Effective altruism as a tower of assumptions
astralcodexten.substack.com
astralcodexten.substack.com
I do think that people should be encouraged to donate more (and should be progressive by income, not a fixed 10%) but I also think the organization misses the whole side of volunteering or personal actions, although they have "altruistic jobs". For example, converting to veganism would greatly outweigh 10% of a median salary to the most effective climate charity.
Converting to veganism is something EA advocates for constantly by the way, it's pretty much the first thing you'll see when looking into animal welfare. I think the biggest issue is that people really like meat, and being told they should stop eating it is likely to turn them off of animal welfare all together, so organizations bury the lede sometimes.
This claim itself is based on probabilities assigned to the potential impacts of veganism and donations. I would argue that this is a form of practical utilitarianism - assigning probabilities of event occurrence, weighted by their negative impacts, and attempting to do the most good despite the uncertainties and evolving information landscapes.
For some people, utilitarianism is a maximally permissive framework that allows you to discuss any set of preferences following the VNM axioms (I won't get into technicalities, but these axioms basically just say that your preferences are minimally coherent. This is not a real restriction on your ethics) by couching it in the language of a "utility function". This does not say anything about your ethics!. In this point of view, practically everyone who has ever lived can be cast as a utilitarian with some appropriate utility function!
For some people, "utilitarianism" implies much more stringent constraints on your utility function and also come with moral imperatives about how to act (notice the previous interpretation tells you what is good with respect to some utility function, but doesn't tell you that you should do anything). For instance, it might imply that you view utilities as additive, so two happy people are twice as valuable as one. And it might also command you to maximize expected utility, or worst-case utility, or it might be a straw-man of sane utilitarianism and command you to complete the impossible task of precisely computing the utility of every possible world-state before being able to ethically take any action.
And of course, there are people who think utilitarianism is anything between these two examples. For example, most flavours of consequentialism can be sensibly described as a form of utilitarianism and some people say utilitarianism when they mean consequentialism. Anyway, the word "utilitarianism" encompasses a ridiculously wide range of views, and when two people with wildly differing interpretations of the word talk to each other, they do not get a productive discussion.
this is why you can get "funny numbers" like the napkin math that lets you know the US produces enough food each year to feed 10-20% more than the entire world population. it mostly goes to animal feed or landfills though.
aside from the obvious animal cruelty it's wasteful. and the corporate capture from animal agribusiness means fruits and vegetables are artificially more expensive than meat and animal products. wonder how that ties into the obesity epidemic and poverty?
I don't get it. I really don't. From any angle I choose to look at it (ethical, health, environmental) meat seems like a terrible choice. Why is it that during perma-drought I can buy a burger every day for a few dollars, and each one of those patties took over a thousand gallons of water to produce?
[0] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4476215-its-about-chicken-f...
For example, if someone goes from “I don’t believe in utilitarianism” to “therefore there is no reason to do trials to determine which medicines are effective because any medicine could indirectly do something good, who knows” then I think something has gone wrong?
Similarly, it doesn’t mean we can’t make rough guesses about effectiveness and avoid all the charities that, while well-intended, are unlikely to move the needle.
Somehow, though, some EA people convince themselves to donate to very speculative causes anyway. I think the answer is just: don’t do that? You can stick with things that are likely to work.
And there are not zero ways to put it into practice. Donating through GiveWell is something you can do.
I know multiple people (like, a dozen maybe?) who were convinced to become vegan due to EA. One specifically did so because at the time they didn't feel they could donate a significant amount to charity, and so felt veganism would be higher value.
Of course the reason here was animal cruelty, not climate (veganism is likely worse than vegitarianism or careful omnivorism from a strictly climate perspective).
(Though personal diet choices are probably meaningless, unless you can start a movement, which veganism seems to have done)
I don't think anyone working on, say, AI risk is claiming that their work is 1.37x more valuable than mosquito nets. Rather, they claim that there are plausible assumptions under which it's highly valuable. If I also find their assumptions plausible, I'm now persuaded they're working on something worthwhile. Great! It distinguishes them from lots of people working on stuff that definitely isn't.
