Had never heard of effective altruism. Interesting concept. So when I give the homeless men and women in NYC a lunch I bought just for them and expect nothing in return am I doing good well? I hope so. I guess I’m not smart enough to really understand the philosophical twists of EA. But man, you sure can stinkin’ write. Like ice water on a hot day. My brain feels refreshed.
In terms of personal policy I prioritize charitable giving to organizations that serve the third world. Suffering in the developing world is orders of magnitude worse than in the US and Europe, and given the average wage in those areas of the world US dollars have a much greater impact.
But long term what really changes lives is the advancement of technology coupled with economic development--the best example being the the reduction in levels of global poverty due to China and India modernizing. And that's something that's just going to occur regardless of individual efforts.
I've devoted the vast majority of my career to trying to do good well – many people do – and I can't overstate how much the mundane stuff matters. I work with public health data, and not only do you have to learn a lot about what people do day-to-day, you have to understand where your actions fit in to the world you're trying to improve.
EA sometimes feels like once you've optimised your solution you swoop into, say, Botswana with your billions of dollars and just dictate what they should do. But you need a whole boring and compromised and suboptimal process that involves the government, and the people, and the doctors, and the organisations, and everyone else, and _especially_ the law and democracy of that place that prevents you from doing whatever you want.
My current job is my most effective because a lot of my colleagues me do all those things that I would find both tedious and impossible, though I make sure not to stay away from the tedious in my work as well. It enables our work to survive changes in government staffing and myriad other day-to-day obstacles. What we make makes things a little better, and we improve it constantly, and even the exciting bits are often less impactful than the mundane ones. I've always felt that's the best way of doing effective altruism.
I've briefly engaged with the EA community a couple times, but the rabbit holes seem like way too much of a distraction, and at least in my corner of the world, I haven't seen too much in there that makes me do good better.
I bummed around a few forums as a regular that cross-pollinated with rationalists and EA types.
What it all boiled down to, once you got past the low hanging fruit ideas like “maybe focus more on malaria nets than on X Y or Z”, was “What if the world was like THIS? Because then we could do some seriously crazy, malignant, psycho BS in the name of generations yet unborn.” And then instead of defending the assertion that the world was indeed like THAT, they defend the chain of logic that dictates the crazy, malignant, psycho response.
I will not impugn them with ill intent, but they are rather begging to become a key source of legitimacy for the first torturing, brutal authoritarian warlord that can lie convincingly to them.
I used to work for a Hedge Fund. All day we worried incessantly that we were allocating capital to the best causes. We had a whole lot of really smart people devoting their lives to it.
The fund also donated low 7 figures a year to charity. We spent maybe 30 mins picking the charities. Usually we just picked what someone's wife was most interested in. A lot of it was super dumb and useless. We could have saved many thousands of lives through some EA charities.
So I think the idea that "everyone who has ever wanted to do good has wanted to do good well" is just incredibly wrong. I agree with much of the rest of the article. But the idea that we should do even the most basic research on charities is actually incredibly foreign to almost everyone.
Maybe the value in the Effective Altruism movement actually goes the *other* way: by channeling the innate desire for novelty, excitement and coolness back toward being practical and ordinary?
Just like "Doing Good Well" has been normal ethics forever, so has "Interesting Beats Important" always been a part of human psychology. New is cool, old is boring, regardless of which is actually "better." The problem isn't so much getting people excited about new ideas, that's natural. The hard part is figuring out which new ideas are actually useful, and which ones are, you know, carnivore genocide.
So if EA can have a good effect, maybe it's not so much about creating new ideas that are good -- but rather, about doing a better job *testing* whether a bunch of new ideas actually are good or not. It could be about tying creative policy ideas back to the question of practical effectiveness.
Maybe what I'm talking about is literally the opposite of the EA mentality -- not firing a shotgun of cool ideas out, but picking through the shotgun blast to separate a couple of gold pellets out from all the lead ones (what a terrible metaphor this is!). But if it is the opposite of EA, well then, that sounds like a dialectic to me. EA seems like a thesis in need of an antithesis.
I always thought of EA as essentially "evidence based charity." People generally pick charities semi-randomly. They might give to diabetes research b/c their cousin has diabetes, or they might donate to an animal rescue because Sarah McLachlan made them sad. EA came along with the idea that we should actually look into what charities actually do the most good on a dollar-per-dollar basis, and basically concluded the answer was "bed nets."
