Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 619 posts

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

#161

Post by latency-guy2 »

nl wrote: post #116
quantumwannabe wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The founders of the Effective Altruism movement are mostly non-technical people. You can't blame their arrogance and failures on the "techbros". The people mentioned on the Effective Altruism Wikipedia page: Peter Singer: Professor of Bioethics (philosopher) Toby Ord: Philosopher. Philosophy PhD, Computer Science bachelors Hilary Greaves: Philosopher, and he double-majored in physics in undergrad William MacAskill: P…

"TechBros" doesn't mean "programmers". It broadly means something like "people who think tech will solve everything but don't think very deeply"

Nah, it's an insult meant to lower the assumed position/opinion of whoever it was aimed at. Maybe in the past it meant what you describe it as, but I haven't seen that in any recent use.

It's more or less a term one would use to signal to others to dogpile the person and get them to leave the conversation/topic, mostly by being absurdly obtuse and misconstruing their words to it's most literal meaning with nothing left to deem charitable if engaging, or just speaking to other people entirely and not towards the subject whatsoever. Kind of like how most insults devolve into in pretty much all social media, just another word to pull out of the ad-hom bag.

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

#162

Post by ShroudedNight »

Does the effectiveness of various forms of altruism actually form a total order? I've yet to see any kind of rigorous argument in favour, yet seems like a fundamental requirement if one is going to expend such incredible resources into attempts to maximise this value.

The reason I ask is that, when I first discovered Effective Altruism, finding the premise to be deeply compelling, I ended up staying up all night watching videos trying to reconcile / assimilate it into my world view. In one video, various trolley problem scenarios were enumerated, and the EA guests were advocating sparing a lamborghini to the detriment of a child's life so that the car could be sold off and the money donated to saving multiple children in the developing world. Furthermore, there was some suggestion of a threshold where the altruism of sparing X domesticated animals was 'higher' than sparing Y humans, which definitely felt like it fell into [citation needed] territory.

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

#163

Post by kortilla »

fassssst wrote: post #83

Sounds like a bunch of sociopathic, terminally online people found each other and started yet another hierarchical fund raising scheme. What’s better than picking individual charities based on utility? Charity index funds. Also known as social democratic governments that collect taxes.

> Also known as social democratic governments that collect taxes.

That conclusion does not follow. Why do you think a social democratic government has any focus on the utility of its work?

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

#164

Post by vzqx »

kazinator wrote: post #122

Quoted post unavailable.

If you give 10% of your income, you're still keeping 90% for yourself. So it implies you consider yourself nine times as valuable as all other humans. I'm not on board with Effective Altruism, but 10% of your income seems like a reasonable amount to give to those less fortunate.

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

#165

Post by nl »

dchftcs wrote: post #129
nl wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"TechBros" doesn't mean "programmers". It broadly means something like "people who think tech will solve everything but don't think very deeply"

And yet Effective Altruism in itself is not technology focused. There's no evidence that list of people (many philosophers) think tech will solve everything.

Longtermism explicitly is technology focused though:

> Many longtermists reckon that the antidote to the threat from technology is more technology; mastering artificial intelligence will forestall a malevolent AI from enslaving us. They also believe that technological acceleration is morally good in its own right, as it enables the universe to sustain more people. Bostrom laments the lives lost every second that technological advances are delayed. In a paper from 2003 he invites readers to imagine all the “unused energy…being flushed down black holes”, and all the suns beyond our own that are “illuminating and heating empty rooms”, because we lack the means to populate the planets orbiting them

And longtermism has taken over much of the EA movement:

> Disillusioned effective altruists are dismayed by the increasing predominance of “strong longtermism” ..[snip].. According to Benjamin Todd, a founder of 80,000 Hours, longtermism “might well turn out to be one of the most important discoveries of effective altruism so far” ..[snip].. Projects devoted to global health and poverty still garner the most funding, but their share of the total allocation is shrinking as long-term-risk research attracts more cash.

Both quotes from the linked article.

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

#166

Post by diffeomorphism »

imgabe wrote: post #76
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 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…

What if closing the community theater caused them to drop art, pursue biology and then cure cancer?

> The idea that the moon is made out of cheese is stupid.

Agreed, but you are the only one that claimed this was the idea because clearly you are not the "arrogant and fundamentally wrong" one.

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

#168

Post by Bukhmanizer »

Admittedly the SBF debacle is the first time I’ve heard of EA, but I don’t think it’s surprising that it’s attracted such characters.

Frankly it strikes me as just sketchy moral accounting, where you can be as greedy or exploitative as you want to be as long as you’re contributing to something that you can justify as having a higher “moral score”, but in the end you’re doing all the calculations and all the numbers are made up.

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

#169

Post by unmole »

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.

> when did this become an either/or?

I don't have unlimited resources. I have the privilege of having a surplus that I can redirect to making the world better. EA is a framework for trying to do the most amount of good from the limited resources that I have.

> We can do both.

So, save fewer lives for more theatre seats?

> diversification of one's "ethics portfolio"

I don't understand what that is supposed to mean.

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

#170

Post by [deleted] »

vzqx wrote: post #164
kazinator wrote: post #122

Quoted post unavailable.

If you give 10% of your income, you're still keeping 90% for yourself. So it implies you consider yourself nine times as valuable as all other humans. I'm not on board with Effective Altruism, but 10% of your income seems like a reasonable amount to give to those less fortunate.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN