> Actually, if you think real hard about it, we're the good guys
--the bad guys
The economist likes it because it resembles what their target audience tells themselves so they can sleep at night.
If you wanna do good in the world, you can't just aim a bunch of money at a goal and expect the good to happen, you gotta get your hands dirty and course correct when your original plan turns out to be more harmful than helpful. I'm sure there are a lot of good intentions in there, but from the outside it's looking like the supposed rationality has been compromised by greed at the expense of the supposed altruism. As expressions of altruism go, EA just doesn't seem very effective.
The claims made there are beyond absurd and based on a remarkable absence of anything resembling reason.
That's echoed by a surprising amount of people here.
Or instead get brain-wormed into giving all your torment nexus dollars to "ai safety" cult that tells you that you're helping to prevent the endless torture of all sentient minds that could ever exist in the entire universe.
Hubbard proved that you can create an effective cult out of bad science fiction-- perhaps it should be surprising that it took so long for someone to improve on the design...
In the past, the community made the mistake of becoming too closely associated with “earning to give”. Many people involved in effective altruism still think this is a good strategy for some people, particularly those who have a good personal fit for high-paying careers. But donating to charity is not the only way to have a large impact. Many people can do even better by using their careers to help others more directly. Many people in the community do both.
This sentence is too short for such a complex topic. Whether you can (or should at all) mix your political projects with your career is an entire debate. That they throw it away entirely shows that they are very conservative: the entire idea of collective political action (which is not charity nor work) does not exist in their worldview.
I was initially curious about effective altruism ~10 years ago, but fortunately i had enough political background to realize that this is essentially a movement of silicon valley sociopaths virtue-painting their bad behavior and their working for the most evil industries on earth in the name of a hypothetical future greater good that will never materialize because they keep supporting the capitalist system that's destroying our planet. It's like saying you're gonna work for Darth Vader because the pay is good so you'll provide good for the universe; it's entirely fucked up and does not hold any form of scrutiny from actually-rational people with a modest social sciences / political background.
And it is a debate they (or at least the ones around here, I'm in Europe, having turned down each opportunity to relocate to the USA) will encourage you to think about.
For the purposes of "FAQ to sell you on the difference with earn-to-give", when earn-to-give is also a complex topic with an entire debate, the sentence they wrote is an appropriate size of answer, even if I find their writing style to be "preach to the choir" rather than actually saying something that would convince an outsider.
(Regarding un-convincing writing style: look at how caveated that whole quotation is. This is typical nerd writing (and I say that as a nerd), not bold "written in primary colours" language that political, business, and charity slogans use).
> That they throw it away entirely shows that they are very conservative: the entire idea of collective political action (which is not charity nor work) does not exist in their worldview.
They've definitely got political activities amongst their piles of recommendations, so I don't know what you have in mind here that makes them fail it. (Also, thanks to the way political language is a treadmill, when you say "conservative" I don't know if you mean "small government", "Trumpist", "pre-Trump Republican party", "Chesterton's fence", or something else; US use of the word has always been very different from European use of the term).
Don't get me wrong: I think EA is not particularly good at the "effective" part despite their attempts (and name), but you're not making a strong case here.
I've never met EA people in person, but through their blogs i've never felt invited to think about anything beyond raw numbers and vague notions disconnected from any actual social structure and injustice i could see with my eyes. Maybe i've missed the most interesting bloggers out there?
> They've definitely got political activities amongst their piles of recommendations
I would be interesting to know what you consider political. I've never seen anything resembling it. But maybe you'd call lobbying political activities? I'm thinking in terms of building collective power through union and non-electoral mobilizations. EDIT: for me warming up to this politician, that party, or taking a position in a corporation is not "politics"
> when you say "conservative"
I mean they don't appear to be revolutionaries. I can't see a better world through their writings, nothing significantly different about the power structures, merely green-coated capitalism where technology has magically solved every problem, which i thought to be naive wishful thinking that simply does away with centuries of revolutionary theory and praxis which did in fact bring social change. I personally find much more rationality, despite my disagreements, in Marx or Kropotkin (and their 21st century successors), than in the "rationalist" community online.
Earning money is not the problem. Most of us have had (or still have) morally-questionable jobs to put food on the table. That's a reasonable trade-off until we have a better, more ethical society. But making it a moral argument to work for the most evil corporations on earth to do good just doesn't make sense. At which point do you become the bad guy you're trying to avoid being through effective altruism?
It's not a competition, but it really feels like they're all trying to win that title.
As for the most evil, the competition is fierce. Of course i don't think Backblaze or OVH is just as evil as Amazon or Google. Just like i don't think La Vache Qui Rit or Loué are as evil as Carrefour and Unilever. But in my view, if you're recruiting people and aiming for a better world, you should aim higher than "my employer is not actively supporting genocide". Otherwise, your utopian project has nothing very interesting nor moral about it.
But you started with most evil corporations. What did you mean by it and why did you bring it up?
