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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   30738 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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Or at least a bifurcation of the salt of the earth EA types away from the navel gazing longtermists.

Then what, exactly, is novel about EA once you get past the navel-gazers? I still do not understand what is new or interesting about EA.

Pledging to donate part of your income up front? Well, tithing is a well-known concept, and automatic paycheck withdrawals to your retirement account is a pretty well-established and useful concept.

Having metrics and quality control in regards to charities? It’s debatable when exactly effective altruism cohered as a concept, but critiquing donations to red tape-burdened inefficient charities is certainly not a new concept.

Like…once you strip out the funding for battling paperclip-optimizing super AIs, which still seems a silly concept given we can barely build a good Roomba to vacuum up my dog hair, let alone grey goo that will reshape physical reality…what is EA besides common sense? We don’t need Scottish philosophers to construct an elaborate taxonomy and praxis for automatic savings accounts and spending a solid 5 minutes to ponder that we are in fact quite well-aware of breast cancer by this point, and don’t need a month of NFL games to remind us.

Pledging to donate part of your income up front? Well, tithing is a well-known concept, and automatic paycheck withdrawals to your retirement account is a pretty well-established and useful concept.

Having metrics and quality control in regards to charities? It’s debatable when exactly effective altruism cohered as a concept, but critiquing donations to red tape-burdened inefficient charities is certainly not a new concept.

It seems obvious to me that the new concept here is actually taking these issues seriously. As others have pointed out, no these aren't entirely new concepts EA created out of thin air. The importance of EA comes in that they actually raise awareness and push for more people to understand the importance of these ideas.

'Common sense' as a concept is highly overrated, it essentially means whatever you think is right. If you think all of this is so easy to understand and obvious on the face, then as @Tarnstellung pointed out, why is so much of charity extremely inefficient and just bad? And do you think that should change?

And yet people still donate millions to breast cancer awareness and similar rubbish. Maybe we need a movement to get people to put a bit more thought into how they donate, to make sure their money is used in the best way possible, to make their... altruism effective?

Maybe we need a movement to get people to put a bit more thought into how they donate, to make sure their money is used in the best way possible, to make their... altruism effective?

Maybe we need a single organization dedicated to charity and peace and love, who can coordinate collection of donations, provide social services, and lead outreach efforts to drum up support. It can even have local, regional, national, and supranational levels, led by a leader selected for wisdom and benevolence from a conclave of regional leaders!

Oh wait, we just reinvented the Catholic church.

The Catholic Church is much more than its social programs. Arguably, the social programs are one of the less important things it does, especially nowadays. The Church also doesn't do any research on cost effectiveness (or do you think ornate cathedrals do more good than malaria nets?).

There is no need for a centralized EA organization. Cost effectiveness research, of the kind performed by GiveWell, isn't that expensive. You could reasonably have multiple groups each doing their own analysis and outreach efforts, and these meta-charities would be separate from those that actually implement the programs. GiveWell doesn't directly help anyone as far as I know, they do the research and direct any extra money to charities they find to be effective.

This may be a bit oversimplified, but a core part of utilitarian ethical calculus revolves around optimizing tradeoffs. EA takes that ethos, and tries to apply it to the real world, identifying places where minimal resources may be expended to reduce the most human suffering--mosquito nets in Africa is one of the central examples. EA looks for efficiency, opportunities for optimization, and benefits that scale cheaply and easily. Very much for better and for worse, EA is a big-picture-focused approach to practical philanthropy. Many other strains of philanthropy are individual-focused; the EA critique of such measures is that they are inefficient and do not scale well.

EA looked at American politics and decided the cheap, low hanging fruit to easily have large effects with small amounts of money was..........

Giving hard-left organizations millions to make an indie film about racism and millions more to the richest liberal slush fund in the world to write one paragraph.

My half-assed review of OPP can be found in the comments here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/vdwwso/a_critical_review_of_open_philanthropys_bet_on/

It sounds like you are skeptical of the efficacy of magic beans? Yeah, in that case, it looks like just the worst combination of some form of quokka-ness with enough of a veneer of "trust me, I've done the utilitarian math, and it says that Democrats are surprisingly underfunded!" High-minded principles got suckered by a grift (well, to the extent that principles were involved at all beyond providing a fig leaf, which is worth questioning).

That said, as a practical matter, EA looks especially vulnerable to grifting exactly because its focus on big-picture analysis tends to dismiss individual failures. On the principles side, EA is an attempt to speedrun morality, which to me raises more red flags than a Chinese military parade.

EA looked at American politics

The irony here is that EA in general was extremely allergic to politics for over a decade. To the point where there were multiple lectures and serious discussions about avoiding political alignment.

Not everyone in EA wanted SBF to start meddling in politics, in fact I'd argue a majority didn't. And a majority right now certainly agree that political meddling is a bad idea.

EA is not a hivemind. I don't recall GiveWell endorsing politicians, for example.

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