[eddsh1994]

I know EA's who earn six figure salaries but take the average salary of the country (UK) and donate the rest. So you will find anecdotal evidence supporting both getting rich and not getting rich.

But let's say people do get rich and donate to charities to have a clean conscience... is this a bad thing? EA is not a reason to do outright immoral actions to donate to charity but out-competing a colleague for a promotion? Leaving a job after 6 months to take double the salary elsewhere? I think these are all decisions I've personally taken for EA-based reasons and donate a fixed 10% per month so yes ultimately I've ended up richer but I fund more charities and that seems like a good thing.

Building ponzi schemes to redirect money from investors to charities is never okay.

[polygamous_bat]

I know Christian priests who have lived their entire lives in poverty serving their community. I've also read about priests in the Catholic churches using their position to molest children. The problem happens when the Catholic Church itself systematically covers up for them.

Similarly, if SBF claimed to follow EA that would not be as big of an issue. The problem happens when you consider that he was also championed by EA as the poster boy, and now everyone is realizing he has been a scammer all along.

Moreover, the way I saw the value proposition of EA is that "we are better at doing math to calculate the effectiveness of charities, finding out which ones are scammy, and also to assess risks to humanity, so you should trust us to do that." That value proposition really blows up when top-line EA couldn't do their due diligence and figure out an eight billion dollar hole in the ground even when their whole existence depended on it.

[lern_too_spel]

Was he championed by "EA" (is that some organization I am unaware of?) as a posterboy, or was he championed by puff pieces paid for by investors, which cited the founder's pedigree and his belief in EA in order to bolster the company's reputation?

[skinnymuch]

He was well liked enough in EA communities like Less Wrong, EA discourse, and the diff real time chats. It definitely wasn’t only puff pieces.

[lern_too_spel]

I still don't understand GGP's point. Is the logical conclusion really that because other EAs couldn't recognize SBF as a scammer, we should not even try to measure the impact of charitable donations?

I might note that EA makes logical sense to me, and I pretty much ignored SBF because, as I've often noted in this forum, the entire crypto space is filled with scammers and suckers.

[polygamous_bat]

> Is the logical conclusion really that because other EAs couldn't recognize SBF as a scammer, we should not even try to measure the impact of charitable donations?

My (logical) conclusion is that since other EAs couldn't recognize SBF as a scammer, we should double- and triple-check all of their math about risk and effectiveness, instead of trusting them. Not saying the idea of charitable giving has lost merit, rather its primary champions in the last decade have lost a ton of credibility.

[eddsh1994]

I think one strong argument against this is SBF/FTX was highly funded by sophisticated investors and VCs. If they didn't catch it, why should anyone else? People believed FTX was making money through tx fees and front-running via Alameda. The classic "due diligence was done by others" scenario.

Saying this, people were skeptical of SBF in EA, worried about so many eggs in one basket, and didn't like crypto as a source of funding. It's a large group with many views!

I agree with double- and triple-checking all the math about risk and effectiveness. I'm interested in donating to effective charities that use my dollar in the best way and if you correctly find better ones to do so I'd donate :)

[yboris]

Are you suggesting that the skill of detecting a scammer (who actively was giving away large amount of money - using a very strong, costly signal) and the skill of estimating effectiveness are similar enough that having an example in failure of one suggests trouble for the other?!

[lern_too_spel]

Is it more beneficial for EAs to check the math of charities or to check the math of other people claiming to be EAs by gaining unauthorized access to their financial data?

[anthonypasq]

this is the dumbest critisicm ever. Everyone was perfectly justified in championing him around as a posterboy because no one in the world besides him and a few coworkers knew he was a fraud. and now that everyone knows hes a fraud, they no longer parade him around.

youre really going to get mad at the EA movement for not realizing FTX was a fraud when literally, and i actually mean literally, no one knew it until a couple weeks ago. He bamboozled every government and financial institution in the world, but the humble EA movement should have known.

[ben_w]

While it may feel a bit unfair for those reasons, it's not at all dumb.

Why?

Effective Altruism can't be fully effective if it can't spot scammers.

Yes this is hard, yes extra hard when the first encounter is them parachuting a promise of a billion dollars into your lap… but while I have no solutions and absolutely don't blame anyone who took that money, it's not dumb to criticise.

In fact, I'd say that failures you couldn't spot in advance are the learning opportunities; failures you did spot in advance would make you a co-conspirator in my view, even if not by law.

