Comment by zestyping | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zestyping | Hacker News Reader

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-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.

> 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.

If this is the argument, then the criticism should focus on HFT, not on EA.

Most HFT employees aren't earning to give, and donate little to none of their income to effective charities. If HFT is harmful, then those non-EA HFT employees deserve at least as much criticism as EA HFT employees. So if you're worried about HFT, you should start with criticism of HFT, and if someone tries to defend HFT by bringing up EA, _then_ you can debate whether the benefits of earning-to-give outweigh the damage done by HFT.

But this article, and your comment, are doing the exact opposite -- you're _starting_ with criticism of the EA movement, and only mentioning HFT in passing! It comes across as looking for an excuse to criticize EA, rather than being genuinely concerned about harm caused by HFT.

EA advocates of earning to give are telling people to _switch_ to an HFT career _as an ethical choice_.

The criticism here is of the claim that _earning to give_ is charitable, not a claim that HFT is charitable.

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.

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

The issue is primarily with motivated reasoning, not consequentialism, though naive consequentialism (also rampant in EA) can also be dangerous.

ETG encourages people to think of the positive side of what they're doing (donating money) without considering the negatives (harmful careers). Being rich, and focusing on getting rich as a goal, distorts your thinking.

The best paid careers are in HFT, which is far less harmful than e.g. ad optimisation (the business of most big tech)

Interesting — could I hear your argument why?

The only people HFT “harms” are traders, i.e. voluntary participants in the “get rich” game who are likewise trying to win, but aren’t good enough.

BigTech ads are instead non-consensually forced upon people and steal their attention (best case) or manipulate their thoughts/desires (worst case)

> BigTech ads are instead non-consensually forced upon people and steal their attention (best case) or manipulate their thoughts/desires (worst case)

Those who make the ads and those who view them are voluntarily exchanging their time and attention with each other. They're traders in the same way high-frequency traders are.

maybe in theory, but in practice ads are everywhere and completely unavoidable in everyday life

Maximizing profits often requires minimizing the welfare of others - for example through exploitative labor practices. You can't fully undo the damage of the former by giving a portion of your fortune away. Especially since you have less information about what would actually help than the people who are being exploited for that profit in the first place.

I think ETG basically advocates for a kind of central planning - replacing a large bureaucracy with a class donors who believe they have special knowledge about what would help the lives of others.

> Maximizing profits often requires minimizing the welfare of others

Wait, what? That's just not true. You can be very highly productive without exploiting anyone. Even if you happen to be in an industry where exploiting others is the status quo, you can do outsized amounts of good (rivaling the best outcomes of charity) by being even a bit less exploitive. Stated another way, social responsibility - even in profit-seeking enterprises - is quite compatible with EA.

It depends. It's sometimes possible to increase profits without harming others, but _maximizing_ profits will eventually cause harm (by definition, it's optimizing for profit at the expense of other factors). Competing on the basis of profit in a field of competitors will naturally push you to maximize profit, i.e. to maximize efficiency and externalities.

That's what corporations are — large, complex machines under steady selective pressure to maximize efficiency and externalities. If you're lucky, they will go the efficiency route. But if it's easier, or they're already pretty efficient, they will tend to maximize negative externalities instead.

So guardrails are needed. Reasonable people disagree about where the guardrails should be. One thing that is hard to dispute, though, is that seeking profit, and continuing to focus your attention on increasing profit, will bias your thinking about where the guardrails should be.

I don't see how working at an HFT exploits anyone more than a normal office job.

I think a better argument is that earning to give emphasizes careers that produce the "most" value as measured by the market. But there are plenty of valuable careers that the market probably undervalues, like teaching.

EA is about being data driven, and even if teachers are undervalued. (I think they are) It's probably not enough to make up for the difference in pay when that difference is donated to the most effective charities.

>Maximizing profits often requires minimizing the welfare of others - for example through exploitative labor practices.

