[alexmuro]

As someone who creates data and analysis which get used in setting policy I do find a lot of EA spreadsheet analysis of measured "good" to be very niave to the nature of measurement and classification.

That being said, I think this peice is a bit of an overreaction and there seem to be many earnest actors in the EA community really thinking about how they can do good in the world. SBF is very unfortunate for EA, but to jump from him example to saying all EA practitioners care exclusively about the ends over the means is a bit of a leap, imo.

[axlee]

It's just a bunch of privileged armchair humanitarians who never left the confines of their fancy circles, let alone been confronted to the things they're trying to fix. They think they can fix issues better than NGOs which have had boots on the grounds for decades, just because they know python and excel, as if people actually working on humanitarian causes were benevolent r**ards. Of course, it allows for great intellectual masturbation and self-congratulation, as if fixing complex social/ecological issues was just about "cracking a problem" and presenting a neat 12-page PPT presentation, before moving to the next problem.

If any of these people actually walked the talk, we'd see a lot more one-way tickets to Africa for them to finally be able to employ their beautiful minds on real problems.

[low_tech_love]

The best comment I’ve read in HN for a really long time.

[bee_rider]

For someone outside the space (like me), what’s the big innovation of Effective Altruism? I assume when the rubber hits the road, most people doing big donations have people to look at the effectiveness of that donation.

I guess I’m just suspicious of any community or movement that labels itself as “effective,” because it is hard to believe that they were the first ones to think of the idea of not being ineffective, haha.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Most people doing big donations aren't particularly interested in effectiveness. The Susan G. Komen foundation, still the largest breast cancer charity in the US, had a big controversy about this around the time that Effective Altruism started to get big. According to their annual reports (https://www.komen.org/wp-content/uploads/fy19-20-annual-repo...), if you go to their site and donate $100 towards their promise of "ending breast cancer":

* $5 goes towards breast cancer research. (IIUC, cancer researchers are somewhat skeptical of the idea that cancer could be "ended" as such, but that's a minor quibble.)

* $8 goes towards treatment and screening. Not exactly what was promised, but still saving lives, so close enough.

* $14 goes towards administering the Susan G. Komen foundation.

* $22 goes towards raising funds for the Susan G. Komen foundation.

* $51 goes towards "education". They say this includes patient support services, not just telling people about the Susan G. Komen foundation, but don't offer a further breakdown.

And my understanding is that, in non-EA philanthropic circles, this breakdown isn't considered particularly egregious. At least they're doing something! An ineffective charity would be something like One Laptop per Child, which raised money and press attention from a fake crank-powered laptop and accomplished nothing of note before technological innovation outpaced them.

[jstarfish]

In the absence of any substantive allegations of misappropriation, be fair to OLPC. They had the challenge of engineering and logistics for a tangible product, not vagaries like "education."

To my neighbor, SJK's efforts yielded as much as OLPC's vaporware. As a career nurse, she's well-educated about the breast cancer she has, that she will soon die from because she can't afford to treat it.

SJK amounts to little more than a goddamn fortune-teller. Not one cent of that $8 has bought her a single extra minute of life.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Yeah, I should be clear, I don't mean to be particularly hard on OLPC. They tried to do a cool-sounding thing, it didn't happen to work out despite real efforts towards it, and as far as tech demos go the crank laptop wasn't egregious. But Susan G Komen isn't really being dishonest either - those numbers are from a nicely designed pie chart in their 2020 annual report! They're just responding to the donor demand for cool events and soaring rhetoric that makes them feel like part of a movement. People who are interested in effectiveness instead donate to organizations like the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, which puts over 70% of donor money into research grants.

[Nifty3929]

EA seeks to measure and compare altruistic endeavors, however imperfectly. For example, measuring the good created by donating to your kids school, to the 9/11 fund, or to bed nets in Africa. An EA would likely say that the good for society created by donating to your kids' school is less than the good provided by donating the same amount of money to bed nets. They might quantify that in lives saved, such as a $1000 donation to bed nets saving about 1/5th of a life in Africa. But maybe the $1000 donation to the school improves the lives of 100 students by 1% each, or something like that.

