[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.

[nemomarx]

For decades things like usaid were bipartisan and basically untouchable, so that and higher taxes would have been a fairly secure way to do things. The question is can that be accomplished again, or do we need a thorough overhaul of who's in power in various parts of society?

None of this will happen naturally though. We need to make it happen. So ultimately my position is that we need to aim efforts at making these changes, possibly at a higher priority than individual giving - if you can swing elections or change systems of government the potential impact is very high in terms of policy change and amount of total aid, and also in terms of how much money we allow the rich to play and gamble with. None of these are natural states of affairs.

[Joeboy]

(Sincerely) good luck with that, but I don't see why it means we should be against saving the lives of poor people in the immediate term. At some point we might just have to put it down to irreconcilably different mental wiring.