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The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

economist.com

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Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#61

Post by cscurmudgeon »

armchairhacker wrote: post #10

Like most things: EA as a concept is fine. Finding the "maximal" way to improve the lives of others is great, and finding better ways to contribute than charity and volunteering is honorable. The issue is when people take it to the extreme (like someone who literally argued that a person doing mere charity or volunteer work is bad , because they are wasting time and effort that they could've spent making money and re…

Sorry, it is not a "fine" concept.

It is just utilitarianism with modern marketing and pure utilitarianism has problems.

See one example below where utilitarianism's suggestion goes against what almost everyone considers ethical:

You can take 10 healthy organs from one person without any social connections and use the organs to save 10 terminal patients who would otherwise die.

EA effectively sanctions robbing a million people to help a million people + 1

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#62

Post by duxup »

> “It really suited my character at the time to try to think about effectiveness and rigour in everyday life,”

So was there any of that… that made getting into crypto or AI a good idea?

What was the math there?

I’ve seen effective altruism mentioned on HN before and I don’t really understand how it turns into directing people to jobs or specific tech… at all.

I feel like if you’re trying to help people the moment you mix your business in it, now you have conflicts of interest.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#63

Post by bena »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #15

Maybe this is superficial, but I was put off by the name "effective altruism". By naming it such, it felt like an implicit dig that most altruism is not effective. Like oh your altruism is not that productive, but my altruism, well it's effective altruism. Especially when that notion is pushed by people who overlap with the rationalist subculture, another arrogantly named group. In general I find it concerning when t…

They've effectively poisoned the terms "effective", "altruism", "longterm", "rational", and "utilitarian".

Because it was all a hustle to continue doing exactly whatever they wanted to do. Here is a good book that talks about the mindset:

https://www.amazon.com/Winners-Take-All-Charade-Changing/dp/...

It's easy to say you're doing things "longterm" for "future generations". The non-existent are the easiest people to advocate for. They demand absolutely nothing of you. And if your projected "altruism" will only really be felt well after you're dead, you aren't on the hook to show results now. They claim this is utilitarian, but it's not. It never was.

What is known is that small real changes now can affect large changes later. Doing things to improve today will improve tomorrow, next year, next decade, etc. If you are looking to be effective with your altruism, the most rational, utilitarian thing you can do is solve the problems of today. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to separate you from your money.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#64

Post by lotsofpulp »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #30

I used to work for one of the largest software vendors in the non-profit space worldwide and it fundamentally changed the way I look at the non-profit world. The big ones have essentially become these weird quasi-think tanks that passively influence policy or actively engage the community to achieve an often political agenda. For example, a large non-profit can't explicitly lobby congress to ban sex education in scho…

>Nobody is tracking what big non-profits and charitable funds ask (or demand) others to do, and they get to market themselves as doing good for the world.

Forget about tracking, the people paying even get a tax deduction.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#65

Post by chatterhead »

Effective Altruism is bullshit and here is why; because, the invisible hand has already shown itself to be a far better lever of human good through the acceptance of human nature. "Helping people" implies you know what people need. It's a power position to begin with and thus designed to fulfill the doers goals of doing good not the receivers 'need' of being helped.

Each of us, individually, pursuing our own self-interests produce value to society and others as a whole. Whether through producing products, offering services, performing labor, or consuming goods, we all seek our own interests to the betterment of the whole.

EA is just a new sort of chivalry for a new wannabe class of Nobles. That's it.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#66

Post by a-dub »

polygamous_bat wrote: post #32

To me, SBF embodied the worst stereotypes about the Effective Altruism movement. The not-so-subtle air of I'm-smarter-than-thou, the hubris to think whatever they have thought of haven't been thought and dismissed by others (probably for good reason), and a bull-headed focus on risk and return that can be exactly quantified, to the point of ignoring other, "softer" sides of the issue. SBF isn't alone in this. In scho…

expected value makes some sense when you're sampling a lot, but basically none for one offs.

personally i think if you're making big bets/one-offs, you probably should be computing something like minimax trees for all the possible outcomes before making a choice and maybe adjust the bet size such that the worst case is something you can swallow.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#67

