[benkuhn]

This article completely mischaracterizes the beliefs of most of the people quoted or referenced, then engages with those beliefs only via asserting the opposite without any supporting argument. I'm disappointed.

For example:

> The most charitable explanation of Singer’s dismissal of political action is that he is trying to sell being an altruist and he thinks a consumer -hero version is the one people are most likely to buy. Singer and other effective altruist philosophers believe that their most likely customers find institutional reform too complicated and political action too impersonal and hit and miss to be attractive.

Interestingly, the author quotes part of Singer providing an argument against the effectiveness of institutional reform, but does not himself provide an argument for it, just an assertion that political change is "the most obvious and powerful tool we have." (I think that's far from obvious!) Instead, he jumps straight to accusing Singer of arguing in bad faith. This is actually the opposite of charitable.

For another example, I'm deeply confused about how the author of this piece could cite Will MacAskill and Toby Ord, then write:

> The underlying problem is that effective altruism's distinctive combination of political pessimism and consumer-hero hubris forecloses the consideration of promising possibilities for achieving far more good.

Ord and MacAskill co-founded an organization, 80,000 Hours[1], which advocates mostly not for effective giving (which the author derides as a "consumer hero" approach) but rather for spending your career working on one of the world's most pressing problems; notably including for instance several types of policy change.

EDIT: and I missed this one the first time around:

> One could spend at most a few tens of millions of dollars on anti-mosquito bed nets before returns start dramatically diminishing because everyone who can be helped by them already has one.

A single bednet charity, the Against Malaria Foundation, has literally already raised 10x this amount without substantially diminishing returns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Malaria_Foundation

[dundarious]

> Ord and MacAskill co-founded an organization, 80,000 Hours[1], which advocates mostly not for effective giving (which the author derides as a "consumer hero" approach) but rather for spending your career working on one of the world's most pressing problems; notably including for instance several types of policy change.

That’s not a universally true statement about 80,000 hours. I took their career choice questionnaire and was told to work as a well paid Software Engineer and to donate a percentage of my income (which is what I was already doing — I’m fond of some of Effective Altruism). You could argue that is classic Consumer Hero advice.

I know you qualified your statement but I just want to emphasize it as I think it leaves room for criticism.

[benkuhn]

For more concrete data: If you look at their current "key ideas" page,[1] they go over 4 categories of high-impact careers (notably including government/policy) and then say "if you think none of the categories above are a great fit for you, we’d encourage you to consider earning to give. It’s also worth considering this option if you have an unusually good fit for a very high-earning career."

This post[2] suggests 80k's key researchers think about 15% of people interested in EA would be the best fit for earning to give, while 10% of people attending an EA-themed conference were perfectly planning to.

I don't think criticizing effective altruism based on the assertion that it's mostly about earning-to-give is reasonable given those numbers or the framing in 80k's "key ideas" post.

[1]: https://80000hours.org/key-ideas/#career-categories [2]: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LrKFNQxjETPvzXQcv/...

[michaelt]

> I took their career choice questionnaire and was told to work as a well paid Software Engineer and to donate a percentage of my income

The good thing about earning to give is it works no matter how niche your skill sets are.

What's an efficient way to deploy an expert microchip designer, when so few global poverty NGOs need microchips designed?

[greenshackle2]

I got that same advice circa 2015. However I'm under the impression they started moving away from "earning-to-give" recommendations around 2015-2016.

It's still there mind you, but research and policy are prioritized higher. I'm not sure what else they would recommend to someone who is ill suited for these other careers.

[TeMPOraL]

Yeah, that article is pretty weird. To add on your last point:

> > One could spend at most a few tens of millions of dollars on anti-mosquito bed nets before returns start dramatically diminishing because everyone who can be helped by them already has one.

That's a feature. It's half of what makes "effective" part of "effective" altruism effective. The fact that charities aren't infinite money sinks allows everyone to donate by a simple algorithm of:

  do {
    let charity = runQuery("
          SELECT *
          FROM charities
          ORDER BY effectiveness DESC
          LIMIT 1;")
    donateTo(charity);
  } while(charity != null && hasMoneyToHelp());

The idea being, charities that can do most good now get the funds, and as they saturate and hit diminishing returns, they stop being the most effective ones, so other charities takes their place. Repeat until there are no more charities remaining, thus no more problems to solve.

(People may have slightly different definitions of "effective", or one may prefer to do e.g. LIMIT 5 and pick one of the top 5 at random - the idea still works, the slight variance is a hedge against uncertainty.)

It's an obvious idea, and it's how people approach other aspects of their lives if they care about the outcome, so why not donating too?

The article continues:

> > This points to the limits of the individualistic consumerist approach to ending poverty. The best – most beneficial – choice you can make as an individual spending $50 or even $5,000 is different from the best choice you should make if you have several hundred billion dollars to spend.

