Effective altruism is not effective

Then, Argentina is working extremely well, except for themselves, that is.

They are in a treadmill of unpayable debt that works in the following way:

- The left is tasked with buying people's complacency with borrowed money.

- The right is tasked with giving away sovereignty: privatization and military bases.

People are expected to pick a side and stay busy fighting over which side is right. Meanwhile, the country is taken over. Divide and conquer.

It is working extremely well. There are now US military bases near Ushuaia, Neuquen and the Guarani acquifer, the 3 most strategic locations in Argentina. Everything that can be privatized has been privatized, and provisions have been made so that Argentineans can never pay off their debt, so that they can continue to lose their sovereignty. What should they privatize next? the sky is the limit.

> > One could spend at most a few tens of millions of dollars on anti-mosquito bed nets before returns start dramatically diminishing because everyone who can be helped by them already has one.

That's a feature. It's half of what makes "effective" part of "effective" altruism effective. The fact that charities aren't infinite money sinks allows everyone to donate by a simple algorithm of:

  do {
    let charity = runQuery("
          SELECT *
          FROM charities
          ORDER BY effectiveness DESC
          LIMIT 1;")
    donateTo(charity);
  } while(charity != null && hasMoneyToHelp());

(People may have slightly different definitions of "effective", or one may prefer to do e.g. LIMIT 5 and pick one of the top 5 at random - the idea still works, the slight variance is a hedge against uncertainty.)

It's an obvious idea, and it's how people approach other aspects of their lives if they care about the outcome, so why not donating too?

The article continues:

> > This points to the limits of the individualistic consumerist approach to ending poverty. The best – most beneficial – choice you can make as an individual spending $50 or even $5,000 is different from the best choice you should make if you have several hundred billion dollars to spend.

There's only one entity with several hundred billion dollars to spare, and that's US Government. Other than that, this is why people donate to charities: charities exist to pool money, to turn ten thousand $50 donations into a single $500 000 force that can be better used than if everyone tried to apply their $50 directly at the problem.

But in the case of despotic or otherwise terrible leaders, the problem is that it's unclear what to do to stop them even if you have control over a large military, let alone if your only resources are a relatively small amount of money and the time of a relatively small group of people.

It remains an unsolved problem how to evaluate causes like political advocacy that have very long-term or very uncertain effects. Combine that with the rancor and division that talking about contemporary politics causes and its no wonder EA as a movement chooses to eschew political advocacy for the most part. I guess the overall sentiment is that the money some people donate to feed the Democratic or Republican party machines could probably be spent better.

That said, I've have seen (relatively) small EA grants given to organizations advocating and acting to improve governments in undeveloped countries. For example, the first one I came across was this: https://www.givewell.org/research/incubation-grants/innovati...

I disagree that this article give an accurate impression of the EA. The main point of effective altruism is that people should use evidence in choosing which charitable causes to devote their time to. I don't feel like the author sufficiently engages with this point; instead he attacks Singer for not coming up with a satisfactory standard for what percentage of one's wealth to donate, and laments that EA isn't political enough.

EA arose based partially based on the observation that people do most of their giving to, for example, local churches and schools than to truly desperate people in other parts of the world. People also tend donate their effort to local and relatable causes. The argument isn't that buying Malaria nets is going to eliminate all the evil in the world, the argument is it's a better use of money than other charities, and that we should use evidence to determine how to expend our resources.