I’ll read the rebuttal of EA, but I’ll trade you if you read this EA unmanifesto.
Effective altruism distills all of ethics into an overriding variable: suffering.
This is actually not true. Givewell, for instance, publishes their findings as spreadsheets and lets you set weights on different aspects of human experience you consider to be good or bad.
Effective altruism discounts the ethical dimensions of relationships, the rich braid of elements that make up a “good life,” and the moral worth of a species or a wetland.
This is also just objectively not true and suggests to me you’ve never even talked to an effective altruist. But it is generally believed by EAs that horrible suffering, such as the kinds of suffering caused by easily-preventable illnesses, is much worse than any of the subtle and varied experiences of a good life which can be bought with the same amount of money are good. So if you just want to “do good,” donate to stopping horrible illnesses before donating to subtler causes.
But setting that aside, the idea of charity is rooted in the theory that you need a popular buy-in before you can achieve significant lasting change.
I think neglectedness is actually the core disagreement between effective altruists and many leftists […] Leftists emphasize organizing and mass participation. From a leftist perspective, all things equal, the fact that a movement is big is a point in favor of joining it. Leftists believe that nothing you do is going to do much good unless it’s part of a broad, coordinated effort to permanently shift the balance of power. […] From an effective altruist perspective, all things equal, the fact that a movement is big is a point against joining it: if lots of people are working on janitorial justice, probably the problem is already well-handled.
I don’t actually believe this about leftism personally, but I think this should be taken evidence against charity being rooted in the need for a popular buy-in.
When you’re relying on a few plutocrats to dictate philanthropic social policy, you’re banking heavily on their omniscience.
Agreed. You may have missed this, but I’m advocating for socialism, not charity.
Givewell, for instance, publishes their findings as spreadsheets and lets you set weights on different aspects of human experience you consider to be good or bad.
This is still a fixation on an individual subjective human perspective. Which is a bit confusing, given that the EA manifesto explicitly leans on Bayesian statistical analysis. The end result is a round peg (perceptions and emotional priors) being shoved into a square hole (hard numerical figures). It also isn’t effective as a policy guide, because the layman fiddling with weights on a spreadsheet still doesn’t have any actual control over the scale of political economy that a government or a mega-millionaire commands.
This is also just objectively not true and suggests to me you’ve never even talked to an effective altruist.
We’re running into a Jordan Peterson line of argument, wherein “you just don’t understand my line of thinking” is used to dismiss critiques you’re not equipped to rebut.
Can I counter with “You’ve never even talked to a non-effective altruist?” and conclude you’ve been too cloistered to explore ideas outside the EA space? Or would you consider that a personal attack rather than a statistically informed observation?
horrible suffering, such as the kinds of suffering caused by easily-preventable illnesses, is much worse than any of the subtle and varied experiences of a good life
This isn’t either/or. You can go back to the old Bill Gates plan to mitigate overpopulation in the third world. He initially tried to push out contraception to the local populations of communities he’d hoped lower birthrates would help. Instead, what he discovered was routine vaccination and standard modernized health care drastically reduced infant mortality and resulted in parents choosing to have fewer kids as a result.
In hindsight, we discovered similar patterns of behavior across the US and Europe, Latin America, India, and China. But as a knock-on effect, we’ve seen the US/EU focus so exclusively on disease mitigation as a strategy for improving relations in countries they wish to ally with that they neglect their domestic populations (who are comparatively much wealthier, but see the foreign aid as coming at their expense). The iterative result has been a series of claw-backs of positive disease mitigation policy fueled by a popular media that’s vilified the very act of disease mitigation and denigrated the people who received it as subhuman. And the true irony of the affair is in how many of these popular media institutions are owned and operated by self-proclaimed EAs.
The EA strategy of trying to decouple and distill policies into their individual components, then min-max solutions at a spreadsheet level, have produced a backlash their narrow focus failed to anticipate.
I think this should be taken evidence against charity being rooted in the need for a popular buy-in.
Until the AI wonderkin can fully divorce themselves from the public at-large, they’re going to need to rely on human labor and ingenuity to accomplish large, complex projects. The strongest card that EAs have to play is typically their ability to quickly roll up a highly educated, multi-talented workforce underneath them. Even then, they’re notoriously inefficient in their application of these skilled technicians.
