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I have a different perspective here, where a) I think it's conceptually possible, b) the interesting question is whether people who say they are are really only doing the pure altruism. I first encountered the term pure altruism in two papers by James Andreoni, from 1989 and 1990. In them, Andreoni lays out a model of altruistic giving, where agents contribute to a public good both because they value it in itself, but also because they get a private benefit, a "warm glow". He has some nice academic results, like a quick mechanism for indexing one's own altruism (if one was taxed one dollar less, or a thousand, how much more would one donate?), and other observations (taxation may not produce warm glow, and as a result increasing taxation by some amount doesn't reduce donations by that amount; when parents get a warm glow from giving to their children, children are incentivized to be more "spoilt" in a technical sense).
Are people who are saying they are doing pure forms of altruism actually doing so? Often not so. There are aspects of the EA community that just don't make sense by considering its participants as pure white cherubs of innocence and selflessness, although each particular case will be uncertain and ambiguous, and although pointing the discrepancy is tricky.
One of the biggest bets Open Philanthropy—a large philanthropic foundation I'm acquainted with—is making is in its own people. 161 people, earning say 150K to 250K salaries, with overhead of 20% to 40% (?) is 30M to 52M/year—probably higher than any one of their grants in 2024 and 2025. This does not include the cost of their office, another cool 16.5M. This leads them to have a class interest: they are invested in that form of doing philanthropy—rather than anonymous part-time rotating grantmakers whose funds under management grow or shring depending on their evaluated success (like the Survival and Flourishing Fund).
Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed outlines how this happened with the apparatchik in Russia. The apparatchik are in charge of the wellbeing of the Soviet Union and ended up reallocating ressources to themselves. Some of my experience is that the grantmakers just want to be sucked up to, their ideas confirmed, their egos upheld, their strategies validated, their personalities admired. But at the same time they are selected for not rocking the boat in a deep way. More mundanely, people get grants from projects that don't work out, and don't pivot, because they think that would involve losing their jobs. EA seems like a failed Schelling point to me, because it advertises itself as doing pure altruism, but the actors end up fighting for their own self-interest, sometimes in quite obvious ways.
Is pure altruism selected out? If you do something for someone such that you don't get something out of it, can you continue doing that into the future? What is the mechanism? I think this is a key question that leads to rederiving some form of non-naïve form of altruism. Or alternatively, it leads to exploiting the pure altruism until its ressources are exhausted. One of the first guys to think about this ended up killing himself.
On the other side, pure altruism can be understood essentially as a mating display because it's a costly signal of strength, and it. The underlying purpose of ideology X isn't ideology X, it's displaying that you can still be a well-adjusted person even with its iron around your neck. Some version of this is fine by me, but the problem becomes when people really believe their ideologies and do cripple themselves for real, as happened with Germany's industrial economy as a result of their terrible energy policy. This matters to me, I made a heavily real, non-fake investment in learning German. I passed the C1 exam but probably at some point did have a C2 level in German. Now I just do business with Americans instead. I also do find it aesthetically distasteful when people do something which is nominally about, e.g., helping the homeless in a way that makes the problem worse, partly because nobody taught me how to do the Straussian reading.
At the same time, how do you coordinate around public goods? One cool answer is dominant assurance contracts but in practice this hasn't been implemented much, perhaps because the people who could have jobs as grantmakers they would rather preserve, but also because part of the problem of setting up a new project is just distribution, and you have a chicken an egg problem here (you could do a dominant assurance funding model if only you had already built the distribution funnel for your thing, but that's a big part of the job).
Anyways one answer here is to try to get people in man vs. nature games because man v. man conflicts are just fucked up.
I think "pure altruism" is a strawmanning of EA in general and Open Philanthropy in particular. One of EA's main tenets is that the traditional hyperfocus on overhead costs of charities is unhelpful as a measure of actual efficacy. If you want smart, driven people to do good work in allocating resources, paying them something like market rate is advisable. Otherwise, you're selecting on something other than merely talent for the job.
