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Effective Altruism, longtermers and charity
nexuscrawler
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Registered User regular
This seemed like a tangent worth exploring in its own thread.
If you're not familiar with it Effective Altruism is a school of thought that's getting lots of attention these days. SBS of the FTX Exchange and Elon Musk are both big proponents of it.
On its face EA seems fine. It's focused on using charity money and work in the most effective ways possible relying on research and facts rather than emotions. Of course this attracts techbros who think they're smarter than everyone else. So they can justify not paying taxes because its "inefficient" use of their money and only they know how to best spend it.
Its also hits some significant logical problems when you scratch the surface. Peter signer, one of AE's founders, says that all suffering and need should be considered equal and charity applied at a global scale. So helping your neighbor is selfish because the money you spent there could help more people somewhere else in the world. Completely ignoring the logistical differences of helping someone in front of you vs someone on the other side of the planet.
Perhaps the most distasteful branch of AE is longtermerism. the notion that regular charity's needs are eclipsed by existential threats to humanity. Why fight easy to cure childhood illness when global warming will kill us all anyway? Obviously its a waste of money right? William MacAskill's book What we Owe the future lays out arguments like this. That's where billionaires like Elon Musk find justifications for all kinds of shit. He's going to save us all by going to Mars so any bad he does in the process is negligible.
Anyway thats my opening spiel I don't have time to write out a longer essay on the topic. But its been coming up so I figured it might be worth having its own thread.
If you're not familiar with it Effective Altruism is a school of thought that's getting lots of attention these days. SBS of the FTX Exchange and Elon Musk are both big proponents of it.
On its face EA seems fine. It's focused on using charity money and work in the most effective ways possible relying on research and facts rather than emotions. Of course this attracts techbros who think they're smarter than everyone else. So they can justify not paying taxes because its "inefficient" use of their money and only they know how to best spend it.
Its also hits some significant logical problems when you scratch the surface. Peter signer, one of AE's founders, says that all suffering and need should be considered equal and charity applied at a global scale. So helping your neighbor is selfish because the money you spent there could help more people somewhere else in the world. Completely ignoring the logistical differences of helping someone in front of you vs someone on the other side of the planet.
Perhaps the most distasteful branch of AE is longtermerism. the notion that regular charity's needs are eclipsed by existential threats to humanity. Why fight easy to cure childhood illness when global warming will kill us all anyway? Obviously its a waste of money right? William MacAskill's book What we Owe the future lays out arguments like this. That's where billionaires like Elon Musk find justifications for all kinds of shit. He's going to save us all by going to Mars so any bad he does in the process is negligible.
Anyway thats my opening spiel I don't have time to write out a longer essay on the topic. But its been coming up so I figured it might be worth having its own thread.
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The ethical thing would have been to never have accrued such vast sums of wealth in the first place!
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
From their own page on disbursements and justifications from their "long-term" fund:
So here we have a grant to print some copies of a "rationalist" fanfic, fund someone recovering from burnout working for a "longtermism" org learn to ride a bike. And fund that same org despite admitting that the disbursment approver is an employee of that organisation.
This is from a fund that is meant to be investing in things critical to the long term future of humanity. EA has been completely taken over by these people.
It’s “it’s less effective to spend our wealth ameliorating despair for the billions alive now than spending it to ensure that the hundreds of billions of future humans over the coming several millennia suffer less”
Which coincidentally means investing in their tech companies who are building intergalactic societies or whatever Musk said he was doing that justified him spending less time at Tesla during his testimony yesterday
Using this frame, not even climate change is worth considering addressing for example, because that might only affect 10 billion people vs the potential future trillions who are exploring planets where the Earth’s climate means nothing
You see but that can't be it because they're hyper rational supermen who know best!
Never do they consider “what if no billionaires” as effective altruism
You start with a decent-sounding premise (“do the most good”) and then just bullshit into doing what you want to do and point to your premise to shut down criticism
Will climate change kill all of humanity? no - then there is no value in stopping it.
Will nuclear war kill all of humanity? no - then there is no value in stopping it.
Will the creation of general AI that can improve itself potentially wipe out humanity no obviously not maybe? Then all efforts to improve safety of AI research have infinite value.
It's just broken stupid ethics giving these people the warm fuzzies when they worship sociopathic billionaires.