There's only one entity with several hundred billion dollars to spare, and that's US Government. Other than that, this is why people donate to charities: charities exist to pool money, to turn ten thousand $50 donations into a single $500 000 force that can be better used than if everyone tried to apply their $50 directly at the problem.

[heavenlyblue]

Effectiveness of charities has exactly the same problems as efficient market hypothesis: markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Or in other words, charities can remain full of shit for longer than you have money for.

[TeMPOraL]

Yes, and the same rules apply:

- Don't invest more than you can comfortably lose.

- Don't throw away the entire concept just because it's not perfect.

- Get better at telling who's full of shit, or delegate it to someone you trust.

[Dracophoenix]

Don't 2 & 3 contradict each other in this case? Throwing away the yoke of institutional giving is predicated upon recognizing that overhead and start up costs eat up transferable dollars.

[TeMPOraL]

They're complementary.

#2: Just because there are charities or companies that do bad things, doesn't mean the concepts of charities and companies, or philanthropy and markets, are fundamentally broken. There are good and bad charities/companies, even though it may be hard to tell which is which.

#3: You can make your donations more effective if you get better at telling which charity is good (same for investments and companies). There are diminishing returns on effort here - particularly if you aren't planning to specialize in charity evaluation. In that case, you can convert this problem into an easier problem of finding trustworthy specialists in charity evaluation, and donating to places they consider good/effective.

[wizzwizz4]

That's why we have charity evaluators like GiveWell. https://www.givewell.org/

[jimbokun]

Now consider how long a government can remain irrational.

[imtringued]

> but does not himself provide an argument for it, just an assertion that political change is "the most obvious and powerful tool we have." (I think that's far from obvious!)

Argentina, Venezuela and Zimbabwe are basically nations that destroyed themselves through bad political reforms. If there had been a way to prevent those reforms you could have prevented millions of people from slipping into poverty and needing micro interventions.

[zucker42]

Effective altruists would generally be open to the idea that political reforms might theoretically be the best way to spend money in some cases.

But in the case of despotic or otherwise terrible leaders, the problem is that it's unclear what to do to stop them even if you have control over a large military, let alone if your only resources are a relatively small amount of money and the time of a relatively small group of people.

It remains an unsolved problem how to evaluate causes like political advocacy that have very long-term or very uncertain effects. Combine that with the rancor and division that talking about contemporary politics causes and its no wonder EA as a movement chooses to eschew political advocacy for the most part. I guess the overall sentiment is that the money some people donate to feed the Democratic or Republican party machines could probably be spent better.

That said, I've have seen (relatively) small EA grants given to organizations advocating and acting to improve governments in undeveloped countries. For example, the first one I came across was this: https://www.givewell.org/research/incubation-grants/innovati...

[29athrowaway]

Countries, not nations. There are many nations living in Argentina and Venezuela, some do have political representation, some do not. e.g.: the Mapuche nation in Argentina lacks political representation.

Then, Argentina is working extremely well, except for themselves, that is.

They are in a treadmill of unpayable debt that works in the following way:

- The left is tasked with buying people's complacency with borrowed money.

- The right is tasked with giving away sovereignty: privatization and military bases.

People are expected to pick a side and stay busy fighting over which side is right. Meanwhile, the country is taken over. Divide and conquer.

It is working extremely well. There are now US military bases near Ushuaia, Neuquen and the Guarani acquifer, the 3 most strategic locations in Argentina. Everything that can be privatized has been privatized, and provisions have been made so that Argentineans can never pay off their debt, so that they can continue to lose their sovereignty. What should they privatize next? the sky is the limit.

[astrange]

Have they tried selling themselves back to Spain?

[29athrowaway]

Argentineans are happy with their limbs and they surely are not in need for illegitimate children, so no.

[matkoniecz]

"the most obvious and powerful tool we have." is not the same "if it worked then it would be useful in some cases".

Author makes extremely strongly claim and expects to believe it without any support.

[chriswarbo]

One problem with politics is that it's adversarial: if a political cause has opponents, spending resources on that cause can turn into a war of attrition (e.g. the amount spent on US election campaigns)

[mensetmanusman]

It has to be adversarial, because politics by its very nature is how people control the behavior of other people.

[jjk166]

> Argentina, Venezuela and Zimbabwe are basically nations that destroyed themselves through bad political reforms. If there had been a way to prevent those reforms you could have prevented millions of people from slipping into poverty and needing micro interventions.

Now imagine if the people championing those bad reforms had simply stayed out of politics? The more powerful a tool is, the more cautiously it should be wielded.

[k_bx]

Yes, but how much would such a reform cost and is it even possible with only money? Being effective means counting how much good you’re doing per one dollar.

[puchatek]

Maybe political change would be the most obvious remedy but it's track record of helping the poor is gives ample reason to look for change elsewhere.