Utilitarianism doesn't need all the numbers to be precise. You really only need to get the signs right to improve your decision making. Often, you can get different signs for overall utility from two different assumptions that are both plausible. That's an important signal for which assumptions to worry about. The assumptions that only change the magnitude by a digit or two aren't that important.
The countries that lack these things need some fundamental thing to be sustainable and grow in excess of their inputs. It takes resources to grow resources.
The poverty strucken parts of the world don't have sustainable infrastructure or the capability of building it.
The problem is obvious but nobody wants to talk about it.
If I had responsibility to do something good, it needs to be on my own terms and I decided how it were to be used then maybe I would want to help. But if it is going to be lost to corruption, abuse, drugs then that's not the intended purpose of the investment.
Takes resources to get resources.
Also takes good management. If I'm investing resources, I don't want my resources being pilfered away.
The kinds of things that these countries need are large government backed projects with extreme amounts of funding to introduce core infrastructure such as water pipes, hospitals, education curriculums. Things that we in the West take for granted or are even free.
For this to work, Everything hinges upon a high trust, values based society where people WANT civilization and WANT society. That means low crime, low criminality, the availability of work to earn money for food and effective shelter. And mutual good will.
I don't think giving them money and letting them spend it on consumables helps as much as it could.
In the UK parts of our national services are run by foreign companies, as direct foreign investment. They know how to run a railway or hospital or waste disposal.
Governments in the west have enough on their plate, it would take a great deal of investment for a government to instigate a plan to introduce an infrastructural plan in a country that is NOT their own. The corresponding government organisational capability might not even exist in the recipient countries.
But it seems like you’re making assumptions that poor people in poor countries are bad at spending their money in ways that will matter. GiveDirectly has some good studies so I don’t really believe that.
Also, is replacing a leaky roof “consumption” or “investment?” How about starting a small business or sending kids to school?
Send them money for food but also help them build a railway, shopping mall or water infrastructure.
What we would do from our perspective might not be the same thing that we would do in their perspective. But obviously we have a perspective of what they need. How we can help them.
Do people suddenly rise up and decide to build water infrastructure or electrical grid or proper housing for everyone in a town?
Takes extreme funding to do both. Would they be willing to listen to what we tell them what to do?
For example, the reason GiveWell doesn't recommend donating for vaccination campaigns isn't because they don't think vaccinations are cost-effective (they are) but because giant organizations like governments and the WHO are funding these things already. It's not a "neglected" cause so it's hard to move the needle by donating there.
I suspect that hard infrastructure like railways are funded by loans from the IMF and maybe foreign aid? I don't know if GiveWell has evaluated that sort of thing specifically.
GiveWell's mission is advising individual donors on which charities they should give money to, which means charities that exist, take donations, are trustworthy, can show effectiveness, and so on. It's not things people could theoretically fund; it has to be practical.
The sheer amounts of investment needed are extremely high. What took the western world 100s of years needs to be invested (time and work) over many years to bring up these places to the level of the west.
"I cannot see a 100% perfect way to do exactly the thing I want, thus there is no reason to do anything at all."
Imagine if you applied the same logic to everything in your life.
We also think it, on the whole, has made some outrageously bad analysis about what it should work on, and is perpetutating that nonsense in an echo chamber of sci-fi speculation.
And that really sucks, because we see all that energy that could be spent on climate issues or public health or democratization instead aimed at predicting when WOPR or SkyNet will achieve sentience. It's... frustrating.
If you consider EA Global as a charity, and the money donated to longtermist AI to be, functionally, salaries paid to employees, the overhead of EA jumps by like 15%. That's not admirable, by EAs own metrics.
I.E. I still don't understand why you can't just dislike the fact that some people are devoting time, energy, and money to AI safety, and just be an effective altruist for the issues that you think are most important. In other words, don't throw the EA baby out with the AI Safety bathwater.
I don't! I donate (lots of) money to GiveWell, and I credit EA members for convincing me to do that. The parts of EA that are functionally "hey donate money to effective charities" are good things that make the world better. I do think that it is dangerous to EA as a movement to be discolored by self-dealing AI longtermism.