This is completely untrue. Let's say you choose the rather extreme example of corporate executive who outsources jobs to Asia for purely selfish motivations. They are still undeniably injecting wealth to a poorer economy that otherwise would not have happened , and this wealth allows people purchase goods that dramatically increase their livelihoods like antibiotics, electricity, or cleaner burning stoves.

Even if you want to approach this from a "capitalism bad" angle, this still doesn't make sense. It's not like EA is a primary motivation of people wanting to work lucrative jobs. On the internet, you can see endless number of comments about wanting to work a FAANG job, and none of them have anything to do with EA.

High frequency traders aren't involved in exploitative labor practices.

EA was never recommending "Open up a sweat shop and violate as many labor practices as possible to maximize income", "become a successful drug dealer" or "market for tobacco companies"

It was "Go work at Google, in finance, high frequency trading, or become a corporate lawyer and donate a large portion of your income to the world." All jobs where the impact is close to neutral.

Impact in corporate law is not necessarily close to neutral at all. You may, for example be promoting income inequality and housing affordability issues by facilitating international investment funds buying up huge swathes of real estate in a city.

You may be helping plutocrats syphon resources and public funds away from developing countries.

You may be promoting the inequality of arms in access to justice, given that regulators and citizens cannot pay for the best legal advice, therefore enabling corporate regulatory capture over the long term.

Given the ubiquity of offshore vehicles in many international legal transactions, you may enable companies to evade contributing fairly to the countries in which they operate, thereby fuelling a decline in funding available for public services, and increasing the tax burden on wage-earning citizens.

And you may even have little awareness you are even doing these things because of the relative opacity and abstraction of the ownership of the corporate vehicles that make up your client base.

> Impact in corporate law is not necessarily close to neutral at all. You may, for example be promoting income inequality and housing affordability issues by facilitating international investment funds buying up huge swathes of real estate in a city.

This is debatable. If they are renting out the houses this could reduce rents which would improve the lives of the poor who rent much more often than own. If they are sitting on them it's much more likely to be negative.

> You may be helping plutocrats syphon resources and public funds away from developing countries.

I'll give you that you shouldn't earn to give by working for Gaddafi. I think the vast majority of EA would agree.

The third rule at 80,000 hours the biggest proponent of earn to give is

3. Doesn’t cause harm

And their actual recommendations given are

Tech startup founder

Quantitative trading

Software engineering

Startup early employee

Data science

Management consulting

Marketing

Actuarial science

Executive search

Nursing

Allied health

> This is debatable. If they are renting out the houses this could reduce rents which would improve the lives of the poor who rent much more often than own. If they are sitting on them it's much more likely to be negative.

Large investors don't tend to be drawn to projects offering affordable housing to local residents because they are not as profitable as the alternatives. Many large European cities are currently suffering a housing affordability crisis driven in part by properties increasingly catering to tourists (esp. Air B&Bs) and luxury properties for investment for international high-net worth individuals.

> I'll give you that you shouldn't earn to give by working for Gaddafi. I think the vast majority of EA would agree.

It usually wouldn't be as clear cut and easy to spot a case as that. But for example, until the war in Ukraine, European law firms were happy to act for any number of Russian businesses or oligarchs, provided they don't figure on any anti-money laundering lists (themselves, often relatively simple to circumvent). Or say, an African business person who has acquired their huge wealth in domestic assets and infrastructure through nepotism and is salting away the wealth offshore or into Europe via various direct or opaque investments, all legally facilitated by big law firms.

>The third rule at 80,000 hours the biggest proponent of earn to give is

3. Doesn’t cause harm

Not causing harm is much harder to tease out than one might think. The first order effects might appear harmless, but what about the second and third order effects? Is one often even in a position to know given the levels of abstraction in global financial markets? Are you lifting up developing countries by investment, or unwittingly enabling more to be extracted from them than is being put in?

> Tech startup founder

> Startup early employee

Plenty of these have caused harm. Many modern startups have the explicit goal of "disrupting" traditional labor rights or unions.

> Marketing

There's so much variability here, ranging from pretty benign activities to outright lying to people's faces about health outcomes of dangerous products.