[anthonypasq]

expecting effective altruism to not trust every single institutional indicator of legitimacy (dozens of governments, central banks, the entire media) is dumb.

its a fairly decentralized movement, its just a random collection of people donating money.

[ben_w]

I don’t blame for the same reason I wasn’t expecting, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a learning opportunity.

If you skip the learning opportunity, then I will blame, given the association with big-R Rationality causes an expectation.

[anthonypasq]

there's absolutely no indication they aren't using this as a learning opportunity. William MacAskill who is one of the leaders of the movement has already put out multiple posts about this whole affair.

[tomrod]

Utilitarianism is fine with doing bad to some for the betterment of all. EA is re-skinned utilitarianism. It's really as simple as that and suffers no reduction to see that -- talking about how its not good to do harm to others is a noble point that ignores that utilitarianism is fine with harm done to some (versus only seeking Pareto-improving outcomes).

[eddsh1994]

EA is not the same as Utilitarianism. This is the butchered message without nuance that people are reading in relatively shallow posts like the one we're commenting about.

https://www.effectivealtruism.org/faqs-criticism-objections has a small paragraph on the differences. Having been involved with EA since 2017 in my own small way I can absolutely say with confidence it is not the same. Ends do not justify the means. It is simply meant to be a guiding philosophy to how you donate; treat all lives equally and donate focusing on lives saved per dollar. This should be backed by research proving it's effectiveness and can be unintuitive. There is a vocal longtermist view point that lives in the future should be valued the same resulting in some pretty weird ideas but I ignore most of that.

[tptacek]

The ends don't justify the means for you, which is laudable, but clearly for some leaders in the EA community, they do. This is the standard critique of "longtermist" EA, which hypnotizes itself with huge numbers of extrapolated future entities to justify harming people today.

[eddsh1994]

> which hypnotizes itself with huge numbers of extrapolated future entities to justify harming people today.

Any sources on this? Or do you mean things like reducing energy usage to tackle climate change?

[tptacek]

Reducing energy to tackle climate change seems pretty unimpeachable. Directing money away from developing world medical charities in order to fund wealthy people riding bikes while thinking about AI seems apposite though.

[eddsh1994]

I both strongly agree and disagree with you here.

> Directing money away from developing world medical charities in order to fund wealthy people riding bikes while thinking about AI seems apposite though.

I dislike the whole longtermism stuff and am very vocal about that when I can be. Lives now matter more than hypothetical lives in the future. I've written about this on the EA forums before. However, if EA was to die today, I strongly believe the number of funds to developing world medical charities would decrease! Why? Because people normally think local when it comes to charity, especially larger donations, such as the mantra "charity starts at home". EA has led many people to really think about this and review the charities they donate to, drank the koolaid of being "Effective" with their charitable donations, and now 'regular' people (like me) are donating a good chunk of their pay checks to world medical charities (based on which ones are doing the better job, such as those suggested by givewell).

Overall even if EA has some bad actors (like SBF), and some stupid research goals (imo), and some money that seems fairly... circular if you know what I mean (EA Infrastructure Funds), I believe the general message is strong.

[impossiblefork]

Reducing energy use to tackle climate change will impact GDP, and thus increase unemployment, and thus as a consequence lead to reduced competition for workers, and thus a reduced labour share of GDP. It's thus something which can greatly benefit large capital owners while harming workers.

For this reason it isn't completely unimpeachable.

It'd be great if it could be done without harming workers, but it would harm workers, and disproportionately.

[tomrod]

Sidenote: today I learned the word "apposite" and my day is vastly better.

[yboris]

Where do EAs advocate for harming people today? I'm not aware of any nefarious outcomes that come from caring about making the future go well.

[eddsh1994]

I guess the argument they have is if you have someone suffering today and $10,000 will end their suffering, longtermist EA’s will argue that $10k should be spent on AI alignment research because theoretically AI could end human life & theoretically there could be trillions more humans if that doesn’t happy so trillions of lives > 1 life (valuing existing and future lives the same). I don’t subscribe to this view but it does exist and ‘harming people today’ to make ‘the future go well’ is a vocal minority within EA.

[luckylion]

> EA is re-skinned utilitarianism.

Meh, that's a weird take. If it was, it would ask people to act only to maximize outcome and ignore other constraints, because they would be less secondary. As far as I'm aware, it doesn't, it only suggests that, if you want to do something altruistic, you might want to look at what's most effective and not just do anything that vaguely feels or sounds like it might be helpful.

[tomrod]

Define the metric for effective. You'll note it matches utilitarianism.

