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Effective Altruism Is about Getting Rich with a Clean Conscience

130 points by grebulon 4y ago

grebulon 4y ago
“It’s my big number.” I tell people it’s OK to be rich.”
spindle 4y ago
This certainly isn't true for some of the founders of effective altruism, like Peter Singer, who gives away money as he earns it (as opposed to promising to give it away in the future) and isn't rich (by First World standards).
- woodruffw 4y ago
  I don't know to what extent "mainstream" EA can rest on Singer's plaudits: I got a decent amount of pushback from EAs (or EA-sympathetic people) on this site just last week for pointing out that they've diverged significantly from Singer's original altruistic positions. It seems a little hypocritical to use him as ethical cover without adhering more closely to his specific ethical proscriptions (which don't, to my knowledge, include Internet Rationalist stuff like AGI and colonizing the galaxy).
  - spindle 4y ago
    I agree with you about Singer. And about hypocrisy. If you got pushback, then I guess it must be controversial what "EA" refers to at the moment. I hope it shakes out in a sensible way.
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      I hope so too! I think Singer (and the school he's produced) have made some very important contributions to applied ethics, and it would be a shame to have those contributions imploded or overwhelmed by a small group of conscience-plagued billionaires.
- tptacek 4y ago
  But it is true for other leaders in the movement, like Nick Beckstead, who wrote a PhD dissertation that argued that wealthy people in developed countries deserved aid more than poor people in developing countries, because the wealthy were more likely to make a further positive impact.
  - yboris 4y ago
    Could you share where Nick says this? His dissertation is here: https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/40469/PDF/1/play/ https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/40469/PDF/1... On the Overwhelming Importance Of Shaping the Far Future If you are right, I am confident that, at best, there's a small comment about how it might be the case that in some situations, particular people could do more good with resources, and not (as you put it!) that "wealthy people in developed countries deserved aid more than poor people"
    - tptacek 4y ago
      This is a weird hand to go all-in on, since you can just CMD-F the dissertation to find this: By ordinary standardsat least by ordinary enlightened humanitarian standardssaving and improving lives in rich countries is about equally as important as saving and improving lives in poor countries, provided lives are improved by roughly comparable amounts. But it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal
      - yboris 4y ago
        All this assumes that "saving and improving lives" costs the same. Because this is very not true, your summary: "that wealthy people in developed countries deserved aid more than poor people in developing countries" fees like an inaccurate summary of Nick's views.
        tptacek 4y ago
        I really don't care how you want to slice and dice this excerpt. Whatever the fairest summary of it you can come up with is, just pretend that's what I was referring to, and I think my point will still hold.
freedude 4y ago
If I am doing wrong in order to perform good deeds I am setting myself up for a lifetime as a failure. This is like the mafia leader that gives to the church. Good deeds can never pay back the evil anyone has ever committed. The solution is only found in the blood of Christ.
mikkqu 4y ago
Is it a bad thing?
- HarryHirsch 4y ago
  The rich man who came to Jesus asking him what he should do knew that too much money was a bad thing. He followed all the commandments but felt that it wasn't enough.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  Is it a bad thing that people can convince themselves that whatever they do to make a lot of money is ethical as long as they buy some mosquito nets afterward? I can see some potential issues.
  - tfigment 4y ago
    Felix Salmon on Slate Money podcast this past weekend suggest that its still net positive given alternative is those people don't even try to make world better. More nuanced than that but my take on the position.
    - HarryHirsch 4y ago
      Effective altruism sounds like choosing between destroying the enviroment and destroying the enviroment with some greenwashing on top. In my mind, the movement amounts to PR to make excessive riches and excessive political influence palatable.
    - emodendroket 4y ago
      What if the alternative might be someone says “no, this is a bridge too far for me” and just doesn’t do something?
  - eddsh1994 4y ago
    > whatever they do to make a lot of money is ethical as long as they buy some mosquito nets afterward EA doesn't support this. It's absolutely not okay to do immoral things to make money and even things like Earning to Give via legit quant roles is and was pretty hotly debated.
virtualritz 4y ago
"[...] It is sadly thus that the very human impulse to help others [...] have been infused with logic so cold that even Mr. Spock would cringe upon hearing it. One iteration of this tendency is in the idea of “effective altruism.” We believe a more accurate phrase for this concept is “defective altruism” and will therefore use that term for the remainder of this article." Quoted from https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_elitist_philanthropy_of_so_called_effective_altruism# https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_elitist_philanthropy_of_...
- deleted 4y ago
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- kbelder 4y ago
  >We believe a more accurate phrase for this concept is “defective altruism” and will therefore use that term for the remainder of this article." How could anyone take an article that includes a sentence like that seriously?
  - virtualritz 4y ago
    That's a rather odd way to say you didn't actually read it. It's written like a paper and I quoted from "the abstract". To understand the conclusion in the abstract you obviously need to read the paper.
yourMaster_666 4y ago
Effective Altruism is a lipstick on a pig.
eddsh1994 4y ago
I know EA's who earn six figure salaries but take the average salary of the country (UK) and donate the rest. So you will find anecdotal evidence supporting both getting rich and not getting rich. But let's say people do get rich and donate to charities to have a clean conscience... is this a bad thing? EA is not a reason to do outright immoral actions to donate to charity but out-competing a colleague for a promotion? Leaving a job after 6 months to take double the salary elsewhere? I think these are all decisions I've personally taken for EA-based reasons and donate a fixed 10% per month so yes ultimately I've ended up richer but I fund more charities and that seems like a good thing. Building ponzi schemes to redirect money from investors to charities is never okay.
- tomrod 4y ago
  Utilitarianism is fine with doing bad to some for the betterment of all. EA is re-skinned utilitarianism. It's really as simple as that and suffers no reduction to see that -- talking about how its not good to do harm to others is a noble point that ignores that utilitarianism is fine with harm done to some (versus only seeking Pareto-improving outcomes).
  - kiba 4y ago
    I don't know what that means since all ethics must account for consequences of their choices. The idea of doing bad to do some good seems to be a theoretical concept, but not likely to hold up in reality.
  - eddsh1994 4y ago
    EA is not the same as Utilitarianism. This is the butchered message without nuance that people are reading in relatively shallow posts like the one we're commenting about. https://www.effectivealtruism.org/faqs-criticism-objections https://www.effectivealtruism.org/faqs-criticism-objections has a small paragraph on the differences. Having been involved with EA since 2017 in my own small way I can absolutely say with confidence it is not the same. Ends do not justify the means. It is simply meant to be a guiding philosophy to how you donate; treat all lives equally and donate focusing on lives saved per dollar. This should be backed by research proving it's effectiveness and can be unintuitive. There is a vocal longtermist view point that lives in the future should be valued the same resulting in some pretty weird ideas but I ignore most of that.
orzig 4y ago
I want to highlight that this opens with > based on […] some quick reading I’ve done on the topic and is dominated by a quote from Hitchhiker’s Guide. There are much better considered critiques of effective altruism than this article.
- p10jkle 4y ago
  eg: https://www.salon.com/2022/11/20/what-the-sam-bankman-fried-debacle-can-teach-us-about-longtermism/ https://www.salon.com/2022/11/20/what-the-sam-bankman-fried-...
- grebulon 4y ago
  Please share some, if you don't mind. Happy to read more and learn more. :)
  - WillPostForFood 4y ago
    https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-i-am-not-an-effective-altruist https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-i-am-not-an-effective-al...
- ajkjk 4y ago
  I'll always take another.
- cschmidt 4y ago
  This was a very good read: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad? https://www.economist.com/1843/2022/11/15/the-good-delusion-has-effective-altruism-broken-bad https://www.economist.com/1843/2022/11/15/the-good-delusion-... Edit: this article is discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33618156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33618156
- deleted 4y ago
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varelse 4y ago
moistly 4y ago
The one and only billionaire who gets to die with a clean conscience is Chuck Feely. Dude was a billionaire. Gave it all away. Now he’s an ordinary $2 millionaire. All other billionaires should be ashamed.
- germinalphrase 4y ago
  *Chuck Feeney
whatshisface 4y ago
The only way to get rich with a clean conscience is to use your money to buy social status at cool charities (like the MIT media lab) while keeping most of it for yourself. There's no way that starving kids in Africa can offer the kind of status that semicharitable PR foundations do. For one thing, they can't write articles like this
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  This is probably why EA is swerving away from impactful large-scale disease prevention type stuff and into paying each other to worry about HAL 9000.
kiba 4y ago
The idea that you can excuse your poor behavior by donating to charity to effective altruism is a poor take on the concept. How you got rich is important, because damages as well contributions must be accounted for. The notion of 'end justify the mean' probably just means you end up being a docuhebag instead of contributing anything meaningful.
aschearer 4y ago
