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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34433 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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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.

To the extent that money—real money—flows from such people, EA priorities will inexorably align with what they want, and anyone who resists this will be pushed out. You have data? That’s swell. Donors are how charitable organizations make payroll. You want to stop malaria on the grounds of maximum impact per dollar spent? Actually, this week the hot thing is criminal justice reform in a first world country—why don’t you go rationalize that cause for us?

https://eigenrobot.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-and-its-future

Rich people are using their connections with EA and other forms of philanthropy, real or chimerical to try and prop up their own position, and, implicitly or deliberately, the position of others like them. Critiques of billionaire philanthropy, its tax, reputational and political dimensions, have, at this point, been done to death.

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 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.

EA reverses normal concentric loyalties and therefore it's bad. Normally it goes family -> friends -> acquaintances -> locals -> nationals -> etc...EA, like progressives, say this is bad and that actually a random African is worth as much as your neighbour.

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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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.

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.

Yes, GiveWell doesn't send rice but the malaria medicine and vitamins do the same thing.

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.

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?

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.

Maybe their mortality rate is a bit too high for Western sensibilities, but what do they think?

... 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 they're unable to influence their mortality rate on their own, maybe that's the way it should be?

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.

EA reverses normal concentric loyalties

No, it equalizes them. You can argue that is bad, but it is not "reversed".

Effective charity requires accountability.

The EA movement still is heads-and-shoulders over the average non-EA charity in terms of accountability.

This is why the church was an effective charity - you get free stuff but you also have to behave and participate

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 yet to figure out that shipping pallets of rice to Africans only creates more Africans who need even more rice next year?

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.

Has EA ever shipped rice to Africans? Or are you simply straw-manning?

Their population started exploding when the shipments started flowing. Are you disputing that food AID generates more Africans? That seems straightforward.

What does EA do to hold its beneficiaries accountable that others don't?

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.

Are you disputing that food AID generates more Africans? That seems straightforward.

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:

  1. Medicine to prevent malaria

  2. Nets to prevent malaria

  3. Supplements to prevent vitamin A deficiency [in Africa]

  4. 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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