[luckylion]

No, it doesn't, and even if it did: since utilitarianism is much more than "if you want to do something for other people, make sure it's helpful" isn't "utilitarianism reskinned".

But that's besides the point, because it obviously isn't. It feels like that's a hot take that neither cares to understand EA, nor understands utilitarianism and just operates on simplified versions of both. Much like people who understand the categorical imperative to be equivalent to the golden rule.

[yboris]

EA is NOT re-skinned utilitarianism. For example here's Effective Altruism for Christians: https://www.facebook.com/eaforchristians

Effective Altruism is a large movement, just because some behave a certain way, doesn't mean all subscribe to those ideas.

[plorg]

Couldn't you just as easily describe this in the other way? Christianity is a large religion, just because some behave a certain way, doesn't mean all subscribe to those ideas.

In my experience there are a lot of Christians who are utilitarians, a lot who are consequentialists, a lot who are deontologists. Groups like this exist because there are people struggling to integrate new ideas or new combinations of old ideas into their existing belief structures. This is how all religion works.

A lot of EA is just straight-up utilitarianism, and appears in practice to suffer from the same problems as that framework. Christianity works similarly. There are a lot of high-minded ideals (that may conflict with each other), some people argue over which ones are "true", but in practice many people choose for themselves a subset that allows them to make sense of the world, or end up rejecting the label because they cannot make sense of their lives under that umbrella of ideas.

[kiba]

I don't know what that means since all ethics must account for consequences of their choices.

The idea of doing bad to do some good seems to be a theoretical concept, but not likely to hold up in reality.

[tptacek]

In almost any religion, there are true believers and cynical exploiters. An important question to ask is, who are the "leaders" (formally or informally) of the movement? There's no doubt that thousands of "EA" people really do donate sacrificially for the greater good. But if the movement directing those donations is run by operators or delusive narcissists, that makes the movement worse.

(It says nothing about the believers sacrificing for the greater good; that's a moral good in and of itself).

[uplifter]

Why is 10% per month optimal? Does it vary with the possible harm of the actions taken to fund it? It would seem that at some risk level it should exceed the likely benefits, but I'm struggling with the calculus. I wasn't familiar with EA until the FTX meltdown brought it into discussion here.

[eddsh1994]

10% I believe was originally an arbitrary rounded number that shouldn't have too bad an impact on someone. It's not novel, by any means, as you can see Islam advocating similar with Zakat! The novel part of EA was analyzing the outcome of charities based on research to ensure it actually improves lives in a quantifiable way. A great example of why this is useful is [0], which tl;dr was a highly funded waterpump dressed up like a childs toy to replace manual pumps in Africa where kids could play and water would be brought up to the surface. The issues were numerous as explained in that post! Now look at an EA-aligned org called Givewell [1] and what sort of research they do to find the most 'effective' charities where that is lives saved (or formally, Quality Adjusted Life Years) per dollar assuming all lives are equal (if $1000 saves a life in Ethiopia compared to $10000 in the US, saving 10 lives is more 'effective' roughly speaking). That's the core gist of EA. It's not re-skinned utilitarianism, it's not some crazy plot to get rich, it's analyzing charitable giving like you would an investment. There are then groups like Giving What We Can that advocate one should donate a percentage of their salary to these charities and the outcome is you might save more lives working as a developer in the Bay Area than a nurse, over your 40 year career (instead of being a nurse yourself you could fund 10 nurses in Nigeria, for example).

[0] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/P9XEtnHFQF24HCC8v/...

[1] https://www.givewell.org/

[uplifter]

Thank you for elaborating. I appreciate the thoughtful approach to effectiveness, no pun intended. I guess I'm was just concerned with the risk of cargo-cultism where an arbitrary target like 10% of income donated to charity can become the goal in itself rather than a means to an end. That is a risk with any system I supposed, including many traditional religions and their ethical frameworks, and I was curious about tenets or axioms within EA to mitigate that risk.

[eddsh1994]

That’s fair! The 10% Giving What We Can is a minority of EA in general, specifically people who subscribe to the idea of “Earning to Give”. There are other ideas too, such as people who argue working in nuclear policy is important, or AI Alignment research, or one of my favorites Allfed [0]. Personally for me, a non-degree holding individual who would still like to use my career to benefit others, donating a chunk of my pay check to charities saving the most lives is my form of ‘effective altruism’.

[0] https://allfed.info/

[janee]

Maximizing earnings (regardless ethical or not) just for the sake of redistribution based on an individuals choice seems dangerous to me.

It feels like someone optimizing for "power"