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"I liked it before it was cool."
This is a phrase typically associated to hipsters and the mainstream bands they still love, but I'm now starting to think the idea has some merit. I liked EA before it was cool.
It just makes sense to take an abstract principle ("black lives matter"), a set of causes, put them into a spreadsheet and sort by (black lives saved)/(dollars spent). Maybe that works for me because to borrow a phrase from Scott, I'm a regional manager of playing with tiny numbers in spreadsheets. Or jupyter notebooks, but whatever. I liked EA before it was cool.
But now? I'm not really sure I like the current EA movement much. Just today, a far left and a far right substack I read both converged on the idea that it has been captured by the mainstream.
https://eigenrobot.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-and-its-future
https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/sbf-ftx-ea-and-lt-my-reflections
I guess the example of the latter he's probably not hinting at is SBF's "effective" investment in "TRUMPLOSE".
https://external-preview.redd.it/ByiDrANZMyT2-CXazkm0rXXbXJ2bSgRTOnKDORrk9Gg.png?auto=webp&s=22c925a1be8509efa46fdef0a9a94c2822d32b0f
I can't see any plausible case this is "effective", but it's certainly the position of the rich.
For those in this community who are closer to the movements, what do you guys think is the current state of EA? It's clearly not just a bunch of weird nerds who discovered mosquito nets in uganda >> mental health for suburban teenagers anymore. But does that original core remain? Has it moved someplace new?
EA when it was dunking on "awareness" charities and supporting charities that actually help people was great. Somehow EA has reinvented awareness charities.
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EA reverses normal concentric loyalties and therefore it's bad. Normally it goes family -> friends -> acquaintances -> locals -> nationals -> etc. This is the natural way of the world and how every person has operated since forever, save for the largest circles. EA, like progressives, say this is bad and that actually a random African is worth as much as your neighbour. I find this to be an abomination.
Effective charity requires accountability. This is why the church was an effective charity - you get free stuff but you also have to behave and participate. Modern government-operated versions of this have no mechanism for accountability, so big cities get to spend 2-3x the median salary per homeless person providing "charity" and end up with more and more homeless druggies every year.
Has EA yet to figure out that shipping pallets of rice to Africans only creates more Africans who need even more rice next year? Spending resources on resource sinks with no plan on how said sink will change is not effective nor is it altruistic.
I don't think progressives do this. They simply put certain tribal loyalties higher than those a conservative might. Unlike EA, progressives value the life of a single American black criminal far more than they value of thousands of black Ugandan children.
Progressives value any group who they can offer their enemies' stuff to in exchange for loyalty, but I digress. Haidt and co. did seven studies that effectively show the concentric loyalties are literally reversed.
I don't interpret this literally, because they don't behave like they prefer black criminals over their parents. However, one of their tribal signals is that they say they do. I do believe they hate their parents. That's a common thread, along with no kids.
I believe that progressives will say they are universalists if you explicitly ask them and their answer has no consequence beyond emotional.
However I believe that in terms of either money donations or choice of causes to give attention to, progressives are not. Many EAs are, however.
They aren't universalists though, they like white people less. White liberals are the only group that rates their own race lower than others.
If they say they are universalists, ask them if that means one should treat white and black people equally.
The usual claim is that white people already have it plenty good, so deprioritizing them is just moving towards a more level playing field.
Yeah, but they would still not say yes if you stipulated, "what if white people were equal to blacks in wealth per capita and/or a minority"? They sure don't seem to have much love for white South Africans.
They would fight the hypothetical.
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Trivially, GiveWell doesn't and as far as I know hasn't really supported direct food aid: not only is it already a crowded field, while there's some possible benefits, there's also a lot of concern about crowding out local agriculture or having the constant-need requirements you bring up.
Reproduction as a whole was (and remains) a concern, but it's not an unknown one, and there are some counterintuitive reasons to suspect that decreasing mortality and especially early mortality causes reductions in reproduction rate -- and while it'd be easy to dismiss them as just-so stories, they've shown up in surprising places (eg, studies on deworming).
((Uh, modulo the difficult question about how much you trust studies at all.))
GiveWell has also separately been investigating 'family planning' organizations, though they've not promoted them too heavily (or been very happy with the effectiveness of any).
There's a stronger argument that the programs GiveWell does focus on, like malaria, worm infection, and vitamin deficiency, result in greater net population growth without solving the underlying problems, but for most of these efforts the actual pills or vitamins aren't the crux of the costs anyway.
