[nonethewiser]

>The popularity of EA always seemed pretty obvious to me: here's a philosophy that says it doesn't matter what kind of person you are or how you make your fortune, as long as you put some amount of money toward problems. Exploiting people to make money is fine, as long as some portion of that money is going toward "a good cause."

I dont think this is a very accurate interpretation of the idea - even with how flawed the movement is. EA is about donating your money effectively. IE ensuring the donation gets used well. At it's face, that's kind of obvious. But when you take it to an extreme you blur the line between "donation" and something else. It has selected for very self-righteous people. But the idea itself is not really about excusing you being a bad person, and the donation target is definitely NOT unimportant.

[pjc50]

> EA is about

A friend of mine used to "gotcha" any use of the expression "X is about Y", which was annoying but trained a useful intellectual habit. That may have been what EA's original stated intent was, but then you have to look at what people actually say and do under the name of EA.

[Recursing]

> you have to look at what people actually say and do under the name of EA.

They donate a significant percentage of their income to the global poor, and save thousands of lives every year (see e.g. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-eff... )

[cyanydeez]

Yes, but how many do they entrain in poverty.

This is like saying "the master is go because he clothed his slaves"

[HDThoreaun]

The vast majority of EA money goes to givewell and their mission to serve the global poor. Some people have obviously abused the earn to give idea but most effective altruists are just trying to think about ways to be more effective with their giving.

[cyanydeez]

No, theyre trying to find ways to justify hoarding wealth and avoiding systemic change. Theyre basically new age conservatives.

[Viliam1234]

Or maybe you are just making that up, because it feels bad to admit that some people are more interested in helping others than you are.

[cyanydeez]

Yeah, sure. Maybe list the most visible adherent you think has the most moral and ethical good.

[Joeboy]

As per conversation elsewhere, I think you've fallen for some popular but untrue / unfair narratives about EA.

But I want to take another tack. I never see anybody make the following argument. Probably that's because other people wisely understand how repulsive people find it, but I want to try anyway, possibly because I have undiagnosed autism.

EA-style donations have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. I know there are people who will quibble about the numbers, but I don't think you can sensibly dispute that EA has saved a lot of lives. This never seems to appear in people's moral calculus, like at all. Most of those are people who are poor, distant, powerless and effectively invisible to you but nevertheless, do they not count for something?

I know I'm doing utilitarianism and people hate it, but I just don't get how these lives don't count for something. Can you sell me on the idea that we should let more poor people die of preventable diseases in exchange for a more morally unimpeachable policy to donations?

[nyeah]

Lots of people and organizations make charitable donations. Often that's done in the name of some ideology. Always they claim they're doing good, not throwing the money away.

None of this is new. What may be new is branding those traditional claims as a unique insight.

Even the terrible behavior and frightening sophistry of some high-profile proponents is really nothing groundbreaking. We've seen it before in other movements.

[Viliam1234]

> Always they claim they're doing good, not throwing the money away.

And the core idea of Effective Altruism is to actually verify those claims.

[nemomarx]

I don't think the complaint is really the donations or the impact, rather it's that the community has issues?

Whether you agree that someone can put money into saving lives to make up for other moral faults or issues or so on is the core issue. And even from a utilitarian view we'd have to say that more of these donations happened than would have without the movement or with a different movement, which is difficult to measure. Consider the usaid thing - Elon musk may have wiped out most of the EA community gains by causing that defending, and was probably supported by the community in some sense. How to weigh in all these factors?

[Joeboy]

> Whether you agree that someone can put money into saving lives to make up for other moral faults or issues or so on is the core issue

For me the core issue is why people are so happy to advocate for the deaths of the poor because of things like "the community has issues". Of course the withdrawal of EA donations is going to cause poor people to die. I mean yes, some funding will go elsewhere, but a lot of it's just going to go away. Sorry to vent but people are so endlessly disappointing.

> Elon musk may have wiped out most of the EA community gains by causing that defending

For sure!

> and was probably supported by the community in some sense

You sound fairly under-confident about that, presumably because you're guessing. It's wildly untrue.

[nemomarx]

I can't imagine EA people supported the USAID decision specifically - but the silicon valley environment, the investing bubble, our entire tech culture is why Musk has the power he does, right?

And the rationalist community writ large is very much part of that. The whole idea that private individuals should get to decide whether or not to do charity, or where they can casually stop giving funds or etc, or that so much money needs to be tied up in speculative investments and so on, I find that all pretty distasteful. Should life or death matters be up to whims like this?