I have had different experiences with critics of EA. Many critics come off as passive, finding one or two basic disagreements with institutions or moonshot/futurist ideas that they use to justify their total disengagement with their potential positive impact in the world beyond themselves and their friends/families. You might not even call these folks critics - maybe they're just "excuse-seekers"?
It sounds like you are a critic who is actively engaged at the second and third blocks of the tower, which I assume the author would have no issue with.
And the analysis (good and bad) is the movement. It's great that they're encouraging people to donate money, and have goals in doing so, but that idea's been around since ancient times. (And they're far the first people to apply utilitarian frameworks or RCTs to philanthropy either, so it's really the detail that's novel)
And since the movement set itself up with the goal of debating the effectiveness of altruistic interventions (including explicit suggestions that others weren't doing altruism effectively), it seems ludicrously antithetical to that objective to shield it from criticism by telling us to shut up about the bits we think are ineffective and go away and give 10% of our own income instead.
(Apart from anything else, 10% of the average sceptic's lifetime income probably isn't worth nearly as much in QALY as a throwaway comment convincing a single SV billionaire with exit money to spend on the future of humanity that they might be better off listening to boring old aid agencies that don't even do RCTs, rather than being seduced by arguments in favour of donating to a more EA-approved cause like the nonprofit marketing wing of OpenAI Inc)
I haven't made that claim. I have accurately stated that EA organisations have both explicitly criticised many/most aid agencies for not providing enough evidence of efficacy in the form of RCTs etc and explicitly endorsed and funded OpenAI. In my opinion, the latter cause is a less effective and in-need-of-funds one than the average "do not recommend" charity on GiveWell, and so I think human QALYs would benefit from high net worth individuals regarding the core of the EA movement's opinions on effectiveness as highly debatable and listening to voices outside it too.
(And obviously whilst many EAs recommend and contribute significantly to global development causes, it's also true that this cause is extremely highly prioritised outside the movement whereas AI risk and "longtermism" - an increasingly emphasised if not universally approved part of the movement - is pretty much exclusive to it, so I think the net direction of most people already committed to human-life centred philanthropy paying attention to the EA movement is going to be to fund the former less and the latter more)
No, my point is that funding a company that sells closed-source text and image generation APIs in partnership with Microsoft in the hope this will prevent cyberpunk is a much worse use of philanthropic funds than a typical aid agency that indulges in all the stuff GiveWell frowns on (not doing RCTs to measure the nutrition benefit of feeding the hungry, doing "donor illusion" because it's an extremely cost effective and considerably-more-honest-than-OpenAI way of attracting support etc.) Most interventions not classed as "highly effective" have more plausible claims to effectiveness than some EA darlings
So paying less attention to certain EA arguments will, ironically, result in more effective donations.
Now I'm aware that EA is a diverse movement and some people give all their money to malaria nets and are doubtful of some of the "longtermist" causes (and EAs make perfectly well-reasoned and well-evidenced arguments for malaria nets, although they're not the only ones making them). But that seems like a particularly good reason not to blog about how sceptics should shut up and donate their own money to their own causes rather than pointing out issues with the EA movement...
Either you would “never do this” because you feel that it would hurt the cause or because you realize that all of those initial responses are completely fallacious.
“Steel man” those questions. It is obvious that they are attacking the intellectual ideas behind EA. But you’re conflating actions, moral character, and ideas.
Here’s a steel man of one of the “questions” (assertions):
Q: [Given that you are going to commit to donating 10% of your time or money or whatever and do X:] I think charity is a distraction from the hard work of systemic change. [Therefore you should put that 10% towards systemic change instead.]
> Foundational Assumptions
Say I accept these. Then I make my next assumptions:
1. I value my direct experience over second-hand experience, statistics, and science
2. Because I think (1) helps inform me better so that I can be true to the Foundational Assumptions (being effective)
3. I think Utilitarianism as a guiding framework is completely useless and won’t help me stay true to the Foundational Assumptions
4. I know my family and community better than I know people outside that circle, which helps me stay true to the Foundational Assumptions (being effective)
5. I will therefore focus 95% of my good-doing activities on very local help
Would I still be in the EA club?
The way you've defined things, asking a homeless person for what they believe would most help them is not effective, because it is second hand.
See above.