For someone who claims to read a lot it's odd that he would use a passage from an unrelated source to describe the motivation for EA. Why not just read some of the direct sources and their motivations? The Life You Can Save by Peter Singer is quite short and accessible. Maybe it's easier to attack straw men... Having read Singer, I'd say that the motivation is to take the sense of "doing good in the world" and apply reason to it. There's a kid drowning in a pond in front of you and there's a kid drowning on the other side of the world. Why do we act differently, Singer asks? From there he goes on to build an ethical case that it's our _obligation_ to give significantly more to charity. I don't recall Singer ever advocating for earning ever more money, nor certainly doing so at the expense of others. And I'm fairly certain Singer would strongly object to deferring giving to some uncertain future point. Setting aside this article, where's all the hate for giving to charity coming from? Guilty consciences? Shouldn't we as a society celebrate and encourage giving? It seems the alternative more often then not is to accumulate.
- tptacek 4y ago
  I don't think it's reasonable to simply read Peter Singer and define the whole movement with his ideas, because EA-thought doesn't stop there.
  - aschearer 4y ago
    Well I've provided the basis of my understanding of EA, which is more than you or the author. If we're meant to have a conversation on the merits of EA then we need to be clear about our terms. To try to mind read, if everyone's simply saying: "it's wrong for someone to do immoral things and justify them with the promise of future charity" then I suspect there's not much to say except, "Yes, duh."
    - tptacek 4y ago
      I think it's safe to assume that people talking about EA this month are thinking more in terms of MacAskill and longtermist EA; the EA of "earn to give" and AI defense.
- 4y ago
setgree 4y ago
Thinking about the counterfactual for a bit: if EAs weren't EAs, who would they be? * Finance professionals who gave less to charity? * altruistic folks who gave to poorly validated charities? * Changemakers who decided instead to go for the money and thereby reify the social structures of their lives? * Regular people who thought less hard about ethics, e.g. giving vegetarianism or veganism a go? * Regular people who never considered becoming megalomaniac crypto scammers? And whether EA is good or bad as a whole depends on the characteristics and composition of this counterfactual group. IMO, that's pretty hard to get a good grip on.
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  We don’t know what else could happen with the example. Maybe a finance professional would have become a socialist and put their own effort in for societal improvements alongside donating.
  - setgree 4y ago
    Totally! And this is why evaluating whether a movement like EA is good or not is really hard. In general, for hard questions like this, I take a “know them by their fruit“ approach, I.e. seeing how folks do on easier-to-evaluate ethics tests, like whether someone is vegetarian or vegan. By that light, the movement comes out looking pretty good. If you apply a more anti-capitalist test, the movement does not look so good.
ltbarcly3 4y ago
Why would it be wrong to get rich without doing things which you should be ashamed of later, and helping people that need it? I think it's normal charity that should be considered conscience laundering. You give money to the Red Cross and feel good about yourself, and ignore the fact that the money is embezzled or squandered without helping anyone. It's people that don't care where the charity money goes or the long term consequences of it when it does at least go to someone in need that should be criticized.
recursivedoubts 4y ago
A lot of charity is performative. I have been forced to attend absolutely disgusting gala events where rich people sell one another discounted items, donated as tax deductions via the companies they run, and give speeches about how important it is to help the poor. Beyond the base gluttony, the feeling of being a "good person" is the point of all of it, and to absolve themselves of the fact that much of the wealth there is built on the backs of working people via usury, swindle and vice. Infuriating. This is why Jesus said: > Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
- deleted 4y ago
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btreesOfSpring 4y ago
Not sure what the end-game is in this line of thinking but the consistent narratives against both charitable giving or government intervention to produce institutions of social assistance can not be good for the unfortunate and marginalized.
Biganon 4y ago
I'm sorry, is there a problem with my browser? Did I miss 90% of the "article"? Or is it just an assertion and a quote from a book? Because I see a grand total of 0 arguments for or against the thesis that is being made, just "I think EA is this. Here's a quote by Douglas Adams."
- deleted 4y ago
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- grebulon 4y ago
  Well, I wouldn't call it an 'article' myself. More of a note or a perspective, with a connection to one of my favorite books. :) I wrote a long piece about the features Twitter needs, and I'd say that's a nice long article. This one is definitely just a quick note, but hopefully with an insightful connection that resonates with the HN crowd.
ifyoubuildit 4y ago
As someone who is not rich (as in I need to keep working to live, though I'm quite comfortable), I don't feel any animosity towards those that are. Am I doing it wrong? The headline seems to imply that gaining wealth is inherently a slimy thing to do. I just don't buy it. And if those people choose to donate some of that wealth, that seems strictly better than just being wealthy on its own. Maybe it's just so difficult for people to get ahead these days that they start to focus more on what other people have and become bitter?
- balderdash 4y ago
  I think it comes down to the fact that there are ways to get rich that run the spectrum of clean to dirty, on one end I don’t know how anyone faults the founders of BioNTech for getting rich creating a product that benefits humanity, on the other end of the spectrum it’s companies whose profits are derived from say government subsidies, “sin”, large exogenous societal costs are a little harder to feel good about…
zestyping 4y ago
Many aspects of Effective Altruism have been helpful, but Earning to Give is not one of them. When Effective Altruism started gaining traction in the early 2010s, Earning to Give was a poster child of EA recommendations, hailed as a counterintuitive yet rational outcome of utilitarian analysis. It has long been considered mainstream in Effective Altruism and was advocated heavily by the organization 80,000 Hours, which provides career advice for people wanting to do good in the world. It's not a bad thing to earn money in ethical ways and then also donate money to good causes. Unfortunately, one of the specific examples that gets the most attention is to go into high-frequency trading (instead of another career) so you can earn money to donate. https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/trading-in-quantitative-hedge-funds/ https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/trading-in-quantitativ... Although 80,000 Hours no longer emphasizes Earning to Give, it has never taken public responsibility for the damage it has done by steering young people toward career decisions that prioritize Earning to Give and for broadly legitimizing Earning to Give in EA circles.
- yboris 4y ago
  I saw Earning to Give as a broader strategy. I was a math teacher with no way to help those who were the worst-off in the world. By taking a fraction of my income and giving it to cost-effective charities I was able to do that. So could basically anyone - regardless of how divorced their work was from philanthropy. Earning to Give as a specific strategy for college-age students isn't terrible either. Of course one can pervert it by going to maximize earnings for a tobacco company, but people aiming to do good would most-likely steer away from these types of things anyway. I think the reason 80,000 Hours moved away from the Earning to Give strategy was because of the numerous new (and better) opportunities they were able to find as they put in more research time and as the movement grew in its size.
- wutbrodo 4y ago
  I was expecting some allusion to _why_ you think ETG is damaging. For a consequentialist, the baseline logic is straightforward: what do you think the pitfalls are? Or is your issue with consequentialism itself? The latter would seem to reject the fundamental premise of EA, not just ETG
PaulHoule 4y ago
Isn’t it all about spamming trolley problems until people give up on rational thinking about ethics completely?
- yboris 4y ago
  The right way to think about all trolley problems is that you can be one of any of the people in the scenario. So in the standard example, rather than having to choose to pull the lever or not, you can be one of six on the tracks. I suspect everyone would agree that having a 6/7 chance of survival is better than 2/7.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    Sometimes I think trolley problems need the option "do nothing, push the trolley up to the top of the hill, throw the switch, let the trolley fall again". Say the pair is ("Sam Bankman-Fried", "Eliezer Yudkowsky")
ajkjk 4y ago
In EA I see a bunch of people who are struggling to break free of the mindset of utilitarianism, because they are so entrenched in it that their only ability to criticize its application is itself utilitarianism. That is, if the only way you have to say that something is good is that it is "high value", then you are forced to evaluate all actions in terms of their value, and then I guess you can go and choose the highest value ones according to that system. But there are in fact wholly distinct ways to make moral judgments which are incompatible with that. "But", they say, "that's got to be the most valuable way of knowing what to do, basically by definition". No, you're just doing that thing again: you're measuring your measuring sticks using the same system, and then measuring your way of measuring measuring sticks using the same system again, ad infinitum. "But isn't that better? Your moral system must be worse than that." Yeah, mine's worse _in your system_. But it's better _in mine_, and to me you seem like... well.... a self-absorbed buffoon who found a way to fetishize utilitarianism and wealth-maximization and reason themselves out of any imperative to feel empathy or consideration for, like, the people or communities around you.
kryogen1c 4y ago
> here’s my take on effective altruism: I think it’s a justification for being ambitious, for getting as rich as possible, and (in many cases) by any means possible, and keeping your conscience clear along the way. Can someone explain to me what happened here? The last I knew about EA was from a JRE podcast in 2017 with macaskill, where his ideas were to spend currency where it had the greatest impact and with the greatest efficiency while presenting the least friction to give, and I recall these ideas and the charity being supported by thinkers like Sam Harris and others. Now I'm reading connections with sbf and future now and you'd think macaskill had gone full dark side. Macaskill's wiki says he wrote a book about longtermism which seems fine on its face but I've only read negative things about here on HN. Without knowing more, Seems like people are being reactionary to me. What's the scoop?