Yes, GiveWell doesn't send rice but the malaria medicine and vitamins do the same thing.
This is where EA gets really grotesque and why I said it was an abomination. So we're giving supplies to Africans and notice that the effect is more Africans who need more supplies. The solution? Let's just get them to have less kids! Does it not seem crazy to you to that EA basically declares itself the captain of these Africans? Why do they even need malaria medicine? It's always been there. Maybe their mortality rate is a bit too high for Western sensibilities, but what do they think? And if they're unable to influence their mortality rate on their own, maybe that's the way it should be?
Heck, I would quantify a marginal African life as negative and even I'm creeped out by this "we know best, we will do it for you" attitude.
The people who are "unable to influence their mortality rate on their own," in the AMF's model, are children under five years old. So yes. I would say they are unable to influence their mortality rate on their own, and I don't think "that's the way it should be" is a particularly likely conclusion for them any more than it is for any other four year old on the planet. If you think that's a likely conclusion, then I suppose we have completely incompatible moral principles.
An analogy: if aliens showed up and started handing out some crazy technology we can't replicate that cured any disease for 5 year olds and younger, do you think that would be good or bad? I think bad.
I think good, as the children would then live, and children dying is bad. It is a pretty foundational moral intuition on my part that children dying is bad and things that exclusively cause children to not die are good, and I'm pretty sure it's extremely widespread, to the point I would very seriously have to rethink my model of the general population if normies disagreed.
If this were to happen, we would no longer be sovereign. These aliens are basically superior, so instead of building our own capacity from the ground up, one can skip all that by currying favour with said aliens. Our rulers are now also subservient to the aliens, lest they do something the aliens don't like and we lose access to this special alien technology that we never had in the first place.
Change out aliens for a rival power, like the Chinese. Suppose for COVID they came up with a vaccine that actually works and gave it to us for free, but we did not have the ability to manufacture it. Say Biden or whoever decided that we would accept this gift. The Chinese now own us. Nobody who will turn down these vaccines can get elected, and it goes without saying that not pissing off China would be a requirement for shipments to continue.
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It's not terribly clear it does, in the same degree or extent; the demographic collapse when countries have child mortality drop isn't perfectly reliable, but neither is it some unlikely possibility.
If I thought any GiveWell cause was going to strap Africans to the table and chop their balls off, perhaps. When they're basically looking at providing condoms and LARCs, I'm a little less concerned about whether it would be Better if sub-Saharan African instead 'should' be reinventing premarin or making its own rubber.
... having actually spoken with a number of people there, they're not especially predisposed to a lack of running water, to blindness, or to malaria. (Or a wide variety of other issues: a local guide complained at length that he was sick of having to get treated for dysentery, so don't trust that particular bottled water company).
And if the moon were made of cheese, they'd never be hungry.
There may well be some situation where merely providing optional resources overwhelms internal agency -- indeed, my willingness to put the threshold for direct food aid points to a pretty low bar! -- but I don't think any GiveWell programs here have gotten anywhere close.
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No, it equalizes them. You can argue that is bad, but it is not "reversed".
The EA movement still is heads-and-shoulders over the average non-EA charity in terms of accountability.
This doesn't match my experience with churches at all. For instance, when I volunteered serving dinner and distributing food to the poor, there was literally no effort made to restrict it to good people/the congregation/etc.
Has EA ever shipped rice to Africans? Or are you simply straw-manning?
On concentric loyalties, the circles grow exponentially larger. The chance that your inner few circles will happen to contain most effective causes are basically nil. If all the resources are going to the outer rings, the loyalties are effectively reversed.
What does EA do to hold its beneficiaries accountable that others don't? I was not saying that they are worse, they just aren't better from what I know. Churches now don't have nearly enough cultural capital to make and demands, but in times where it's volunteers serving their local community, guys would absolutely be expected to maintain a certain level of decorum and respect, lest service be denied. There's also more reason for the recipients to do this. They are interacting with real people they know, not salaried representatives of the government or other massive entity.
Their population started exploding when the shipments started flowing. Are you disputing that food AID generates more Africans? That seems straightforward.
The most obvious example is GiveWell re-evaluating its charities ~annually and periodically removing charities from its recommendations. GiveWell publishes its reasoning and provides spreadsheets where you can plug in your own numbers. Evidence Action also cut its busing program after finding it wasn't effective enough. You can argue that GiveWell is, itself, largely unaccountable, but I'd argue a meta-charity rating the effectiveness of the concrete-charities is a good deal of greater accountability than almost any other non-profit.