> Based on your second assumption, it appears that being effective to you means, at worst, only helping those close to you, and at best, helping in ways that are visible to you. Do you think those in your community are the most in need of assistance, and even if they are, do you think that your view of what they need is more insightful than their opinion of what they need?"
It’s not (under those assumptions) about helping those close to me per se. It’s about doing good with a high probability. I know what they need so I am more likely to actually help them, instead of causing unintentional harm.
It’s funny that this author chose the tower analogy. EA is like a skyscraper of assumptions, built with paper: send money through three continents in order to help Africans in a very specific way without necessarily knowing anything about their specific needs. Maybe the malaria nets will help save millions. Or maybe they will just end up polluting the waterways.
> The way you've defined things, asking a homeless person for what they believe would most help them is not effective, because it is second hand.
If I ask that person then I get first-hand experience with that person.
I don't follow this line of reasoning. It's basically anti-empiricism which can be used to support pretty much any ideology you want. There's evidence that the malaria nets help save lives. We can see that fewer people get malaria. We can see death-rates declining.
You can argue that that doesn't actually improve life/quality of life. You can argue that there are better ways, but the claim that "maybe they will just end up polluting the waterways" is based, fundamentally, on an intentional lack of knowledge.
Calling donating money to malaria nets or deworming "a skyscraper of assumptions built with paper" is like calling modern physics or modern cancer treatment "a skyscraper of assumptions built with paper". Sure, yeah, it's complex and you don't understand all of it, and neither do I, but we have very clear and obvious evidence that it works!
> If I ask that person then I get first-hand experience with that person.
No you haven't, you've been told something through their biases. It's second hand experience, which you claim is unreliable. They could be lying to you! If what matters is your direct experience and observation, a study on what is most beneficial to homeless people, and a recorded interview with a homeless person, and a direct in person conversation with a homeless person (or a study on malaria nets, or a recorded interview with someone whose describes how their town has far fewer malaria related deaths than a decade ago) are all equally bad and less reliable than your preconceived beliefs and in-the-wild observations of what people struggle with.
> See above.
You don't actually define "effective" anywhere. I'm asking you to do that. You say it's a foundational assumption, and that sticking with things you know well helps you be effective, but we still don't know what effective means, and certainly not what it means to you, hence my request, which your above post doesn't address.
Consider at least two possibilities:
1. To you, "effective" means provably done. That is, if you do not have incontrovertible (say, directly observable evidence) that your work has done good, you assume the value of your investment is zero.
2. To you, effective means something akin to utilitarianly efficient, e.g. most utils per $.
It sounds to me like you initially claimed (2) and had a number of higher level assumptions about low trust, but it appears now you're claiming (1), and perhaps there are other possibilities that I haven't thought of. So once again I'd implore you to actually say what you mean.
Physics manages simple models and the the efficacy of cancer treatment is (I guess) pretty measurable. You can’t compare these things to the Nerds in the West → Africa pipeline because of the mountains of variables that are layered on top. Just the sheer amount of humans that have to be involved, for one.
I’m glad that we were able to figure out that those “fundamental assumptions” were not, in fact, the bare fundamental assumptions. They were just the fundamental assumptions that EA proponents thought that they needed because they thought that things like Utilitarianism, empiricism, etc. just followed immediately from them. Hence how you are trying to logic nerd my simple, primitive, chimp-like, intuitive list of assumptions and get me to either write whole thesis of axioms or to concede that Utilitarianism+empiricism etc. are the one true tools to rule all. But I am unfortanetely too low-IQ and not committed enough to some silly nerd morality hobby to write a whole thesis in order to try to convince people that trying to prevent the AI Apocalypse should not be the topmost concern of people’s precious 10%.
Maybe some people in EA forums are tying themselves in knots, but you don’t have to hang out there, and I’m skeptical that people who post a lot are typical.
I’m not sure that “we should strongly consider” necessarily means you do the considering yourself, since “we” is fairly vague about who does the work. But maybe the wording could be clarified?
Also, fwiw, this is effectively already true. The main EA organizations are operating funds you can donate to directly, which they will subsequently distribute.