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  Things change. I dont know about EA but Sam Harris is too known for his Islamophobia now. Joe Rogan is lying about kitty litter boxes in schools and saying how kind and nice Ben Shapiro (a bigot) is
- yboris 4y ago
  I read MacAskill's What We Owe The Future - it's a great book, and a compelling argument. I recommend you read it. What I suspect might be happening is that "do gooders" (as research has shown) are often attacked by others because those that do good are a "threat" to the status quo. Rather than living your life as you do, when you encounter a vegetarian, you are reminded that your meat consumption causes suffering in animals. When you encounter an EA (Effective Altruist) giving 10% of their income to charity, you are reminded about how you too could do the same but are choosing not to. So for many people, it is easier to find some shred of hypocrisy or fault in those doing the good and thus have the clean conscience to ignore the good aims.
polygamous_bat 4y ago
KurvaKing 4y ago
jdoliner 4y ago
This feels a lot like the old canard that there's no such thing as altruism because altruistic people get joy out of acting altruistically and thus their altruism is really just selfishness. Which is ridiculous because the act of taking joy is itself the altruism, i.e. an altruist is the type of person who can take joy in things that benefit others rather than themselves, the joy doesn't negate the altruism, it is the altruism. That being said EA has clearly gone completely off the rails and FTX should be the final nail in the coffin. It's become a way for nerdy people to do stats and thought experiments and pretend they're doing something altruistic. EA will never be net positive given the massive negative that's been done by SBF and FTX.
polygamous_bat 4y ago
A lot of defense of EA on this thread follows the same chain of thought: "what's wrong with doing the most good? What's wrong with Peter Singer's philosophy of doing so? Have you read The Life You Can Save?" It's like trying to defend against criticisms of religious fundamentalism by saying "What about the teachings of Love and Kindness by Jesus? Have you ever read the Bible?" The literal words of the Bible doesn't matter as much when people who claim to follow it in the earnest are also doing the most harm. You need to have a conversation internally first to figure out what your ideology is, otherwise it just looks like avoiding responsibility to the "outsiders".
- gonehome 4y ago
  It's a little different - I don't personally identify as part of the EA movement because of the associated baggage, but the ideas around trying to do the most good, extending empathy beyond kin/culture to other people suffering that you cannot see, and reasoning about the effectiveness of charity make sense to me. Without getting into a flame war not fit for HN, the same cannot be said for the supernatural foundations and epistemic claims of religions - the foundational ideas of EA are not the problem in this case. I think Sam Harris breaks it down decently here: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/303-the-fall-of-sam-bankman-fried https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/303... though that's a little out of date with how fast news on the topic is moving. It's also another reminder why it's good to keep your identity small [0] and deal with the ideas directly. Said another way: "Go three-quarters of the way from deontology to utilitarianism and then stop. You are now in the right place. Stay there at least until you have become a god."[1] [0]: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html [1]: https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1497157447219232768?s=20&t=7fULq3NXML7gb2O4OMpGjA https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1497157447219232768?s...
- eddsh1994 4y ago
  There is a lot of conversation internally. You can see these debates here [0]. The guy credited with who got SBF into EA wrote a post [1] which was also debated heavily in the comments. A good introduction, or at least my introduction, was by the same guy's debate [2] which I recommend if people are interested in EA outside of the current media storm. [0] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/ https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/ [1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WdeiPrwgqW2wHAxgT/a-personal-statement-on-ftx https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WdeiPrwgqW2wHAxgT/... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qslo4-DpzPs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qslo4-DpzPs
yboris 4y ago
This is not at all what Effective Altruism is about. If you're getting crazy rich and giving 50% of it away to cost-effective charity than you're likely doing a tremendous net-amount of good. It's not as if you get a bunch of free stuff the moment you say I am doing something for EA purposes.
yboris 4y ago
Saying "Effective Altruism Is about Getting Rich with a Clean Conscience" is the same as saying "Vegetarianism is about breaking into animal shelters and letting all the animals out". What a rude and erroneous way to summarize a complex movement comprised of so many different activities and points of view.
scottLobster 4y ago
Honestly "Effective Altruism" is just another empty set of words. See all the No-True-Scotsman fallacies in this comment thread alone. Unless there's an explicitly codified standard of behavior, the words are meaningless. "Effective" by what standards? "Altruism" according to who? One person's altruism is another's abuse. Safe Injection Sites for drug addicts are a good example, on one hand they are "altruistic" in trying to prevent deaths of drug addicts and hopefully steer some toward rehab programs. On the other hand they bring crowds of junkies to whatever neighborhood they're in, likely making life more dangerous for any residents/businesses. Is the use of imminent domain to build public infrastructure "effective altruism" when it bulldozes peoples' homes for a new road? Most of the time calling something "effective altruism" is just the time-honored tradition of projecting a veneer of righteousness onto an action, and sometimes an attempt to shut down counterarguments that are pointing out negative impacts. It's just the new, trendier "making the world a better place".
- yboris 4y ago
  I wonder if you missed the part about Effective Altruism (at its origin and in current practice) being about giving 10% or more of one's income to cost-effective charities. This isn't a "veneer of righteousness" to give away thousands of dollars to charity (even when living on "average" income). Many EA people abstain from animal products (which is a substantial change in one's behavior in today's culture). What gave you the idea that EA was "just another empty set of words"?
  - scottLobster 4y ago
    And who decides if the charities are effective? And even if they are effective, at what cost? Right now there are many charities that are dumping clothes on sub-Saharan Africa, and while those charities may be "effective" at clothing Africans they've also denied said Africans any chance at a native textile/fashion industry due to the dumping making such industries unprofitable. Is that a worthy trade? What if two EAs making the same amount give the same 10% to two effective but opposing charities (say one donates to a charity promoting veganism and the other donates to a charity that provides free meals, including meat, to starving populations), is their altruism still effective or does it cancel out? Like I said, it's "making the world a better place" 2.0. Better for whom? With what trade-offs? Well that seems to be up to the EA in question, with vague guiding principles of "be good, honest and focus on helping as many neglected people as possible" (https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-effective-altruism#what-values-unite-effective-altruism https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-e...). Who decides who's being neglected? Can a group of people, say a subsistence farming community be considered "neglected" if they're satisfied with their lives, even if they're technically living in extreme poverty? I could go on in detail, but reading that site's "values" is largely just a collection of left-wing-ish tropes where it's assumed the reader already knows what otherwise vague terms mean and agrees with their definitions. Which is ironic given Value 3: "Rather than starting with a commitment to a certain cause, community or approach, it’s important to consider many different ways to help and seek to find the best ones. This means putting serious time into deliberation and reflection on one’s beliefs, being constantly open and curious for new evidence and arguments, and being ready to change one’s views quite radically." Even prescribing the 10%+ of income donated to charity, so? That's no different than a tithe. Only here you get to choose the church's values assuming you pick anything in the general direction of "good". Ultimately it suffers from similar attempts to replace religion with secular humanism. The belief system is so abstract that, despite all the words it and its advocates spend describing itself, it doesn't really stand for anything more sophisticated than the lyrics to the Power Rangers Wild Force intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Y3Ib0YNFaQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Y3Ib0YNFaQ
stephc_int13 4y ago
Good Conscience is liberating. Humans really are afraid to be punished, they've all been kids at some point, the fear of being bad is deeply ingrained. In practice, the more important and beneficial part is to be seen as good by others. If someone can convince enough people, they will have little doubts about themselves. As a rule, I consider any advertisement of virtue as suspicious.
rich_sasha 4y ago
So there are some assholes doing EA. Maybe even it's a majority. Maybe even the organisations that front it are all "look how amazing we are". Is EA actually... bad? It would seem at worst it's not as good as advertised. If 10% of the followers donate 10% of their income to charity, isn't that a massive win? I'm not part of EA myself, like many I'm mildly annoyed by the arrogance but also feel like that's not enough to substantially criticise a movement.
- raydiatian 4y ago