Of course, it's always possible OpenPhil is actually bad at their stated mission for whatever reason, including design flaws. So having different models out there, like volunteer crowdsourcing, is a good thing.
Famously, the Soviets did not rely on charitable giving to fund their efforts. Donors can always stop donating.
Scott has addressed this kind of thing--how much altruism is mandated or what is sufficiently pure--multiple times. Numerous essay in EA Land focus on the emotional unsustainability of pure altruism.
Some level of partiality/self-interest is allowable on pragmatic grounds alone. Martyrdom should not be a standard requirement.
Some things may be straw men of EA, but IMO it has made a lot of obvious errors as a movement, stretching its reputation to the point I don't think it maintains much credibility with people who are not already bought into charity qua charity. That most of EA freaked out about the PEPFAR cancelling is a great example. Its a 22 year old program that still requires massive outside subsidies, and there is no visible point on the horizon where that will not be true. You can call it many things, but "effective" is not one of them. Thats like calling a family where, after 22 years all the kids are still in the house, barely passing classes, and with no jobs and no prospects "effective parenting."
Why is "requiring outside subsidies" an issue?
What charities are more effective per dollar than PEPFAR?
Requiring outside subsidies is an issue because your program turns into a self licking ice cream cone. This seems true for PEPFAR. The purpose of PEPFAR is to keep the people on PEPFAR alive which then demands more money to keep the same people alive in the future. There is no expectation that PEPFAR recipients will erect an anti-retroviral factory anytime soon so they can provide themselves the drugs, nor any other factory that will allow them to be productive enough to actually buy them at market price. The expectation, rather, is this program will be a moneysink for the remainder of my lifetime. This is, of course, a problem with most large charities. Effective charities are almost always more targeted and more discriminatory. An adoption program that places kids with well vetted parents, a financial support network for widows of fallen soldiers and police officers, etc. Such programs are effective in that they are targeted towards an end: creating functional adults who can be independent, positive contributors to society. Public schools are an example of a failed attempt at effective altruism. In theory educating the public could have positive externalities. In practice, they have proven to be moneysinks because the reality of schooling is it is related to, but is not actually education, and human teaching ends up approximating a garbage-in-garbage out model. You can predict the outcomes of an incoming kinder-garden class with fairly good accuracy with just the demographics of the children, while ignoring the teachers almost entirely.
Retrovirals work. They let people lead normal lives, and make HIV no longer a death sentence. We now have semi-experimental vaccines that stave off the disease, and I strongly expect a full cure being on the market within a decade at most.
Even if PEPFAR wanted to run indefinitely, it will face the guinea worm 'problem' of not having a disease to tackle, and unless you're 70 years old, it'll happen in your lifetime.
I'll generally defend PEPFAR on its own merits, but the blackpill for PEPFAR-as-promoted is less about the effectiveness of the drugs themselves, and what the actual provisioning of even very effective drugs actually looks like, on the ground. This discussion is specific to PrEP (and this context that got me to write it up), but as far as I can tell it's pretty endemic to the program in the areas it's most critical.
That might change literally overnight if a full cure, extremely long-lasting PrEP, or sufficiently easy and effective vaccine comes about and is accepted, but I'm not highly confident for even that.
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So its just like a normal charity. It keeps people alive who cant keep themselves alive. Its a charity you anticipate will no longer exist in 70 years due to scientific advances wholly unrelated to the charity and the people who benefit from it, other than the fact they will also incidentally benefit from those advances.
70 years? 20 at the worst. I would take bets at worse than even odds at a mere ten.
I really don't understand this line of thinking. It's akin to condemning advocating lifestyle 'solutions' for diabetes right before they discovered porcine insulin. After people have been publishing papers saying, hey, this funny little trick seems to work.
That is still wholly unrelated to PEPFAR. You aren't alleging that PEPFAR recipients are at the bleeding edge of HIV-cure research are you?
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