As a single data point, that's what I do! I don't engage with any of the "discourse" and am thoroughly uninterested in uninformed speculation about whatever x-risk event is scaring people today. It's really really easy to be more effective than 99% of people with your charitable contributions, and other people can go for that last 1% if they really want.
Divide your monthly income by 10, set up a monthly recurring donation through GiveWell's website[0] to one or more of their top charities, and forget about it. Be free!
Which, I guess is the point of the article, and your comment. People get way tied up in knots by all the weird AI stuff and then don't do anything. I think I would actually like to cite Peter Singer on this -- in one of his books (maybe The Most Good You Can Do?) he talks about how we have a moral imperative to follow our beliefs wherever they lead us, even if it's somewhere unintuitive. He extrapolates from the idea of ruining your shoes to save a drowning child to a much broader idea that we should help people, at cost to ourselves, no matter where they are, etc. And he comes up with a completely "unreasonable" (to most people) answer that we should live our lives completely in service to reducing suffering. But then he backs down from this idea, because hardly anybody is going to be Mother Theresa. Instead, he advocates for donating 10% (or maybe 20? I forget.) of your income to high-impact charities, with more than that being supererogatory -- morally good, but not morally required. The thing is, this position itself does /not/ jive with his strict utilitarianism, it's merely a compromise, because by advocating for this position (donating a flat percent rather than the most you can), more good is actually done in the world. Even if he actually believes something different.
So I guess what I'm getting around to -- maybe x-risk /is/ the big thing we all need to be worried about. But maybe more good is done with a stance of "just donate to GiveWell's recs. If you feel strongly about other things, there are people who would love to talk to you about it." But the ferment of the EA movement is all on the forefront, the sexy and interesting bits (that if I'm being cynical, make one feel smart for thinking about; if charitable, that might be the fulcrum with which to move the world). You don't hear as much about the people who went "yeah that makes sense", set up a donation, and logged off.
I don't think there's a solution to this. Reminded of the idea that most of what you read on the internet is written by a very small portion of active users.[1] (I'm not one of you r/ssc readers!! I was four years ago though. Sorry for the link. Don't hang out there.)
Just saying, you're right, there's people who don't visit EA forums and still believe in the core ideas of EA (we should make the world a better place, we should be effective in how we do so, there are groups who are doing so effectively, I am able to contribute monetarily to them), and the reader of this comment could be one of them in <5m of work.
[0]: https://secure.givewell.org/ [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
I tried again to parse it. It's awkward wording, but the "this" has to refer to "helping other people", as the previous sentence is "We should help other people." So then it means "We should strongly consider how much effort we devote to helping other people". Paraphrased, I interpret that to mean, "We should ask ourselves whether we do enough to help other people".
Only in the next sentence do we get to "Some methods of helping people are more effective than others." Only after that in the chain of logic could come the idea "we should put a lot of thought into figuring out which methods are more/most effective". I'd say that the latter idea is presented as being in the next level of the tower, stated as "Utilitarian calculus (eg QALYs)".
I would say that "utilitarian calculus" in the second level represents possible disagreements over what the best calculus is, like "is measuring QALYs a good idea or should we measure something else?". I think "we should put a lot of thought into figuring out which methods are more/most effective" is in the first level, but the specific conclusion you reach through that thought is in the second level.
On a side note, Judaism has a 10% min but also a 20% max (but which doesn’t necessarily apply to the very wealthy).
― Albert Einstein
Discussion and criticism of effective altruism, and of any other social movement, is and should be possible separate from the question of whether the people participating in that discussion and criticism are personally doing anything about what they're discussing.
Got a problem with US drug policy? Well, what are you doing to heal addicts and stop international crime rings from funding their activities with the drug trade? Got a problem with mass surveillance from intelligence agencies? What are you doing to keep foreign adversaries from infiltrating and sabotaging public information systems? Got a problem with policing strategies? What are you doing to fight crime?
In case it isn't clear, I think all of these are bad responses. EA, for better or worse, has made itself more or less a public-facing movement. Publicity exposes you to opinions of people who are not personally involved in whatever you're doing. Lots of people critique the athletes, coaches, and management of their favorite sports without ever having any hope or possibility of getting involved themselves. Very few people who vote are ever going to run for office. That's fine. And if people with opinions on EA are not themselves particularly altruistic in a way that involves giving money directly to charitable causes, so what? Maybe that makes them less personally virtuous according to your system of ethics, but it doesn't make what they're saying either more or less correct. Those are independent axes of evaluation.
