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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?

#231

Post by jopsen »

Wow, I took EA to mean try donating using analysis like givewell does.

Judging by the article and comments, it looks as if people are living by a creed to be effectively altruistic.

In general any philosophy where you think there is an optimal answer suffers from the risk that the answer could be wrong.

In the case of givewell, one limitation is that you only support causes that demonstrate impact -- you don't support causes that take risks.

I'm sure there is many other reasons not think that everything can be solved through the application of logic :)

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

#232

Post by ivalm »

concordDance wrote: post #225
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…

> 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. As someone with multiple EA friends: this is precisely what it is. > they have their own weird language, there's a hierarchy, and people on the inside operate und…

> If AGI has even a 1% chance of happening this century and those donations reduce the risk of it going wrong and killing everyone by 1% that's still money very well spent.

Sure, but there is no reason to think these numbers are true. Maybe AI alignment research increases chances of AI killing everyone.

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

#233

Post by didibus »

zozbot234 wrote: post #178
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.

I mean, it's not fundamentally wrong. It's better than wasting $10,000 on, e.g. luxuries for yourself that probably won't even make you happier. But it's literally orders of magnitude worse than what you could do, even if you only ever care about your fellow citizens (not people in distant poor countries) in a generation near to your own (as opposed to mankind's long-term progeny).

> It's better than wasting $10,000 on, e.g. luxuries for yourself

I'm honestly not sure. Spending your money back into the economy contributes to a system with a proven track record, part of it goes to taxes, the rest pays for jobs, creates value for the owner, who'll pay some more taxes on their income, and then spend the rest elsewhere, etc.

Donating 10k to a charity has many practical flaws, the charity itself isn't incentivized to maximize the use of the 10k, it can be corrupt, or might operate in a corrupt and inefficient environment, etc.

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

#234

Post by rsj_hn »

sooheon wrote: post #229
MichaelCollins wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "My altruism is more effective than anybody else's, so I'm going to steal everybody else's money so that I can put it to better use." > How do you stop this shit? If you ask yourself why you think "this shit" is bad, at root there will be a consequentialist reason. Deontological ethics is consequentialism by heuristics.

But if you ever try to put any consequentialist theories into practice, at root there will just be a set of deontological heuristics guiding your behavior. Consequentialism is just deontology in drag.

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

#235

Post by concordDance »

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…

Deontological ethics is worse than useless as aguide to doing good.

It only tells you what not to do, rather than what to do.

And it's full of exceptions and edge cases. Is stealing a loaf of bread from scrooge to stop a family from starving wrong? What if you call it "taxes" and the community voted on it? Is it murder to blow up a bridge in wartime? Is unplugging someone's life support murder? What if they're going to die in hours any way and you're out of life support machines for the patient who just came in and has good prospects?

Also, while we can't predict the future we all need to decide what to do. Sure, if you donate antimosquito nets to save kids from malaria one of them might grow up to become the next Hitler, but you should try and figure out on the balance of probability what the most likely outcomes are.

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

#237

Post by c1ccccc1 »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #202
michaelmrose wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interestingly, the sun would kill us much sooner than that: in less than 1 billion years the sun's increased output will heat up the Earth's surface to the point of becoming unlivable.

Related to the topics of AI apocalypse and putting things off because they seem far away: I personally find it amusing to contemplate a strong AGI being developed in 2035 and wiping out humanity. Why? Because it would eliminate the Y2038 problem, retroactively vindicating all the engineers who only allocated 32 bits to timestamps. It would mean the justification of "oh, it's so far off, the world will have changed unimaginably by then", would for once turn out to be correct!

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

#238

Post by rhn_mk1 »

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…

> 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.

I see it as a natural outcome of consequentialism. Your ability to do good things is tied to your circumstances, which are not the same for everyone. Are you saying that you're certain that consequentialism is an invalid way to asess morality?

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

#239

Post by concordDance »

nl wrote: post #145
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…

I think that longtermism (mentioned in the article) is bad though, both as a concept and in practice.

What counts as longtermism though? Preserving archaeological sites rather than bulldozing them? Fighting CO2 emissions? Trying to avoid AGI risk you think will happen in less than a century?

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

#240

Post by i_am_proteus »

concordDance wrote: post #225
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…

> 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. As someone with multiple EA friends: this is precisely what it is. > they have their own weird language, there's a hierarchy, and people on the inside operate und…

That's a might "if" to rest on, given the self-identification of the modal effective altruist as "rational."
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