  > Is EA actually bad It’s the “do well while doing good” philosophy that underlies EA, that is quietly grinning in the shadows eyes glowing sick with greed. Doing well while doing good means turning a profit (or gaining/maintaining power, after the fact) by fixing important problems. The issue here is that you’ve got a principal-agent problem. Jeff Bezos has $150B, says he’ll give it all away in his lifetime. But he’s not going to give it away. He is going to invest it. You’ve got the Bezos Earth Fund which is looking to bootstrap solutions to climate change. The end result of just one winner? Bezos interest group has a huge foot on the thing that controls climate change. This is a lever, for them to pull as necessary. The same way Twitter is a lever for Must. EA is fine, but the problem is that in America “the best of us are by definition the richest” and so it’s pretty hard to engineer a situation where the rich don’t get richer much less agree to concede power to the next party.
  - rich_sasha 4y ago
    As I read your excellent comment, I'm trying to find the bit where the world would be better off if Bezos wasn't a part of EA and I'm not sure I can. Without EA he might still have some BS foundation like many before (I'm not actually taking a stance on his work, I have no idea about it). He might use one to push his weight around and have an outsized influence. Maybe without the label of EA there would be more pressure to justify the scope and impact of charitable work? I'm not sure.
    - raydiatian 4y ago
      > your excellent comment Are you being snarky? I genuinely can’t tell, sorry if you aren’t. > trying to find the bit where the world would be better off if.. You’re right. I don’t genuinely know. I get the feeling more and more each day that our system is hardcore stupid broken. My gut feeling is that the existence of Bezos and EA are, on the whole, part and parcel. Bezos is the product of a system that warps mankind around working to build empires for the few that win the Pareto distribution game. EA feels like the latest contemporary whitewash used to protect it. Maybe I’m just a loser and I deserved to be fucked over at the grocery store and the doctors office for existing but not having more to give to my employer. I just wish my perception would catch up to reality.
aetherson 4y ago
The idea that there's a big demand for a fig leaf that excuses getting rich strikes me as extremely wrong. I don't think that there are a significant number of people in the world who are like, "I'm all set to get rich, except oh no I need to find some excuse for getting rich otherwise someone will be mean to me and I can't deal with that, oh thank god, it's Effective Altruism, now I can get rich." To a first approximation, everyone on this site regularly participates in threads talking about how to maximize their compensation, without anyone feeling a particular need for a fig leaf.
- gregw134 4y ago
  On the other hand, there are plenty of people ready to look down on you if your goal is to make money.
  - tacker2000 4y ago
    So what? Everyone should do it for there own reasons and not care. Is there anything bad about wanting to be wealthy or having power? I dont think so. I think the actual problem is when you are already rich enougg and still want more and more. That is the cancer that is ruining our society.
  - aetherson 4y ago
    My experience is that the number of people who even ask for your justification for increasing your income or wealth is approximately zero. Like I do not think I have ever once in my life had someone say any variation on, "But why would you want to make more money?" And, to be clear, I'm pretty wealthy and am well past the point where, like, there's an obvious necessity for more money. I'm not a subsistence farmer is what I'm saying. If someone does hassle you about your justifications for your wealth, it seems really easy to write that off as jealousy. I am sure that somewhere in the world, there is someone so simultaneously ambitious yet wracked with guilt about their ambition that they need an excuse to satisfy their ambition. I just doubt that there are enough such people that Effective Altruism can use such people as a foundation for its existence.
dnissley 4y ago
This gets part of the way there I think. A lot of EAs have issues with scrupulosity, "pathological guilt/anxiety about moral or religious issues"[1]. It's not so much that any of them have really done anything to feel bad about, it's just that they tend to be the kind of people with a tendency to be very hard on themselves about ever smaller things. The article doesn't accuse them of doing anything bad exactly, but it's kind of... in the background? And even if the article writer didn't intend that, a lot of people, when they discuss this type of thing do intend it. That being rich is somehow bad, or means you did something bad, or reflects poorly on your moral fiber. Which I want to point out is a huge assumption and should be drawn out and pinned to the ground as something worthy of discussion. My own (more extreme) take is that not only have none of them done anything to feel bad about, but that most of them are living hugely net social positive lives and would have been even if they never gave so much as a dime to charity. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrupulosity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrupulosity
constantcrying 4y ago
I do not think this is convincing in any way. And I very much dislike people assigning cynical motivations for the moral preferences of others. Any activity can be described this way. "Working in a soup kitchen?" "I bet you are doing this because it makes you feel superior to all the others who do not volunteer, right? And also, you feel less guilty seeing homeless people now, after all you are already doing something, so there is no reason to feel obligated to them aswell". I am sure that there are many entirely sincere EA enthusiasts, wanting nothing more than see their money be used to better the lives of others. Spending time organizing, fundraising, optimizing charity, doing outreach, some of it might even be "hard work", done gladly without receiving any praise or compensation. On the other hand a friend of mine is regularly getting up at 2am to drag the injured, freezing, decrepit and mentally ill into a place where they can get some semblance of help. To me it is clear who is actually more deserving of respect and who does more to improve the lives of people. If everything you have is money, all problem look like they are solved by spending.
- chubot 4y ago
  I’m ok with people working in soup kitchens or buying mosquito nets “feeling superior” What disturbs me is crypto scammers and the uninformed spouting off about “AI alignment” buying influence within the government, with stolen money Also people who are either dishonest or comically aware of conflicts of interest, pretending they’re above it because they’re “rational”. Eg the AI alignment stuff is mostly funded by corporations and is part of their marketing arm
- deleted 4y ago
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zencloudgarden 4y ago
Being woke is about enjoying priviledge with a clean conscience
zencloudgarden 4y ago
Being woke is about enjoying privilege with a clean conscience
atlgator 4y ago
Who determines what "the most good" is and by what metrics? Is this where charity meets authoritarianism?
- yboris 4y ago
  No authoritarianism. The movement is comprised of numerous people. The general foundation is focusing on making the world a better place; many different directions are encouraged. A sensible metric is something akin to "well being of sentient life forms of today and the future". If you have a different direction than the movement, that's fine. What the movement can do for you is to help you pick ways of helping others that cost less per-dollar-donated or per-effort-spent. Consider learning more https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
  - atlgator 4y ago
    It doesn't need to be a one-person dictatorship to be authoritarian. How long before this is coopted by politics that limit charitable spending on anything but projects that are "blessed" by this group?
    - yboris 4y ago
      No one is forced to stay inside Effective Altruism. You can be an Effective Altruist without calling yourself one. You give to charities EA recommends without subscribing to even half of what EAs care about. If EA is "coopted by politics" I suspect many people will leave and the movement will become a shell of what it currently is. I'm unsure I understand your concern fully.
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fedeb95 4y ago
My thoughts exactly. Apparently making a blog post explains it better than comments on pro-EA posts so kudos to you
fedeb95 4y ago
Another point against the intersection of EA and HN: it seems to agitate souls very much. I guess every age has its religion... and moral justification for its deeds.
kybernetyk 4y ago
A lot of mental gymnastics that could have been avoided if one just read Ayn Rand...
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
Not sure that those claiming to be pursuing "Effective Altruism" have a conscience. If they did, then it seems they would not need to invoke this term to describe their actions, or in this case, their "promised" actions and stated intentions. Long before the internet, and the means to make up language and spread the most nonsensical ideas to millions of people across the globe in milliseconds, people, some of whom became wealthy, acted altruistically. One does not need wealth to practice altruism. Many people do it instinctively. To suggest or even imply that altruism not backed by wealth is insignificant or even less significant is not a novel idea, nor is it non-obvious. It is, of course, deeply cynical. We can expect such unoriginal "thinking" from those entranced by the so-called "tech" industry.
- deleted 4y ago
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MomoXenosaga 4y ago
JC wisely said that rich people's chances of ending up in heaven are pretty low. It was my own country that severed the last ties that the Western world had with medieval society's focus on the afterlife and overruled the Bible on economics. To quote Madonna we live in a material world.
lamontcg 4y ago
We are certainly in the regime where an increasing Gini coefficient is bad overall towards all of society and we need less inequality and not more. If your philosophy tries to contradict that, you need to figure out why your philosophy is wrong, not double down on counterintuitive reasoning as to why it is right. If you can't see why and don't have your eyes open as to why this is obvious, I can't help you.
MrMan 4y ago
I dont think Charity has much of a track record compared to commerce. There are some edge cases where market failures create situations where progress is stuck but those are lots of times governance problems. Telling people how to govern themselves is at least as fraught as the idea that just showering money on non-profits will do anything useful, so it's a tough one. I think non-profits are a way to increase the velocity of money which increases commerce, so while I think a lot of altruistic posturing is bullshit, if it gets people to spend money instead of hoarding it, that is an overall good thing, but for the wrong reasons.
owenpalmer 4y ago
syntax error on line 1 unexpected token: "