Is your problem with EA that they work within the system and try to incrementally make it better? And you snide at them because of this?? And I have no idea what you mean about genocide.
This confirms my point that a lot of EA critiques come from literal extremists who think doing good within the system is “evil”.
I don't think they're making it better, that's the whole debate.
> I have no idea what you mean about genocide
That's just an example, referring to the Rohingya genocide or the Palestinian genocide, both of which have been more than facilitated by tech companies.
> think doing good within the system is “evil”
That's a misinterpretation of what i said. I think it's a valid goal on a personal level, but that it actually doesn't work (produces burnout or corruption of values). Therefore i think it's a wrong collective strategy that entirely misses the point (and centuries of experience) of how to change society for the better.
EDIT: for example, slavery abolition or women's right to vote in the Global North was not achieved by advocating to work for plantation owners and then giving away money to charity. And i don't know of a single historical example where that strategy worked.
How not? Their contribution is around 300k+ lives saved.
> That's just an example, referring to the Rohingya genocide or the Palestinian genocide, both of which have been more than facilitated by tech companies.
Do you think EA's would advocate for this? Or you suggest that some EA's merely working for a company that does this is already making them so evil and irredeemable?
> for example, slavery abolition or women's right to vote in the Global North was not achieved by advocating to work for plantation owners and then giving away money to charity
Do you then think that the only way to make change in society is to create revolutions and protests? Anyone who tries to help in any other way is not useful?
Find me an evil corporation advertised in the job listings. A single one.
Your entire argument is a projection and strawman. You have no idea what you're talking about. The imperative popularized in EA circles is to work in fields that have the most humane impacts where possible, and otherwise donate money you earn by providing value.
If you're going to argue that merely working for FANG or high-earning positions is tantamount to aiding "evil" corporations then you're chastising a lot more people than just EA adherents.
Your whole thing I suspect is informed by the sentiment that making good money must categorically be evil, or some other leftist notion.
It's hard to find one that's not evil on this list, except maybe for reporter at MIT Tech Review? Some of these job titles sound good, but wield no power to make good things in practice (hence the turnover rate for many "ethicist" or QA roles). But i didn't have to scroll much to find unambigously evil corporations (eg. RAND, Google).
> work in fields that have the most humane impacts where possible
I'm sensitive to this argument, but i'm not sure that's possible in practice. It might be possible in some public sector or non-profit jobs, but i'm pretty sure it's impossible when driven by market value and share prices. EA does not ask such profound questions about actual political and social structures affecting our lives and therefore in my view silences the actual solutions to actual problems we face.
> merely working for FANG or high-earning positions is tantamount to aiding "evil" corporations
No. Many people do the minimum that's asked of them to put food on the table, that's just human and we can't really blame them. Those who go above and beyond thinking they'll save the world through Silicon Valley startups and foundations actually destroying it are the ones in my view aiding "evil".
Please don’t suggest something like revolution or class warfare. Maybe you had something else in mind?
Many, in fact. What do we work on, and for whose benefits? How to make useful products without destroying the environment or negatively impacting our bodies and minds? Why, despite an over-abundance of resources and products, do we have such profound inequalities? How could we address them?
Small example: why fixate on AI safety and risk of human extinction when 1) AI problems run much deeper (loss of QA, more economic inequalities, insane resource extraction, etc) 2) human extinction is actually already on track due to pre-AI industrial activities, and addressing the problems we had before ChatGPT came out would de facto solve the problems posed by OpenAI and others in the field?
That's just a small overview, we can (and should) ask many more, and i think what you called class warfare definitely has a place in that list. I'm just as much fascinated by numbers as the next EA blogger, but i do believe being fixated on numbers prevents from asking deep moral and philosophical questions about our shared humanity. Maybe my feeling of the EA community is wrong, and i'd be interested in reading more radical EA-adjascent blogs if you have links to share.
Why is inequality bad when material wealth has been increasing for decades and centuries? And do you think we have more inequality now or in the last centuries?
(BTW EAs are the ones redistributing their wealth so I wonder why you'd oppose them)
Why is resource extraction bad? Because of climate change? Almost all EA folks want to help with climate change. And no, climate change wouldn't cause human extinction - there's a very small chance of it happening. p(doom) climate change is lower than p(doom) of AI is what EA would argue.
Adherents do ask that. You'd have known that if you'd bother to look. But no, it does not reduce all concerns and solutions to your pet ideology.
Your ideological slant isn't much of a mystery, and reveals a conceit that EA itself has an overt political ideological alignment. Demographic surveys show EA is 70% left-leaning. Your far-left sensibility probably more represented than in average population, though still not that much. This is a projection partly owing to high-profile individuals associated you don't like, but mostly because you're not interested in charity, these improvements and what it means to people, because it doesn't satisfy your worldview.
