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The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

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

#131

Post by Self-Perfection »

onetimeusename wrote: post #29
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…

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…

This take on EA notion replaces it with a straw man.

Essentially EA tells not "let's save as many lives as possible" but "let's improve the world according to our values as much as possible". And values might differ among the people.

In your example with cure for relative working with only X probability Vs definitely curing stranger on the other side of the world there should be value X for which you will prefer to cure the stranger. Whether it 10% , 1% or maybe 0.01% I will not blame you. But it worth to know your values like value of your family member life over the stranger's life to act accordingly.

Dive into EA activities starts with exploring your values. How do you value lives of animals in comparison to lives of people? Do you prefer improving people well being now or reducing existential risks like wars and epidemies? EA literally made a tool to estimate one's values and promote this tool on the front page.

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

#132

Post by hardwaregeek »

JamesBarney wrote: post #117
hardwaregeek wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The example of a community theater highlights another issue I have with effective altruism. It effectively encourages you to only donate to things you can make a quantifiable case for. And in a lot of situations, quantification fails. The arts have an immense value in developing philosophical, emotional, empathetic values. A theater may not show up in a balance sheet but it can have a massive effect. And it does conc…

Let me preface this with I know this is a mugging, I think community theater is great, and I don't think it's good to divert all societal resources to nets in Africa. But I just don't think it's as effective, and I don't think most people agree. If the only available labor was teenagers, rebuilding the community theater meant hiring them, and you knew that statistically there was a risk some might die from heat strok…

Sorry, I'm confused as to what you mean by a mugging? Genuinely not sure what you meant by that.

Anyways, I never said any specifics about where this community theater is being built. I don't know where heat stroke came from. Sure, yeah, in the straw man situation of building a community theater in an extremely hot area, where the only labor is teenagers, I would...not enlist teenagers to build a community theater in an extremely hot area? I don't want to be dismissive of your comment but I genuinely don't know what's the point here.

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

#134

Post by hardwaregeek »

unmole wrote: post #127
hardwaregeek wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The example of a community theater highlights another issue I have with effective altruism. It effectively encourages you to only donate to things you can make a quantifiable case for. And in a lot of situations, quantification fails. The arts have an immense value in developing philosophical, emotional, empathetic values. A theater may not show up in a balance sheet but it can have a massive effect. And it does conc…

> The arts have an immense value in developing philosophical, emotional, empathetic values. Too bad these empathetic values privilege building an entertainment venue over saving lives or preventing suffering. /s

...when did this become an either/or? We can do both. In fact diversification of one's "ethics portfolio" seems like something an effective altruist would understand quite well.

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

#135

Post by akira2501 »

wombatpm wrote: post #71
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

It's the modern version of a religious indulgence. Worse, as you point out, all it offers is more undue and unjustified meddling in peoples lives to make up for unfair and injudicious meddling in other peoples financial affairs.

More cynically, you're giving hand outs to people who yet need to learn to be productive, while destroying the lives of people who were trying to leverage their own productivity. I think it has negative value, doubling harming progress for the sake of apology.

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

#136

Post by radu_floricica »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #93
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.

The example of a community theater highlights another issue I have with effective altruism. It effectively encourages you to only donate to things you can make a quantifiable case for. And in a lot of situations, quantification fails. The arts have an immense value in developing philosophical, emotional, empathetic values. A theater may not show up in a balance sheet but it can have a massive effect. And it does conc…

Oh my god, it ENCOURAGES you to do something it believes is right and you don't. This is outright CRIMINAL. How do they dare do something so audacious?

Sorry for the cringe, but really - you're actually saying that encouraging people to do what they think is right is a problem? Especially when they've actually read the books, done the numbers, and all you have is a feeling that they may be wrong in some cases? I can't really argue with that except with caps lock and sarcasm.

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

#137

Post by tptacek »

My "Effective Altruism Is Not A Cult" t-shirt is prompting a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.

I've dug into this stuff over the last couple days, because I had previously understood Effective Altruism to be something akin to like a pledge drive for Charity Navigator's best-reviewed charities or something, and it turns out it's nothing of the sort. In fact, if you read some of the commentary from EA insiders about Sam Bankman-Fried (these come up in stories where EA distances itself from SBF, or claims they knew he was up to no good all along), it's hard to shake the comparisons to Scientology: they have their own weird language, there's a hierarchy, and people on the inside operate under a constant threat of ostracism.

To that, add that some of the ideas are clearly dementing. Take Scott Aaronson's recent post on SBF, which is shot through with EA-think; it includes this:

And a traditional investor who made billions on successful gambles, or arbitrage, or creating liquidity, then gave virtually all of it away to effective charities, would seem, on net, way ahead of most of us morally.

This is logic straight out of the 16th century Medici papacy of Leo X. Maybe it's some kind of horrible drug interaction with Rationalism, or maybe EA is fundamentally Rationalist? Either way: when your logic has established that you can obtain moral superiority by literally buying indulgences, it has officially proven too much, and if you can't recognize that, something has gone terribly wrong in your thinking. Over and over I keep coming across EA arguments that could be used to justify almost literally any behavior, so long as you can tell yourself a story about having a long-term positive goal.

Also: tens of millions in donations to "AI safety" organizations. Yes, to answer the Economist; this movement is irretrievable.

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

#138

Post by radu_floricica »

This provides good context: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-as-...

EA is a very very tempting horse to beat, to the point it's their own internal favorite sport. There are large quantities of ink spilled criticizing it, from inside and outside. But it is all pretty worthless without taking a look at the foundations of the movement.

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

#139

Post by zdragnar »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #134
unmole wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The arts have an immense value in developing philosophical, emotional, empathetic values. Too bad these empathetic values privilege building an entertainment venue over saving lives or preventing suffering. /s

...when did this become an either/or? We can do both. In fact diversification of one's "ethics portfolio" seems like something an effective altruist would understand quite well.

People have a finite amount of money to give, so every dollar is an either/or decision.

Every dollar you spend on a theater donation is a dollar less that you value human lives.

Of course, the same logic applies to candy bars, internet, television, and all the things that being you joy in life.

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

#140

Post by giraffe_lady »

itsdrewmiller wrote: post #85
cscurmudgeon wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mill…

EA doesn't do that - it's a much smaller concept than utilitarianism. (Which also wouldn't always support that conclusion.)

But it has very noticeably begun falling into the same traps long discovered and recognized by utilitarianism. EA now has a significant contingent that is most focused on very unlikely far future outcomes because they would be incredibly bad for an unimaginably vast number of people if they did occur eg unbounded utility. That's pascal's mugging!

The movement is based on the same ideas and values and it's running into the same problems. These similarities don't inherently discredit the movement, but not having a clear awareness of these faults in their framework and a plan for avoiding them is very worrying.

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