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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?

#301

Post by concordDance »

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 doubt even the EA people would do that unless they could virtue signal about how smart they are and how stupid everyone else is online. Most of the time, these people just speculated about how they might spend their money if they were in such a scenario. It was like a hobby

I think it's clear you don't know any EA people in real life.

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

#302

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

concordDance wrote: post #245

One thing a lot of people miss is that effective altruism has worked! The idea of donating to distant causes that do the most good (which is what EA is and this notion long predates the 21st century) has massively reduced the number of deaths of malaria. Bill Gate's efforts to eradicate polio have done a world of good.

You're making assumptions bigger than the pacific tectonic plate here.

While I absolutely applaud Bill Gate's philanthropy, and have no doubt he's one of the most effective charity donors on this planet, you cannot simply use that as a ledger entry in some karmic balance.

Bill at the peak of of his business career wielded enormous power and played a pivotal role in the IP regime that now rules the world, one that places low income nations at huge disadvantage in life or death industries like medicine.

When you say "effective altruism worked" with Bill as an example, what you're actually saying is "we should welcome abusive or even illegal behavior from people like Bill if they give away money later" which is absurd. There's nothing about philanthropy that requires you to do business like a sociopath as a prequel.

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

#303

Post by coldtea »

llamaimperative wrote: post #291
marginalia_nu wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's honestly kinda unsettling how many bizarre sci-fi takes on AGI have gained popular plausibility since the new AI marketing boom. Potent kool-aid.

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 itself (thinking itself into being more intelligent), and more importantly intelligence is some kind of superpower that transends very real limitations (like, physical access, or convincing people to do its bidding). The idea is that if you're super-smart you can convince anybody to do anything, but I'm not sure how this came about, because most super-smart people usually can't convince others to do shit, it's charismatic people (which is orthogonal to high-IQ) that do that. In fact many MENSA geniuses just rub people the wrong way.

I mean one of the most serious (I use the term loosely) proponents of this charade, thinks the "singularity" will create nanobots to control the world...

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

#304

Post by bawolff »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #49
emmanueloga_ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Effective altruism (EA) is a philosophical and social movement that advocates "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis". [1] Seems like a good idea, if only just to have some sort of open-system for rating charities. I suspect the issue is everything that comes around the idea, specially... people. The problem is always people :-). Perhaps a "…

The problem with EA and other utilitarian systems of thought is two-fold. Firstly, you can't predict the future so really you're working off your biases. Secondly, unfettered by principles other than the end justifying the means, you can easily turn those aforementioned biases into justifications for committing horrible acts. Mass murder, or evidently, theft on a massive scale. For instance: "The technological revolu…

> Firstly, you can't predict the future so really you're working off your biases

Obviously. That is the human condition.

Do you not take actions in normal life because you don't have full knowledge of everything? Don't order breakfast because you don't know which menu item is for sure going to be the best.

> How do you stop this shit? Deontological ethics. Don't murder, because murder is wrong. Don't steal, because stealing is wrong. Damn the consequences, stick to simple principles such as these.

Simple rules like: dont hoard your money but find a worthy cause for it?

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

#305

Post by im3w1l »

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…

I don't want people who lie, cheat, steal and manipulate anywhere near AI safety. I don't want them to do the research and I don't want them to fund it. Because I don't want the AI to be made in their image and have those values. An AI that breaks all sorts of rules "for the greater good" is about the most dangerous idea I can think.

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

#306

Post by simonh »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #284
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…

Been saying the same thing. EA functionally is the same pattern I grew up around among evangelical extremists. It's an all purpose source of self righteous authority based on theoretical virtue erasing actual harm.

Ah yes, but if there's an even 1% chance the good they do outweighs the harm and saves some portion of some humans in some amount of time... er... or something.

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

#307

Post by Joeboy »

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…

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" people.

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

#308

Post by coldtea »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #294
marginalia_nu wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's honestly kinda unsettling how many bizarre sci-fi takes on AGI have gained popular plausibility since the new AI marketing boom. Potent kool-aid.

The question is why do programmers believe they know more than Chomsky? The AI we have now is engineering and not science. Don’t you need science to create AI? Don’t you need to understand something fundamental about the brain?

I don't believe that much in any realistic timeframe from AGI, but I don't think you "need to understand something fundamental" to create it. You can create almost anything empirically, without knowing the science behind it at any fundamental level.

Evolution, for example, didn't understand anything (as it's just a process). It wasn't someone with an understanding of brains at the scientific level that built our brains. Just an iterative trial and error process with evolutionary feedback.

To make a simplistic argument, kind of like we can create fire, without knowing about oxidation and chemistry.

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

#309

Post by concordDance »

bena wrote: post #63
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…

They've effectively poisoned the terms "effective", "altruism", "longterm", "rational", and "utilitarian". Because it was all a hustle to continue doing exactly whatever they wanted to do. Here is a good book that talks about the mindset: https://www.amazon.com/Winners-Take-All-Charade-Changing/dp/... It's easy to say you're doing things "longterm" for "future generations". The non-existent are the easiest people to…

This is very wrong.

Most effective altruists are working on relatively near term things, like education in India or parasitic worms in Nigeria, those just aren't controversial and so get discussed less.

But long term projects like switching away from CO2 and to renewables can still be worth doing.

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

#310

Post by notahacker »

c1ccccc1 wrote: post #237
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s much like spending millions on studying how to save humanity from the sun when it expands in 5b years.

Interestingly, the sun would kill us much sooner than that: in less than 1 billion years the sun's increased output will heat up the Earth's surface to the point of becoming unlivable. Related to the topics of AI apocalypse and putting things off because they seem far away: I personally find it amusing to contemplate a strong AGI being developed in 2035 and wiping out humanity. Why? Because it would eliminate the Y20…

I quite like the idea of strong AI being developed in 2038 just in time for its plans to be thwarted by time disorientation...
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