[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.

[tptacek]

Seems fair. The high level ideals of the EA movement seem hard to argue with. I asked on HN a few weeks ago how it could have gotten so weird; my understanding at the time was that it was just like, a fund you send some of your income to that distributes the money to the highest-ranked charities. Seems great!

But then there's this whole weird Scientology side to it, and, worse, that side of it seems to have swallowed up all the highest-profile people in EA.

[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.