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Comment by Imnimo | Hacker News Reader

The base level of the tower contains "we should strongly consider how much effort we devote to this". Isn't this the pillar that leads to all the crazy "Kill predatory animals" (I know this particular example is not a widely held position, it's just the one from the article) stuff? I think everyone is on board for the "altruism" part, it's the "effective" part that doesn't seem to be panning out so well. For whatever reason, it seems like a significant portion of people who devote a lot of time to trying to be effective end up being less effective than if they just gave their money to the Red Cross or other big-name charities.

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How do you figure? The simplest way to do effective altruism is to donate to whatever GiveWell recommends and call it a day, and I would expect that to be significantly more effective than donating to the Red Cross.

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 would say that using GiveWell is a perfectly fine approach, but it is not the one implied by the phrase "strongly consider".

It’s outsourcing the “strongly consider” part; that is, donating through an organization that strongly considers effectiveness.

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?

If the advice given by EA were simply, "here is our charity that tries to make good use of their money, you should donate to them", I think it'd look a lot different as a movement, and many common objections to it would be moot.

I don't understand why the objections would be moot; they would be the same. The "EA charity" would still invest significant sums in things like AI safety and still be driven by the same ideas that people are criticizing.

Also, fwiw, this is effectively already true. The main EA organizations are operating funds you can donate to directly, which they will subsequently distribute.

> The simplest way to do effective altruism is to donate to whatever GiveWell recommends and call it a day

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 appreciate this. I've spent so much time (unrelated to EA) trying to optimize my work to help the most amount of people, and yet how much of that time could have been better spent helping someone in a less efficient way? 2 hours helping at 100% efficiency but 8 hours of thinking (0% efficiency) vs 8 hours of helping at 50% and 2 hours of thinking? Seems the latter would win, 4 hours to 2 hours.

How do you interpret the sentence "we should strongly consider how much effort we devote to this"? A number of comments (on Reddit and Substack, besides yours) take issue with it, but I can't seem to figure out what it even means, let alone how it's objectionable.

I interpret it to mean something like, "you should put a lot of thought into figuring out what the best way to allocate your personal charitable donations is." I draw a contrast against other approaches to charity which are basically "give your money to big-name organizations that seem to know what they're doing and don't worry too much about it". It's the idea that a core (it's in the base of the tower, after all!) part of your approach to charity should be trying to work out a moral calculus that lets you compare one donation to another and decide which is best.

OK, I see.

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)".

Your interpretation also seems reasonable to me.

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.

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