I apologize though, I've gotten kinda bitter about a lot of these things over the last year. It's certainly a well intentioned philosophy and it did produce results for a time - there's many worse communities than that.

[Joeboy]

> the silicon valley environment, the investing bubble, our entire tech culture is why Musk has the power he does, right?

For sure, not quibbling with any of that. The part I don't get is why it's EA's fault, at least more than it's many, many other people and organizations' fault. EA gets the flak because it wants to take money from rich people and use it to save poor people's lives. Not because it built the Silicon Valley environment / tech culture / investing bubble.

> Should life or death matters be up to whims like this?

Referring back to my earlier comment, can you sell me on the idea that they shouldn't? If you think aid should all come from taxes, sell me on the idea that USAID is less subject to the whims of the powerful than individual donations. Also sell me on the idea that overseas aid will naturally increase if individual donations fall. Or, sell me on the idea that the lives of the poor don't matter.

[glenstein]

I actually think I agree with this, but nevertheless people can refer to EA and mean by it the totality of sociological dynamics surrounding it, including its population of proponents and their histories.

I actually think EA is conceptually perfectly fine within its scope of analysis (once you start listing examples, e.g. mosquito nets to prevent malaria, I think they're hard to dispute), and the desire to throw out the conceptual baby with the bathwater of its adherents is an unfortunate demonstration of anti-intellectualism. I think it's like how some predatory pickup artists do the work of being proto-feminists (or perhaps more to the point, how actual feminists can nevertheless be people who engage in the very kinds of harms studied by the subject matter). I wouldn't want to make feminism answer for such creatures as definitionally built into the core concept.

[WhyOhWhyQ]

The op and your reply are basically guaranteed text on the page whenever EA comes up (not that your reply is unwarranted, or the op's message is either, but it is interesting that these are guaranteed comments).

[some_guy_nobel]

You claim OP's interpretation is inaccurate, while it tracks perfectly with many of EA's most notorious supporters.

Given that contrast, I'd ask what evidence do you have for why OP's interpretation is incorrect, and what evidence do you have that your interpretation is correct?

[RobinL]

> many of EA's most notorious supporters.

The fact they're notorious makes them a biased sample.

My guess is for the majority of people interested in EA - the typical supporter who is not super wealthy or well known - the two central ideas are:

- For people living in wealthy countries, giving some % of your income makes little difference to your life, but can potentially make a big difference to someone else's

- We should carefully decide which charities to give to, because some are far more effective than others.

That's pretty much it - essentially the message in Peter Singer's book: https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/.

I would describe myself as an EA, but all that means to me is really the two points above. It certainly isn't anything like an indulgence that morally offsets poor behaviour elsewhere

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

I would say the problem with EA is the "E". Saying you're doing 'effective' altruism is another way of saying that everyone else's altruism is wasteful and ineffective. Which of course isn't the case. The "E" might as well stand for "Elitist" in that's the vibe it gives off. All truly altruistic acts would aim to be effective, otherwise it wouldn't be altruism - it would just be waste. Not to say there is no waste in some altruism acts, but I'm not convinced its actually any worse than EA. Given the fraud associated with some purported EA advocates, I'd say EA might even be worse. The EA movement reeks of the optimize-everything mindset of people convinced they are smarter than everyone else who just say just gives money to a charity A when they could have been 13% more effective if they sent the money directly to this particular school in country B with the condition they only spend it on X. The origins of EA may not be that, but that's what it has evolved into.

[estearum]

A lot of altruism is quite literally wasteful and ineffective, in which case it's pretty hard to call it altruism.

> they could have been 13% more effective

If you think the difference between ineffective and effective altruism is a 13% spread, I fear you have not looked deeply enough into either standard altruistic endeavors nor EA enough to have an informed opinion.

The gaps are actually astonishingly large and trivial to capitalize on (i.e. difference between clicking one Donate Here button versus a different Donate Here button).

The sheer scale of the spread is the impetus behind the entire train of thought.

[mcv]

It's absolutely worth looking at how effective the charities you donate to really are. Some charities spend a lot of money on fundraising to raise more funds and then reward their management for raising to much funds with only a small amount being spent on actual help. Others are primarily known for their help.

Especially rich people's vanity foundations are mostly a channel for dodging taxes and channeling corruption.