See I get this part when we're talking about billionaires, because collectively they have enough money and influence to fix this
Thing is they fuckin aren't
If Tesla was a non profit I might spend more than a quarter second of thought before realizing how horseshit this is. If Musk had leveraged himself to start to try to worm his way into fossil fuel companies so that he could steer those collosi to a brighter future for humanity, likewise
Anyone working in EA spaces or having EA colleagues knows that longtermism has gotten more attention recently—and I do find that regrettable in many ways—but an enormous amount of the work is still about mosquito nets and clean-burning cook stoves. Even the speculative investments in hard to quantify risks of very bad outcomes are not clearly wrong. Part of the reason we were able to develop COVID vaccines so quickly is because the Wellcome Trust funded a bunch of speculative research into MERS on the theory that some coronavirus was likely to cause a pandemic sooner or later. Thank god they did!! And EA now is moving hard into pandemic preparedness as an underfunded high impact area.
Like, what are EAs about? Well, they’re not a monolith so different people have different interests. But the friend/former colleague I have who is most active in EA is an academic working on cost-effectiveness analysis and global health priority setting; her last works in progress talk was about how funders uniformly prioritizing more certain interventions over less certain ones structurally exacerbates health inequalities, and therefore funders need to develop a more context-sensitive approach to managing uncertainty. And I go from sitting in a talk like that to reading, say, Corey Robin doing his masturbatory Jacobin keyboard commando routine about how EA lol tech bros lol, and it’s like, man, this fucking sucks.
I would say I came to discover EA through the Longtermism critique and then because I’ve been forced to learn about SBF, and then again yesterday with Musk’s testimony
I don't think this (the idea that your money or time could be spent better elsewhere) is wrong, though. Like, it's easier to help your neighbor, generally, but the degree of help and cost of help isn't going to be the same or anywhere close to proportional. My donation to basically anything that's going to save American children would save more lives if it was for mosquito nets, and my volunteering to do almost anything, while probably laudable, is not going to ameliorate nearly the suffering that some trivial donation elsewhere will. Some of the fruit out there is so, so low hanging. It's logistically easier to help Dan down the street, but it's going to be hard to have the same impact that a few sub-dollar mosquito nets can have, because so many children are dying from such easily preventable causes.
(maybe soon we'll be able to spend that money on mosquito nets to save American children though, as tropical climates and mosquitos head further north..)
To jump off this point, I was saying in the thread that spawned this one that EA as a concept is good but EA as it's known colloquially (in so far as anything about this niche-ass discussion can be described as colloquial) is becoming associated with a specific flavour of tech bro "we're gonna colonize the stars and fear roko's basilisk" silliness. In part because that's all anyone writing about EA ever talks about. The rest of it gets no coverage by almost anyone.
I'm not opposed to the notion of more targeted charity work and research based on it. Its easy to point of examples of well meaning but pointless charity gestures. Look no further than floods of people sending teddy bears after disasters when dollars given to any charity on the ground would better spent.
The existence of sites like Charity Navigator to make sure that nonprofits are actually doing good rather than just assuming is great. Because there is definitely a place for data based skepticism in charity. Also, process efficiencies and basic management improvements. "What's the harm" is a real concern that should be considered when making donations or providing some form of intervention. It's also beneficial to reduce the risk of giving money to a grift that spends all it's donations on Director pay and turning their logo pink or a rainbow once a year. Spending money to model terraforming a planet without a magnetosphere isn't altruism or charity.
For the douches that have made this topical, yes
Singers A Life You Can Save is available for free as a PDF and as an audiobook narrated by Kristen Bell!
It's not a terribly long book and I would propose most people maybe give it a quick skim.
I'm not sure how intertwined long termism and AE actually are in practice. But given the human tendency to be incredible short term focused a philosophy organized around the idea that the most important charitable work we can do is for the longer term future doesn't strike me a something that is inherently bad or wrong. "A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in." and all that.
I guess for that reason, it's always kind of gone in one ear and out the other when a Billionaire talks about "I'm giving away (x) dollars (with (y) stipulations attached)
maybe I'm missing something though, but even at scale, it seems like the rich guy who says "i'm not giving that person money, they're just going to use it on (z)"
All of this is new to me (Effective Altruism) so I prolly am wrong : )
EA is kind of a bit of a downer and is pretty coldly utilitarian.
But as an example say your neighbors kid needs glasses and they can't afford it. And you have $300 you can spare.
You could either
A) Buy a new outdoor toy
C) Donate to a charity that treats river blindness at $30/case
What should you do with your $300?
