I'll bite. I go to LessWrong, ACX, and sometimes EA meetups. Why? Mainly because it's like the HackerNews comment section but in person.<p>I have never donated to EA. I choose instead to donate to <a href="https://www.gatesphilanthropypartners.org" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.gatesphilanthropypartners.org</a>, which has very similar ideals and approaches and is arguably more <i>effective</i>, a debate which I have openly had with many EA proponents, and to the detriment of none!<p>At least in Austin, AI doomers only make up a smaller chunk than the rest of the people who show up. I'd say the overriding mentality is skepticism and curiosity. The range in political opinion is very large. There's no dominating ideology and every statement will result in someone who politely disagrees!<p>And yes, LW, ACX, and EA are all very intermingled, so make of that what you will!
I think that this is a bait and switch here.<p>I'm not aware of any significant and serious criticism of the "give lots of money to malaria net organizations" approach to Effective Altruism. This also doesn't seem to be especially present in the article. I'm sure that you can find individual examples on twitter or whatever, but from my seat that seems to be a clear minority of the criticism.<p>It is the version of Effective Altruism that has gone beyond that to "we need to focus on AI safety" and "we need to fly to mars" that people are calling bananas. Heck, the article even mentions that it is difficult to separate Effective Altruism from AI Doomerism and lists a bunch of vague accomplishments about AI Alignment as accomplishments alongside "Saved 200,000 lives."<p>The argument that people should efficiently allocate their charitable giving is sound. Where things go off the rails is when people's model of efficiency involves wild future hypotheticals about robot uprisings.
As an idea, and an ideal, it's hard to seriously criticize EA. Sone pretty shady people have done really unethical things while claiming it as a rationale, but I don't understand how that's supposed to convince me that "most good for the least cost" should be anything other than a North star for moral action.
effective altruists are neither.<p>all the movement does is attempt to distort reality to the childlike views of the wealthy.<p>yes, ea practitioners think they are better than everyone else. that’s why all the haters are wrong.
Effective altruism is the result of not teaching STEM majors enough classics and philosophy. These tech nerds have "invented" utilitarianism, a philosophy that goes back thousands of years and has known downsides when taken to the extreme (i.e. ignoring personal liberties and the means of doing things). The ends don't always justify the means.
Effective Altruism is a bad idea. Applying money in a way that does the most good possible is focusing/obsessing too much on one angle. A Local Maximum will be reached without mechanisms to get out of it.
The problem with billionaire philanthropy (which is what the term 'effective altruism' was intended to replace as part of a rebranding effort) is that it tends to be self-serving and opaque.<p>E.g. we don't want secretive private 'do-gooder' foundations running global public health programs because they're always incentivized to deliver their funds to the private investment interests of the billionaires in charge, rather than say bidding out contracts in a transparent manner. Similar arguments apply to the educational system, to clean air and water efforts, etc.<p>The better solution is to (1) increase tax rates on the wealthiest sectors of the economy by restoring 1960s-era tax brackets for income, corporate, and capital gains and (2) change how those funds are spent at the federal and state level, i.e. move away from funding foreign wars and towards fixing all the basic domestic problems.<p>The reason you want government agencies, not private foundations, in charge of this is that they're subject to public scrutiny, FOIA requests by journalists, etc.<p>In other words, 'effective altruism' is just another con artist program intended to give legitimacy and cover to the USA's ridiculously greedy, out-of-control and amoral investment capitalism culture.
> Still not impressed? Recently, in the US alone, effective altruists have:<p>> ended all gun violence, including mass shootings and police shootings
cured AIDS and melanoma
prevented a 9-11 scale terrorist attack
Okay. Fine. EA hasn’t, technically, done any of these things.<p>> But it has saved the same number of lives that doing all those things would have.<p>> About 20,000 Americans die yearly of gun violence, 8,000 of melanoma, 13,000 from AIDS, and 3,000 people in 9/11. So doing all of these things would save 44,000 lives per year. That matches the ~50,000 lives that effective altruist charities save yearly18.<p>> People aren’t acting like EA has ended gun violence and cured AIDS and so on. all those things. Probably this is because those are exciting popular causes in the news, and saving people in developing countries isn’t. Most people care so little about saving lives in developing countries that effective altruists can save 200,000 of them and people will just not notice. “Oh, all your movement ever does is cause corporate boardroom drama, and maybe other things I’m forgetting right now.”