130 points by grebulon 4y ago

“It’s my big number.” I tell people it’s OK to be rich.”

This certainly isn't true for some of the founders of effective altruism, like Peter Singer, who gives away money as he earns it (as opposed to promising to give it away in the future) and isn't rich (by First World standards).

woodruffw 4y ago
I don't know to what extent "mainstream" EA can rest on Singer's plaudits: I got a decent amount of pushback from EAs (or EA-sympathetic people) on this site just last week for pointing out that they've diverged significantly from Singer's original altruistic positions. It seems a little hypocritical to use him as ethical cover without adhering more closely to his specific ethical proscriptions (which don't, to my knowledge, include Internet Rationalist stuff like AGI and colonizing the galaxy).
- spindle 4y ago
  I agree with you about Singer. And about hypocrisy. If you got pushback, then I guess it must be controversial what "EA" refers to at the moment. I hope it shakes out in a sensible way.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    I hope so too! I think Singer (and the school he's produced) have made some very important contributions to applied ethics, and it would be a shame to have those contributions imploded or overwhelmed by a small group of conscience-plagued billionaires.
tptacek 4y ago
But it is true for other leaders in the movement, like Nick Beckstead, who wrote a PhD dissertation that argued that wealthy people in developed countries deserved aid more than poor people in developing countries, because the wealthy were more likely to make a further positive impact.
- yboris 4y ago
  Could you share where Nick says this? His dissertation is here: https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/40469/PDF/1/play/ https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/40469/PDF/1... On the Overwhelming Importance Of Shaping the Far Future If you are right, I am confident that, at best, there's a small comment about how it might be the case that in some situations, particular people could do more good with resources, and not (as you put it!) that "wealthy people in developed countries deserved aid more than poor people"
  - tptacek 4y ago
    This is a weird hand to go all-in on, since you can just CMD-F the dissertation to find this: By ordinary standardsat least by ordinary enlightened humanitarian standardssaving and improving lives in rich countries is about equally as important as saving and improving lives in poor countries, provided lives are improved by roughly comparable amounts. But it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal
    - yboris 4y ago
      All this assumes that "saving and improving lives" costs the same. Because this is very not true, your summary: "that wealthy people in developed countries deserved aid more than poor people in developing countries" fees like an inaccurate summary of Nick's views.
      - tptacek 4y ago
        I really don't care how you want to slice and dice this excerpt. Whatever the fairest summary of it you can come up with is, just pretend that's what I was referring to, and I think my point will still hold.

freedude 4y ago

If I am doing wrong in order to perform good deeds I am setting myself up for a lifetime as a failure. This is like the mafia leader that gives to the church. Good deeds can never pay back the evil anyone has ever committed. The solution is only found in the blood of Christ.

mikkqu 4y ago

Is it a bad thing?

HarryHirsch 4y ago
The rich man who came to Jesus asking him what he should do knew that too much money was a bad thing. He followed all the commandments but felt that it wasn't enough.
emodendroket 4y ago
Is it a bad thing that people can convince themselves that whatever they do to make a lot of money is ethical as long as they buy some mosquito nets afterward? I can see some potential issues.
- tfigment 4y ago
  Felix Salmon on Slate Money podcast this past weekend suggest that its still net positive given alternative is those people don't even try to make world better. More nuanced than that but my take on the position.
  - HarryHirsch 4y ago
    Effective altruism sounds like choosing between destroying the enviroment and destroying the enviroment with some greenwashing on top. In my mind, the movement amounts to PR to make excessive riches and excessive political influence palatable.
  - emodendroket 4y ago
    What if the alternative might be someone says “no, this is a bridge too far for me” and just doesn’t do something?
- eddsh1994 4y ago
  > whatever they do to make a lot of money is ethical as long as they buy some mosquito nets afterward EA doesn't support this. It's absolutely not okay to do immoral things to make money and even things like Earning to Give via legit quant roles is and was pretty hotly debated.

virtualritz 4y ago

"[...] It is sadly thus that the very human impulse to help others [...] have been infused with logic so cold that even Mr. Spock would cringe upon hearing it. One iteration of this tendency is in the idea of “effective altruism.” We believe a more accurate phrase for this concept is “defective altruism” and will therefore use that term for the remainder of this article." Quoted from https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_elitist_philanthropy_of_so_called_effective_altruism# https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_elitist_philanthropy_of_...

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kbelder 4y ago
>We believe a more accurate phrase for this concept is “defective altruism” and will therefore use that term for the remainder of this article." How could anyone take an article that includes a sentence like that seriously?
- virtualritz 4y ago
  That's a rather odd way to say you didn't actually read it. It's written like a paper and I quoted from "the abstract". To understand the conclusion in the abstract you obviously need to read the paper.

yourMaster_666 4y ago

Effective Altruism is a lipstick on a pig.

eddsh1994 4y ago

I know EA's who earn six figure salaries but take the average salary of the country (UK) and donate the rest. So you will find anecdotal evidence supporting both getting rich and not getting rich. But let's say people do get rich and donate to charities to have a clean conscience... is this a bad thing? EA is not a reason to do outright immoral actions to donate to charity but out-competing a colleague for a promotion? Leaving a job after 6 months to take double the salary elsewhere? I think these are all decisions I've personally taken for EA-based reasons and donate a fixed 10% per month so yes ultimately I've ended up richer but I fund more charities and that seems like a good thing. Building ponzi schemes to redirect money from investors to charities is never okay.

tomrod 4y ago
Utilitarianism is fine with doing bad to some for the betterment of all. EA is re-skinned utilitarianism. It's really as simple as that and suffers no reduction to see that -- talking about how its not good to do harm to others is a noble point that ignores that utilitarianism is fine with harm done to some (versus only seeking Pareto-improving outcomes).
- kiba 4y ago
  I don't know what that means since all ethics must account for consequences of their choices. The idea of doing bad to do some good seems to be a theoretical concept, but not likely to hold up in reality.
- eddsh1994 4y ago
  EA is not the same as Utilitarianism. This is the butchered message without nuance that people are reading in relatively shallow posts like the one we're commenting about. https://www.effectivealtruism.org/faqs-criticism-objections https://www.effectivealtruism.org/faqs-criticism-objections has a small paragraph on the differences. Having been involved with EA since 2017 in my own small way I can absolutely say with confidence it is not the same. Ends do not justify the means. It is simply meant to be a guiding philosophy to how you donate; treat all lives equally and donate focusing on lives saved per dollar. This should be backed by research proving it's effectiveness and can be unintuitive. There is a vocal longtermist view point that lives in the future should be valued the same resulting in some pretty weird ideas but I ignore most of that.

orzig 4y ago

I want to highlight that this opens with > based on […] some quick reading I’ve done on the topic and is dominated by a quote from Hitchhiker’s Guide. There are much better considered critiques of effective altruism than this article.

p10jkle 4y ago
eg: https://www.salon.com/2022/11/20/what-the-sam-bankman-fried-debacle-can-teach-us-about-longtermism/ https://www.salon.com/2022/11/20/what-the-sam-bankman-fried-...
grebulon 4y ago
Please share some, if you don't mind. Happy to read more and learn more. :)
- WillPostForFood 4y ago
  https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-i-am-not-an-effective-altruist https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-i-am-not-an-effective-al...
ajkjk 4y ago
I'll always take another.
cschmidt 4y ago
This was a very good read: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad? https://www.economist.com/1843/2022/11/15/the-good-delusion-has-effective-altruism-broken-bad https://www.economist.com/1843/2022/11/15/the-good-delusion-... Edit: this article is discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33618156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33618156
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varelse 4y ago

moistly 4y ago

The one and only billionaire who gets to die with a clean conscience is Chuck Feely. Dude was a billionaire. Gave it all away. Now he’s an ordinary $2 millionaire. All other billionaires should be ashamed.

germinalphrase 4y ago
*Chuck Feeney

whatshisface 4y ago

The only way to get rich with a clean conscience is to use your money to buy social status at cool charities (like the MIT media lab) while keeping most of it for yourself. There's no way that starving kids in Africa can offer the kind of status that semicharitable PR foundations do. For one thing, they can't write articles like this

giraffe_lady 4y ago
This is probably why EA is swerving away from impactful large-scale disease prevention type stuff and into paying each other to worry about HAL 9000.

kiba 4y ago

The idea that you can excuse your poor behavior by donating to charity to effective altruism is a poor take on the concept. How you got rich is important, because damages as well contributions must be accounted for. The notion of 'end justify the mean' probably just means you end up being a docuhebag instead of contributing anything meaningful.