I donate to a lot of different organisations, and I do check which do the most good. Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders are very effective and always worthy of your donation, for example. Others are more a matter of opinion. Greenpeace has long been the only NGO that can really take on giant corporations, but they've also made some missteps over the years. Some are focused on helping specific people, like specific orphans in poor countries. Does that address the general poverty and injustice in those countries? Maybe not, but it does make a real difference for somebody.

And if you only look at the numbers, it's easy to overlook the individuals. The homeless person on the street. Why are they homeless, when we are rich? What are we doing about that?

But ultimately, any charity that's actually done, is going to be more effective than holding off because you're not sure how optimal this is. By all means optimise how you spend it, but don't let doubts hold you back from doing good.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

> the gaps are actually astonishingly large

For sure this is case. But just knowing what you are donating to doesn't need some sort of special designation. Like yes A is in fact much better than B, so I'll donate to A instead of B is no different than any other decision where you'd weigh options. Its like inventing 'effective shopping'. How is it different than regular shopping? Well, with ES, you evaluate the value and quality of the thing you are buying against its price, you might also read reviews or talk to people to have used the different products before. Its a new philosophy of shopping that no one has ever thought of before and its called 'effective shopping'. Only smart people are doing it.

[estearum]

The principal idea behind EA is that people often want their money to go as far as possible, but their intuitions for how to do that are way, way off.

Nobody said or suggested only smart people can or should or are “doing EA.” What people observe is these knee jerk reactions against what is, as you say, a fairly obvious idea once stated.

However it being an obvious idea once stated does not mean people intuitively enact that idea, especially prior to hearing it. Thus the need to label the approach

[mcv]

I agree. I think the criticism of EA's most notorious supporters is warranted, but it's criticism of those notorious supporters and the people around them, not the core concept of EA itself.

The core notions as you state them are entirely a good idea. But the good you do with part of your money does not absolve you for the bad things you do with the rest, or the bad things you did to get rich in the first place.

Mind you, that's how the rich have always used philanthropy; Andrew Carnegie is now known for his philanthropy, but in life we was a brutal industrialist responsible for oppressive working conditions, strike breaking, and deaths.

Is that really effective altruism? I don't think so. How you make your money matters too. Not just how you spend it.

[btilly]

The OP's interpretation is an inaccurate summary of the philosophy. But it is an excellent summary of the trap that people who try to follow EA can easily fall into. Any attempt to rationally evaluate charity work, can instead wind up rationalizing what they want to do. Settling for the convenient and self-aggrandizing "analysis", rather than a rigorous one.

An even worse trap is to prioritize a future utopia. Utopian ideals are dangerous. They push people towards "the ends justify the means". If the ends are infinitely good, there is no bound on how bad the "justified means" can be.

But history shows that imagined utopias seldom materialize. By contrast the damage from the attempted means is all too real. That's why all of the worst tragedies of the 20th century started with someone who was trying to create a utopia.

EA circles have shown an alarming receptiveness to shysters who are trying to paint a picture of utopia. For example look at how influential someone like Samuel Bankman-Fried was able to be, before his fraud imploded.

[socalgal2]

this feels like “the most notorious atheists/jews/blacks/whites/christian/muslims are bad therefore all atheists/jews/blacks/whites/christian/muslims are bad

[jandrese]

It's like libertarianism. There is a massive gulf between the written goals and the actual actions of the proponents. It might be more accurately thought of as a vehicle for plausible deniability than an actual ethos.

[glenstein]

The problem is that creates a kind of epistemic closure around yourself where you can't encounter such a thing as a sincere expression of it. I actually think your charge against Libertarians is basically accurate. And I think it deserves a (limited) amount of time and attention directed at its core contentions for what they are worth. After all, Robert Nozick considered himself a libertarian and contributed some important thinking on things like justice and retribution and equality and any number of subjects, and the world wouldn't be bettered by dismissing him with twitter style ridicule.

I do agree that things like EA and Libertarianism have to answer for the in-the-wild proponents they tend to attract but not to the point of epistemic closure in response to its subject matter.

[Eisenstein]

When a term becomes loaded enough then people will stop using it when they don't want to be associated with the loaded aspects of the term. If they don't then they already know what the consequences are, because they will be dealing with them all the time. The first and most impactful consequence isn't 'people who are not X will think I am X' it is actually 'people who are X will think I am one of them'.

