altruism is not effective

#126

Post by renewiltord » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 6:30 AM UTC

Lewton wrote: post #112

renewiltord wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I routinely give on Kiva but I feel bad knowing that the APRs actually offered are like 30%+ to the guys receiving the loans. Can the cost of administration be that severe?

Where do you see anything about APR? Kiva claims they're zero interest loans

It's some nonsense method of calculating. It's somewhere on the site.

Kiva provides zero-interest loans to µfinance partners, they charge interest to the actual guy who wants to buy a cow, then return the principal to Kiva who gives you back the money. So yeah, Kiva provides zero-interest loans, but the cow guy getting the money is paying like 20%-80% APR.

I think it was their partner Credituyo that was patently ridiculous, like 80% APR loans and shit. But don't quote me on that. Probably have a bunch of other similar partners.

Re: Effective altruism is not effective

#127

Post by scotty79 » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 6:31 AM UTC

Consider the case of returning the shopping cart.

It is a simple thing you can do for the society. It doesn't inconvenience you in any significant way.

And you might have philosophers telling you how you need to adopt a world view that being good requires of you to always return the shopping cart.

Or you might just take a political decision to enforce returning the cart by keeping carts locked until you put a coin in them. You can't get your coin back until you return the cart.

This way you take the moral choice out of this situation. If you don't think returning the cart is worth 1 euro to you, then go ahead, leave it wherever and let someone else put in the work.

This system virtually ensures that there are always carts available, they don't litter the parking lot and has no necessity for any moral component.

Why some stores don't use this system? Because they think their customers wouldn't shop with them if they even once happened to not be able to get the cart because they don't have a coin on them... even though it's very easy to get a coin or ask the shop to give you the plastic coin shaped token to unlock the cart.

So basically the store, for their own benefit of making themselves more attractive by making shopping easier to access for even the most absent minded customers chooses to not introduce the policy that would ensure that necessary work is done, but instead appeals to their customers morality to guilt trip them into doing the work.

For me it perfectly illustrates how solutions based on individual morality are only fake solutions promoted to avoid the real cost of actually getting things done thoroughly.

Re: Effective altruism is not effective

#128

Post by imtringued » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 6:32 AM UTC

benkuhn wrote: post #19

This article completely mischaracterizes the beliefs of most of the people quoted or referenced, then engages with those beliefs only via asserting the opposite without any supporting argument. I'm disappointed. For example: > The most charitable explanation of Singer’s dismissal of political action is that he is trying to sell being an altruist and he thinks a consumer -hero version is the one people are most likely…

> but does not himself provide an argument for it, just an assertion that political change is "the most obvious and powerful tool we have." (I think that's far from obvious!)

Argentina, Venezuela and Zimbabwe are basically nations that destroyed themselves through bad political reforms. If there had been a way to prevent those reforms you could have prevented millions of people from slipping into poverty and needing micro interventions.

Re: Effective altruism is not effective

#129

Post by Karrot_Kream » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 6:33 AM UTC

esyir wrote: post #102

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common philosophical problem. EA fits in a philosophical framework broadly known as utilitarianism (which is also popular among rationalists, a group known to be fans of EA). Buddhism's ideas of moral philosophy often lie in a mixture of what is commonly known as Divine Will Ethics and Virtue Ethics. Utilitarianism is quite popular among modern STEM discourse, but there are moral alternatives out there that…

The trolley problem situation seems pretty straightforward under utilitarianism if you add probability into it, I've never found the "what if one of the 3/4/5 could have been Hitler?" argument particularly convincing. The dictator assumption would apply to all humans born, and we as a species clearly don't punish birth sufficiently if the dictator risk was that heavily weighted. Axiom 1: Human life has value, saving…

I'm not sure what probabilities have to do with anything here. It sounds like you're applying a prior that each individual on each side has some "badness" that is uniformly distributed. In effect, a uniform distribution is probably one of the weakest priors and leads to some of the highest variance results (save perhaps Jeffery's Prior). I would go so far as to say assuming uniform probability of "badness" is probably a bad assumption on the way humans actually discriminate on other humans.

Re: Effective altruism is not effective

#130

Post by lmm » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 6:35 AM UTC

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #116

lmm wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s unclear to me that charitable initiatives have anything even close to perfect information. The whole point of EA efforts like GiveWell is to fix that. > 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. Why do you assume the market distortion is in the direction you'd like it to be? It's far more likely to go in the…

> The whole point of EA efforts like GiveWell is to fix that. I mean it doesn't seem like it is at all. Given the huge swath of political organizations it deems too complicated to analyze, I think GiveWell is far from perfect, and just adding information into an area with very little. It helps, sure, but I don't think we're even close to an EMH approximation. > Why do you assume the market distortion is in the direct…

> I don't assume anything here.

Then on what grounds are you claiming that it's better for people to get directly involved in charitable organisations than get a high-paying job and give money?

> The point is, without an efficient market you cannot achieve Pareto optimal outcomes. You can't assign directions here, I'm not sure what what a direction even means.

If there was an efficient market, we could assume that the relative value of charitable contributions of money and contributions of labour was approximately proportional to the normal market rate between them. There are two equal and opposite ways for that assumption to be false - either charities somehow have much easier access to labour than to money (and are unable to convert that labour into money at anything close to the usual market rate), or vice versa. One of those possibilities seems vastly more plausible than the other to me.

> Look, at this point you're just asking me to believe that EMH applies out of faith.

Not at all, I'm just asking you to not claim that the existence of tax incentives for charitable donations is any kind of evidence about the efficiency of charities. It isn't.