No, I'm disputing that Effective Altruism shipped rice to Africa, which you implied in your previous comment. If you didn't intend to imply that EA was doing it, what was the point of that last paragraph?
GiveWell's top charities are:
Medicine to prevent malaria
Nets to prevent malaria
Supplements to prevent vitamin A deficiency [in Africa]
Cash incentives for routine childhood vaccines [in Africa]
I'll admit that this is not "sending pallets of rice," but it's very similar. They are providing supplies that produce more Africans who need more supplies. Their top one is "$3500 per life saved". But if saving a life also means creating 2-3 more lives, should the cost not actually be infinite? By accountability I don't mean for the charities, e.g. against theft. I mean accountability for the recipients. If I offer someone a couch to sleep on, there is an expectation that the person is working on finding their own place to stay. What are Africans doing to deal with malaria themselves, such that there is a foreseeable end to the program? Does anything happen if they don't follow through?
There are important distinctions you are eliding.
For instance, malaria nets (and deworming) have significant positive externalities.
But, more importantly, you are employing a double standard: expect individual accountability for your people; you expect group accountability for those people.
What exactly is an individual African supposed to do to "deal with malaria themselves"? With vitamin A deficiency?
[ Edit: likewise, where is your concern that the friend sleeping on your couch will be more likely to have kids, propagating their... issues ]
An accountable way to do the same thing would be to fund a company that manufactures the mosquito nets or malaria medication in Africa, staffed by Africans. Once at breakeven, turn over ownership. Job done. If those things are too difficult to manufacture, stick with importing/distribution, but sell the product for money. If nobody will pay for it, then maybe it's not worth as much as GiveWell is paying for it.
Virtually the entire point of altruistic charity is to give people things they couldn't otherwise afford themselves. That is, distributing goods/services that aren't otherwise profitable.
But even if you don't care about that, malaria nets have positive externalities, which means even a myopic free-market promoter should see the obvious value here.
Finally, again, why the double standard? You don't ask churches why they don't set up farms instead of staff food kitchens. You might retort that EAs claim to care about effectiveness, but you have given no actual evidence to think your plan is better from a utilitarian or NPV perspective.
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As someone who has also been around EA for a while and seriously involved, I think that many of the 'core EA' folks still remain deeply committed to the original vision. At recent EA Globals I talked to quite a few people very uncomfortable with the free-spending, involvement with crypto, and political bent of EA. Matthew Yglesias actually gave a talk where he urged EA to remain apolitical citing it as one of the main strengths of the movement.
My take is that unfortunately EA has run into the problem of their original insights becoming 'boring' so to speak. Global health and development, bio risk prevention, nuclear de-armament, climate change, and all the other obvious social change movement have been done to death, and are no longer novel. EA, just like rationalism, tends to run into the problem that they highly value neglectedness over pretty much anything else. This leads to a weird treadmill where whoever points out the most neglected or conventional cause area gets more status, and that take slowly takes over the movement.
The biggest example of this which I think is a much bigger issue than the SBF fiasco is the recent takeover of AI safety obsessives. The FTX did a lot of funding of the worst orgs like Anthropic, but talking with folks at these AI safety places was like talking to a brick wall. They are so clearly disconnected from reality and have takes that are so edgy and contrarian it hurts to listen to them sometimes.
Again overall I think the movement is still in a good place, but it needs to start maturing and stop jumping on board flashy new neglected cause areas just because they are counter-intuitive.
Agree that core EA people seem to be both significantly 'old EA', 'weird', and deeply committed to effectiveness and altruism. Contesting EA should attack that, not say 'they're more democrats'. Although it's quite funny to cite a mattyglesias talk to argue against something becoming more normie democrat!
Also, global health,biorisk,climate change,nuclearhave been normal for several decades before EA even existed - EA's novelty was taking them more seriously and literally, to an extent.
Elaborate? AI is ... definitely a problem, and while AI safety isn't working well (there isn't a clear vision for what AI does, and how its significant 'agency' or ability to compete coexists with 'human utopia', and how any of this AI alignment work coexists with AI's rapid integration into the global economy. Eleizer can at least see that, hence pessimism) but they're not more delusional than the 'AI is just gonna be a fun tool and modern civilization is just gonna vibe for the next thousand years not changing too much no need to worry' or whatever
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I think this critique has legs, and I've made variants of it back in August of this year, but rolling it around the FTX collapse is a little awkward a fit.
