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

271–280 of 619 posts

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

#271

Post by marginalia_nu »

coldtea wrote: post #254
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. This is Pascal's wager level absurdity combined with Drake equation level accuracy...

It's honestly kinda unsettling how many bizarre sci-fi takes on AGI have gained popular plausibility since the new AI marketing boom. Potent kool-aid.

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

#272

Post by ShroudedNight »

karlkeefer wrote: post #185
ShroudedNight wrote: post #162

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 watc…

It seems like suggesting there is _no such threshold_ is even more in need of citation. Boundlessness means that X could be all domesticated animals, and Y=1 human. Surely that seems like not the right call, given that it would ultimately kill even more humans.

There are definitely scenarios where an X big enough to cause broad ecological consequences would encounter little rhetorical friction to overwhelm Y=1.

[Admittedly this is all error-prone hazy recollection, but] From what I understood, the original scenario in question was about a case where X was large, but not of critical strategic consequence to the availability of the animal(s) in question

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

#273

Post by OJFord »

Joeboy wrote: post #265
blitzar wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One is whether it's bad to eg. take first world Professional software developers' 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?

I think you're making that comment with the idea that it's self-evidently wrong? Do I understand you correctly? I find it really weird that people are so glib about the "hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths" part. I don't get how on earth people weigh that as less important than the financial welfare of relatively well-off people in richer countries. Maybe this is some basic failure of humanity on my part.

The problem (and I think roughly the point being made) is that if you follow that logic through, then surely almost everyone here should have the vast majority of their possessions & wealth taken, to fund the equalising up-lifting of others.

Charity and world aid is in a continual discussion & discovery of what we collectively think is 'good enough', helping people get to something that is perhaps 'not disaster', but nevertheless falls far short of the standards the gifters expect for themselves.

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

#274

Post by bendbro »

metta2uall wrote: post #110
chatterhead wrote: post #65

Effective Altruism is bullshit and here is why; because, the invisible hand has already shown itself to be a far better lever of human good through the acceptance of human nature. "Helping people" implies you know what people need. It's a power position to begin with and thus designed to fulfill the doers goals of doing good not the receivers 'need' of being helped. Each of us, individually, pursuing our own self-int…

The concept that seeking our own interests is to the betterment of the whole seems to be demonstrably false.. For example consider the tobacco and fossil fuel executives who are trying to delay the phase-out of their products. Or the people who buy/sell meat in spite of the resulting ecological damage & animal suffering. By the way, a charity quite popular in mainstream Effective Altruism is Give Directly - which aim…

> For example consider the tobacco

Smelly, dead hands, liberal

> fossil fuel

Polluting, dead hands, liberal

> buy sell meat

Greasy, dead hands, liberal

On good terms I would have permitted the fossil fuel claim, but in the context of the others I'd rather be a militant.

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

#275

Post by blitzar »

ALittleLight wrote: post #248
didibus wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 whatev…

> it would not even occur to you to save the theater. You would save the screaming people who are begging for help.

If there was a crypto trade available to make a billion dollars available for the next 15 minutes only - but you have to chose between the community theater, the bus of X people on fire or giving 10% of your gainz to a charity to save X*2 ...

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

#276

Post by blitzar »

radu_floricica wrote: post #138

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.

> to the point it's their own internal favorite sport.

Surely this is a massive irony - the time wasted debating it is time where they could have been collectively earning millions or billions to donate to worthy causes.

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

#277

Post by paganel »

trabant00 wrote: post #243
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.

> He talks about rich and poor

Looking at the current distribution of wealthy vs poor countries and people is kind of disingenuous and rationalistic to ignore the racist undertones. More exactly saying "we'll choose the wealthy people vs the poor ones if it will come to that" while ignoring that most of the wealthy people across the globe are of one "race", while the other peoples are of other "races", is, yes, racist.

About eugenics, whenever cold numbers only come into play in decisions like these I think it's safe to call it that, i.e. eugenics. Choosing wealthy people against poor people based on numbers alone is eugenics. You're choosing the more "worthy" ones, as that Beckstead guy explicitly said. More to the point, saying that people A should have more chances to live compared to people B, because people A is more worthy ("has the potential to create more long-term value"), is the definition of eugenics.

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

#278

Post by agent008t »

didibus wrote: post #233
zozbot234 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Let us make the example more extreme. Let's make it spending 100 billion on building a supermassive yacht, that you then proceed to sink for your own entertainment. Which is not dissimilar from 10 million people spending $10k each on luxury consumption for themselves.

Would you still argue that it still does no harm? You have just squandered 100b worth of society's resources - people's time, physical materials, engineering effort etc. for your own entertainment.

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

#279

Post by thegeomaster »

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…

>maybe EA is fundamentally Rationalist?

The EA forum in fact uses the forum software developed by LessWrong, in very close collaboration with them (it's not open source or anything). In general it looks like the two organizations have a lot in common, and LessWrong is a poster child for the rationality movement.

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

#280

Post by quickthrower2 »

froggychairs wrote: post #218
devilsbabe wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not OP, but I do work in reducing harms of deployed AI systems at a big tech company When most EA/Rationalist folks discuss AI Safety. They’re talking about AGI, a hypothetical construct that we have no way of proving is even possible Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with funding research of that sort. The problem comes is that many EA/Rationalist folks begin downplaying legitimate tangible risks on the horizon (…

The biggest threat of AGI IMO is people wanting and desiring to make the leap from human to digital. It is less The Matrix and more like plastic surgery or some other lifestyle enhancement. At first they wont, like people wouldn’t jump in an unlicensed taxi because that is silly, right!
Post reply on HN