Post by zztop44 »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #38
onetimeusename wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's a good way of putting it. I kind of ignored a lot of what they said but again, just like the rationalists who pretty much were all of the EA people, they came with biases they refused to admit they had. like for example, if a family member of mine needed money for a cancer treatment that had a 50% chance of working versus giving that money to save the life of someone I don't know on the other side of the plane…

> Why should I be asked to ignore my own family by annoying redditors who don't give a shit about me anyways? You shouldn't; doing so would be irrational. There is a fairly decent chance that your relative, if they survive, will be in a position to help you in the future. But the random person on the other side of the planet? The chance of them randomly helping you in the future is about one in a few billion. Particu…

That’s fine… but that’s _not the reason_, right? The reason is that you know the person and don’t want them to suffer. Trying to ignore that lived reality in a quest to be objective or rational seems to me like a recipe for mistaken thinking.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#68

Post by pr337h4m »

I've been convinced for sometime now that "effective altruism" (Lesswrong-ism? Yudkowskianism?) is the communism of the 21st century.

Lots of parallels here beyond the obvious common thread of utilitarian collectivism:

- Censorship: the concept of "infohazards" is super-popular https://nickbostrom.com/information-hazards.pdf https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/information-hazards

- Social control + the creation of an 'other': They are absolutely convinced that sentient AGI will inevitably kill everyone without any real evidence. However, if we manage to create sentient AGI, what these guys plan to do with it is best described as modern slavery https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/ai-boxing-containment#:~:text=...

- Surveillance: They justify it using Bostrom's "vulnerable world hypothesis": https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf?platform=hoots... (TFA also discusses it well)

- Desire for government power: TFA is super clear about that. More interestingly, here's the FTX Future Fund on space governance: "We’d love to see workshops or a mock constitutional convention where sharp people think hard about how to structure international governance institutions for the long-term future, or how to govern space settlement. As explained in more detail on our areas of interest page, we believe that the onset of space settlement could be a watershed moment in human history. We want people to start thinking about how it should work." https://ftxfuturefund.org/projects/alternative-voting-system...

Also: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/space-governance/

- Entryism/influence operations: Pretty much every career profile on 80,000 Hours encourages taking a job at government agencies/influential private organizations to push the EA agenda https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/

Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk. No one with morals and a spine should fear this. (FWIW, the same justification of fearing retribution by an evil power for refusing to collaborate could be used by people in occupied countries who collaborated with the Nazis.)

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#69

Post by mxwsn »

yawnxyz wrote: post #24

I'm not familiar with Effective Altruism, but a takeaway as a tech person working in the clinical trial field: Most drugs go to market with the idea of being effective, e.g. treating as many people / conditions as possible. This leads to a problem that most people deal with a slightly different problem from the next person, so you just end up with large groups of small numbers of people who are essentially overlooked…

Perhaps before 1983, but there's a strong case that since the Orphan Drug Act was passed in the US, orphan drugs are overincentivized and a massive misallocation of resources [0]. Orphan drugs represent nearly half of FDA approved drugs in some recent years and come with huge tax benefits, near monopoly conditions, and typically the most outrageous prices. Maximizing quality-adjusted life years would be better achieved by incentivizing single-dose therapeutics for common ailments. Not the best example but the first that comes to mind is upcoming psychedelic therapy, which could have major potential, but is seen as having a broken business model because most people won't want more than one treatment.

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/01/17/5095068...

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#70

Post by MichaelCollins »

zztop44 wrote: post #67
MichaelCollins wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why should I be asked to ignore my own family by annoying redditors who don't give a shit about me anyways? You shouldn't; doing so would be irrational. There is a fairly decent chance that your relative, if they survive, will be in a position to help you in the future. But the random person on the other side of the planet? The chance of them randomly helping you in the future is about one in a few billion. Particu…

That’s fine… but that’s _not the reason_, right? The reason is that you know the person and don’t want them to suffer. Trying to ignore that lived reality in a quest to be objective or rational seems to me like a recipe for mistaken thinking.

It's not the reason, but it is a reason. The reason (for me) would be the principle of family coming first. But as is often the case, you can reconstruct deontological principles within a utilitarian framework.

For instance; if everybody sticks to the principle of murder being wrong despite the consequences, then there will be fewer misguided mass murderers, and this is better for society in the long run than everybody going around committing murders they believe to be justified by some end.

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