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The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

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

#111

Post by yanderekko »

wahern wrote: post #34
civilized wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is sad! Distributing mosquito nets in malaria-afflicted areas saves lives on the cheap and is universally acclaimed. How better to describe this than "effective altruism"? Why do perfectly nice general descriptive terms so often become tightly bound with one small group and their whole very particular worldview?

> Distributing mosquito nets in malaria-afflicted areas saves lives on the cheap and is universally acclaimed. How better to describe this than "effective altruism"? Philanthropy? Charity? Those words fit perfectly. Does anyone sincerely set out to be ineffective in those endeavors? I can't imagine anyone who was knowingly insincere would have trouble also claiming the moniker of effective altruism. Nonetheless, I th…

>Does anyone sincerely set out to be ineffective in those endeavors? I can't imagine anyone who was knowingly insincere would have trouble also claiming the moniker of effective altruism.

I mean, I'll bite the bullet and say yes. People will always choose to have more effectiveness in a ceteris peribus sense, but the best you could say for the actual observed pattern of charitable contributions is that people are being swayed in their giving by all sorts of concerns (social pressures, ignorance, bigotry, etc.) that cause them to trade off effectiveness for those things. And the message of EA is basically "recognize and call out these biases unless they're truly reflective of your values."

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

#112

Post by Izkata »

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…

> 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.

Pretty much. A subset of altruism is effective, a subset is ineffective. And there's another term for a third subset that overlaps with both: virtue signaling. Usually people treat the term like aligns closer to ineffective altruism though, like "oh that's just virtue signaling", even though it can be both effective and virtue signaling.

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

#113

Post by unmole »

kimixa wrote: post #96

I feel this is an "actions speak louder than words" situation. Has there been any effective believer in "Effective Altruism" that has actually got past the "accumulation of wealth" stage? Where are their great works of human charity? It's been a concept in many wealthy circles long enough we should be seeing the payoff. Or is it just a self-justification of their current actions, of wealth accumulation, to be conveni…

> More than 110,000 donors have trusted GiveWell to direct their donations. Together, they have given over $1 billion to the organizations we recommend.

https://www.givewell.org/about

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

#114

Post by drdeca »

tomrod wrote: post #51

I mean, it broke because utility isn't additive, which is the issue with utilitarian ethics generally.

I agree that utilities between people aren’t really commensurate in a way that allows adding them to be particularly well-defined/meaningful, and that therefore utilitarianism is not the actual full truth of morality,

However, I don’t think that precludes using a kind of utilitarianism where you just kinda fudge over that “there isn’t a canonical way of adding these” bit, in order to produce something which can be a rather good heuristic for “does this provide more or less help to people than that?”.

Like, yes, you can’t really add utilities, but if you value helping people, you can consider how much you value different people getting different amounts of different kinds of help, and if you pretend that this is the same thing as “the utility you provide them”, then you can add up how much you value the individual things and assume that how much you value the stuff adds linearly. And, in some cases, morality should presumably impose some constraints regarding how much you should value providing one sort of help in some quantity to some person or persons, compared to how much you value providing some other kind of help in some quantity to some other person(s).

And so, while I don’t think utilitarianism is true exactly, I think it likely that morality probably demands something which in some ways looks at least a little bit like utilitarianism? Though there are still cases where it is important to recognize that utilitarianism can lead one astray.

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

#115

Post by metta2uall »

xyzzy4747 wrote: post #19

Effective altruists would risk the 10% chance of making thousands of clients lose all their money if it gives them a 50% chance of donating more to charity later. Since it makes sense according to their utility function. That’s what we learned from the FTX debacle. Sort of reminds me of the paper clip manufacturer A.I. who ends up killing all humans due to a broken utility function.

That's an over-generalization... I would think most effective altruists recognise that acting unethically by for example, risking client money, is not justified due to the long-term damage that causes. Big lies usually get found out. Most effective altruists are outraged at what SBF apparently did..

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

#116

Post by nl »

quantumwannabe wrote: post #57
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…

The founders of the Effective Altruism movement are mostly non-technical people. You can't blame their arrogance and failures on the "techbros". The people mentioned on the Effective Altruism Wikipedia page: Peter Singer: Professor of Bioethics (philosopher) Toby Ord: Philosopher. Philosophy PhD, Computer Science bachelors Hilary Greaves: Philosopher, and he double-majored in physics in undergrad William MacAskill: P…

"TechBros" doesn't mean "programmers". It broadly means something like "people who think tech will solve everything but don't think very deeply"

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

#117

Post by JamesBarney »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #93
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.

The example of a community theater highlights another issue I have with effective altruism. It effectively encourages you to only donate to things you can make a quantifiable case for. And in a lot of situations, quantification fails. The arts have an immense value in developing philosophical, emotional, empathetic values. A theater may not show up in a balance sheet but it can have a massive effect. And it does conc…

Let me preface this with I know this is a mugging, I think community theater is great, and I don't think it's good to divert all societal resources to nets in Africa.

But I just don't think it's as effective, and I don't think most people agree.

If the only available labor was teenagers, rebuilding the community theater meant hiring them, and you knew that statistically there was a risk some might die from heat stroke. What risk of death would you deem acceptable to build a community theater?

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

#118

Post by nicpottier »

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 pretty much hits it on the nose for me. I think with a little extra spice of thinking you know best and experts in the field are dumb, aka, white savior complex.

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

#119

Post by unmole »

imgabe wrote: post #76
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.

The idea that you can precisely plan out the exact optimal path is arrogant and fundamentally wrong. What if the friendships made at a community theater help a troubled kid through a rough patch and instead of committing suicide they go on to cure cancer? Not funding the theater would have been very sub-optimal. Even without far-fetched hypotheticals what’s the point of saving everyone’s life if they’re just going to…

So, we should fund entertainment venues for privileged people instead of saving lives or preventing suffering?

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

#120

Post by JamesBarney »

imgabe wrote: post #76
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.

The idea that you can precisely plan out the exact optimal path is arrogant and fundamentally wrong. What if the friendships made at a community theater help a troubled kid through a rough patch and instead of committing suicide they go on to cure cancer? Not funding the theater would have been very sub-optimal. Even without far-fetched hypotheticals what’s the point of saving everyone’s life if they’re just going to…

EA does not need the assumption that you can precisely plan out an optimal path. Just that simply accounting for the good you do and comparing it to other outlets will give you better outcomes than not. Which is a far weaker premise than you can precisely plan out every optimal path.
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