[glenstein]

I think social dynamics are real and must be answered for but I don't think any self-correction or lacktherof has anything to do with subject matter which can be understood independently.

I will never take a proponent of The Bell Curve seriously who tries to say they're "just following the data", because I do hold them and the book responsible for their social and cultural entanglements and they would have to be blind to ignore it. But the book is wrong for reasons intrinsic to its analysis and it would be catastrophic to treat that point as moot.

[Eisenstein]

I am saying that those who actually believe something won't stick around and associate themselves with the original movement if that movement has taken on traits that they don't agree with.

[nyeah]

Sorry, the problem isn't "epistemic closure" by folks who are tired of bad behavior. The problem is the bad behavior.

[stickfigure]

> tracks perfectly with many of EA's most notorious supporters

Just wait until you find out about vegetarianism's most notorious supporter.

[cortesoft]

Well, in order to be a notorious supporter of EA, you have to have enough money for your charity to be noticed, which means you are very rich. If you are very rich, it means you have to have made money from a capitalistic venture, and those are inherently exploitive.

So basically everyone who has a lot of money to donate has questionable morals already.

The question is, are the large donators to EA groups more or less 'morally suspect' than large donors to other charity types?

In other words, everyone with a lot of money is morally questionable, and EA donors are just a subset of that.

[nl]

> you have to have made money from a capitalistic venture, and those are inherently exploitive.

You say this like it's fact beyond dispute, but I for one strongly disagree.

Not a fan of EA at all though!

[cortesoft]

Fair to disagree on that point, but I think the people who would find the EA supporters “morally questionable” feel that way for reasons that would apply to all rich people. I would be curious to hear what attributes EA supporters have that other rich people don’t.

[nl]

I think the idea the future lives have value, and the value of those lives can outweigh the value of actual living people today is extremely immoral.

To quote[1]:

> In Astronomical Waste, Nick Bostrom makes a more extreme and more specific claim: that the number of human lives possible under space colonization is so great that the mere possibility of a hugely populated future, when considered in an “expected value” framework, dwarfs all other moral considerations.

[1] https://blog.givewell.org/2014/07/03/the-moral-value-of-the-...

[addaon]

Isn't this just the Thanos argument, though? Given the huge number of possible future lives under space colonization, all of them ending inevitably in death and suffering, no amount of trying to improve those lives can ever has as much of a positive impact as just avoiding them by pushing for, say, nuclear self-annihilation now, because the somewhat larger suffering for a much, much smaller number of people is a higher "expected value"? I'm not really keen on moral arguments that end up arguing for nuclear war…

[cortesoft]

> I think the idea the future lives have value, and the value of those lives can outweigh the value of actual living people today is extremely immoral.

This is an interesting take. So if we found out for certain that an action we are taking today is going to kill 100% of humans in 200 years, it would be immoral to consider that as a factor in making decisions? None of those people are living today, obviously, so that means we should not worry about their lives at all?

[tovej]

For very much money, as in, let's say, more than 1000x the median person in the wealth distribution, I'd say it's obviously true.

You cannot make 1000x the average persons wealth by acting morally. Except possibly winning the lottery.

A person is not capable of creating that wealth. A group of people have created that wealth, and the 1000x individual has hoarded it to themselves instead of sharing it with the people who contributed.

If you are a billionaire, you own at least 5000x the median (200000k in the US). If you're a big tech CEO, you own somewhere around 50-100,000x the median. These are the biggest proponents of EA.

The bottom 50% only own about 2% of the wealth anymore, the top 10% own two thirds of the wealth, the top 1% owns a whole third and it's only getting worse. Who is responsible for the wealth inequality? The people at the right edge of the Lorenz curve. They could fix it, but don't, in fact they benefit more from their workers being poorer and more desperate for a job. I hope that explains the exploitation.

[zozbot234]

> You cannot make 1000x the average persons wealth by acting morally. Except possibly winning the lottery.

The risk profile of early startup founders looks a lot like "winning the lottery", except that the initial investment (in terms of time, effort and lost opportunities elsewhere as well as pure monetary ones) is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of a lottery ticket. There's only a handful of successful unicorns vs. a whole lot of failed startups. Other contributors generally have a choice of sharing into the risk vs. playing it safe, and they usually pick the safe option because they know what the odds are. Nothing has been taken away from them.