[okintheory]

Political change has done pretty well at helping the poor in Scandinavia.

[medlyyy]

Yep. It's just bad. He's essentially advocating for effective altruism to become another lobbying group or NGO.

[BlueTemplar]

But effective altruism is an NGO, isn't it?

[cycomanic]

I think you are mischaracterising the argument. His argument is that effective altruism can not eliminate poverty, it's inherent in the concept. You also dis not show that he is the one who mischaracterises the "believes" (maybe you mean arguments here?). I think he gave a reasonably accurate description of effective altruism, what in the description do you believe is wrong?

You have not actually engaged with the actual argument, you simply assert that change through political activism is not the "obvious most powerful tool we have". I think you need to back that up, I would say history at least tells us that the largest changes in wealth distributions have come through (often violent) political action.

Regarding the bednet argument, you are simply nitpicking on the numbers. The argument still stands at some point you end up in a position of diminishing returns, i. e. When everyone has a net giving nets is not helping anyone.

[zucker42]

> I think he gave a reasonably accurate description of effective altruism, what in the description do you believe is wrong?

I disagree that this article give an accurate impression of the EA. The main point of effective altruism is that people should use evidence in choosing which charitable causes to devote their time to. I don't feel like the author sufficiently engages with this point; instead he attacks Singer for not coming up with a satisfactory standard for what percentage of one's wealth to donate, and laments that EA isn't political enough.

EA arose based partially based on the observation that people do most of their giving to, for example, local churches and schools than to truly desperate people in other parts of the world. People also tend donate their effort to local and relatable causes. The argument isn't that buying Malaria nets is going to eliminate all the evil in the world, the argument is it's a better use of money than other charities, and that we should use evidence to determine how to expend our resources.

[cycomanic]

Well, I disagree the whole premise of Singer is that we can't change things through the political process so instead we should use "effective altruism".

Now if we are donating to charity should we follow the principles of EA? The answer to that is probably yes, but that's a different question and is not the point raised by the author.

[zucker42]

> the whole premise of Singer is that we can't change things through the political process so instead we should use "effective altruism".

(I'm assuming "I disagree" was meant to be a separate sentence)

I think Singer would say that it's often but not always hard to change things through the political process. But he hardly shuns politics entirely; he often speaks and writes about political issues, and he ran for Australian Senate in 1996.

But anyways Singer's beliefs about the effectiveness of political causes isn't the central point of Singer's EA advocacy, it's just one piece of his beliefs.

[riezebos]

I don't know how "at some point you end up in a position of diminishing returns" in this case is an argument against EA. In the book Doing Good Better one of the core ideas of EA is defined as investing in problems that are neglected, which prevents investing in diminishing returns. Whenever the malaria nets run into diminishing returns I am sure that GiveWell will start ranking AMF lower. If you are arguing that we should not invest in problems that have diminishing returns EA strongly agrees with you.

[TeMPOraL]

GiveWell is literally a priority queue of charities. The moment AMF starts getting diminishing returns, it'll drop down the list. If some other organization figures out an even cheaper way of saving lives, it'll overtake AMF on the list.

It's a simple and obvious system. I'd say the only two things to potentially quibble about is whether or not one likes their sorting function, and the lag time between resorting.

[Rastonbury]

His argument is that effective altruism (EA) is unable to eliminate poverty and therefore it is ineffective? I mean it's an pretty empty criticism, and can be used for any sort of altruistic philosophy given that poverty is a quite an intractable problem. Eg. "Your altruism is not effective unless you work to eliminate world poverty."

Effective altruism boiled down, is getting the most value out of altruistic work as I understand it. Obviously if every child in malaria endemic areas had a net, donating to malaria foundations would not be the most effective thing to do. If we discovered an asteroid that would destroy 20% of the population, EA would probably dictate channeling of all resources to that cause.

[solveit]

No, the burden of proof lies on the person claiming that something is "obvious".

And nitpicking the numbers is incredibly important if said nitpick happens to span orders of magnitude.

[cycomanic]

It does not fundamentally change the argument, so nitpicking does not change how valid an argument is.

[zozbot234]

> I would say history at least tells us that the largest changes in wealth distributions have come through (often violent) political action.

History shows just the opposite. The largest changes in wealth distribution in history have come about through industrialization, starting in Britain and then spreading to other parts of the world. Purposeful political action has most often been harmful to these developments, with limited exceptions (such as 19th-century Japan, and other East Asian countries in the 20th century).

[scotty79]

> [...] but does not himself provide an argument for it, just an assertion that political change is "the most obvious and powerful tool we have."

Maybe because vastly more people were lifted out of poverty (and associated issues) by political decission to switch to some version of free market economy than by any kind of individual charity?

Author probably didn't state it because he assumed it's a common knowledge.