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I feel all these are exploits against the human mind that lead to bad outcomes. E.g. all the food aid to Africa ended up with ever more people starving. Drowned refugee kid led to rape-murders in Europe, increase in crime and loss of social capital. etc.
It's all wrong. Not that we shouldn't offer aid to foreigners, but it should be done deliberately and thoughtfully.
And that information channels that can be used to exploit this need to be closed.
That's literally the point of EA. We shouldn't donate to causes with the best marketing, the most touching pictures of starving children, and so on; we should evaluate them objectively to see which ones actually help.
EA failure modes are rather more esoteric - what I had in mind was the knee jerk political reactions.
And so on and so forth.
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Isn't it all a matter of tradeoffs though?
What I mean is, do you think it's possible to make policy decisions that don't have undesirable side effects?
Take business as an example. You can't spend too much time on thoughtful deliberation, because you must react to multiple competing inputs and try to respond to them in line with your strategy as much as possible. You must make choices that are really only bets about the state of the world now and what you think is the future. Then, tomorrow, you can only hope you'll be perceptive and fast-thinking enough to avoid making the mistakes you made yesterday.
Except in terms of national policy, "tomorrow" might mean "next year". It's a big ship, hard to turn around, especially because it's captained by consensus.
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Well EA (at least in theory) is designed to deliberately and thoughtfully think of the best ways to offer aid to foreigners. One of the main ways they do this is by supporting and advertising programs like GiveWell (https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities). Which is a program designed to properly evaluate the effectiveness of given charity based on metrics like QALYs (Quality of Life Years: https://www.healthanalytics.com/expertise/what-is-a-quality-adjusted-life-year-qaly/). The system then ranks the top charities based on how much good they do based on these rigorous statistics. It's system's like these that EA is really about here, using math and the tools of rationality to find the best ways to give aid to the world at large.
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