But we’re already seeing the results of the Bullshit Jobs and Bullshit Bosses, as the bigger Tech companies stumble through the 2020s. Without people who want to work beside you on a project they are deeply invested in, the work slows down and the work product becomes flimsier and more ineffectual. In the end, you’re left with Bloomberg 2020 tier work, where you’ve got tens of thousands of people collecting a paycheck to do nothing.
I’m advocating for socialism, not charity.
Socialism requires a popular consensus to function. You can’t impose a collective project by executive fiat.
Bayesianism is about reconciling your squishy priors with hard math. If there’s a round peg and a square hole, the square hole is Frequentism.
I don’t understand your point about Bill Gates. You’re saying he had one plan, but then found another plan worked better. What does this have to do with EA? Givewell isn’t an armchair-thinktank, it does pretty solid research and analysis comparing the effectiveness of real-world charities that already exist.
The loss of USAID was really bad. Here’s EA Scott Alexander talking about just how bad the scaling back of USAID is. If there were self-proclaimed EA’s involved with villifying USAID, that is ironic indeed.
Socialism requires a popular consensus to function. You can’t impose a collective project by executive fiat.
Well I agree. I don’t have executive fiat. I’d like to increase the amount of popular buy-in. This is one of the main reasons I post on Lemmy. However, that socialism requires concensus whereas charity does not – this is exactly Ozy Brennan’s point. So I think that we don’t disagree at all. Ozy’s observation is that EA charity organizations generally focus on the opposite of buy-in; they look for areas of neglect – places where big strides can be made because other people aren’t working hard on those problems yet. Perhaps because they sound strange. Like electrocuting shrimp so they don’t feel pain when they die in factory farms (yes this is a real charity).
If there’s a round peg and a square hole, the square hole is Frequentism.
Frequentism won’t work with a contained set of inputs. But now we’re getting into Abstract Algebra rather than probability.
I don’t understand your point about Bill Gates. You’re saying he had one plan, but then found another plan worked better.
I’m saying he kept coming at the problem dead on without exploring the second and third order consequences of did policies.
Lots of maths up front but the models were shit. The end result was a reactionary mess precisely because Gates and his lackeys didn’t care about the popular politics of their policies.
Ozy’s observation is that EA charity organizations generally focus on the opposite of buy-in; they look for areas of neglect
The observation that mosquitoe nets and medical interventions have a long term benefit isn’t a problem on its face. But, again, Ozy is attacking a complex problem of supply chains and sustainable development from a very boiled down “do things that look good on my spreadsheet” as the “Effective” solution.
When these plans fall apart, because the proponents fail to account for second order problems, they denounce everyone else as another problem they need to strike head on, rather than considering where they went wrong.
Poverty and food insecurity are the main reasons why some fishermen in Malawi use mosquito nets as illegal fishing nets, an analysis conducted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs has found.
Because the focus was on disease and food security was discounted as a less pressing problem, the primary tool for mitigating disease spread became an environmental catastrophe.
I’ll read the rebuttal of EA, but I’ll trade you if you read this EA unmanifesto.
This is actually not true. Givewell, for instance, publishes their findings as spreadsheets and lets you set weights on different aspects of human experience you consider to be good or bad.
This is also just objectively not true and suggests to me you’ve never even talked to an effective altruist. But it is generally believed by EAs that horrible suffering, such as the kinds of suffering caused by easily-preventable illnesses, is much worse than any of the subtle and varied experiences of a good life which can be bought with the same amount of money are good. So if you just want to “do good,” donate to stopping horrible illnesses before donating to subtler causes.
I actually think this is the idea of socialism, not charity. Ozy Brennan again, on difference between leftism and EA:
I don’t actually believe this about leftism personally, but I think this should be taken evidence against charity being rooted in the need for a popular buy-in.
Agreed. You may have missed this, but I’m advocating for socialism, not charity.
This is still a fixation on an individual subjective human perspective. Which is a bit confusing, given that the EA manifesto explicitly leans on Bayesian statistical analysis. The end result is a round peg (perceptions and emotional priors) being shoved into a square hole (hard numerical figures). It also isn’t effective as a policy guide, because the layman fiddling with weights on a spreadsheet still doesn’t have any actual control over the scale of political economy that a government or a mega-millionaire commands.