Donations for malaria nets and direct cash transfers lead to tangible immediate difference in peoples' lives. Meanwhile, you sneer at concerns like climate and AI you deem too abstract, while lamenting that EA isn't fixated on some other abstract notion: that a total upheaval of the system, of doing away with Liberalism and private property, solves every problem (the unsaid corollary to the conceit that any solution doesn't matter if it doesn't mean overthrowing Capitalism). You can hand-wave anything and everything as a symptom of Capitalism, as if to say they couldn't happen otherwise, but it's not a compelling argument to most who haven't forgotten 20th-Century Communist experiments. Yeah they sure could sleepwalk their way to success (and to that we hear "oh, they weren't real Communists", or "they failed because of the Capitalists", depending on the day. Completely unserious). Anarchists have even less credibility.
Start applying solutions to real problems people face. That's rational. Then notice how by removing the bad actors from the equation your scifi problems disappear too. That's rational. Telling the billions of people who suffer to shut up because AI extinction is the real problem and we need to throw money at it so that a hypothetical future might be better is just completely irrational, disrespectful, and anything but altruist or efficient.
Done, that's what the charity and grass-roots movements for housing is for.
> actual problems people rationally face every day
Actual problems can be qualified instead of being referred to in abstract. Food in the developed world is effectively a solved problem. Housing should be, but it remains inelastic owing to bad policy.
> All the problems they present (AI, pandemics, whatever) is a hypothetical consequence of the capitalist system.
If some other wink wink system couldn't possibly introduce novel externalities, it is tautologically regressive and imposes more barbaric ones.
started as
But the practice of effective altruism and the problematic influential figures who are vocal effective altruists is what is bringing all of the negative attention.
and your definitions of bad behavior are therefore not post hoc, so let me hear your definitions.
But we don't need to define it to know it when we see it. Here are some examples of bad behavior which is encouraged by the way we currently practice economics:
- Operating generators in violation of local regulation such that the neighborhood around your new data center now has a smattering of new respiratory illnesses is bad behavior. The economic system we've built encouraged that outcome by focusing only on the consent of whatever banker granted the loan and not on the consent of the nearby community (relevant because the loan created the money which then bought the illegal generators). We further encourage abuses of this kind by letting irrational markets determine that it's admirable, because if the stock price went up then surly it must be so, and by doing so we subsequently increase the operator's ability to take out more loans of this kind. People are dying of lung cancer and economic indicators are saying "all systems go."
- Sending weapons to terrorists with the understanding that once they destabilize the regional government, they'll give you a favorable deal re: making off with whatever local resources you're after is bad behavior. That's basically US foreign policy in South America in the 80's, and we provided teams of economists to help draft the new dictators' constitutions to ensure that we could continue to exploit those countries long after.
- Charging $80k for enough Sovaldi to treat a Hepatitis C infection is bad behavior. It's not difficult to synthesize (people have done it in their garages for <$500), and the risk of spreading further infection because you can't afford to treat yourself is high. Society bears a tremendous cost because Gilead has decided that the economics of the situation justify the price they're setting.
Economists tell people that these bad things are unfortunate consequences of a system that for the most part is a good thing. But when they're pressed to support that claim they always do so against a meaningless background, something having to do with barter, as if it's not obvious that if we didn't have a system with this broken design, we wouldn't go back to the stone ages, we'd instead have a different system with a potentially less broken design.
Despite resting on such a feeble value proposition re: the current status quo, economists don't seem at all motivated to explore alternatives either. They appear to be rather happily at work for powerful men who are hurting people, where they manufacture for those men justifications about why the pain is in fact an unavoidable consequence of the laws of physics, and no something that they should feel guilty about.
I realize that, like effective altruists, there are probably a lot of good intentions among economists. It's just hard to look at history and come to any conclusion besides that they're not very good at resisting to attempts to corrupt those intentions.
for example, in a town with a lake, and two "rich" employers, a clothing company that pollutes the lake, and a food company that needs non-toxic water from the lake (and workers who work at the two companies and are the consumers of the food and clothing); it does not matter either of which company owns the lake: the two greedy businessmen will arrive at the same answer either way. And BTW, a socialist approach will not yield the optimum, having no basis to decide either way and relying on impulses not corrected by a market.
you very much need to rethink your notions of good and bad.
That much is clear. No one "owns" or "leads" EA, it's not a monolith; people have their own beliefs and co-opt it, including crazies. The only common tenet is in the name.
Notwithstanding that "shrimp welfare" and the like is in the margins, it does not preclude the overwhelmingly anthropocentric charitable giving by most members.
I mean, the most popular writer associated with that world, Scott Alexander, donated his kidney just to help others. Knowing the good people are trying to do, it's unseemly to me for EA not only to be discarded but viciously attacked because of "vibes" and weirdos who associate themselves with it.
You used the term "an excuse" twice; for what, a hidden motive to do harm? I think some types like Bentham's Bulldog are wrong or misguided in some respects, that doesn't mean you can leap to some notion that they want to harm humanity in the most stupid way possible: donating a meagre sum to shrimp welfare.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. How are you "ranking"? The most high-profile EA-adjacent personalities are guys like Scott Alexander, Benjamin Todd.