Estimates on this stuff are obviously not exact, but the lowest cost to save a life is probably mosquito nets to prevent malaria at roughly $3400/life or $100 for Disability Adjusted Life Year (DALY) prevented.
So if you see some local charity trying to raise say $300k for library upgrades, that money could go and save 100 lives instead of providing more books or AV materials or w/e. But people have bias towards local things, and also things that are just more specific and less statistical. Those 100 lives are not specific. Its we will give 100,000 people mosquito nets, and so 2000 of them that would have gotten malaria in the next 3 years won't(though maybe 2000 still will) and off that 2000, 100 would have died so now the death toll is 100 instead of the 200 it would have been. You can't point to a specific person and go, we saved Malia's life. Maybe you did, but maybe it was someone a village over and she would have been fine regardless, or maybe only gotten slightly sick.
If I spend $300 on a toy it will allow me to play harder. That will enable me to work harder, and over the long term increase the amount on money I can spend on helping people by more than $300.
this is the best solution.
If you are a person with a reasonable amount of money who chooses to focus on long term thinking in your charitable giving, then again, good idea. Probably need to balance that with urgent needs, but, sick kids bring in more dollars than issues with Antarctic plankton bloom or whatnot. I very much doubt we are anywhere close to sufficient fraction of charitable actions being spent on the future.
As ever, the issue is the wealth of the 0.01% making everything broken. If you have $50 million, you are incredibly wealthy but not so wealthy that your existence warps any good works you attempt into evil. You’re on the borderline, and might be evil if you aren’t consciously being a good person. But, if you have a billion, and approach one of these activities then your very existance corrupts them. It becomes nearly impossible for you to do long term good due to the greed of other people. Long term thinking doesn't deliver $1000 of mosquito nets in exchange for a $1050 dollar donation. Its like, a new paper on climate equity in exchange for a $1000 dollar donation. This makes billionaires uniquely poorly situated to do this work, because writing a new paper is something that might cost $1000, or $10000, or $1 million. And if some idiot billionaire is here, why not say it costs a million?
So, if you are a billionaire, and MUST remain a billionaire. You need to focus on short term, "Itemized" giving. Mosquito nets, food, small cash grants to local communities to build wells or plant trees and so on. Convert your desirable liquid cash into boring workaday stuff and have that be all you offer. People will take what they need, and thats that.
If you wish to engage in long term altruism as a Billionaire, step one is to become merely rich. Give away 95% of your money today, to the government, and pledge to self tax at a rate of 95% hereafter on money which would take you above 50 million in assets. Then you can engage in long term thinking with the rest if you so choose.
If you are NOT a billionaire, and wish to engage with a climate charity which focuses on long term solutions (say, their plan is to buy federal oil and gas grants and refuse to drill there, thus raising the price of fossil fuels) then go for it like you would with any charity.
The stupid part is this is to a limited extent an actual problem. Spend wealth on fixing problem, or spend wealth to generate MORE wealth to fix the problem more.
At the scale of Musk and co that's not relevant. And of course FTX gave the game away, mentioning he literally does it as a front. Which a bunch of the other billionaires almost assuredly do too.
Like, it's fine when it is being used by people with an understanding of the issues, access to accurate information, the ability to make correct judgements, and intellectual honesty.
It's popular with a whole bunch of tech-bros, and it is popular with a bunch of finance billionaires.
Though I'm not sure if something like this is more effective than just selling the company / shares and donating or setting up a foundation with the cash.
If every billionaire liquidated all their funds and gave everyone thousands of dollars, what would happen? What if they just torched it all? What's the difference?
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Seems like a gross misrepresentation. His point has always been a bunch of starbucks coffee to you is someone else's life via a vaccine they can't otherwise afford. Even taking into account logistical differences the huge disparity in quality of life for the same money can be staggering. He believes (maybe wrongly) that people only ignore contributing to the realtively easy fix to this situation because its not local to them.
In terms of charity he promotes really sure-fire cheap causes with big upside that only exist due to basic neglect, because those are easy utilitarian calculuses. Usually addressing very curable diseases where there just isn't the money or care to do the curing. As long as you focus in on such extreme scenarios the downsides of utilitarianism don't come in to the fore so much. And there's enough areas of extreme need that all but the richest don't have to look into murkier scenarios to spend their cash.
This is also pretty far disconnected from the billionare assholes dodging taxes. Singer donated like a fourth of his shitty teacher salary to charity, by the same standard those rich guys should be doing at least 95%.