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

241–250 of 619 posts

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

#241

Post by rcoveson »

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…

Are you describing "giving virtually all of [your earnings] away to effective charities" as "literally buying indulgences"? That's literally the most cynical thing I've ever heard.

I can understand having a negative opinion of the EA movement as it exists today. But your reaction to the charitable investor thing makes me think that you actually disagree with... altruism. Or at least the idea that being more altruistic is morally superior than being less altruistic.

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

#242

Post by concordDance »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #61
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…

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…

That example is a bad one. There are many serious risks in trying to do that in practice, which is why our intuitions are against it. E.g. you might be found out and people might mistrust doctors, you might be wrong about the person having to connections, those patients might not live long anyway, etc etc

> EA effectively sanctions robbing a million people to help a million people + 1

Yes, EA people often think taxes are a good idea. This is not a rare thing.

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

#243

Post by trabant00 »

paganel wrote: post #219

> Nick Beckstead, the chief executive of the ftx Foundation, wrote in a PhD dissertation completed in 2013 that “It now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal.” Why? The former has the potential to create more long-term value and therefore save more lives. Bringing racism and eugenics to a whole new…

While I find the statement in bad taste and guilty of classism I can't find the racist and/or eugenics aspects anywhere. He talks about rich and poor, not race or genetics.

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

#244

Post by didibus »

losteric wrote: post #27
didibus wrote: post #21

I've always found EA to be the most capitalist way of trying to do good. Instead of like being humble, not accumulating wealth for yourself, not thinking of yourself as better, etc. EA is pushing for this weird self-centered egotistical philanthropic avenue. That's literally the least efficient way to help anyone. This also always felt very American. I'll get rich by paying workers poorly, finding any advantageous lo…

> This also always felt very American. I'll get rich by paying workers poorly, finding any advantageous loophole I can, screwing customers, but once I'm rich I'll donate some of that money to do good... That also feels very inaccurate and misrepresentative of the philosophy. Rather, I'd say: live mindfully in a broken system. Pick a job that meets your needs with minimal intentional side-effects, donate some surplus…

> That also feels very inaccurate and misrepresentative of the philosophy.

I admit, I don't want to generalize, I'm sure there are many interpretation of the ideas of EA and different people practice it differently.

That said, in practice, at least the prominent figures and their prominent groups, my impression is that they fall into what I described.

Seems there's an appealing aspect to it that's about being able to be the most cut throat, dirty capitalist where ends justify the means, and where you can feel good about being filthy rich off the back of everyone else, because you'll be efficiently altruistic in donating some of it back.

Feels there's a dimension to it that seems to justify taking from the poor to give to the poorer, while keeping a cut for yourself.

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

#245

Post by concordDance »

One thing a lot of people miss is that effective altruism has worked! The idea of donating to distant causes that do the most good (which is what EA is and this notion long predates the 21st century) has massively reduced the number of deaths of malaria. Bill Gate's efforts to eradicate polio have done a world of good.

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

#246

Post by concordDance »

ivalm wrote: post #232
concordDance wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There are reasons to think we can do something about AI alignment, but there's zero chance of being able to get anywhere on that topic with dozens of hours of conversation. It's complicated.

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

#247

Post by simonh »

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…

I don't know anything about the movement, so can't comment on the earlier points.

>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.

Ive seen this argument many times on many different issues and I think it's almost always bunk. The classic example in Fusion research, I had friends when I was a student in the 80s arguing that if we only doubled fusion research spending we'd have unlimited cheap electricity by the year 2000, or others said that AI was the most important thing we could be researching at that point.

The problem is if you're too early on in the development process of a technology, you just flat out don't know enough about it to be able to make informed decisions. That early phase is about exploring avenues of research and figuring out what works and what doesn't, and that takes an irreducible amount of human time, diligence and hard work. Yes you need to invest in that, but above a certain threshold anything more you invest is almost entirely going to be wasted.

With general, or strong AI we only just barely have the beginnings of an idea of how to even do preliminary research on it. We're groping around in the dark for a starting point. It's far, far too early to start worrying about controls and management strategies for the end point of that research. I think there's very little chance much of that is likely to turn out to be relevant, and there's nothing to stop us focusing on that area once we do know what is going to be relevant.

I'm not saying ignore the issue, or don't think about it at all, but the idea that it's some urgent issue that we absolutely have to invest heavily in right now IMHO doesn't stand.

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

#248

Post by ALittleLight »

didibus wrote: post #224
ALittleLight wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, if you had to choose between funding community theater and saving X lives, how large would X need to be before you'd abandon the theater? It's fine to spend money on the theater, everyone spends money and time on themselves and their interests. If you consider community theater altruism though, I think it makes sense to acknowledge that it is ineffective altruism - that is, you're doing a little bit of good with…

"saving a life" is kind of vacuous. You need to contextualize the life saved, do we mean they went to live one more day, or a full long life of prosperity and comfort with a happy painless death from old age. And did they themselves gain the means to save more lives in turn? For example, I feel giving people the means of saving their own life, or other people's lives a much more efficient way to save lives than actua…

Our moral intuitions are developed for dealing with actual cases that we are actually experiencing. If you showed up with a fire hose and found that a bus full of X people and an empty community theater were on fire - it would not even occur to you to save the theater. You would save the screaming people who are begging for help.

One way to think about effective altruism is that it's trying to get you to apply whatever moral intuitions you would use in a concrete scenario to an abstract scenario. To any individual apart from it, it's abstract to know that mothers in some poor country can't adequately nourish their children, or that mosquito nets reduce malaria deaths, and so on. But, the reality is that those people are actually real, are actually suffering, and actually could be helped. If you take that message to heart then it won't make sense to send your charity to the community theater - by all means, send the theater money if you want, but it's a selfish thing, not an altruistic thing.

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

#249

Post by Joeboy »

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…

There are surely two separate issues here? One is whether it's bad to eg. take first world crypto investors' money and use it to stop hundreds of thousands of people dying of preventable diseases in developing countries. Personally, I think not really, or at least it'd be an odd thing to be upset about? Happy to hear the arguments in favour of huge numbers of preventable deaths.

Where that narrative gets problematic wrt SBF is that, aiui in the eyes of EA "leadership", "too many" EA individuals choose to allocate their donations to boring global health causes, rather than building the movement or weird long-termist stuff. So with that in mind, the obvious decision was to take the friendly billionaire money and put it into those "important" areas. Which means now, we have a popular and hard to refute characterization of EA as an organization that raises money for itself and weird causes normal people don't care about. But, like I said, the majority of EA money goes towards global health, ie. stopping people dying.

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

#250

Post by astrange »

dammod wrote: post #209
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…

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…

> 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.

Even without such an argument, “the ends justify the means” isn’t a reason to do something in the real world, because there are no “ends” in the real world. Everything just keeps happening.

Post reply on HN