This is so similar to how hearing people treat Deaf people, and have since the Milan “conference” of 1880 that banned speakers of signed languages and Deaf people from that conference and ultimately only admitted one Deaf ASL speaker from the American/Gallaudet University delegation, and the Gallaudet people found themselves the only ones who argued passionately for signed languages, and all the other hearing people decided that Deaf people really needed all signed languages to be banned and an emphasis on spoken speech was what Deaf people needed.
From that time on, language deprivation has been rampant. And when hearing aids exploded in usage in the 1980s, hearings decided that Deaf people, regardless of their audiogram results, really needed heading aids, and double down on speech therapy, to reverse the pervasive language deprivation and inability to speak of most Deaf people up to that point. You do understand what came next? In the early 2000s hearings expanded cochlear implants so that very young Deaf babies could be implanted, and they would benefit the most from the noise machines! Alas, same results, exactly as useless as hearing aids.
If only they listened to Deaf people at any point since 1880, they would hear the same consistent desire that all Deaf children and their families learn ASL, and that Deaf children all attend school together, because it is life altering to not struggle for crumbs of communication or community.
Effective altruism, but for no one. And Bill Clinton’s agreeing with right wingers to make sure that no one got ahead on federal dollars is a pernicious scourge, especially to those on SSI, even now.
This is a good takedown of the latest, Tech-centered version of EA. But I remember being turned off of it 10+ years ago when it was "regular" people going "I'm more virtuous than you because I work at a hedge fund and give away 400k per year". Like sure, the people who are helped by that 400k definitely appreciate it, but the whole philosophy of EA rests on the fact that some people will not be helped because others need it more (and, like you pointed out, he with the money chooses). But where did that 400k come from??
There's no possible way that working at a financial institution is doing less than 400k worth of extraction when it provides 400k worth of salary to an I-banker. And that's my problem with the EA-ers: they're just not thinking big enough (or to the extent that they are, it's like you've pointed out, sidetracked by the imagined billions of descendants rather than the real billions of people right here).
Effective Altruism is just one way (of several that I have witnessed -- former FAANG eng here) for people to justify high-status-yet-hopelessly-immoral jobs.
Thank you for putting voice to my discomfort with EA. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why it was so repulsive, and you eloquently answered that question. Arrogance of the very rich. Some of the very rich think that $$$ = intelligence, sadly untrue.
They should just stfu and PAY THEIR FAIR SHARE OF TAXES, dammit. They are making money off common resources and common infrastructure but act as though the rest of us hoi polloi are just there for them to squeeze, not nice versa.
:: That led to a focus on means-testing poverty programs, as in Bill Clinton’s welfare reform package. ::
Which ended up helping nobody, and making it HARDER for those who needed welfare the most to get it, while making it easier for the kind of Red State White Trash who oppose welfare "in principle" (i.e., when it's given to minorities!) to nonetheless get the lion's share of it.
People are saying America might not recover from Trump's Presidency—I think he was just the finishing move of Clinton NeoLiberalism. The Clintons did more to destroy America than even Reagan can take credit for, because the Clintons were supposed to be on Our Side....
Biden's notably moved away from the neoliberal consensus in important ways (on student debt relief, economic stimulus, antitrust actions.) He hasn't gotten a lot of credit for it, which makes me worry that the momentum won't be sustained...
I will say that Biden's action in those areas is a pleasant shock—it's like he actually LISTENED to what Bernie Sanders was saying, rather than trying to fob him off onto some "outreach" program like Schmuck Schumer did! I don't think it's enough action or fast enough, but it's momentum in the proper direction—more importantly, it's giving Progressives a reason to hope we CAN turn this boat around in time.
That's why watching his slow-walk reactions to the Gaza Genocide is so saddening, and his condoning police attacks on college protesters so upsetting—I just want to shake him and say, "Snap out of it, Joe! It's not 1968, and you're not Richard Nixon. It's time for you to stand up and lead, and we really need you to do that now...."
He did just stop weapons sales, and has spoke out forcefully against the Rafah invasion. So that's hopeful...though I don't know that it's enough to stop Bibi, who knows that he's out of office and maybe in jail as soon as the war ends.
I know Bernie Sanders was big on Student Loan Forgiveness when he was running for President, so I associate that with him. Good to hear he's not the only one pushing for that....
What are your thoughts about Give Directly, an organization I know of from GiveWell? They make direct cash payments to the poorest people in the world.
There's much that I agree with in this post and yet, it irks me. I'm still sorting through my thoughts, but I'll start with an attempt at a short version --
Trying to figure out how to make the future (and the present) more humane, more fair, or more just isn't only difficult it's a wicked problem ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem ) . Any theory which purports to solve it is likely to fall short in crucial ways. That is certainly true of EA, and it's important to recognize how and why it falls short.
And yet . . . while I don't think the keys to the future (or the budget) should be completely turned over to EA, I think it can add value in important ways. To what extent should people's thinking about charity (or development) bend in the directions indicated by EA? The answer shouldn't be 100%, but it shouldn't be 0 either. I worry that your post will be read by people as a reason to dismiss EA -- both the organized movement with the name and the variety of ideas under that banner -- without trying to think about the value that it does offer, and I think that would be a mistake.
I mean, I really think it's worthless. EA didn't invent the idea that charity should be cost effective, or that you should try to make sure you're actually doing good with your money. It just claimed to be able to do those things with new and great accuracy and virtue, even though it couldn't. SBK's crash and burn (and Musk's endorsement) should pretty much put the kibosh on it, imo.
