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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?

#71

Post by wombatpm »

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…

Seems more Ends Justify the Means when you start talking about future lives saved

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

#72

Post by ketzo »

schoen wrote: post #53
ketzo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I think it was a very explicit dig. The founding idea is that giving $10,000 to save, y’know, four ailing dogs with bad livers or whatever, or a community theater, as opposed to many human lives, is fundamentally wrong. “If you’re gonna give, you should maximize the impact as measured in human life” is fundamentally at odds with many common forms of giving, yes.

It's worth mentioning that organized EA is much more concerned with animal welfare and animal rights than a lot of the surrounding culture, so many EAs strongly advocate giving to animal-related causes. But they would still be concerned with having as large an impact as possible, so something to help 1,000,000 animals would be favored over something to help four.

That’s a good point, I should have picked my examples better. Thanks for the clarification.

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

#73

Post by diab0lic »

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…

Kelly maximizes the long run returns as the number of bets approaches infinity. If the variance is extremely high on f(x) and you get a single bet it can be rational to go very heavy. (Here x is the Bernoulli with p=0.75 and f(x) the payoff of 10000:1 on x = 1)

This problem is usually considered from the other angle: if variance is high but the odds are unfavorable you should favor fewer bigger bets over many smaller bets. Why? Because the more bets you make the more likely you are to converge onto the expectation. A single big bet leaves you either running way over expectation or slightly under it. All of this assumes that you have to bet though, the safest thing to do with negative expectation is to just not bet.

His example is unusual in that it has positive expectation (so you want to bet) and high variance (because you’re limited to a single bet). f(x) = 0b or 10000b so the single sample has a mean of 5000 and a variance of 50,000,000 but the E[f(x)] is 7500. A bigger than Kelly bet is rational here but if you had unlimited (or a large number of) bets you should revert to Kelly.

Food for thought.

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

#75

Post by wizofaus »

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…

I don't know about "always", but yes, there's a strong rational element behind favouring friends and especially family, and in general others that you're more likely to interact with in the future. For one thing, I'd think confidence that you have family members that will ensure your children will thrive even after you're gone gives peace of mind for most parents. And even if I never actually need help from family or friends of the nature I give them now, the regular act of providing assistance is an important part of what maintains good relationships, which we all know are pretty vital to mental health etc. I would say though that giving money is probably not generally the best way to achieve that end, and EA are primarily (solely?) about monetary donations.

Honestly I don't think there's any realistic way to decide in general whether giving assistance to person A vs person B is more "rational" or even more "effective", but it's good to at least be aware that some charities/NGOs/etc. are at least trustworthy and ensure a high % of donations do actively go towards providing help, rather being swallowed in marketing and admin budgets.

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

#76

Post by imgabe »

ketzo wrote: post #26
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…

I mean, I think it was a very explicit dig. The founding idea is that giving $10,000 to save, y’know, four ailing dogs with bad livers or whatever, or a community theater, as opposed to many human lives, is fundamentally wrong. “If you’re gonna give, you should maximize the impact as measured in human life” is fundamentally at odds with many common forms of giving, yes.

The idea that you can precisely plan out the exact optimal path is arrogant and fundamentally wrong.

What if the friendships made at a community theater help a troubled kid through a rough patch and instead of committing suicide they go on to cure cancer? Not funding the theater would have been very sub-optimal.

Even without far-fetched hypotheticals what’s the point of saving everyone’s life if they’re just going to spend it figuring out how to make more mosquito nets or whatnot?

People are not as smart as they think and it’s important to leave room for serendipity and random associations.

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

#77

Post by barbazoo »

dools wrote: post #17

Just the other day I was listening to this Dave Troy podcast "against long termism"[0] and it's the first time I ever heard the term "effective altruism", however within the last few days of having listened to EA has come up multiple times. I also remembered when listening to it that the title screen of the Baba Is You videogame on the nintendo switch promotes the "Giving what we can" charity. Very interesting stuff,…

Thanks for mentioning Dave Troy and his podcast!

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

#79

Post by joindpp »

wizofaus wrote: post #75
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…

I don't know about "always", but yes, there's a strong rational element behind favouring friends and especially family, and in general others that you're more likely to interact with in the future. For one thing, I'd think confidence that you have family members that will ensure your children will thrive even after you're gone gives peace of mind for most parents. And even if I never actually need help from family or…

In defense of marketing and admin budgets. What would you prefer, a nonprofit where $100 of your donation goes to "providing help" (I don't really know what that means, since money alone can't do anything) or a nonprofit where $30 of your $100 is invested in "marketing and admin" which results in: - the charity has $500 - there are admin humans around to "provide help" (and you're paying them a decent or even above-average salary because you want them to do an amazing job, right?) What if they took $60 out of your $100 and turned it into $5,000 (not unheard of if they invest in digital ads to a warm list, for example)

It's counterproductive to insist that nonprofits operate without operations budgets.

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