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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?

#181

Post by zozbot234 »

onetimeusename wrote: post #29
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…

that's a good way of putting it. I kind of ignored a lot of what they said but again, just like the rationalists who pretty much were all of the EA people, they came with biases they refused to admit they had. like for example, if a family member of mine needed money for a cancer treatment that had a 50% chance of working versus giving that money to save the life of someone I don't know on the other side of the plane…

> I will consistently try to save my family member

Sure, but that's because we all prefer living in a society where everyone abides by their obligations to the people closest to them - nothing wrong with this. That's special pleading, though.

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

#183

Post by googlryas »

joindpp wrote: post #81
googlryas wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like real effective altruism is achieved by sites like charity navigator, which give you a sense of how well your donations to a given cause are spent by the organization.

This is not really true. Charity Navigator incentivize that charities operate on a shoestring which is not very effective: https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_abou...

I haven't watched the video (yet), but for example wikipedia has a stellar near-perfect rating, but still devote 15%/$12M of their budget to salaries which surely could be cut drastically if they wanted to really be on a shoestring.

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

#184

Post by davisoneee »

asimpletune wrote: post #158
Self-Perfection wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This take on EA notion replaces it with a straw man. Essentially EA tells not "let's save as many lives as possible" but "let's improve the world according to our values as much as possible". And values might differ among the people. In your example with cure for relative working with only X probability Vs definitely curing stranger on the other side of the world there should be value X for which you will prefer to c…

Ok but now I’m kind of lost. I genuinely don’t know anything about EA, so this is an honest question. If EA is improving the world according to your values, is it really distinct as a concept? Like, to me, the reason why I think almost anything is because it improves the world according to my values. Another way to put it is that to me it kind of sounds like someone is saying, “we believe in doing the best thing”, bu…

Effective altruism is about the _effective_ part. Don't just donate to the charity or cause that _sounds_ good; look for where your money would provide the biggest impact.

If you want to save lives in general, look for the most _effective_ charity like that, which may be something like mosquito nets rather than a cancer research foundation. Don't just donate money to whatever is the most obvious charity advertised on television.

If you had a family member with cancer, look at which of N cancer foundations spend the money most effectively and donate there.

Often, altruism comes down to people giving money to the 'obvious' causes, which don't necessarily use the money effectively.

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

#185

Post by karlkeefer »

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.

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

#186

Post by radu_floricica »

margalabargala wrote: post #151
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.

That essay kind of straw-mans the whole thing. He uses EA to alternatively mean the foundational philosophy, or the specific organization and the choices the people running it make, interchangeably. "I don't think AI is a risk, so I'm opposed to EA" charitably means that that person is opposed to EA, the organization headed by the people named in the article, and the choices they have made, who have made themselves t…

I don't have the feeling the criticism in this thread is directed at a specific organization. The top negative comment refers to the name "effective altruism", and most comments are pretty general.

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

#187

Post by whendoyoushrink »

asimpletune wrote: post #158
Self-Perfection wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This take on EA notion replaces it with a straw man. Essentially EA tells not "let's save as many lives as possible" but "let's improve the world according to our values as much as possible". And values might differ among the people. In your example with cure for relative working with only X probability Vs definitely curing stranger on the other side of the world there should be value X for which you will prefer to c…

Ok but now I’m kind of lost. I genuinely don’t know anything about EA, so this is an honest question. If EA is improving the world according to your values, is it really distinct as a concept? Like, to me, the reason why I think almost anything is because it improves the world according to my values. Another way to put it is that to me it kind of sounds like someone is saying, “we believe in doing the best thing”, bu…

"Doing good better" was the book title, and I think better defines the goal well. Not perfect, better.

The choices that people make with giving often have no framework for deciding good, let alone better. The moral question is not is X better than Y, but what of all the choices I am going to make can I make better?

If everyone made better choices, not perfect just better, there is a LOT we could improve.

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

#188

Post by Self-Perfection »

asimpletune wrote: post #158
Self-Perfection wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This take on EA notion replaces it with a straw man. Essentially EA tells not "let's save as many lives as possible" but "let's improve the world according to our values as much as possible". And values might differ among the people. In your example with cure for relative working with only X probability Vs definitely curing stranger on the other side of the world there should be value X for which you will prefer to c…

Ok but now I’m kind of lost. I genuinely don’t know anything about EA, so this is an honest question. If EA is improving the world according to your values, is it really distinct as a concept? Like, to me, the reason why I think almost anything is because it improves the world according to my values. Another way to put it is that to me it kind of sounds like someone is saying, “we believe in doing the best thing”, bu…

First a disclaimer: I am not a part of EA community, but I have met several people from this community. And I am loosely connected to rationalists community. I find EA concept appealing and I think I should allocate some of my resources to help this movement.

Indeed my wording was too broad and over-compassing. Effective altruism was kick started from comparison of different organizations collecting money for whatever altruistic means. And comparison showed that these initiatives are vastly different in effectiveness which prompted an idea that we should take into account effectiveness of particular initiative before giving it money.

EA seems to focus on reducing suffering over improving happiness. Giving a hand to a stranger who have stumbled and have fallen to the ground near you is out of the scope: EA is about strategic long lasting calculated stuff.

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

#189

Post by roenxi »

heavyset_go wrote: post #130
hardwaregeek wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Then you will be delighted/horrified to find out that the effective altruism community doesn't feel the need to make quantifiable justifications for how they spend their own donations, as evidenced by this $20k grant they gave someon…

I am not sure exactly what people miss, but taking a stab in the dark - human emotions have evolved over millions of years to try and guide people in the direction of making rational decisions more often than not. The expected situation is that the rational option and the emotional option align. If they don't, that means:

1. Your model of the world is incomplete or inconsistent (eg, forgetting to include negotiation as a strategy, forgetting long term consequences).

2. You've hit on a cognitive bias and can probably do a huge amount of good that other people will miss (eg, lending with interest -> modern industrial society, rule of law rather than letting high status people do whatever -> mass prosperity). The cognitive bias is probably well known and understood and the evidence that the emotional response leads to poor outcomes should be obvious.

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

#190

Post by dang »

codefreeordie wrote: post #143
dang wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but please don't post shallow dismissals to Hacker News. We're hoping for something more than putdowns and supercilious swipes. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html p.s. You've unfortunately been posting a bunch of unsubstantive/baity comments lately. Can you please not? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

Quoted post unavailable.

The politics of your comment completely elude me; I couldn't care less about your view or theirs, have no idea what "effective altruism" is, and learned nothing from your post since it was purely snark and swipes. All I care about is that you broke the HN guidelines. You've been doing that repeatedly (e.g. posting informationless flamebait) on lots of different topics. If you keep doing it, we'll end up having to ban you for what ought to be obvious reasons (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), so please stop.
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