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Notes -
"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 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.
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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