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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?

#201

Post by raverbashing »

devilsbabe wrote: post #193
tptacek wrote: post #137

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 insi…

re your last sentence: why do you disapprove of funding research into AI safety

At this point I think that giving $5 to a homeless person in SF (even if they go straight to doing another shot) might be more productive than this self-aggrandizing vapid BS about some theoretical risk that might come in the future

Right now what's threatening the most people is war, famine and diseases. Climate change is a tangible future threat but I'd bet a couple $ that the JSO organizers are full EA proponents and are flying private jets to convince people to throw soup into works of art

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

#202

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

michaelmrose wrote: post #199
devilsbabe wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

re your last sentence: why do you disapprove of funding research into AI safety

I'm not the poster but there is no reason to believe that we possess the tools to contemplate AI safety worse it may be a fools errand to contemplate how to control something much smarter than you are. Ergo at this point in time money spent to pay people to contemplate it is almost certainly entirely wasted.

It’s much like spending millions on studying how to save humanity from the sun when it expands in 5b years.

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

#203

Post by c1ccccc1 »

tptacek wrote: post #137

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 insi…

Depends what Aaronson meant by "being ahead morally"; it's unclear whether he is referring to morality in the sense of being virtuous, or in the sense of making other people better off. Hypothetical Charitable Investor's donations are a sign that that they might be rather virtuous, but they certainly aren't 1000 times more virtuous than the average person, and if it turns out that they secretly have a habit of kicking puppies, then they aren't virtuous at all. But it could certainly be true that, compared to an average person, Hypothetical Charitable Investor has had 1000 times the impact in terms of how they improved other people's lives.

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

#204

Post by ManuelKiessling »

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.

Well, if there are no written agreements - take the money and do your thing anyway, then?

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

#205

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

yanderekko wrote: post #155
davidgay wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > Firstly, you can't predict the future so really you're working off your biases. > Um, are you saying that this implies that people should just throw up their hands and donate to whatever causes since who knows? No, it implies that you shouldn't lecture others that you have the one true answer as to the best path forwards. You are free to (and in fact should) use your best judgment in your own personal choices, ju…

I don't think EA institutions argue that they have the One True Answer. They just often give recommendations - "eg. if you care about maximizing QALY overall, we recommend charities X, Y, and Z." If I don't care about QALY maximization, fine. But if I do, why would I not listen to the recommendations?

Longtermism and QALY do not seem compatible.

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

#206

Post by inkblotuniverse »

wahern wrote: post #46
civilized wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all philanthropy and charity are the same though. It's not all aimed through rigorous cost-benefit analysis. Which is not to say everyone should do that! But there's a difference between caring a lot about quantified impact and being guided by more qualitative considerations. What's the word to describe the difference? Quantitative altruism? Moneyball philanthropy? Maybe you feel we don't need a word. But I find…

> But there's a difference between caring a lot about quantified impact and being guided by more qualitative considerations. What's the word to describe the difference? Sure, if you needed a term to categorize. We can build ontologies (and identities) all day if we want. But I ask this: can you quantify the difference between a qualitative vs quantitative emphasis in charity work? Point being: I'm not sure the distin…

A charity organization that converts 70% of the money you give it into e.g. saved human lives is better than one that converts 5%. EA was inspired by the observation that most people don't know where their money is going when they give it to charity.

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

#208

Post by [deleted] »

JamesBarney wrote: post #156
pavlov wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This game can go on endlessly. What if hiring the teenagers mean they’re getting a salary, can help their families, and without the job they’d run off into the jungle to join the warlord who runs a murder cult army? Turns out the community theatre prevented a massacre and one of the kids wins the Nobel Prize for her plays in fifty years.

I don't understand the purpose of your what if. Mine was specifically to be an intuition pump to see how valuable the OP thinks a theater is when weighed against actual lives. It's easy to say x is important where x is saving sea turtles, teaching kids to read, or repairing a community theaters. It's harder to say x is more important than y charity when y charity saves lives effectively.

[deleted]

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

#209

Post by dammod »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #49
emmanueloga_ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Effective altruism (EA) is a philosophical and social movement that advocates "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis". [1] Seems like a good idea, if only just to have some sort of open-system for rating charities. I suspect the issue is everything that comes around the idea, specially... people. The problem is always people :-). Perhaps a "…

The problem with EA and other utilitarian systems of thought is two-fold. Firstly, you can't predict the future so really you're working off your biases. Secondly, unfettered by principles other than the end justifying the means, you can easily turn those aforementioned biases into justifications for committing horrible acts. Mass murder, or evidently, theft on a massive scale. For instance: "The technological revolu…

Peter Singer, one of the "founders" of effective altruism, argues pretty vehemently in his book "Effective Altruism" that the ends do NOT justify the means. Like you've said, doing that has lead some people to go off the deep end and do some horrifying stuff, so just because you think you can improve the world better than the guy next to you doesn't mean you should take the guy's money.

(Although, I've googled a bit and found a "counter"-example, where Singer argues that in a case where six innocent people could be wrongly accused of murder and killed, you should point at one as the perpetrator if it means only they get killed and the other five ones get let go, therefore saving five lives: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/866768837)

So yes, killing is morally wrong and should never be the mean to your end, but the rest is really muddy. Is stealing from the rich in order to feed the poor a justified mean? Is donating most of your money you make trading off the stock market, where other people have lost that money, a justified mean? Is lobbying against climate-unfriendly companies a justified mean?

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

#210

Post by c7b »

It's interesting that the article notes the similarity of EA to a religion. I don't just mean the 'cultist' element of people afraid to speak out, message control,... but on a more fundamental level: the sort of practical ethics where elite university professors tell you they've figured out what you ought to do with seemingly impenetrable analytical rigour, honed in countless seminars. It really struck me about Peter Singer already, who seems to be the spiritual ancestor to EA and all of this.
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