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Comment by lispisok | Hacker News Reader

This stuck out to me too. If Effective Altruism is about using math to figure out how to do the most good they seemed to have ignored higher order effects of their actions. What if buying the castle hurt Effective Altruism's reputation so less people got into EA so less people donated money to buy mosquito nets or malarial regions in Africa resulting is less overall good?

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It's hard to trust a community who claims to focus on effectiveness but then it turns out puts great effort into looking good. That kind of deception is more damaging than a bit of bad press.

There's plenty of charities with great marketing. EA doesn't need to be another one.

But the point is, you're just asserting that. I think the parent poster was observing that, as effective altruists, they might attempt to quantify the pros and cons of such reputational factors (some game theoretic calculation, perhaps?) and include it in their determinations.

Prove it with the maths. I'd be willing to bet that the maths comes out on the favour of those who put effort into looking good.

Not when you factor in how this strategy affects those who employ it. Sure, compromising your ethics and lying to people in order to secure more donations will bring in more money for the good cause - short-term. Longer term, how long until you start thinking, since you're already lying to the donors anyway, why not also lie about the whole charity thing and start pocketing the donations for yourself?

"Ends don't justify the means" isn't true on paper, for perfectly rational actors - but is true for actual humans.

There's a danger here, of which I imagine they're aware - higher-order effects are very hard to estimate in chance and magnitude, or in how your actions specifically contributed to them. This makes them perfect for justifying whatever you want, intentionally or accidentally. Overemphasize some positive second-order effects, fail to notice some negative second-order effects, and suddenly your first-order selfish choice looks like a charity. Societies and markets are dynamic systems, so predicting outcomes is less like predicting path of a rocket from Newton's laws, and more like predicting the weather.

It does not take a genius to understand how bad it looks to buy a castle in the UK

The previous owners were using it as a single family home (according to Wikipedia). Make of that what you will. It's definitely a bigger 'waste' of resources than using it for conferences.

No-one cares about the waste of resources though. A castle is a symbol of power. It's the combination of lots of big, bold ideas, lots of public speaking, giving money out, THEN buying a castle. People begin to worry that these people want to rule them.

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