Or rather, in my case — "more effective" -> "most effective" — and that search for how to perfectly save the world has been driving me insane a bit.
So how to keep it at the "more effective" level?
Yesterday, did the same thing with dinner at The French Laundry. Can't be helped, man, I don't care about random lives. But like the great philanthropists of old, I am happy to give away all but the first billion dollars I've made.
And I think most people are like me. Like, you'd be accused of being a boor if someone said they were planning on buying an expensive engagement ring and you offered this alternative.
I wonder if this is because of Moral Relativism, i.e. a moral code that requires 90% is just as valid as a moral code that requires 10%.
You can see this axiomatic commitment to capitalism in their actual practice and advice they give people: starting non-profit orgs that are integrated with the capitalist economy, recommending getting high earning jobs at capitalist firms, donating huge amounts to capitalist politicians like Joe Biden (see Sam Bankman-Fried), not taking any anti-capitalist political action, etc.
Genuine set of questions, that is an interesting take!
I would guess that an effective altruist would be very interested in seeing how their "investment" would turn out - i.e. would the politician actually be effective in reaching the goals that they set out to achieve? If yes, then I think that it would be quite inline with EA to support politicians like these.
The current state of affairs is definitely NOT convenient for me. But I’ve become jaded, and I do not believe that the current gov of the USA, nor attempting to change the current gov of the USA, is a good use of my time.
I’m kinda tired of this facade that you must support a party. I just don’t think it does anything productive, and just makes me exhausted. Maybe I am wrong, and lord knows I would be very happy to be wrong. Until then, I will chug along on a small corner of things that I can actually improve.
As an example, I have never read about EA support for worker unionization, which would be a pretty effective way of increasing worker access to food, shelter and healthcare. It's not even a new, unproven idea! Workers in the US were much more unionized in the past, with a measurable QoL impact. However, since this an issue that can't be solved with monetary donations, plus it requires rocking the political boat, EA advocates are functionally blind to it. These are the types of things I think about when being "anti-politics" is mentioned as a feature.
If you want to pick something that pretty much everyone in EA would agree is good, that would be donating to whatever GiveWell recommends. Yes, this uses money to actually accomplish things.
I think the reality is that humans create most of the problems they are worried about. This may seem like a cop out, but people are just inherently greedy. While other political systems attempt to shut our nature down capitalism embraces ourselves and aligns our incentives to generally make society better. As long as people are in charge there will be corruption and mistreatment and abuse of power.
I understand where you are coming from but I will state unequivocally: people are not _just_ inherently greedy. Each of us has the capacity to be greedy and selfish, but we also each have the capacity to be giving, caring and accountable to others. How might we act if we lived in a society in which wealth hoarding was a cultural taboo rather than a celebrated cultural value? What if we looked towards billionaires with pity rather than envy or resentment?
As the late anthropologist, David Graeber, put it: “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is just something we make, and could just as easily make something different.” Rather than just concede that capitalism is the best we can possibly do, why not consider how we could reform it and/or replace it with something better? (For the record, I consider communism and capitalism two sides of the same coin. We need to be more creative and visionary about the world we want to live in than what these tired ideologies offer.)
I would reframe this as "in practice, as an actually existing movement, recognizes that capitalism is our current system, and in order to create less exploitative, inequitable, and unsustainable systems, one has to engage with it to a large degree".
How can new, better systems be set up today without funding something in the global capitalist system? The article suggests that anyone with better ways of doing good per-unit-time or per-dollar should be evangelizing those rather than dismissing the efforts of others who have some current answers to those questions, and are probably open to better answers as they come up.
For those that were around for it, there was a big huge discussion here awhile back about Blue Tribe vs Grey Tribe mentality and this is just more Grey Tribe quibbling. Scale happens best not at the level of the firm / charity, but at the realm of the state. It's possible to participate meaningfully in politics just by making your voice heard, this is why the Blue Tribe is so powerful. Grey Tribe is fundamentally libertarian, and libertarians fundamentally just wanna be free to go their own way. But there's power in numbers.