Bankman-Fried spent nearly as much on a sportsball endorsement than he did for all of FTX Future Fund expenditures combined; clearly he wasn't thinking about EA first and foremost, nor was he really pretending for the non-FTX expenditures. Finding out that he was also spending money on things to keep his business running is sordid, in the buying-and-selling politicians sense, but it would be absolutely business as normal except for the part where FTX went broke in a giant fireball of hilariously bad fraud.
The FTX Future Fund failed from a rationalist perspective of noticing that their sole and primary funder had a significant chance of disappearing in a flash even without the fraud, but they weren't advertised as a rationality group first and foremost; if anything, their rationalist expenditures were kinda debatable as projects to "improve humanity’s long-term prospects". Their EA grants are a grab bag of not-especially-great spending, but at least as a quick glance it's more EA nepotism than Clinton influence-peddling.
Yes, to some extent they're practicing the world's oldest profession, and selling themselves for access. If they didn't realize that a decade ago, this should be a good wakeup call for literally everything else in both charity and in effective business. But for anyone who was willing to be associated with crypto at the benefit of saving hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of lives, that's a pretty easy bullet to bite. I've done worse!
Eigenrobot mentions (and glosses over, and flags since it 'spun off' in a way that I don't think is a strong quibble) the criminal justice reform snafu (previous discussion here), and I think that is a more damning criticism of OpenPhilanthropy and to a lesser extent the people contemporaneously evaluating it. Same for the Clinton fund, which Eigenrobot spends more time on, but misses the delightful quote of :
Which should absolutely have raised a whole bunch of red flags, especially given how vague the goals are (it's a plan to find areas to target?!). If something exactly meets your current bars by conservative estimates, this is a really convenient accident. I'd separately add land use reform and (more controversially) immigration policy, and I don't think they're the only other failure of EA principles at OpenPhilanthropy so much as the ones that are on their fucking header list.
And there's definitely a point where you've lost those principles; the Parable of Murder-Gandhi looms large, and it's definitely eaten some specifically EA people who went from selling their reputation to selling their souls.
But it's not clear how related these are to this specific failure, or how well Eigenrobot's proposals would have solved the problem here. Bankman-Fried could readily have waved a generic "I donated X amount to charities" sheet to burnish his reputation, and honestly given the low reputation of EA even before this in general circles I wouldn't be surprised if he often did. The revolving door and press-release-as-charity stuff ran through different organizations that would not have been tempted to follow his principles, and it's not clear that they would have needed his proposed approaches to have effective quid-pro-quos. More broadly, it's a little naive of a look at how things like CHAI, criminal justice reform, or land use reform grew into focus areas at OpenPhilanthropy. And despite all the problems and near-fraud, GiveWell focuses remain so far above the average charities that it's probably still worth looking at them, even with the reservations.
The underlying core of EA remains: it's a set of mathematic principles, not a set of people. To the extent I would have once trusted CEA, GiveWell, or OpenPhilanthropy's assessments of a given charity at one point, I don't anymore, but even when I trusted them it was worth checking. Anything else is noise.
The relation is the following. SBF specifically is the top "sociopath" in Eigenrobot's telling. He has become one of the most visible public faces of EA, and has personally donated a substantial fraction of money to EA-umbrella causes. Moreover, there are many such sociopaths in the community; Kelsey Piper is another very visible one.
The critique here is that folks like SBF are funding causes like the Clinton Foundation and "TRUMPLOSE" and this is guiding EA-the-movement.
FTX could likely have collapsed even if SBF was a techno-libertarian. But I'm starting a discussion about EA-the-movement, not FTX.
EA is both a movement/principle and also a community. I'm personally very aligned with the principle. But I'm wondering if the movement still aligns with that principle, both in terms of current activities (which they mostly do, but proportionally less than before) as well as future activities guided by the current zeitgeist.
Ambushing her friend is the most recent.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy
Prior to that was (as per her beliefs) letting people die by not warning them about COVID cause she didn't want her Vox buddies to think she wasn't cool. (This was back when journalists were calling techbros racist for worrying about the China virus.)
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Is eigenrobot far-right? He certainly leans that way a bit but is still, like scott, still antiracist, prolgbt, etc
On eigenrobot's essay itself:
Donors being anonymous doesn't solve anything, they can still influence secretly, and even if they don't the 'power' just moves, someone / a group of people still publicly distribute the money and they have the same incentives.
democracy bad, this just makes your charity less effective because it's run by random people, and less possible to organize large scale action
'power corrupts, so power is bad' is dumb. you still need power and organization!