[tovej]

The risk profile being the same does not mean that the actions are the same. The unicorns that make it rich invariably have some way of screwing over someone else., Either workers, users, or smaller competitors.

For Google and Facebook, users' data was sold to advertisers, and their behaviour is manipulated to benefit the company and its advertising clients. For Amazon, the workers are squeezed for all the contribution they can give and let go once they burn out, and they manipulate the marketplace that they govern to benefit them. If you make multiple hundreds of millions, you are either exploiting someone in the above way, or you are extracting rent from them.

Just looking at the wealth distribution is a good way to see how unicorns are immoral. If you suddenly shoot up into the billionaire class, you are making the wealth distribution worse, because your money is accruing from the less wealthy proportion of society.

That unicorns propagate this inequality is harmful in itself. The entire startup scene is also a fishing pond for existing monopolies. The unicorns are sold to the big immoral actors, making them more powerful.

What is taken away when inequality becomes worse is political power and agency. Maybe other contributors close to the founders are better off, but society as a whole is worse off.

[nl]

I think Yvon Chouinard has acted morally throughout his career. His net reported wealth was $3B before he gave his company to the trust he created.

He's far from the only example.

I understand the distribution of wealth. I agree that in the US in particular it is setup to exploit poor people.

I don't think being rich is immoral.

[tovej]

You think the wealth inequality is set up to exploit poor people, but you don't think contributing to the wealth inequality is immoral.

That's an interesting position. I would guess that in order to square these two beliefs you either have to think exploiting the poor is moral (unlikely) or that individuals are not responsible for their personal contributions to the wealth inequality.

I'm interested to hear how you argue for this position. It's one I rarely see.

[jjj123]

The main idea is not an excuse to be a bad person, but it does justify making an ungodly amount of money, and making even more money after you’ve already made an ungodly amount of money. And for not letting that money get taken by taxes (god forbid, how ineffective!).

So I’d argue on OPs side, I don’t care what EA stated intent is, it works pretty well as a smokescreen for the types who want to get really fucking rich by any means necessary. Even better if the donation target is a North Star they never actually reach.

[JohnMakin]

It is a little bit though, using these lines of thinking it becomes extraordinarily easy to excuse, justify, or even paint as a good thing highly unethical or immoral actions.

For instance -

If I find some sort of fraud that will harm X number of users, but make me Y dollars - if Y > (harm caused), not doing (fraud making me Y dollars) could be interpreted as being "inefficient" with your resources or causing more harm. It's very easy to use the philosophy in this manner, and of course many see it as a huge perk. The types of people drawn to it are all much the same.

[cyanydeez]

Its a illogical theory, even if practiced in good faith.

Just because the market pays for one activity does not mean ots externalitirs are equally solvedby the matkets valuation.

From basic physics, its akin to saying you can drop a vase and return it to predropped state with equal effort.

Entropy alone prevents EA.

[ghurtado]

I don't see anything in your comment that directly disagrees with the one that you've replied to.

Maybe you misinterpreted it? To me, It was simply saying that the flaw in the EA model is that a person can be 90% a dangerous sociopath and as long as the 10% goes to charity (effectively) they are considered morally righteous.

It's the 21st century version of Papal indulgences.

[HDThoreaun]

The thing is that dangerous sociopaths will be dangerous sociopaths either way. What’s the downside in convincing them to donate 10% of their income to effective causes?

[klustregrif]

> EA is about donating your money effectively

For most it seems EA is an argument that despite no charitable donations being made at all, and despite gaining wealth through questionable means it’s still all ethical because it’s theoretically “just more effective” if the person continues to claim that they would in the far future put some money towards these hypothetical “very effective” charitable causes, that just never seems to have materialized yet, and all of cause shouldn’t be perused “until you’ve built your fortune”.

[Aunche]

If you're going to assign a discount rate for cash, you also need to assign a similar "discount rate" for future lives saved. Just like investments compound, giving malaria medicine and vitamins to kids who needs him should produce at least as much positive compounding returns.

[faidit]

That future promise doesn't do much good if the planet is dead by the time these guys get around to donating, thanks to the ecological catastrophe caused by their supposedly well-intentioned greed. Also, EA proponents tend to ignore society's opportunity cost here - that money could have been taxed and put to good uses by the public in the meantime. Whatever the inefficiencies of the public sector, at least we can do something to fix it now instead of trusting the promises of billionaires that they will start giving back one day.