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by JohnFen 947 days ago
> At it's core, I struggle to see how anyone can disagree with effective altruism as a basic principle

I don't think anyone disagrees with that. The issue isn't the idea that we want to engage in altruism in the most effective way we can, the issue is the EA movement.
1 comments
Applejinx 947 days ago
I don't get how effectiveness is a prerequisite. Be altruist, or not.

Sounds like ass-covering from people who are like 'I am ultimately rational and therefore must act with maximum effectiveness'. Ultimately rational as a perceived state within humans is a FEELING. You can take a bunch of ketamine and conclude that you possess that quality, and many people have done just that, some of 'em very wealthy and powerful.

Beats admitting the truth, I guess.

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AlexandrB 947 days ago
In my experience, people are better at rationalizing their feelings than actually being rational. There's a certain lack of humility to claiming that just because you used some numerical weights to arrive at a decision it was arrived at rationally.
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RationalDino 947 days ago
Indeed the more complex and complete you make your rational model, the more tunable weights there are. By just dropping in the right weights, you can get whatever result you want. Therefore complex models tend to produce worse results in practice than very simple ones.

This lesson was brought home for me by https://www.amazon.com/Software-Estimation-Demystifying-Deve... explaining why the COCOMO model didn't work well in practice as an estimation technique, despite their having collected a lot of good data on what affects schedule.

This lesson is one that the EA community broadly seems to ignore.

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JohnFen 947 days ago
> I don't get how effectiveness is a prerequisite. Be altruist, or not

It's not. What I meant by my comment was that pretty much everyone who engages in altruistic behavior wants that behavior to be as effective as possible. The EA movement did not invent or discover this, it's always been the case.

Even people whose altruistic behavior stops at dropping a few coins in the donation box at the supermarket wants those coins to be used in the most effective way.

The EA movement is something else entirely.

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