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The same thing happened to them as happens to a lot of organisations based around wide-ranging general principles. They didn't start off on "we are committed to sending mosquito bed nets to Africa", that was just what popped up when they crunched the numbers as the best bang for the buck. They started off on broad, vague lines of "let's do good stuff".
This is part of my objection to the impression they gave off about "we're gonna do charity right, unlike all those other organisations". They had valid criticisms about bloat and mission drift and expenditure on officers and fancy shit, and they were correct, but they were mistaken in "this will never happen to us because we have spreadsheets!" (or whatever mathematico-philosophical/ethical principles they were using).
(Pause here for me to insert "And I always thought Peter Singer was a pain in the backside and the veneration for me put me right off". Okay, bias stated, carry on).
Well, it happened to them just like all the charities they were criticising. I suppose The Great Vegan Menu Massacre was an early sign. The "but if we calculate the biomass of all the insects on earth, that is immense amounts of suffering we must address!" line of reasoning was also odd (can you really find it in your heart to be concerned if a fly or beetle is in pain right this second?) and while it just looked like one of the odd, quirky things the odd. quirky people who were most enthused about EA would like as a cause, maybe it too was a sign. But now they have ventured into dipping their toe into politics (with 'we like Carrick Flynn as a candidate, he shares the same values' and not alone endorsing him but encouraging EA people and supporters to go donate etc. to his campaign).
And now they're "when we told you to forget your suffering neighbours in favour of the malaria-stricken children in Africa, now we're forgetting the malaria-stricken children in Africa because AI RISK!!!!" Guess those kids can just go die now, right? And before you jump in with "that's uncharitable", there were plenty arguing that donating to actual suffering going on right now in the world was stupid because if you saved your money and invested it, you could help so many more people in the future. That the future never comes, and in ten years' time the same argument about "if you invest your money rather than give it to the people in need right now, you can help so many more!" still applies, so you end up with a growing heap of money 'to help those in need' that somehow never gets given to those in need.
So yeah, they've fallen into the same patterns as all the other do-gooder organisations they criticised, so that is why I'm sticking with "I put money in the collection tin when it's rattled under my nose, and to my church fundraising for good causes".
EA seems to try to bootstrap "things you feel into your heart" into "things you don't feel in your heart". Someone with malaria is less emotionally relevant than a dying child in a pond in front of you.
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I think my objection is a bit different from yours. I actually want the old EA back - the one that would make a spreadsheet, honestly attempt to evaluate criminal justice reform, and then say "sorry we don't like cause B1:B/C1:C -> sort put it at the bottom".
Assuming you think AI risk is real, why is this anything other than absolutely the right thing to do?
This is a very bad criticism of EAs who actually use spreadsheets. It's like saying "because some growth companies are getting 2x growth yearly, no company should ever do share buybacks." But the reasoning fails once you actually encode it in a spreadsheet - once the gains from consumption exceed the future projected gains from investment, you stop investing and spend.
Um, that is very much not what has happened with any EA org yet. I think you're describing college endowments.
Your disagreement with EA and mine are quite different. I don't object to EA because it's weird and non-mainstream, or because spreadsheets lead to different results than zeitgeist informed intuition. I think that's what is right about older EA. My lament is that the visible people claiming the title of EA seem to have mostly given that up.
I am not lamenting that I hate EA and always have because "ugh weirdos in fedoras". My lament is that I liked it before it became cool.
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Per this report from Givewell, the largest effective-altruist organization, the funds they've directed towards anti-malaria and other global healthcare causes is at an all-time high. In 2021 their total funds raised was $595 million, compared to $35 million back in 2014. The top recipients of that money were Malaria Consortium (22%), Against Malaria Foundation (17%), GiveDirectly (6%), Hellen Keller International - Vitamin A Supplementation (5%), New Incentives - CCTs for immunization (4%), SCI Foundation - Deworming (4%), Sightsavers - Deworming (3%), Evidence Action - Deworm the world (1%), and END fund - Deworming (0.16%). The only one of those not dedicated to health is GiveDirectly, which just gives money to poor third-worlders. If your perception doesn't match this, maybe you're basing it too much on the controversial things that people argue about online, rather than on what they are actually doing.
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