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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?

#311

Post by concordDance »

blitzar wrote: post #276
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.

Yes, listening to criticism is all well and good... for a time. But eventually you'll realize you need to just block and ignore the naysayers and do you own thing.

Which, to be fair, the 95% of effective altruists that you never hear about do.

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

#312

Post by AbrahamParangi »

Tenoke wrote: post #212
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…

Sorry, scientology? This comes off as pretty bad faith. Most EAs are people like me who read some essays, setup some recurring donations to GiveWell and call it a day. If that's how being a scientology member goes then it must be milder than I've been led to believe.

You describe all religions. Read some scripture, perform some simple devotions, and call it a day.

I don’t mean to overstate the religiosity of EA but it’s not structurally different.

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

#313

Post by concordDance »

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…

> Does the effectiveness of various forms of altruism actually form a total order?

Given a moral compass, yes.

EA is about not just looking at the immediate and the definite, the relative value of animals and humans is out of scope (though of course many individuals there will have opinions on it).

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

#314

Post by awsdasdasd »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #298
JamesBarney wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is you wouldn't endanger the lives of teenagers to build a community theater because you believe the lives of teenagers are more valuable than a community theater. But repairing a community theater could easily cost $100,000 which would save the lives of ~22 people in Guinea if donated to certain bed net charities. And even the most die hard theater fans probably wouldn't save a theater if to do so it would…

The same argument means that any luxury that any person indulges in. Let’s say thanksgiving, christmas, craft beer, VR headset, calling their mother, etc. is costing X lives (X is not necessary integer) and so isn’t the rationalist thing to do. “Ah bit they are luxuries, distinct from charity…” Ok then give me the luxury of donating to the local theatre!

Effective alturism vs luxury alturism?

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

#315

Post by blitzar »

Joeboy wrote: post #307
blitzar wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. And if not software developers why not? Who gets to chose which grift is a grift and which is an honest living? > I find it really weird that people are so glib about the "hund…

Have you ever been close to anybody who died? If you have prevented that, and then you multiply that by a few hundred thousand, do you not get close to a place where rich people's investments not panning out doesn't seem like something to get too upset about? It's interesting to me that there's a kind of horseshoe effect here with the "rich people must be protected" on the same side as the "rich people are evil" peop…

> do you not get close to a place where rich people's investments not panning out

Rich people like software developers

And investments like every cent they earn

Absoultely 10000% happy with taking every cent of it and saving as many lives as possible. Why are you against this?

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

#316

Post by Tenoke »

AbrahamParangi wrote: post #312
Tenoke wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, scientology? This comes off as pretty bad faith. Most EAs are people like me who read some essays, setup some recurring donations to GiveWell and call it a day. If that's how being a scientology member goes then it must be milder than I've been led to believe.

You describe all religions. Read some scripture, perform some simple devotions, and call it a day. I don’t mean to overstate the religiosity of EA but it’s not structurally different.

You can reduce everything to being religion if you do it this way to the point of the comparison being useless.

HN? Religion. Weight lifting? Religion. Dental hygiene? Religion. Voting? Religion. Functional Programming? Religion. Punk? Religion.

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

#317

Post by simonh »

yanderekko wrote: post #95
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…

>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 recruiting to contribute more charity and volunteering) I mean, the concern here is that coming off as an asshole can be self-defeating, not that these views are actually incorrect, right? Seems…

The problem is they can't possibly know if they are correct or not, we just don't have enough information about the actual future and what effect actions now might have on it.

Plus it doesn't take into account our individual competencies and nature. It doesn't matter how much I think curing cancer is more important than my current job, I know absolutely zilch about curing cancer. Also I have no idea if I'm actually right about cancer being a top priority, or if curing it is even possible. Meanwhile sick people that doctors and nurses can save using known techniques are dying right now.

Effective Altruism as a principle is fine, it makes a degree of sense. We do need to invest in long term projects, but all this talk of 1% chance of this or that saving humanity is fiddling while Rome burns.

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

#318

Post by [deleted] »

npteljes wrote: post #217
hardwaregeek wrote: post #15

Maybe this is superficial, but I was put off by the name "effective altruism". By naming it such, it felt like an implicit dig that most altruism is not effective. Like oh your altruism is not that productive, but my altruism, well it's effective altruism. Especially when that notion is pushed by people who overlap with the rationalist subculture, another arrogantly named group. In general I find it concerning when t…

>most altruism is not effective. Like oh your altruism is not that productive, but my altruism, well it's effective altruism. I unironically think this. In Hungary where I live, if you don't care about these things much but still want to contribute somewhat to society by charity, the first lines of contact will mostly be crooks that feed on goodwill. There will be beggars, organized into groups, charities that don't…

[deleted]

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

#319

Post by ethanbond »

coldtea wrote: post #303
llamaimperative wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not weird at all. When (probably when , not if ) we create it, we will quickly be interacting with an entity with a similar power imbalance as we have to ants. No one knows exactly what the outcome will be, even less so what to do about it, but surely the kool-aid is watching accelerating progress toward this state and believing either it won’t happen or it won’t be interesting/surprising. Disclaimer: I don’t think t…

> Not weird at all. When (probably when, not if) we create it, we will quickly be interacting with an entity with a similar power imbalance as we have to ants. That's the sci-fi idea, which handwaves away several very big assumptions and improbabilities, such as that intelligence can be grown to absurd levels (or even just majorly) just by adding hardware to allow for it, that intelligence can just be expanded by its…

1) Why do we have a reason to believe there’s a cap to intelligence?

2) No, you don’t need to assume it happens via adding hardware

3) No, you don’t need to assume it can expand by itself

4) We’ve already seen people connecting AI systems to open internet and open internet to command and control of physical systems (cars, utilities, soon weapons systems) - turns out there was no convincing necessary

5) Nanobots also not a necessary assumption

Also, incentives, not charisma, are what steer human behavior. Consider for example if the Bitcoin whitepaper were written by an AI? No escape necessary. No convincing necessary. Yet the idea has managed to marshal enormous amounts of capital, computational power, social power, and even some political clout. IMO there’s no reason to believe the AI looks like a robot terminator rather than an incentive-generating piece of information.

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

#320

Post by FeepingCreature »

blitzar wrote: post #289
OJFord wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. And if not software developers why not? Who gets to chose which grift is a grift and which is an honest living? > I find it really weird that people are so glib about the "hund…

Humans have very strong instincts against exploitation by peers. I think the appropriate answer here is: "Sure, let's seize the wealth of approximately everyone in a western country." Singling out a particular group, even though it's less seizure in total, raises people's hackles for reasons entirely unrelated to whether redistribution is a good idea.
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