Where I think they went off the rails was with the turns toward longtermism and existential risk. My take away is that "bed nets" is boring, which is why, pre EA, people didn't donate enough to buy new bed nets. OTOH, AI apocalypses and asteroid strikes and global pandemics are all cool things that you can read about in sci-fi novels. At some point, Scott Alexander (or someone) figured out that, if we apply arbitrary odds to these risks, and count all the hypothetical harm people who might never be born as part of the harm calculous, EA people can shift all their donations to cool sciencey things that make their STEM hearts flutter, rather than bed nets. Maybe it shakes out in the end (although I'm skeptical), but i really think that it is an example of EA people falling into the same trap EA was designed to avoid - donating to cool flashy causes rather than things that actually help the most people, i.e. bed nets.
There is a glaring conflict of interest in the altruism non-profit industry in that those working within the industry require it to be perpetual... thus they have a natural incentive to perpetuate the need for their services. Then add to this that the altruism non-profit industry is headed by multi-billionaires that have control of the mainstream media and direct those reports to inflame the public perception of their need and hence glorify their participation.
In its extreme, it is a form of Munchhausen disease.
Meanwhile problems do not get solved, and the shrinking inventory of real productive leaders silently inventing, building & growing real beneficial things and fixing the worlds problems.... they have to do so with the constant threat of being attacked by the "virtuous" in control for their lack of altruism.
Frankly, this nation is sick this way. The producer is the real hero. Of course there are people doing great work in the altruism space, but unless they are doing it silently without the seek for notoriety, they should be suspected charlatans and looters without the true motivation to do good in the spaces they claim to occupy.
I have to wonder if it's just hubris, of a kind specifically related to living in the first world, that spawns this kind of thinking.
To my mind the greatest factors of the last 100 years in terms of alleviating human suffering in the third world have been technological and economic development. Those forces are so massive and fundamental that they are immune to the efforts of individual human beings in terms of either impeding or advancing the tide.
Consider: Robert Wright wrote an article years ago that pointed out that in the 1970's South Korea's number one export was human hair. Now of course it is the country of Samsung, LG, Hyundai and KIA. What changed? Foreign investment from startup's like Nike built factories that fostered infrastructure that fostered further economic development. That's a story that's being repeated around the world in places like China, India, Vietnam, etc.
What really matters is science and capitalism. Charitable giving of any sort is just froth on the surface of the waves.
Aug 10, 2022·edited Aug 10, 2022Liked by Freddie deBoer
--EA: Does 99 boring things and 1 crazy thing
--FDB: Ignores all the boring things because they're boring (totally fair! we all do this!), then asks "Why is EA only doing crazy things and never the boring things?"
Quick example: GiveWell continues to direct ~$500 million/year, mostly to deworming, malaria nets, and cash grants to poor Africans. My guess is the total amount of money ever spent on researching/discussing carnivore eradication is <$500,000 (though I could be wrong), AFAIK no money has ever been spent implementing it.
The boring things are literally a thousand times more prominent and important, people just never talk about them because they're boring.
As for everyone agreeing with EA - I think the biggest difference from ordinary people is something like utilitarianism. Without utilitarianism it's not completely coherent to talk about "do the *most* good" (although you can kind of vaguely gesture at the same concept). Once you do have utilitarianism, you start getting questions like "why aren't you donating more of your money?" and "why would you donate to a college instead of to malaria nets?" which I think are already pretty EA and not what normal people do/support/ask. So I do think the "do the most good" thing is actually kind of unique.
I've actually never heard of this. Is it like when someone mansplains to you that if you want to help homeless people you should donate to a food bank because that means your $ goes further than giving a person on the street money if they ask for it?
Like, sure, that's "true" if you ignore how human beings function an that you can't "rationally measure" what if means to someone when you stop and have a respectful conversation instead of looking at them like their a bag of trash?
Was EA big before Substack? I only ever heard of it because of Yglesias (explaining what it is or means to be), and I only ever see updates about it because of Scott Alexander (who seems very involved).
How are mosquito nets versus computers for inner city schools just not basic common sense and a rudimentary grasp of mathematics? Why does this require an entire school/philosophy of charitable giving?
And once you accept that mosquito nets give you the most bang for your buck why not redeploy DDT? (BTW I recommend Malcolm Gladwell's article on Fred Soper for anybody that's interested.)
EA is mostly pathetic in the same way that all "rationalist" ventures are: they lack the ability to evaluate the world qualitatively so they think they can replace that lack by evaluating absolutely EVERYTHING quantitatively. Throw in a few magic buzzwords like "bayesian" and "priors" and you have just another on-the-spectrum circlejerk.