aschearer 4y ago

For someone who claims to read a lot it's odd that he would use a passage from an unrelated source to describe the motivation for EA. Why not just read some of the direct sources and their motivations? The Life You Can Save by Peter Singer is quite short and accessible. Maybe it's easier to attack straw men... Having read Singer, I'd say that the motivation is to take the sense of "doing good in the world" and apply reason to it. There's a kid drowning in a pond in front of you and there's a kid drowning on the other side of the world. Why do we act differently, Singer asks? From there he goes on to build an ethical case that it's our _obligation_ to give significantly more to charity. I don't recall Singer ever advocating for earning ever more money, nor certainly doing so at the expense of others. And I'm fairly certain Singer would strongly object to deferring giving to some uncertain future point. Setting aside this article, where's all the hate for giving to charity coming from? Guilty consciences? Shouldn't we as a society celebrate and encourage giving? It seems the alternative more often then not is to accumulate.

tptacek 4y ago
I don't think it's reasonable to simply read Peter Singer and define the whole movement with his ideas, because EA-thought doesn't stop there.
- aschearer 4y ago
  Well I've provided the basis of my understanding of EA, which is more than you or the author. If we're meant to have a conversation on the merits of EA then we need to be clear about our terms. To try to mind read, if everyone's simply saying: "it's wrong for someone to do immoral things and justify them with the promise of future charity" then I suspect there's not much to say except, "Yes, duh."
  - tptacek 4y ago
    I think it's safe to assume that people talking about EA this month are thinking more in terms of MacAskill and longtermist EA; the EA of "earn to give" and AI defense.
4y ago

setgree 4y ago

Thinking about the counterfactual for a bit: if EAs weren't EAs, who would they be? * Finance professionals who gave less to charity? * altruistic folks who gave to poorly validated charities? * Changemakers who decided instead to go for the money and thereby reify the social structures of their lives? * Regular people who thought less hard about ethics, e.g. giving vegetarianism or veganism a go? * Regular people who never considered becoming megalomaniac crypto scammers? And whether EA is good or bad as a whole depends on the characteristics and composition of this counterfactual group. IMO, that's pretty hard to get a good grip on.

skinnymuch 4y ago
We don’t know what else could happen with the example. Maybe a finance professional would have become a socialist and put their own effort in for societal improvements alongside donating.
- setgree 4y ago
  Totally! And this is why evaluating whether a movement like EA is good or not is really hard. In general, for hard questions like this, I take a “know them by their fruit“ approach, I.e. seeing how folks do on easier-to-evaluate ethics tests, like whether someone is vegetarian or vegan. By that light, the movement comes out looking pretty good. If you apply a more anti-capitalist test, the movement does not look so good.

ltbarcly3 4y ago

Why would it be wrong to get rich without doing things which you should be ashamed of later, and helping people that need it? I think it's normal charity that should be considered conscience laundering. You give money to the Red Cross and feel good about yourself, and ignore the fact that the money is embezzled or squandered without helping anyone. It's people that don't care where the charity money goes or the long term consequences of it when it does at least go to someone in need that should be criticized.

recursivedoubts 4y ago

A lot of charity is performative. I have been forced to attend absolutely disgusting gala events where rich people sell one another discounted items, donated as tax deductions via the companies they run, and give speeches about how important it is to help the poor. Beyond the base gluttony, the feeling of being a "good person" is the point of all of it, and to absolve themselves of the fact that much of the wealth there is built on the backs of working people via usury, swindle and vice. Infuriating. This is why Jesus said: > Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

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btreesOfSpring 4y ago

Not sure what the end-game is in this line of thinking but the consistent narratives against both charitable giving or government intervention to produce institutions of social assistance can not be good for the unfortunate and marginalized.

Biganon 4y ago

I'm sorry, is there a problem with my browser? Did I miss 90% of the "article"? Or is it just an assertion and a quote from a book? Because I see a grand total of 0 arguments for or against the thesis that is being made, just "I think EA is this. Here's a quote by Douglas Adams."

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grebulon 4y ago
Well, I wouldn't call it an 'article' myself. More of a note or a perspective, with a connection to one of my favorite books. :) I wrote a long piece about the features Twitter needs, and I'd say that's a nice long article. This one is definitely just a quick note, but hopefully with an insightful connection that resonates with the HN crowd.

ifyoubuildit 4y ago

As someone who is not rich (as in I need to keep working to live, though I'm quite comfortable), I don't feel any animosity towards those that are. Am I doing it wrong? The headline seems to imply that gaining wealth is inherently a slimy thing to do. I just don't buy it. And if those people choose to donate some of that wealth, that seems strictly better than just being wealthy on its own. Maybe it's just so difficult for people to get ahead these days that they start to focus more on what other people have and become bitter?

balderdash 4y ago
I think it comes down to the fact that there are ways to get rich that run the spectrum of clean to dirty, on one end I don’t know how anyone faults the founders of BioNTech for getting rich creating a product that benefits humanity, on the other end of the spectrum it’s companies whose profits are derived from say government subsidies, “sin”, large exogenous societal costs are a little harder to feel good about…

zestyping 4y ago

Many aspects of Effective Altruism have been helpful, but Earning to Give is not one of them. When Effective Altruism started gaining traction in the early 2010s, Earning to Give was a poster child of EA recommendations, hailed as a counterintuitive yet rational outcome of utilitarian analysis. It has long been considered mainstream in Effective Altruism and was advocated heavily by the organization 80,000 Hours, which provides career advice for people wanting to do good in the world. It's not a bad thing to earn money in ethical ways and then also donate money to good causes. Unfortunately, one of the specific examples that gets the most attention is to go into high-frequency trading (instead of another career) so you can earn money to donate. https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/trading-in-quantitative-hedge-funds/ https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/trading-in-quantitativ... Although 80,000 Hours no longer emphasizes Earning to Give, it has never taken public responsibility for the damage it has done by steering young people toward career decisions that prioritize Earning to Give and for broadly legitimizing Earning to Give in EA circles.

yboris 4y ago
I saw Earning to Give as a broader strategy. I was a math teacher with no way to help those who were the worst-off in the world. By taking a fraction of my income and giving it to cost-effective charities I was able to do that. So could basically anyone - regardless of how divorced their work was from philanthropy. Earning to Give as a specific strategy for college-age students isn't terrible either. Of course one can pervert it by going to maximize earnings for a tobacco company, but people aiming to do good would most-likely steer away from these types of things anyway. I think the reason 80,000 Hours moved away from the Earning to Give strategy was because of the numerous new (and better) opportunities they were able to find as they put in more research time and as the movement grew in its size.
wutbrodo 4y ago
I was expecting some allusion to _why_ you think ETG is damaging. For a consequentialist, the baseline logic is straightforward: what do you think the pitfalls are? Or is your issue with consequentialism itself? The latter would seem to reject the fundamental premise of EA, not just ETG

PaulHoule 4y ago

Isn’t it all about spamming trolley problems until people give up on rational thinking about ethics completely?

yboris 4y ago
The right way to think about all trolley problems is that you can be one of any of the people in the scenario. So in the standard example, rather than having to choose to pull the lever or not, you can be one of six on the tracks. I suspect everyone would agree that having a 6/7 chance of survival is better than 2/7.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Sometimes I think trolley problems need the option "do nothing, push the trolley up to the top of the hill, throw the switch, let the trolley fall again". Say the pair is ("Sam Bankman-Fried", "Eliezer Yudkowsky")

ajkjk 4y ago

In EA I see a bunch of people who are struggling to break free of the mindset of utilitarianism, because they are so entrenched in it that their only ability to criticize its application is itself utilitarianism. That is, if the only way you have to say that something is good is that it is "high value", then you are forced to evaluate all actions in terms of their value, and then I guess you can go and choose the highest value ones according to that system. But there are in fact wholly distinct ways to make moral judgments which are incompatible with that. "But", they say, "that's got to be the most valuable way of knowing what to do, basically by definition". No, you're just doing that thing again: you're measuring your measuring sticks using the same system, and then measuring your way of measuring measuring sticks using the same system again, ad infinitum. "But isn't that better? Your moral system must be worse than that." Yeah, mine's worse _in your system_. But it's better _in mine_, and to me you seem like... well.... a self-absorbed buffoon who found a way to fetishize utilitarianism and wealth-maximization and reason themselves out of any imperative to feel empathy or consideration for, like, the people or communities around you.