It really forces us to have hard conversations about how we use our collective effort to help each other, based on more than just feelings in the moment. Feelings are an important part of the end goal, but feelings about some particular intervention are not a good way to evaluate it. We're also forced to be clear about what good we think an intervention will provide, and to whom.

[low_tech_love]

Your answer sums up perfectly why I am so strongly against EA. The idea that you can quantify your donation to bed nets in terms of something so arbitrary as “lives saved”, without taking into account the extremely complex social environment at which that donation is arriving, is completely opposite to my beliefs. It is basically the same as measuring something like “what’s the benefit of an individual vote?”

The idea that you really believe that as an EA you are having “harder” conversations and you are more “forced” to be clear about what you do than other non-effective altruists is just baffling to me.

[renewiltord]

It seems to make sense to me. You evaluate whether your actions are doing the most good in the world according to your metrics. For example, should I work at a soup kitchen for a day or work in my day job in HFT for a day and donate it all to a soup kitchen.

With the latter I could support quite a few people at the soup kitchen for that day.

You can take that to whatever extent you desire. Should I donate to guineaworm eradication or local libraries? And so on and so forth.

And the general EA community rates lives highly. So max lives saved usually trumps everything else.

[low_tech_love]

Some political/social communities simply kidnap words and terms and use them as if their solution is the only solution to a problem. You are absolutely right to be suspicious; the fact that they are oblivious enough to reality that they really believe themselves to be more effective than others (simply because they hide behind arbitrary numerical computations) is reason enough to suspect that their numbers aren’t really covering everything.

It is a bit like the way feminists think of themselves as the only line of fight for women’s rights, or right-wing extremists and populists keep labelling themselves as “freedom fighters”. All of a sudden if you’re opposed to them you become a woman-hater, or a freedom-hating socialist (because they can’t understand that there are other alternative ways to defend the same ideas). These are just political groups with one specific ideology who are marketing themselves as the solution. Thankfully nowadays with the fall of SBF people are dismissing EA as the fad that it is, but there was a time when opposing EA would elicit reactions such as “oh so you’re against effectiveness/transparency?” or “so you are in favor of corruption?” Sigh.

[kiba]

I guess I’m just suspicious of any community or movement that labels itself as “effective,” because it is hard to believe that they were the first ones to think of the idea of not being ineffective, haha.

What do people donate money to charity for? It's certainly not all to the poorest or desperate people amongst us. It get donated to a church, or to an art museum. Beyond a certain point, they don't really need the money.

Meanwhile, halfway around the world people lives in abject poverty or they're dying to famine or war.

I certainly don't act like an effective altruist. My money goes to things I cared about, like open source projects, but not necessarily to people who need the money to live another day or help people who could help other people live another day.

Let's put it this way. Is it wrong to not save people's lives, especially when it is of no inconvenience to you? I am not talking about donating so much money that I am a beggar on the street, but donating a substantial enough money but still retain a 'middle class' lifestyle.

Then the next question is whatever you doing effective or counterproductive? I think it should be no surprise that a large amount of people don't give such thought to the questions. Imagine the vast scientific illiteracy that pervades our world, like anti-vaxxers asking for money to help spread their messages.

[jstarfish]

> Is it wrong to not save people's lives, especially when it is of no inconvenience to you?

I used to think so. Later events then taught me that proactively helping people doesn't necessarily keep their knife away from your throat. You see people's true colors when you try to disengage.

I only save the lives of animals these days. People are scum. Animals never did me wrong.

[monero-xmr]

It’s not just donations. It’s living your entire life according to “expected value”, or what the maximum “utility” units (utils) can be created through every action and relationship. It’s an extremely inhuman way of living that goes against ethical norms established since the dawn of civilization. Effective altruists are dangerous and you should not be friends with them, hire them, or associate with them at all if you possibly can. They put your wealth and life at risk.

[kiba]

That is silly. People argued about whether cars are good for the environment or whether we should create a walkable society, or policies about climate change, and so forth. They are always arguing about the consequences of their actions.

At the end of the day, people don't follow some sort of pure moral philosophy like some sort of platonic ideals.