from Hacker News

Effective Altruism Is a Welter of Lies, Hypocrisy, and Eugenic Fantasies

by kosasbest on 11/12/23, 9:57 PM with 60 comments

• by RationalDino on 11/12/23, 10:34 PM

  EA sounds rational and wonderful. And it does make sense. We should follow our logic to its rational conclusions. Our moral intuitions are obviously wrong a lot - just look at the trolley problem. With reason we can do better.

  The problem is that it quickly becomes an invitation to ideas like longtermism. Which involve long chains of potentially flawed reasoning, leading to the belief that you're doing tremendous good. And with confirmation bias making it hard for you to doubt your logic, leading to an unbounded potential for error.

  As the old moral goes, "Nobody is as easy to fool as a person who wants to fool himself."

  This problem is not original to EA. The history of the 20th century is full of potential utopias. On the basis of the end justifies the means, the prospect of infinite good justifies unlimited harm. Unlimited harm came in the form of wars, famines, and mass repression. But the utopian futures never materialized.

  That said, there is a lot of good to the idea of EA. It is better to do something effective than to virtue signal. But we should also be biased towards wins we can be more sure are real. Things that are short term and concrete. The more distant and hard to measure the win, the more that we should bias ourselves to the belief that we're missing something.

• by Animats on 11/12/23, 10:44 PM

  The philosophical question is, what's the discount rate on moral decisions? Is saving 2 lives in 10 years better than saving one life now? It's the trolley problem over time. What should that number be? And who gets to set it? Optimal values for young people are higher than those for old people.

  The problem with "effective altruism" is much simpler. Most of the people behind it were crooks.

• by tasty_freeze on 11/13/23, 1:44 AM

  The author of the article isn't playing fair. He opens with SBF's downfall and then says even without that, there are so many reason EA is suspect. But then he keeps reintroducing SBF into the narrative, and conflates the billions that SBF swindled with the millions he gave to EA, shading it to seem that the total amount was dirty EA money.

  He also says things like, "leading EAs were spending large sums of money on Oxfordshire palaces". One is bad enough and I don't fully trust his reporting on it when he blithely claims that that multiple palaces were bought.

  I've recommended "The Life You Can Save" to multiple people because the book had a great impact on me. Most of the things being claimed critics make of EA sound completely alien to me, such as justifying getting filthy rich because at some point you will be giving half of it away. I'm sure people use EA in that way, but does EA promote that view? In the same way, the eugenics movement try to hijack the theory of evolution to justify behavior that the theory itself says nothing about.

• by xyzzy123 on 11/13/23, 12:18 AM

  The article is focused almost entirely on personal drama and no attempt is really made to refute the central tenets of EA.

  I think a lot of people find the concept of EA morally threatening. Their natural reaction is to want to "take those people down a peg" because they perceive EA as an incursion on the moral high ground. I think this tendency is more pronounced among the left. Rather than discuss "how can we do good and get the best bang for buck and is this movement doing that?" they'll focus on people they think have illegitimately gained status and pillory them.

  I think the EA "brand" should be more careful to avoid this very natural "crab bucket" type of moral backlash. IMHO a good start would be to de-emphasise "high flyers" and direct focus towards the many unpretentious people who do their best to do "a little good".

• by rutierut on 11/12/23, 10:23 PM

  It's a wonder that obnoxious hit pieces like this still get made in this day and age. The first paragraph is filled with disingenuous strawman rhetoric.

  > colonize space, plunder the vast resources of the cosmos

  The author obviously tries to draw a parallel between inter-earth colonization and plundering to make longtermism and by proxy AE look bad.

  I'm not an EA but I've never met people more receptive to criticism as they are. This is a group of people, uniting around a desire to do good, actually going through with it, and somehow catching a huge amount of flak for it.

• by kdmccormick on 11/12/23, 10:21 PM

  I keep seeing takes like this, but the effect EA has had on my life so far is that it gave me motivation and an easy framework to donate thousands of dollars a year to fund deworming, vaccination, and other direct relief in underdeveloped countries, for two years in a row. I honestly had no idea who SBF was until FTX melted down. I saw zero connection between EA and Musk, Trump, etc.

  Was I duped? I don't think so. SBF's downfall has definitely shaken my confidence in EA as a trustworthy institution, but I still generally feel great about those donations and will likely repeat them again next year (albeit with a closer look at exactly how the funds are distributed).

  As with many things, it easier and more fun to disparage movements than it is to get involved and make positive change. This article is a good example of that.