Had never heard of effective altruism. Interesting concept. So when I give the homeless men and women in NYC a lunch I bought just for them and expect nothing in return am I doing good well? I hope so. I guess I’m not smart enough to really understand the philosophical twists of EA. But man, you sure can stinkin’ write. Like ice water on a hot day. My brain feels refreshed.
In terms of personal policy I prioritize charitable giving to organizations that serve the third world. Suffering in the developing world is orders of magnitude worse than in the US and Europe, and given the average wage in those areas of the world US dollars have a much greater impact.
But long term what really changes lives is the advancement of technology coupled with economic development--the best example being the the reduction in levels of global poverty due to China and India modernizing. And that's something that's just going to occur regardless of individual efforts.
Freddie's thesis is a great way of looking at the world and I will now structure my identity around it.
Seriously, thanks for this piece. I am old enough to know that it is true but need reminding often enough.
I've devoted the vast majority of my career to trying to do good well – many people do – and I can't overstate how much the mundane stuff matters. I work with public health data, and not only do you have to learn a lot about what people do day-to-day, you have to understand where your actions fit in to the world you're trying to improve.
EA sometimes feels like once you've optimised your solution you swoop into, say, Botswana with your billions of dollars and just dictate what they should do. But you need a whole boring and compromised and suboptimal process that involves the government, and the people, and the doctors, and the organisations, and everyone else, and _especially_ the law and democracy of that place that prevents you from doing whatever you want.
My current job is my most effective because a lot of my colleagues me do all those things that I would find both tedious and impossible, though I make sure not to stay away from the tedious in my work as well. It enables our work to survive changes in government staffing and myriad other day-to-day obstacles. What we make makes things a little better, and we improve it constantly, and even the exciting bits are often less impactful than the mundane ones. I've always felt that's the best way of doing effective altruism.
I've briefly engaged with the EA community a couple times, but the rabbit holes seem like way too much of a distraction, and at least in my corner of the world, I haven't seen too much in there that makes me do good better.
I bummed around a few forums as a regular that cross-pollinated with rationalists and EA types.
What it all boiled down to, once you got past the low hanging fruit ideas like “maybe focus more on malaria nets than on X Y or Z”, was “What if the world was like THIS? Because then we could do some seriously crazy, malignant, psycho BS in the name of generations yet unborn.” And then instead of defending the assertion that the world was indeed like THAT, they defend the chain of logic that dictates the crazy, malignant, psycho response.
I will not impugn them with ill intent, but they are rather begging to become a key source of legitimacy for the first torturing, brutal authoritarian warlord that can lie convincingly to them.
I used to work for a Hedge Fund. All day we worried incessantly that we were allocating capital to the best causes. We had a whole lot of really smart people devoting their lives to it.
The fund also donated low 7 figures a year to charity. We spent maybe 30 mins picking the charities. Usually we just picked what someone's wife was most interested in. A lot of it was super dumb and useless. We could have saved many thousands of lives through some EA charities.
So I think the idea that "everyone who has ever wanted to do good has wanted to do good well" is just incredibly wrong. I agree with much of the rest of the article. But the idea that we should do even the most basic research on charities is actually incredibly foreign to almost everyone.
The rest of EA I'm not so excited about.
Maybe the value in the Effective Altruism movement actually goes the *other* way: by channeling the innate desire for novelty, excitement and coolness back toward being practical and ordinary?
Just like "Doing Good Well" has been normal ethics forever, so has "Interesting Beats Important" always been a part of human psychology. New is cool, old is boring, regardless of which is actually "better." The problem isn't so much getting people excited about new ideas, that's natural. The hard part is figuring out which new ideas are actually useful, and which ones are, you know, carnivore genocide.
So if EA can have a good effect, maybe it's not so much about creating new ideas that are good -- but rather, about doing a better job *testing* whether a bunch of new ideas actually are good or not. It could be about tying creative policy ideas back to the question of practical effectiveness.
Maybe what I'm talking about is literally the opposite of the EA mentality -- not firing a shotgun of cool ideas out, but picking through the shotgun blast to separate a couple of gold pellets out from all the lead ones (what a terrible metaphor this is!). But if it is the opposite of EA, well then, that sounds like a dialectic to me. EA seems like a thesis in need of an antithesis.
I always thought of EA as essentially "evidence based charity." People generally pick charities semi-randomly. They might give to diabetes research b/c their cousin has diabetes, or they might donate to an animal rescue because Sarah McLachlan made them sad. EA came along with the idea that we should actually look into what charities actually do the most good on a dollar-per-dollar basis, and basically concluded the answer was "bed nets."