kryogen1c 4y ago

> here’s my take on effective altruism: I think it’s a justification for being ambitious, for getting as rich as possible, and (in many cases) by any means possible, and keeping your conscience clear along the way. Can someone explain to me what happened here? The last I knew about EA was from a JRE podcast in 2017 with macaskill, where his ideas were to spend currency where it had the greatest impact and with the greatest efficiency while presenting the least friction to give, and I recall these ideas and the charity being supported by thinkers like Sam Harris and others. Now I'm reading connections with sbf and future now and you'd think macaskill had gone full dark side. Macaskill's wiki says he wrote a book about longtermism which seems fine on its face but I've only read negative things about here on HN. Without knowing more, Seems like people are being reactionary to me. What's the scoop?

skinnymuch 4y ago
Things change. I dont know about EA but Sam Harris is too known for his Islamophobia now. Joe Rogan is lying about kitty litter boxes in schools and saying how kind and nice Ben Shapiro (a bigot) is
yboris 4y ago
I read MacAskill's What We Owe The Future - it's a great book, and a compelling argument. I recommend you read it. What I suspect might be happening is that "do gooders" (as research has shown) are often attacked by others because those that do good are a "threat" to the status quo. Rather than living your life as you do, when you encounter a vegetarian, you are reminded that your meat consumption causes suffering in animals. When you encounter an EA (Effective Altruist) giving 10% of their income to charity, you are reminded about how you too could do the same but are choosing not to. So for many people, it is easier to find some shred of hypocrisy or fault in those doing the good and thus have the clean conscience to ignore the good aims.

polygamous_bat 4y ago

KurvaKing 4y ago

jdoliner 4y ago

This feels a lot like the old canard that there's no such thing as altruism because altruistic people get joy out of acting altruistically and thus their altruism is really just selfishness. Which is ridiculous because the act of taking joy is itself the altruism, i.e. an altruist is the type of person who can take joy in things that benefit others rather than themselves, the joy doesn't negate the altruism, it is the altruism. That being said EA has clearly gone completely off the rails and FTX should be the final nail in the coffin. It's become a way for nerdy people to do stats and thought experiments and pretend they're doing something altruistic. EA will never be net positive given the massive negative that's been done by SBF and FTX.

polygamous_bat 4y ago

A lot of defense of EA on this thread follows the same chain of thought: "what's wrong with doing the most good? What's wrong with Peter Singer's philosophy of doing so? Have you read The Life You Can Save?" It's like trying to defend against criticisms of religious fundamentalism by saying "What about the teachings of Love and Kindness by Jesus? Have you ever read the Bible?" The literal words of the Bible doesn't matter as much when people who claim to follow it in the earnest are also doing the most harm. You need to have a conversation internally first to figure out what your ideology is, otherwise it just looks like avoiding responsibility to the "outsiders".

gonehome 4y ago
It's a little different - I don't personally identify as part of the EA movement because of the associated baggage, but the ideas around trying to do the most good, extending empathy beyond kin/culture to other people suffering that you cannot see, and reasoning about the effectiveness of charity make sense to me. Without getting into a flame war not fit for HN, the same cannot be said for the supernatural foundations and epistemic claims of religions - the foundational ideas of EA are not the problem in this case. I think Sam Harris breaks it down decently here: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/303-the-fall-of-sam-bankman-fried https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/303... though that's a little out of date with how fast news on the topic is moving. It's also another reminder why it's good to keep your identity small [0] and deal with the ideas directly. Said another way: "Go three-quarters of the way from deontology to utilitarianism and then stop. You are now in the right place. Stay there at least until you have become a god."[1] [0]: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html [1]: https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1497157447219232768?s=20&t=7fULq3NXML7gb2O4OMpGjA https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1497157447219232768?s...
eddsh1994 4y ago
There is a lot of conversation internally. You can see these debates here [0]. The guy credited with who got SBF into EA wrote a post [1] which was also debated heavily in the comments. A good introduction, or at least my introduction, was by the same guy's debate [2] which I recommend if people are interested in EA outside of the current media storm. [0] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/ https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/ [1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WdeiPrwgqW2wHAxgT/a-personal-statement-on-ftx https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WdeiPrwgqW2wHAxgT/... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qslo4-DpzPs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qslo4-DpzPs

yboris 4y ago

This is not at all what Effective Altruism is about. If you're getting crazy rich and giving 50% of it away to cost-effective charity than you're likely doing a tremendous net-amount of good. It's not as if you get a bunch of free stuff the moment you say I am doing something for EA purposes.

yboris 4y ago

Saying "Effective Altruism Is about Getting Rich with a Clean Conscience" is the same as saying "Vegetarianism is about breaking into animal shelters and letting all the animals out". What a rude and erroneous way to summarize a complex movement comprised of so many different activities and points of view.

scottLobster 4y ago

Honestly "Effective Altruism" is just another empty set of words. See all the No-True-Scotsman fallacies in this comment thread alone. Unless there's an explicitly codified standard of behavior, the words are meaningless. "Effective" by what standards? "Altruism" according to who? One person's altruism is another's abuse. Safe Injection Sites for drug addicts are a good example, on one hand they are "altruistic" in trying to prevent deaths of drug addicts and hopefully steer some toward rehab programs. On the other hand they bring crowds of junkies to whatever neighborhood they're in, likely making life more dangerous for any residents/businesses. Is the use of imminent domain to build public infrastructure "effective altruism" when it bulldozes peoples' homes for a new road? Most of the time calling something "effective altruism" is just the time-honored tradition of projecting a veneer of righteousness onto an action, and sometimes an attempt to shut down counterarguments that are pointing out negative impacts. It's just the new, trendier "making the world a better place".

yboris 4y ago
I wonder if you missed the part about Effective Altruism (at its origin and in current practice) being about giving 10% or more of one's income to cost-effective charities. This isn't a "veneer of righteousness" to give away thousands of dollars to charity (even when living on "average" income). Many EA people abstain from animal products (which is a substantial change in one's behavior in today's culture). What gave you the idea that EA was "just another empty set of words"?
- scottLobster 4y ago
  And who decides if the charities are effective? And even if they are effective, at what cost? Right now there are many charities that are dumping clothes on sub-Saharan Africa, and while those charities may be "effective" at clothing Africans they've also denied said Africans any chance at a native textile/fashion industry due to the dumping making such industries unprofitable. Is that a worthy trade? What if two EAs making the same amount give the same 10% to two effective but opposing charities (say one donates to a charity promoting veganism and the other donates to a charity that provides free meals, including meat, to starving populations), is their altruism still effective or does it cancel out? Like I said, it's "making the world a better place" 2.0. Better for whom? With what trade-offs? Well that seems to be up to the EA in question, with vague guiding principles of "be good, honest and focus on helping as many neglected people as possible" (https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-effective-altruism#what-values-unite-effective-altruism https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-e...). Who decides who's being neglected? Can a group of people, say a subsistence farming community be considered "neglected" if they're satisfied with their lives, even if they're technically living in extreme poverty? I could go on in detail, but reading that site's "values" is largely just a collection of left-wing-ish tropes where it's assumed the reader already knows what otherwise vague terms mean and agrees with their definitions. Which is ironic given Value 3: "Rather than starting with a commitment to a certain cause, community or approach, it’s important to consider many different ways to help and seek to find the best ones. This means putting serious time into deliberation and reflection on one’s beliefs, being constantly open and curious for new evidence and arguments, and being ready to change one’s views quite radically." Even prescribing the 10%+ of income donated to charity, so? That's no different than a tithe. Only here you get to choose the church's values assuming you pick anything in the general direction of "good". Ultimately it suffers from similar attempts to replace religion with secular humanism. The belief system is so abstract that, despite all the words it and its advocates spend describing itself, it doesn't really stand for anything more sophisticated than the lyrics to the Power Rangers Wild Force intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Y3Ib0YNFaQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Y3Ib0YNFaQ

stephc_int13 4y ago

Good Conscience is liberating. Humans really are afraid to be punished, they've all been kids at some point, the fear of being bad is deeply ingrained. In practice, the more important and beneficial part is to be seen as good by others. If someone can convince enough people, they will have little doubts about themselves. As a rule, I consider any advertisement of virtue as suspicious.

rich_sasha 4y ago

So there are some assholes doing EA. Maybe even it's a majority. Maybe even the organisations that front it are all "look how amazing we are". Is EA actually... bad? It would seem at worst it's not as good as advertised. If 10% of the followers donate 10% of their income to charity, isn't that a massive win? I'm not part of EA myself, like many I'm mildly annoyed by the arrogance but also feel like that's not enough to substantially criticise a movement.

