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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?

#431

Post by tptacek »

martopix wrote: post #390
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…

Please do not forget that you can disapprove of all the longtermism stuff and of the alleged cult-like structure, and still think it's important to pledge your money to charity. Please don't let the bad publicity around EA stop you from donating what you can, to charities that you trust and have a proven record of efficacy, whether from EA-related organization or other research. The original message still stands and…

If anything, EA seems like an obstacle to that kind of common-sense thinking. I could donate to charity. But: if holding on to the money made it more likely that I'd earn more money later, I could donate even more money to charity. I'm thus ethically obligated not to donate. See, for this, William MacAskill's conversation with Sam Bankman-Fried where he urged him to take a job at Jane Street to maximize his income.

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

#432

Post by melagonster »

bnralt wrote: post #388
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. "If killer GMOs have even a 1% chance of happening this century and donations to Greenpeace reduce the risk of them killing everyone by 1% that's still money well spent." Would you find that argument compelling? My guess is that most people would…

here. killer GMOs is a choice, isn't a probably future.

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

#433

Post by tptacek »

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…

It's easy to justify almost any sort of behavior if you take some risk and assign it a severity of "infinity". A 1% chance of happening? At severity infinity, you're morally obligated to act at even a 0.00001% chance: 0.00001% times infinity is still infinity. That's the AGI logic I'm seeing from these people.

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

#434

Post by PebblesRox »

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 it's some kind of horrible drug interaction with Rationalism, or maybe EA is fundamentally Rationalist?"

I have always associated EA with the rationalist movement, since I came across it via reading rationalist stuff.

If you define EA as "figuring out how to deploy a given set of resources so as to do the most good," your conclusions are going to depend on your value system: how do you define and measure good?

So when a bunch of rationalists who believe in consequentialism do that, they're going to maximize their value system and end up looking really weird to everyone else who doesn't share their values. You'd have the same outcome in a different flavor if a bunch of Christians did it.

I disagree with a bunch of the underlying values in the EA movement but I really admire the mindset that actually tries to solve the problem of "how can we be most effective with our giving?" instead of what I personally do, which is get overwhelmed by guilt and confusion, stop thinking about helping other people, and go back to my default of living my life mostly thinking about how to maximize my own comfort and preferences.

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

#435

Post by tptacek »

rcoveson wrote: post #241
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 altruisti…

No, I pasted a quote from an extremely respected thinker who, in the context of Effective Altruism, said that a financier who gave away virtually all his earnings would be morally superior to most of us. Giving away money is a good thing, everybody does it, by all means do it more. But the idea that you can purchase moral superiority, and, moreover, that the superiority you obtain is proportionate to the amount you donate relative to the average person? That is literally the logic of indulgences.

You've skipped the words "way ahead of most of us" in the quote I provided, is what I think happened.

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

#436

Post by Balgair »

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…

> ... they have their own weird language, there's a hierarchy, and people on the inside operate under a constant threat of ostracism.

Aside: A good rule of thumb for when you should start getting out of something is when the group comes up with a cute little name for those outside the group, typically ending in 'ie'. Normies, heggies, fundies, libtards, etc. It starts out innocent enough, but when those artificial divisions spring up, that's when the brains start shutting off and people start preaching to the choir.

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

#437

Post by tptacek »

edanm wrote: post #392
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…

> This is logic straight out of the 16th century Medici papacy of Leo X. Maybe it's some kind of horrible drug interaction with Rationalism, or maybe EA is fundamentally Rationalist? Either way: when your logic has established that you can obtain moral superiority by literally buying indulgences, it has officially proven too much, I think you're missing the point of that paragraph, or at least misrepresenting it here…

The underlying logic of someone who made and gave away billions being overall ahead of other people morally is sound, IMHO

I'm not sure what to do with this. It is, obviously, not sound. There are a variety of ways in which such a person could be less moral than the pitifully ineffective non-billionaires. I'm not kidding when I say that we worked a lot of these problems out in the 16th century.

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

#438

Post by 1ncorrect »

martopix wrote: post #390
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…

Please do not forget that you can disapprove of all the longtermism stuff and of the alleged cult-like structure, and still think it's important to pledge your money to charity. Please don't let the bad publicity around EA stop you from donating what you can, to charities that you trust and have a proven record of efficacy, whether from EA-related organization or other research. The original message still stands and…

I see billionaire individuals and organised charities as polar extremes of the same policy failure. Neither should exist, and when they do it should be as an ephemeral anomaly.

Any charity which fails to prioritise putting itself out of business is functionally a grift.

If society truly valued what charities do, their activities would be intrinsically valuable, and not require a special economic status to be conjured for them to be viable.

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

#439

Post by polygamous_bat »

edanm wrote: post #427
edanm wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you make your billions unethically, no amount of charity will make you a good person. I completely agree! I thought the context of the rest of my post made it clear that I assume they made it in an ethical way, but I guess it wasn't clear? I mean, if someone says they gave away billions to charity, my first question isn't immediately "but how did you make billions?". I just assume it's legit, because in most cas…

I also right after said that this doesn't allow them to then go do something bad. I mean this in both directions, obviously!

My problem with assumption that you make is that you assume the billionaires came to their billions through some divine magic, and thus "a very few bad apples" can't spoil the bunch.

I start my line of thinking from the other end -- what kind of regulation and laws exist that can create exponential wealth for someone whose work output only ever scales linearly. The gap between single person's output produced and wealth generated is proof that our simple abstraction that "money is just a symbol proportional to one's contribution to society" breaks down at very large (and sometimes really tiny) scales. Effective altruism will never fix that because it presupposes the system where billionaires are created and exists comfortably. The alternative, of course, is taking a closer look at the system itself and making sure our abstraction of "money = effort given to society" functions properly at all scales.

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

#440

Post by tptacek »

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.

I wouldn't be surprised if that's, like, the modal experience people have with the movement. But that, too, is how Scientology works!

I'm reacting to messages circulating about the whisper campaign among EA higher-ups, many of which are explicit about the fact that they didn't warn the public about Sam Bankman-Fried because EA-the-movement would ostracize them, not just from their community but also from their jobs. I'm not making those messages up. Maybe they're completely disconnected from reality? There's several of them, from several different people, though, so it'll take something more compelling than "it is unpleasant to be compared to Scientology" to refute my lying eyes.

EA even has its own Xenu: it's just called AGI.

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