Where I think they went off the rails was with the turns toward longtermism and existential risk. My take away is that "bed nets" is boring, which is why, pre EA, people didn't donate enough to buy new bed nets. OTOH, AI apocalypses and asteroid strikes and global pandemics are all cool things that you can read about in sci-fi novels. At some point, Scott Alexander (or someone) figured out that, if we apply arbitrary odds to these risks, and count all the hypothetical harm people who might never be born as part of the harm calculous, EA people can shift all their donations to cool sciencey things that make their STEM hearts flutter, rather than bed nets. Maybe it shakes out in the end (although I'm skeptical), but i really think that it is an example of EA people falling into the same trap EA was designed to avoid - donating to cool flashy causes rather than things that actually help the most people, i.e. bed nets.
There is a glaring conflict of interest in the altruism non-profit industry in that those working within the industry require it to be perpetual... thus they have a natural incentive to perpetuate the need for their services. Then add to this that the altruism non-profit industry is headed by multi-billionaires that have control of the mainstream media and direct those reports to inflame the public perception of their need and hence glorify their participation.
In its extreme, it is a form of Munchhausen disease.
Meanwhile problems do not get solved, and the shrinking inventory of real productive leaders silently inventing, building & growing real beneficial things and fixing the worlds problems.... they have to do so with the constant threat of being attacked by the "virtuous" in control for their lack of altruism.
Frankly, this nation is sick this way. The producer is the real hero. Of course there are people doing great work in the altruism space, but unless they are doing it silently without the seek for notoriety, they should be suspected charlatans and looters without the true motivation to do good in the spaces they claim to occupy.
I have to wonder if it's just hubris, of a kind specifically related to living in the first world, that spawns this kind of thinking.
To my mind the greatest factors of the last 100 years in terms of alleviating human suffering in the third world have been technological and economic development. Those forces are so massive and fundamental that they are immune to the efforts of individual human beings in terms of either impeding or advancing the tide.
Consider: Robert Wright wrote an article years ago that pointed out that in the 1970's South Korea's number one export was human hair. Now of course it is the country of Samsung, LG, Hyundai and KIA. What changed? Foreign investment from startup's like Nike built factories that fostered infrastructure that fostered further economic development. That's a story that's being repeated around the world in places like China, India, Vietnam, etc.
What really matters is science and capitalism. Charitable giving of any sort is just froth on the surface of the waves.
--EA: Does 99 boring things and 1 crazy thing
--FDB: Ignores all the boring things because they're boring (totally fair! we all do this!), then asks "Why is EA only doing crazy things and never the boring things?"
Quick example: GiveWell continues to direct ~$500 million/year, mostly to deworming, malaria nets, and cash grants to poor Africans. My guess is the total amount of money ever spent on researching/discussing carnivore eradication is <$500,000 (though I could be wrong), AFAIK no money has ever been spent implementing it.
The boring things are literally a thousand times more prominent and important, people just never talk about them because they're boring.
As for everyone agreeing with EA - I think the biggest difference from ordinary people is something like utilitarianism. Without utilitarianism it's not completely coherent to talk about "do the *most* good" (although you can kind of vaguely gesture at the same concept). Once you do have utilitarianism, you start getting questions like "why aren't you donating more of your money?" and "why would you donate to a college instead of to malaria nets?" which I think are already pretty EA and not what normal people do/support/ask. So I do think the "do the most good" thing is actually kind of unique.
No good ever comes of people making one of their interests into their whole identity.
I've actually never heard of this. Is it like when someone mansplains to you that if you want to help homeless people you should donate to a food bank because that means your $ goes further than giving a person on the street money if they ask for it?
Like, sure, that's "true" if you ignore how human beings function an that you can't "rationally measure" what if means to someone when you stop and have a respectful conversation instead of looking at them like their a bag of trash?
Was EA big before Substack? I only ever heard of it because of Yglesias (explaining what it is or means to be), and I only ever see updates about it because of Scott Alexander (who seems very involved).
How are mosquito nets versus computers for inner city schools just not basic common sense and a rudimentary grasp of mathematics? Why does this require an entire school/philosophy of charitable giving?
And once you accept that mosquito nets give you the most bang for your buck why not redeploy DDT? (BTW I recommend Malcolm Gladwell's article on Fred Soper for anybody that's interested.)
EA is mostly pathetic in the same way that all "rationalist" ventures are: they lack the ability to evaluate the world qualitatively so they think they can replace that lack by evaluating absolutely EVERYTHING quantitatively. Throw in a few magic buzzwords like "bayesian" and "priors" and you have just another on-the-spectrum circlejerk.