raydiatian 4y ago
> Is EA actually bad It’s the “do well while doing good” philosophy that underlies EA, that is quietly grinning in the shadows eyes glowing sick with greed. Doing well while doing good means turning a profit (or gaining/maintaining power, after the fact) by fixing important problems. The issue here is that you’ve got a principal-agent problem. Jeff Bezos has $150B, says he’ll give it all away in his lifetime. But he’s not going to give it away. He is going to invest it. You’ve got the Bezos Earth Fund which is looking to bootstrap solutions to climate change. The end result of just one winner? Bezos interest group has a huge foot on the thing that controls climate change. This is a lever, for them to pull as necessary. The same way Twitter is a lever for Must. EA is fine, but the problem is that in America “the best of us are by definition the richest” and so it’s pretty hard to engineer a situation where the rich don’t get richer much less agree to concede power to the next party.
- rich_sasha 4y ago
  As I read your excellent comment, I'm trying to find the bit where the world would be better off if Bezos wasn't a part of EA and I'm not sure I can. Without EA he might still have some BS foundation like many before (I'm not actually taking a stance on his work, I have no idea about it). He might use one to push his weight around and have an outsized influence. Maybe without the label of EA there would be more pressure to justify the scope and impact of charitable work? I'm not sure.
  - raydiatian 4y ago
    > your excellent comment Are you being snarky? I genuinely can’t tell, sorry if you aren’t. > trying to find the bit where the world would be better off if.. You’re right. I don’t genuinely know. I get the feeling more and more each day that our system is hardcore stupid broken. My gut feeling is that the existence of Bezos and EA are, on the whole, part and parcel. Bezos is the product of a system that warps mankind around working to build empires for the few that win the Pareto distribution game. EA feels like the latest contemporary whitewash used to protect it. Maybe I’m just a loser and I deserved to be fucked over at the grocery store and the doctors office for existing but not having more to give to my employer. I just wish my perception would catch up to reality.

aetherson 4y ago

The idea that there's a big demand for a fig leaf that excuses getting rich strikes me as extremely wrong. I don't think that there are a significant number of people in the world who are like, "I'm all set to get rich, except oh no I need to find some excuse for getting rich otherwise someone will be mean to me and I can't deal with that, oh thank god, it's Effective Altruism, now I can get rich." To a first approximation, everyone on this site regularly participates in threads talking about how to maximize their compensation, without anyone feeling a particular need for a fig leaf.

gregw134 4y ago
On the other hand, there are plenty of people ready to look down on you if your goal is to make money.
- tacker2000 4y ago
  So what? Everyone should do it for there own reasons and not care. Is there anything bad about wanting to be wealthy or having power? I dont think so. I think the actual problem is when you are already rich enougg and still want more and more. That is the cancer that is ruining our society.
- aetherson 4y ago
  My experience is that the number of people who even ask for your justification for increasing your income or wealth is approximately zero. Like I do not think I have ever once in my life had someone say any variation on, "But why would you want to make more money?" And, to be clear, I'm pretty wealthy and am well past the point where, like, there's an obvious necessity for more money. I'm not a subsistence farmer is what I'm saying. If someone does hassle you about your justifications for your wealth, it seems really easy to write that off as jealousy. I am sure that somewhere in the world, there is someone so simultaneously ambitious yet wracked with guilt about their ambition that they need an excuse to satisfy their ambition. I just doubt that there are enough such people that Effective Altruism can use such people as a foundation for its existence.

dnissley 4y ago

This gets part of the way there I think. A lot of EAs have issues with scrupulosity, "pathological guilt/anxiety about moral or religious issues"[1]. It's not so much that any of them have really done anything to feel bad about, it's just that they tend to be the kind of people with a tendency to be very hard on themselves about ever smaller things. The article doesn't accuse them of doing anything bad exactly, but it's kind of... in the background? And even if the article writer didn't intend that, a lot of people, when they discuss this type of thing do intend it. That being rich is somehow bad, or means you did something bad, or reflects poorly on your moral fiber. Which I want to point out is a huge assumption and should be drawn out and pinned to the ground as something worthy of discussion. My own (more extreme) take is that not only have none of them done anything to feel bad about, but that most of them are living hugely net social positive lives and would have been even if they never gave so much as a dime to charity. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrupulosity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrupulosity

constantcrying 4y ago

I do not think this is convincing in any way. And I very much dislike people assigning cynical motivations for the moral preferences of others. Any activity can be described this way. "Working in a soup kitchen?" "I bet you are doing this because it makes you feel superior to all the others who do not volunteer, right? And also, you feel less guilty seeing homeless people now, after all you are already doing something, so there is no reason to feel obligated to them aswell". I am sure that there are many entirely sincere EA enthusiasts, wanting nothing more than see their money be used to better the lives of others. Spending time organizing, fundraising, optimizing charity, doing outreach, some of it might even be "hard work", done gladly without receiving any praise or compensation. On the other hand a friend of mine is regularly getting up at 2am to drag the injured, freezing, decrepit and mentally ill into a place where they can get some semblance of help. To me it is clear who is actually more deserving of respect and who does more to improve the lives of people. If everything you have is money, all problem look like they are solved by spending.

chubot 4y ago
I’m ok with people working in soup kitchens or buying mosquito nets “feeling superior” What disturbs me is crypto scammers and the uninformed spouting off about “AI alignment” buying influence within the government, with stolen money Also people who are either dishonest or comically aware of conflicts of interest, pretending they’re above it because they’re “rational”. Eg the AI alignment stuff is mostly funded by corporations and is part of their marketing arm
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zencloudgarden 4y ago

Being woke is about enjoying priviledge with a clean conscience

zencloudgarden 4y ago

Being woke is about enjoying privilege with a clean conscience

atlgator 4y ago

Who determines what "the most good" is and by what metrics? Is this where charity meets authoritarianism?

yboris 4y ago
No authoritarianism. The movement is comprised of numerous people. The general foundation is focusing on making the world a better place; many different directions are encouraged. A sensible metric is something akin to "well being of sentient life forms of today and the future". If you have a different direction than the movement, that's fine. What the movement can do for you is to help you pick ways of helping others that cost less per-dollar-donated or per-effort-spent. Consider learning more https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
- atlgator 4y ago
  It doesn't need to be a one-person dictatorship to be authoritarian. How long before this is coopted by politics that limit charitable spending on anything but projects that are "blessed" by this group?
  - yboris 4y ago
    No one is forced to stay inside Effective Altruism. You can be an Effective Altruist without calling yourself one. You give to charities EA recommends without subscribing to even half of what EAs care about. If EA is "coopted by politics" I suspect many people will leave and the movement will become a shell of what it currently is. I'm unsure I understand your concern fully.

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fedeb95 4y ago

My thoughts exactly. Apparently making a blog post explains it better than comments on pro-EA posts so kudos to you

fedeb95 4y ago

Another point against the intersection of EA and HN: it seems to agitate souls very much. I guess every age has its religion... and moral justification for its deeds.

kybernetyk 4y ago

A lot of mental gymnastics that could have been avoided if one just read Ayn Rand...

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

Not sure that those claiming to be pursuing "Effective Altruism" have a conscience. If they did, then it seems they would not need to invoke this term to describe their actions, or in this case, their "promised" actions and stated intentions. Long before the internet, and the means to make up language and spread the most nonsensical ideas to millions of people across the globe in milliseconds, people, some of whom became wealthy, acted altruistically. One does not need wealth to practice altruism. Many people do it instinctively. To suggest or even imply that altruism not backed by wealth is insignificant or even less significant is not a novel idea, nor is it non-obvious. It is, of course, deeply cynical. We can expect such unoriginal "thinking" from those entranced by the so-called "tech" industry.

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MomoXenosaga 4y ago

JC wisely said that rich people's chances of ending up in heaven are pretty low. It was my own country that severed the last ties that the Western world had with medieval society's focus on the afterlife and overruled the Bible on economics. To quote Madonna we live in a material world.

lamontcg 4y ago

We are certainly in the regime where an increasing Gini coefficient is bad overall towards all of society and we need less inequality and not more. If your philosophy tries to contradict that, you need to figure out why your philosophy is wrong, not double down on counterintuitive reasoning as to why it is right. If you can't see why and don't have your eyes open as to why this is obvious, I can't help you.

MrMan 4y ago

I dont think Charity has much of a track record compared to commerce. There are some edge cases where market failures create situations where progress is stuck but those are lots of times governance problems. Telling people how to govern themselves is at least as fraught as the idea that just showering money on non-profits will do anything useful, so it's a tough one. I think non-profits are a way to increase the velocity of money which increases commerce, so while I think a lot of altruistic posturing is bullshit, if it gets people to spend money instead of hoarding it, that is an overall good thing, but for the wrong reasons.

owenpalmer 4y ago

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