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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.
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?
How is that unrelated? In the absence of PEPFAR, I have good reason to believe we will cure HIV in mere decades. What PEPFAR does is ensure that those who are suffering from it right now live long enough to receive said cure.
Even if the cure doesn't materialize, people are still alive, and longer than they would have been in its absence.
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