We’re running into a Jordan Peterson line of argument, wherein “you just don’t understand my line of thinking” is used to dismiss critiques you’re not equipped to rebut.
Can I counter with “You’ve never even talked to a non-effective altruist?” and conclude you’ve been too cloistered to explore ideas outside the EA space? Or would you consider that a personal attack rather than a statistically informed observation?
This isn’t either/or. You can go back to the old Bill Gates plan to mitigate overpopulation in the third world. He initially tried to push out contraception to the local populations of communities he’d hoped lower birthrates would help. Instead, what he discovered was routine vaccination and standard modernized health care drastically reduced infant mortality and resulted in parents choosing to have fewer kids as a result.
In hindsight, we discovered similar patterns of behavior across the US and Europe, Latin America, India, and China. But as a knock-on effect, we’ve seen the US/EU focus so exclusively on disease mitigation as a strategy for improving relations in countries they wish to ally with that they neglect their domestic populations (who are comparatively much wealthier, but see the foreign aid as coming at their expense). The iterative result has been a series of claw-backs of positive disease mitigation policy fueled by a popular media that’s vilified the very act of disease mitigation and denigrated the people who received it as subhuman. And the true irony of the affair is in how many of these popular media institutions are owned and operated by self-proclaimed EAs.
The EA strategy of trying to decouple and distill policies into their individual components, then min-max solutions at a spreadsheet level, have produced a backlash their narrow focus failed to anticipate.
Until the AI wonderkin can fully divorce themselves from the public at-large, they’re going to need to rely on human labor and ingenuity to accomplish large, complex projects. The strongest card that EAs have to play is typically their ability to quickly roll up a highly educated, multi-talented workforce underneath them. Even then, they’re notoriously inefficient in their application of these skilled technicians.
But we’re already seeing the results of the Bullshit Jobs and Bullshit Bosses, as the bigger Tech companies stumble through the 2020s. Without people who want to work beside you on a project they are deeply invested in, the work slows down and the work product becomes flimsier and more ineffectual. In the end, you’re left with Bloomberg 2020 tier work, where you’ve got tens of thousands of people collecting a paycheck to do nothing.
Socialism requires a popular consensus to function. You can’t impose a collective project by executive fiat.
Bayesianism is about reconciling your squishy priors with hard math. If there’s a round peg and a square hole, the square hole is Frequentism.
I don’t understand your point about Bill Gates. You’re saying he had one plan, but then found another plan worked better. What does this have to do with EA? Givewell isn’t an armchair-thinktank, it does pretty solid research and analysis comparing the effectiveness of real-world charities that already exist.
The loss of USAID was really bad. Here’s EA Scott Alexander talking about just how bad the scaling back of USAID is. If there were self-proclaimed EA’s involved with villifying USAID, that is ironic indeed.
Well I agree. I don’t have executive fiat. I’d like to increase the amount of popular buy-in. This is one of the main reasons I post on Lemmy. However, that socialism requires concensus whereas charity does not – this is exactly Ozy Brennan’s point. So I think that we don’t disagree at all. Ozy’s observation is that EA charity organizations generally focus on the opposite of buy-in; they look for areas of neglect – places where big strides can be made because other people aren’t working hard on those problems yet. Perhaps because they sound strange. Like electrocuting shrimp so they don’t feel pain when they die in factory farms (yes this is a real charity).
Frequentism won’t work with a contained set of inputs. But now we’re getting into Abstract Algebra rather than probability.
I’m saying he kept coming at the problem dead on without exploring the second and third order consequences of did policies.
Lots of maths up front but the models were shit. The end result was a reactionary mess precisely because Gates and his lackeys didn’t care about the popular politics of their policies.
The observation that mosquitoe nets and medical interventions have a long term benefit isn’t a problem on its face. But, again, Ozy is attacking a complex problem of supply chains and sustainable development from a very boiled down “do things that look good on my spreadsheet” as the “Effective” solution.
When these plans fall apart, because the proponents fail to account for second order problems, they denounce everyone else as another problem they need to strike head on, rather than considering where they went wrong.
Case in point
Because the focus was on disease and food security was discounted as a less pressing problem, the primary tool for mitigating disease spread became an environmental catastrophe.