[HN Gopher] Effective Altruism Is a Welter of Lies, Hypocrisy, a...
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Effective Altruism Is a Welter of Lies, Hypocrisy, and Eugenic
Fantasies
Author : kosasbest
Score : 63 points
Date : 2023-11-12 21:57 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.truthdig.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.truthdig.com)
| kdmccormick wrote:
| I keep seeing takes like this, but the effect EA has had on my
| life so far is that it gave me motivation and an easy framework
| to donate thousands of dollars a year to fund deworming,
| vaccination, and other direct relief in underdeveloped countries,
| for two years in a row. I honestly had no idea who SBF was until
| FTX melted down. I saw zero connection between EA and Musk,
| Trump, etc.
|
| Was I duped? I don't think so. SBF's downfall has definitely
| shaken my confidence in EA as a trustworthy institution, but I
| still generally feel great about those donations and will likely
| repeat them again next year (albeit with a closer look at exactly
| how the funds are distributed).
|
| As with many things, it easier and more fun to disparage
| movements than it is to get involved and make positive change.
| This article is a good example of that.
| lispisok wrote:
| Speaking as somebody who isnt into EA, I assure you most of the
| people criticizing EA havent donated a dime or spent a single
| minute volunteering. Everybody talks the talk about how to
| charity but nobody walks the walk
| operatingthetan wrote:
| If I want to criticize a cult do I need to join it or try on
| their beliefs first? Seems like no to me? It feels like you
| are trying to point out a hypocrisy that isn't there, the
| authors weren't correcting the movement on 'how to charity,'
| but rather problematic behaviors encoded into the group's
| mode of operation.
| late2part wrote:
| Correct.
|
| And there's a sickness in our society, that a
| person/movement/concept is judged by those associated with
| it, instead of on its own.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| >that a person/movement/concept is judged by those
| associated with it, instead of on its own.
|
| This seems a bit odd... the issues happened within the
| context of the group's activities and the problems were
| shielded by EA. This is like suggesting the Catholic Church
| had nothing to do with child abuse and we should only blame
| the priests.
| hollerith wrote:
| There is no HR department or board of quality assurance
| for effective altruism: it's like Spiderman fandom: the
| only qualification for becoming a fan of Spiderman is
| _saying_ that you are a fan of Spiderman. The other
| Spiderman fans have no way to kick you out of the fandom.
| EA is more like Spiderman fandom than it is like
| priesthood in the Catholic Church.
|
| At least in the Bay Area, I heard that the people who
| regularly organize in-person events will refuse entry to
| certain men who have a history of preying on women, but
| really there is no way to prevent those men or anyone
| else from persisting in publicly proclaiming that they
| are effective altruists.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| I mean they purchased a building for their HQ and had
| group meetups and stuff. It's a bit less nebulous than
| your spiderman fans example.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33903850
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| And how do you know that?
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| As someone who doesn't have the resources: of course I don't.
|
| But I also don't want the markets dictated by the whims of
| some dissociated jackoff arrogantly and ineffectively
| disbursing obscene amounts of money, and certainly not with
| the momentum of some centralized institution. I need cheaper
| food and cheaper rent and cheaper utilities prices to be able
| to effectively act as an altruist - you have to take care of
| yourself before you can take care of others - and when all of
| the resources are being siphoned off and distributed to the
| top, myself and millions of others simply lack the capacity.
|
| And if many hands makes for little work, doesn't that give
| way to a more effective framework than a handful of people
| controlling affecting altruism? I reckon so.
|
| Not to mention the whole free market thesis being wholly
| disrupted by the shrinkage of the middle class in developed
| nations, leaving the have-nots subordinated to the haves and
| ever more preoccupied with just getting by.
| mtsr wrote:
| You do you, and please don't take this as a complaint about
| altruism per se. But making one feel good is often considered
| the most important (and most effective) part of effective
| altruism.
| Tyr42 wrote:
| [delayed]
| devindotcom wrote:
| Glad it's worked out for you. But if you had been inspired to
| take charitable action by, say, being born again in evangelical
| christianity, should people abstain from pointing out the
| problems with that institution? And does every article critical
| of such an institution need to be tempered with praise to
| satisfy those who have not experienced its dark side or who
| disagree with the premise?
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| But _is_ EA an institution? It seems to me like a big-tent
| philosophy; anybody (honest or dishonest) can declare
| themselves an adherent, and while there are several
| organizations within the umbrella, there 's nobody conferring
| official titles.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| What happens in the EA is pretty much exactly a mirror of what
| happens in churches. The good and the bad. I hope it will serve
| to illustrate how we all are human and will react similarly in
| similar environments.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| Both function as a 'we are the good people' mask for bad
| behaviors. I don't think it's necessarily human to join and
| protect groups that function as whitewashing.
| mentalpiracy wrote:
| lowercase effective altruism is fine and good.
|
| Effective Altruists hijacked their original, not-terrible idea
| into a cult.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| I may be missing sarcasm here, but isn't the lower case
| version just altruism? The kind where you just do good stuff
| for people and don't brand it or advertise it?
