My Left Kidney

> And FTX blowing up was a major event in the course of that debate, since it starkly illustrated the weaknesses of a moral philosophy that centers numbers and dollars over the kind of traditional ethical judgement practiced by other charitable movements.

Honestly, I think this just doesn't make sense (and I have no ties with EA whatsoever). You've written it nicely, but it just doesn't follow. It makes no sense to judge a movement by its worst possible member, and it doesn't make sense to say that the overall philosophy doesn't work when one guy obviously didn't follow the philosophy and then had it explode in his face.

The argument, to me, feels akin to "well, vegetarians think they're morally superior, because they don't kill animals, but just look at PETA! PETA does this horrible stuff where they kill animals in shelters[1]." And then perhaps follow it up with "this shows the weaknesses of a moral philosophy that centers around saving animals lives..." but it doesn't. PETA doing shady stuff doesn't illustrate any philosophical failures any more than SBF doing shady stuff. If you want to address the philosophical failures of EA, you may, but I don't see any of that in your comment.

> but it immediately and prominently shifts to arguing about how EAs are great people who will donate their kidneys to strangers

Is this so surprising? Look at the immediate and negative response that EA receives today. Of course any mention of EA would want to be brought with a caveat that "hey, EAs do some good things too, you know - we're not all SBF!"

But I question if your interpretation of the article is even correct. Simply Ctrl-F "effectiv" gives a bunch of hits in section IV, and then no more hits for the rest of the article, except for a stray one in section VII, which was essentially my impression when reading the first time. He talked about it enough to address the controversy, then moved on. Like a reasonable person, not an author of "promotional religious material".

[1]: Actually true, btw (not that it has any bearing on vegetarianism): https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/petas-ter...

Well he really inspired me to consider kidney donation, if only I hadn't just discovered that I have only one.

I tried googling the risk and it's all a bit inconclusive but:

>The linear no-threshold model is disputed by several health organizations, including the American Association of Physicists in Medicine and the Health Physics Society, both of which concluded that cancer risk estimation should be limited to doses greater than 50 mSv. Both organizations state that risks from doses below this threshold are too small to be detectable and may be nonexistent.

> Which I guess raises a larger point about how the rationalist and EA and other similar communities have a tendency to try to reduce fiendishly complex multivariable human issues to equations and statistics without realizing that some problems are not math problems and will defy any attempt to be quantified, statistitized, or calculated.

Some of my old coworkers were really into EA, LessWrong, and the rationalist community.

At first it was fun to read some of the articles they shared, but over time I observed the same pattern you described: Much of the rationalist writing felt like it started with a conclusion and then worked backwards to find some numbers or logic that supported the conclusion. They had already made up their minds, after which the rationalist blogging was all about publicly rationalizing it.

The other trend I noticed was how much they liked to discard other people's research when it didn't agree with something they wanted to write. They were very good at finding some obscure source that had a different number or conclusion that supported their claims, which was then held up as an unquestioned source with no further scrutiny.

Someone once described it to me as "second option bias": Rationalist writings have a theme of taking a commonly held belief and then proposing a slightly contrarian take that the closest alternative explanation is actually the correct one.

Once you start seeing it, the pattern shows up everywhere in rationalist writings. In this article for example:

1. Argument that kidney donation is actually much safer than people think because the author picks 1 or 2 specific failure modes and cites those as if they captured all possible downsides.

2. Argument that CT scans are actually much more deadly than people think because there are many possible downsides that we can't account for. Author admits to surveying a contentious field and selecting the most conservative risk estimate he found.

3. Argument that the Center for EA buying their own expensive castle to host their own meetings is good, actually. Anyone who questions the Center for EA spending millions on a remote castle so they could meet there must be wrong and misinformed and outsiders, with little more than "just trust them that the math is right" as the argument.

This author is a very good writer so he's masterful at breezing past the details, but it's hard to miss the pattern once you start seeing it. The pattern is more obvious in a lot of the less popular rationalist writings where it's clear the authors discarded any sources that were inconvenient to their conclusion but elevated any sources that told them what they wanted to hear.

Another common pattern in rationalist writing is to make strong claims based on weak evidence, then to hedge in the footnotes as a way to preemptively defuse counterarguments. Sure enough, this article has some footnotes that acknowledge that the radiation risk numbers he used in the main article are actually highly disputed and he chose the most conservative ones. This point is conveniently separated from the main article to avoid detracting from the point he wanted to make. The main article confidently makes one claim, then anything that might weaken that claim is hidden in a footnote.

Predictably, many of the comments on HN questioning the radiation numbers are met with "he addressed that in the footnote" comments that try to shut down the debate, so the strategy clearly works. Something about hedging in footnotes inoculates certain readers against questioning the main article. It's another pattern that becomes obvious once you start seeing it.

Yes, from the outside his fervent desire to donate a kidney looks like a compensation for his rationalism. Personally, I find EA to be uncompelling because it implicitly assumes both that there are objective universal values and that price and value are in direct proportion. Even if we could agree on our values (historically we can't), I don't believe that there is a pricing model that could possibly get this right. But even if such a model existed, it still would be unsatisfying for me to do proxy work to satisfy the model (i.e. earn to give) rather than the direct embodied work in the world that needs to be done.

It is unsurprising to me that people attracted to rationalism/EA get stuck in this tension and find a need to demonstrate their values in an embodied way. Interestingly, anonymous kidney donation is both embodied and abstract unless you have a relationship with the recipient. I admire that the author had the conviction to act on their principles, but I also have a suspicion that this will not truly resolve the internal conflict that led to their act.