My recommendation is 2.5% politics donations, 2.5% personal cause donations (I like the FSF), 5% towards local organizations doing community stuff. Adjust as you see fit.
> In what Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has called “the most important election of our lifetime,” small donor donations already total $2.8 billion — an unprecedented high considering the impact of COVID-19 on the American wallet.
> Biden has seen a high tally of these small donations from a dollars-only standpoint. At around $368 million, money from small donors makes up about 38 percent of Biden’s total. But President Donald Trump has seen a higher proportion of money raised from small donors, with 45 percent, or $268 million, of his total coming from contributions of $200 or less.
From https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2020/10/small-donors-give-b...
Seems like every donation, even those under $200, counts. In a proportion and as part of helping win races.
I had a visualization in mind that showed size of donations per district among other stats but I can't find it now. There are rough estimates for the "cost per vote" based on donations divided by number of votes achieved but obviously there are a number of confounding factors with analyses starting from numbers like those.
As far as redirecting funds to things you believe in, I don't imagine some of the recent changes enacted by recent bills would have taken effect in any way other than getting folks to vote for someone who would help push them through, and donating money for political ads and other kinds of campaigning can often make or break a campaign (I can't think of a better recent example than how JD Vance was just given $28M for the Ohio race that ostensibly favors Republicans).
There's another reason to donate to political campaigns. Much of the money in politics comes from corporate PACs. This money often comes with weird strings attached and doesn't really serve the public interest. Grassroots donations (to the Blue Tribe, in the Red it's likely to just go in someone's pocket) provides a counterweight to this massive influence and is very important in prioritizing politicians' platforms and agenda. If they can rely on public donations, then they can spend less time satisfying corporate donors.
I think it is far better give money to a Cause that I know works today then gamble on long-term political Roi. I can still politically influence those around me with my time as I see fit.
I like https://80000hours.org/ They go over this topic way more in depth and also have a job board of most impactful jobs.
I think the motivations behind the loudest objectors, however, are because donating to charities in your own backyard, that work on things that you enjoy as a fan or as a hobby, that employ your friends and family etc. are the vast bulk of charities. And the bulk of the cash that goes to them is eaten up by a combination of overhead in the form of salaries, travel, and accommodations, and for the big boys hiring contractors with personal and political relationships to do studies and reports that deliver recommendations, rather than any direct improvement on the targets that are the nominal purpose of the organization.
People just prefer to give money to charities that get kids to paint murals, or their local art museum (where their niece works) than those that would have a far larger effect on lives farther away that they relate to less. That's of course true for plenty of the effective altruists, too, it's just that their hobbies are ideological or science fictional, so the charities that they think are effective are often outlandish, hyper-libertarian, or simply stupid.
But criticize the individual donating badly, not the idea. The complaint that effectiveness is impossible to measure so therefore the mean of all giving is inevitably moderate effectiveness is defensive nonsense and a direct appeal to the law of averages. We're just trying to hide the fact that, with the bizarre out-of-touch narcissistic elites that we've bred with our terrible politics, we pray that they're ineffective in pursuing what they think is best. Every time a rich guy accomplishes what he thinks is best, a public school closes.
But the criticism largely seems to be coming from a middle class segment who thinks that charities are best when they're about going to parties, expressing yourself, being thanked, and pushing periodic press releases to raise awareness. I think it'd be better to ditch the larger brand, and push for effective alleviation of hunger, or effective relief of homelessness, or taking effective care of refugees or immigrants. Just get the ideology out of the way immediately i.e. this is the thing that I think is most important to do, let's find the most effective way to do it.
Sorry for the rant.
Isn't it a bit ironic then that so much of the criticism of EA has to do with these very activities? There is a legitimate role for awareness raising, as long as it's not consuming huge amounts of valuable resources.
> push for effective alleviation of hunger, or effective relief of homelessness, or taking effective care of refugees or immigrants.
This is exactly what EA's are doing. But picking the most viable cause areas is also important. Some incredibly popular causes, e.g. short-term disaster relief in foreign countries, really are a lot less viable than what EA's typically fund.