My larger point is not that marketers or tech founders are inherently evil people, but that the system is rotten. For example, despite all the charities and philanthropy going to undeveloped countries, the net flow of resource is out of these countries and into more developed ones[1]. Nothing about ETG seems to contradict these tendencies, if you work in actuarial science and help a company minimize the taxes they pay in South Africa, but then donate 50% of your paycheque back to charitable causes in the country, your actions have not been a net benefit to the people of that country.

[1] https://www.howwemadeitinafrica.com/actual-flow-resources-de...

> Maximizing profits often requires minimizing the welfare of others - for example through exploitative labor practices.

I've had a long, albeit shallow, exposure to EA, and my model of altruism has roughly matched up with it for even longer. Most of the formulations of Earn-to-Give I've encountered don't fit your description here, of maximizing profit blindly, at any expense[1]. The formulation I'm familiar with is ceterus-paribus: choosing between two jobs as with much of EA, a gentle pushback against intuitive notion that you should privilege doing good with your own two hands over doing good with money. The exemplar here is not "sell meth to kids to buy mosquito nets", it's "be an accountant for a widget firm to donate enough to hire two Peace Corp workers instead of working directly as a PC worker".

For a more explicit but more recent example, 80k Hrs published, 5 years ago, an explicit rejection of what you're describing:

> We believe that in the vast majority of cases, it’s a mistake to pursue a career in which the direct effects of the work are seriously harmful, even if the overall benefits of that work seem greater than the harms.

https://80000hours.org/articles/harmful-career/

> ETG basically advocates for a kind of central planning - replacing a large bureaucracy with a class donors who believe they have special knowledge about what would help the lives of others.

Tangential, but I don't follow this. How does ETG give donors more control than working in an altruistic career, or than donors with a more traditional mindset?

It's not universalizable.

I'll admit it's tricky to figure out when this really matters. On the margins, it is clearly the case for plenty of people, maybe even most people, that they can do more good by earning to give than they can by directly providing charitable services. But by earning to give, you're relying on and presupposing the existence of other people doing the direct service provision. If everyone becomes a stock broker and no one becomes a nurse, the world does not end up better off. And the line where that happens is nebulous and not necessarily at the 100% mark or even at a majority mark. A world with more stock brokers and fewer nurses gradually gets worse. I don't know where that point is, but maybe at least when a charitable organizations reaches some threshold where the bottleneck to providing more service is labor rather than money? "Pay more" to solve the labor problem doesn't necessarily work, either, because if you pay your employees a high salary, then Givewell will rank you as less efficient and all those charitable people will stop giving you money. This isn't true of all non-profits, of course. Employees of the University of Alabama Athletic Department and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art can earn 7 and even 8 figures and still receive massive donations, but real charities usually can't do that.

To be clear, I'm sympathetic to the marginal focus. I don't vote. Why? Because obviously, one vote has never made a difference in any voting precinct I've ever lived in for any election. The vast majority of the time, a single vote will never make a difference in any election. But obviously, someone has to vote. And we're probably at a level of civic engagement in the US where the percentage of people who vote arguably leaves the country worse off, with an unrepresentative government and citizens who feel disconnected and ineffective and don't identify with or agree with the goals and mission of the their nation.

For all those reason, even though I don't vote, I'm not going to start a campaign trying to convince people in general that they also shouldn't vote. Earning to give seems in a similar category. Go ahead and do it, but it feels dangerous to advocate for it in a general way implying that it is what all sufficiently intelligent and high-skill people should do. You're creating a class-divided society where anyone who directly cares for others is looked down on as low status and ineffective. This is unfortunately much harder to quantify than "how many malaria cases can I prevent in the next ten years," but we know at some point it becomes a real problem. Inability to quantify doesn't make it go away.

If you get a high paying job you are very likely not looking rationally at the harm done by your job.

My understanding of ETG is that people have the goal to earn as much money as possible so they can donate more. But if you take the idea of rationally deciding how to do most god, of course you have to balance the good you do with your donations against the bad you do in your job. And you are the worst person to evaluate that rationally.

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