[morsecodist]

Effective Altruism is such an interesting title. Almost no one views their Altruism as ineffective. The differentiator is what makes their flavor of Altruism effective, but that's not in the title. It would be like calling the movement "real Altruism" or "good Altruism".

A good name might be rational Altruism because in practice these people are from the rationalist movement and doing Altruism, or what they feel is Altruism. But the "rationalist" title suffers from similar problems.

[kmmlng]

I suppose in the beginning, it was about finding ways to measure how effective different altruistic approaches actually are and focusing your efforts on the most effective ones. Effective then essentially means how much impact you are achieving per dollar spent. One of the more convincing ways of doing this is looking at different charitable foundations and determining how much of each dollar you donate to them actually ends up being used to fix some problem and how much ends up being absorbed by the charitable foundation itself (salaries etc.) with nothing to show for it.

They might have lost the plot somewhere along the line, but the effective altruism movement had some good ideas.

[agos]

“Measurable altruism” would have been a better name

[sfink]

> One of the more convincing ways of doing this is looking at different charitable foundations and determining how much of each dollar you donate to them actually ends up being used to fix some problem and how much ends up being absorbed by the charitable foundation itself (salaries etc.) with nothing to show for it.

Color me unconvinced. This will work for some situations. At this point, it's well known enough that it's a target that has ceased to be a good measure (Goodhart's Law).

The usual way to look at this is to look at the percentage of donations spent on administrative costs. This makes two large assumptions: (1) administrative costs have zero benefit, and (2) non-administrative costs have 100% benefit. Both are wildly wrong.

A simple counterexample: you're going to solve hunger. So you take donations, skim 0.0000001% off the top for your time because "I'm maximizing benefit, baby!", and use the rest to purchase bananas. You dump those bananas in a pile in the middle of a homeless encampment.

There are so many problems with this, but I'll stick with the simplest: in 2 weeks, you have a pile of rotten bananas and everyone is starving again. It would have been better to store some of the bananas and give them out over time, which requires space and maybe even cooling to hold inventory, which cost money, and that's money that is not directly fixing the problem.

There are so many examples of feel-good world saving that end up destroying communities and cultures, fostering dependence, promoting corruption, propping up the institutions that causing the problem, etc.

Another analogy: you make a billion dollars and put it in a trust for your grandchild to inherit the full sum when they turn 16. Your efficiency measure is at 100%! What could possibly go wrong? Could someone improve the outcome by, you know, administering the trust for you?

Smart administration can (but does not have to) increase effectiveness. Using this magical "how much of each dollar... ends up being used to fix some problem" metric is going to encourage ineffective charities and deceptive accounting.

[kmmlng]

That's fair enough, there are problems with this way of thinking. I suppose you could say the take-away should be "Don't donate to charities where close to your whole donation will be absorbed as administrative costs". There definitely are black sheep that act this way and they probably served as the original motivation for EA. It's a logical next step to come up with a way to systematically identify these black sheep. That is probably the point where this approach should have stopped.

[morsecodist]

This is a super fair summary and has shifted my thinking on this a bit thanks.

[concordDance]

The vast majority of non-EA charity givers to not expend effort on trying to find the most dollar efficient charities (or indeed pushing for quantification at all), which makes their altruism ineffectual in a world with strong competition between charities (where the winners are inevitably those who spend the most on acquiring donations).

[tim333]

>Almost no one views their Altruism as ineffective

As someone who has occasionally given money to charities for homelessness and the like I don't really expect it to fix much. More the thought that counts.

[zarathustreal]

I like to call this “lazy altruism”

[mushi01]

Do you really think all altruism is effective? Caring about the immediate well-being of others is not as effective as thinking in the long term. The altruism you are describing is misguided altruism, which ultimately hurts more than it helps, while effective altruism goes beyond the surface-level help in ways that don't enable self-destructing behaviours or that don't perpetuate the problem.

[morsecodist]

No I think almost all people doing altruism at least think what they are doing is effective. I totally get that they EA people believe they have found the one true way but so does do others. Even if EA is correct it just makes talking about it confusing. Imagine if Darwin has called his theory "correct biology".