Donate more, and donate to charities that are effective (use more of the donations for actions directly related to their mission statement instead of marketing/admin/etc). The rest is interpretation, as they say. That's all "EA" is.<p>I won't speculate on why some people are so insistent that we must throw the baby out with the bathwater immediately, declare EA Dead, and forget it ever existed.
I've always thought of the "Effective Altruism" movement as a product of big egos. The ones following it think they know better than the ones they're 'saving'. But perhaps the EA adherents are seeking salvation for themselves rather than others. They see the ones they want to help as 'pitiful' in some way and want to provide for them. That seems a rather dehumanizing attitude to me.<p>Maybe people don't view themselves as pitiful and want to provide for themselves rather than be dependent on handouts at some unreliable rando's discression? People on the other side of the planet can have very different societal norms that go unconsidered outside of their communities.<p>I've always thought sticking to 1 or 2 degrees of separation avoids issues of cultural differences and long logistical chains. And who better to ask what would really help people than their friends?<p>Then again, I think fate sometimes chooses you for a bit of charity work and it's wise to go along with it.
I always feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I see how vitriolic the discussion around EA gets. I’m sure you can find some crazies in who adhere to EA in wacky ways (as with any other group), but the brunt of the focus of EA has always clearly been to do the most good per dollar, or to be effective with your altruism. Maybe a secondary belief is that you should donate 10% of your income to charity. These seem like obviously good things, to the point that I don’t understand how people can be so against while maintaining a straight face.
I kind of regret reading this article. It's very long and doesn't have all that much interesting information.<p>It starts with the author discovering that some charities are not effective, especially when rich people go to poor countries and try to do direct actions. Then it somehow uses this as an argument that trying to measure the effectiveness of charities is bad and that giving money to charities in general is bad because sometimes charities are mismanaged.<p>Half of the article is basically complaining that charities in general are sometimes ineffective or have unintended negative side effects (for example malaria bed nets being used for fishing).<p>Guess what - the fact that it's a difficult problem to tell how to do good is exactly why EA exists - to at least try and bring order into chaos. What's the alternative? The article just keeps complaining about collecting data and statistics and trying to estimate good by saying "but sometimes the estimates are wrong!", but it presents zero alternatives. It's basically just advocating against charity in general, saying that it should be the job of the governments. Or it's arguing that you people need to only support things they are emotionally invested in, because "unsentimental calculations" are evil.<p>The other half of the article is citing random billionaire's opinions on the world and complaining that they are self-important and weaving in lots of random things about the SBF trial for some reason.<p>There's some valid criticisms of effective altruism in the article, specifically: criticizing how they try to put a value on everything (even when it is a hard problem or not exact) and criticizing longtermism (because it's difficult to say whether to weigh the present or the future more). It also mentions the common discussion about doing direct action yourself versus spending more time working and donating more money. But I think those are already the obvious discussions about EA that everyone knows about.
There's some detailed criticism of this article in the comments on the EA forum:<p>> The overwhelmingly thrust of Wenar's article -- from the opening jab about asking EAs "how many people they’ve killed", to the conditional I bolded above -- seems to be to frame charitable giving as a morally risky endeavor, in contrast to the implicit safety of just doing nothing and letting people die.<p>...<p>> (If he just wants to advocate for more GiveDirectly-style anti-paternalistic interventions that "shift our power to them", that seems fine but obviously doesn't justify the other 95% of the article.)<p><a href="https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cfwxiG8ovaAA9us6t/linkpost-leif-wenar-s-the-deaths-of-effective-altruism" rel="nofollow">https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cfwxiG8ovaAA9us6t/...</a><p>And here's a link to GiveWell's comments on the article (that Wired sent them for review).<p><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WfBvF7N4Z1VyQcqtQmqJPY59J33IjHKOwVlRH6gTwzM/edit" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WfBvF7N4Z1VyQcqtQmqJPY59...</a>
EA is basically Ethics for Assholes.<p>Basically it allows assholes who have a single minded focus on making money a way to salve their conscience by reducing morality to a cash flow problem and ignoring any of the other social and moral implications of their behavior.
It's an interesting time when Stanford Professors are putting out weak mudslinging articles like this.<p>Note the difference: <a href="https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-effective" rel="nofollow">https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-eff...</a>
> The teachers gave your kids the pills this morning without asking you. By the next day your kids are feeling better—but how do you feel? How do you feel about the teachers and the superintendent? What do you think about those Chinese trillionaires, now bragging back home about how they’ve helped the poor foreigners?<p>Uh, I feel pretty happy about it? I'd also be somewhat annoyed <i>at the superintendent, the one that actually did the scheduling</i> if this reaction wasn't a total fluke. But much happier than annoyed.<p>I mean, you just told me the pill adds a month of life expectancy. Am I supposed to not think that's true a couple sentences later?<p>The way this analogy is explained is a mess.
I don’t find anything offensive about carefully considering how to do good, or taking a longer term view of humanity.<p>I think the thing that is irritating about EA is that it often feels like this generation’s ‘post-colonial guilt’. Many people with the privilege to act on their EA sentiments are the beneficiaries of financial inequality, either via inheritance or VC froth, and can afford to absorb the risks.<p>To be honest, EA feels like church without the beardy cloud man, and IMO is a better use of the philosophy brain-trust than metaphysics, so I have no desire to see it fail. The cultish part is more a Silicon Valley thing than an EA thing.
I thought effective altruism was based on the work of Peter Singer. Like, as long as you have resources to spare, you are morally obligated to use those resources in the most effective way possible to help people and other living beings -- a perspective kind of aligned with Kropotkin's mutual aid. With Sam Bankman-Fried we're looking at the libertarian techbro version of that, which is basically "get rich first, then help people". Or, in the extreme case, "sure, I'd like to help, but I'm not rich enough to do so... effectively."