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Altruism is just any kind of selfless helping of others.
| The "effective" part means thinking about how to do more
| good with limited resources; ie does a marginal dollar
| spent on cancer research do as much good as a dollar spent
| on malaria control.
|
| Not everyone wants to do the math themselves so there's
| some communication involved in sharing that research.
|
| And as with any cause, outreach can be very productive as
| well. Unless you're so wealthy that you think you can solve
| the world's problems all by yourself, you might find it
| worthwhile to spend some time on advocacy.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > ... but the effect EA has had on my life so far is that it
| gave me motivation and an easy framework to donate thousands of
| dollars a year to fund deworming, vaccination, and other direct
| relief in underdeveloped countries
|
| TFA literally explains how a $18m donation with _stolen money_
| was used by the EA movement to buy a lavish mansion.
|
| TFA also explains of the EA movement was lauding SBF for
| driving in a beaten up Toyota Corolla even though they fully
| knew he was living in a $40m luxury mansion in the Bahamas
| while flying private.
|
| What makes you think most of the money you donate to such gurus
| actually end up to charitable causes ?
|
| If you want to donate, donate directly to charitable causes
| instead of donating to obvious charlatans.
|
| The EA movement tarnished its reputation by being accomplice in
| defrauding people's money in the FTX scam.
|
| They played the "SBF is an altruistic genius driving a Toyota
| Corolla" card while they knew it wasn't true and people fell
| for it.
|
| Turns out: there was no altruistic genius. And that's a
| decision of justice: guilty on seven criminal counts.
|
| Maybe "EA" should be renamed "EC": "Effective Criminals"?
| rutierut wrote:
| It's a wonder that obnoxious hit pieces like this still get made
| in this day and age. The first paragraph is filled with
| disingenuous strawman rhetoric.
|
| > colonize space, plunder the vast resources of the cosmos
|
| The author obviously tries to draw a parallel between inter-earth
| colonization and plundering to make longtermism and by proxy AE
| look bad.
|
| I'm not an EA but I've never met people more receptive to
| criticism as they are. This is a group of people, uniting around
| a desire to do good, actually going through with it, and somehow
| catching a huge amount of flak for it.
| RationalDino wrote:
| EA sounds rational and wonderful. And it does make sense. We
| should follow our logic to its rational conclusions. Our moral
| intuitions are obviously wrong a lot - just look at the trolley
| problem. With reason we can do better.
|
| The problem is that it quickly becomes an invitation to ideas
| like longtermism. Which involve long chains of potentially flawed
| reasoning, leading to the belief that you're doing tremendous
| good. And with confirmation bias making it hard for you to doubt
| your logic, leading to an unbounded potential for error.
|
| As the old moral goes, "Nobody is as easy to fool as a person who
| wants to fool himself."
|
| This problem is not original to EA. The history of the 20th
| century is full of potential utopias. On the basis of the end
| justifies the means, the prospect of infinite good justifies
| unlimited harm. Unlimited harm came in the form of wars, famines,
| and mass repression. But the utopian futures never materialized.
|
| That said, there is a lot of good to the idea of EA. It is better
| to do something effective than to virtue signal. But we should
| also be biased towards wins we can be more sure are real. Things
| that are short term and concrete. The more distant and hard to
| measure the win, the more that we should bias ourselves to the
| belief that we're missing something.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _The more distant and hard to measure the win..._
|
| known for ages* by the phrase "the end does not justify the
| means"
|
| * _exitus acta_ numquam _probat_
| jltsiren wrote:
| It's the old debate between rationalism and empiricism again.
|
| "Rational" is a dangerous word. On the surface, it sounds like
| "smart". But if you take rationalism to the extreme, it becomes
| epistemological opposition to evidence. You build mental models
| and make logical conclusions without considering if the
| conclusions are also valid in the real world.
|
| Scientific worldview is closer to empiricism than rationalism.
| You start by assuming that your mental models are wrong. They
| may still be useful, but you have to make observations and
| experiments and consider the evidence to determine that.
|
| Effective altruism is a useful concept. It only becomes
| problematic once you get too deep into rationalism. The
| effectiveness of your altruism is fundamentally an empirical
| question, and it should be answered by empirical means rather
| than by reasoning.
| Animats wrote:
| The philosophical question is, what's the discount rate on moral
| decisions? Is saving 2 lives in 10 years better than saving one
| life now? It's the trolley problem over time. What should that
| number be? And who gets to set it? Optimal values for young
| people are higher than those for old people.
|
| The problem with "effective altruism" is much simpler. Most of
| the people behind it were crooks.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Yep. Crooks have been hiding behind charity since forever. It
| didn't invalidate charity then and it doesn't now.
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(page generated 2023-11-12 23:00 UTC)