I find the later piece equally worth engaging with -- he talks about the rapid growth of EA, and the concerns that exposes, but also what it is that he continues to find compelling -- I don't think any of the things he describes require that EA movement, as it exists today, but I also think it would be a tragedy to throw dirt on the EA movement without trying to develop other ways to cultivate the spirit that Matthews found in EA:
----------------quote--------------
Things have indeed gotten weird in EA. The EA I know in 2022 is a more powerful and more idiosyncratic entity than the EA I met in 2013. And as it’s grown, it’s faced vocal backlash of a kind that didn’t exist in its early years.
A small clique of philosophy nerds donating their modest incomes doesn’t seem like a big enough deal to spark much outside critique. A multi-billion-dollar complex with designs on influencing the course of American politics and indeed all of world history … is a different matter.
...
I encountered effective altruism while I was a journalist covering federal public policy in the US. I lived and breathed Senate committee schedules, think tank reports, polling averages, outrage cycles about whatever Barack Obama or Mitt Romney said most recently. I don’t know if you’ve immersed yourself in American politics like that … but it’s a horrible place to live. Arguments are more often than not made in extreme bad faith. People’s attention was never focused on issues that mattered most to the largest number of people. Progress for actual people in the actual world, when it did happen, was maddeningly slow.
...
Finding EA was a similarly transformative experience for me. The major point for me was less that this group of people had found, once and for all, the most effective ways to spend money to help people. They didn’t, they won’t, though more than most movements, they will admit that, and cop to those limits to what they can learn about the world.
What was different was that I now had a sense that there was more to the world than the small corner I had dug into in Washington, DC — so much so that I was inspired to co-found this very section of Vox, Future Perfect. This is, in retrospect, an obvious revelation. If I had spent this period as a microbiologist as CRISPR emerged, it would have been obvious that there was more to the world than US politics. If I had spent the period living in India and watching the world’s largest democracy emerge from extreme poverty, it would have been obvious too.
...
My anxieties about EA’s evolution, as it tends toward longtermism and gets more political, are bound up in pride at that achievement, in the intelligent environment that the movement has fostered, and fear that it could all come crashing down. That worry is particularly pronounced when the actions and fortunes of a handful of mega-donors weigh heavily on the whole movement’s future. Small, relatively insular movements can achieve a great deal, but they can also collapse in on themselves if mismanaged.
My attitude toward EA is, of course, heavily personal. But even if you have no interest in the movement or its ideas, you should care about its destiny. It’s changed thousands of lives to date. Yours could be next. And if the movement is careful, it could be for the better.
I guess what bugs me about EA is that it has the distinct whiff of Andrew Yang's "Techno-Libertarians for UBI" song-and-dance to it—which is the 21st Century's version of Gilded Age Robber Barons endowing libraries and concert halls as a way to "buy their way into Heaven", after a lifetime of exploiting their workers and destroying the environment to get rich.
As has already been said about "Billionaire Charity"? Just pay your Gods-Damned taxes instead!
Yes, perhaps the difference in my perspective comes down to the question of what degree you see it as a top-down vs bottom-up process. If you see EA as being guided by the vision of (as Noah referenced) SPF or Musk (or Andrew Yang), that's not something that's very attractive to get involved with.
If you see it as a large group of (younger) people trying to do some good in the world and arguing endlessly about that constitutes "doing good in the world" -- that has obvious strengths and weaknesses but is much more sympathetic, and that's closer to the impression I have of EA.
Okay, if you think the underlying ideas are better realized under a different banner, where would you point? I'm not saying that EA invented the idea just that, for me, it's harder than I would like to point at institutions who are popularizing that concept.
Perhaps this just reflects my ignorance; I'd be happy if there's an obvious answer to the question.
I mean, utilitarianism has been around for a while, with various pluses and minuses. the EA movement really seems to maximize minuses and minimize pluses.
Has EA created some sort of real uptick in people donating kidneys? people were certainly donating organs before EA existed...
Thinking more about your comment about utilitarianism here's what I'd say.
Yes, EA, in general, seems like an offshoot of utilitarianism and, yes, even by the standard of evaluating charities EA isn't perfect. But I'm curious if there are any other utilitarian groups doing a better job.
For example, Give Directly was mentioned upthread. It doesn't claim that all charity should be replaced with direct cash grants but it does think people should ask the question, "is this other charitable program better or worse than just giving cash directly" and it wants to do programs at large enough scale that there's actual evidence to use to compare program X with cash grants.
Similarly, I wouldn't argue that GiveWell is perfect, or that people should only give money to GiveWell recommended charities, but I think it is a useful point of comparison to ask, "what should I look for to decide whether [Charity X] is better than just giving to GiveWell recommended groups."
"That might mean writing a recommendation like the one GiveWell offers for deworming, which reads quite weirdly if you’re used to more typical charity recommendations. It more or less directly says 'we’re very unsure if this works, but if it does, the benefits are sufficiently large that it’s worth doing.'”
I got curious about your question about Kidney donations. It's hard to find historical data, what I did see was this, which doesn't prove anything either way ( https://unos.org/news/2022-organ-transplants-again-set-annual-records/ ). You could argue that EA contributed to the 2019 peak, but I doubt it was a major factor:
"A total of 6,466 people became living organ donors in 2022, slightly fewer than in 2021. Living organ donation has varied considerably over the last several years, reflecting various trends in transplant need and the circumstances where living donation is an option. The all-time record of 7,389 in 2019 was followed by a decrease to 5,726 in 2020, due to effects of the COVID-19 pandemic."
The FDB piece is pretty good. He of course ends by turning it into some sort of weird boast about how he's better at leftism than the other leftists because he got there first and also because he's bored or some such, but if I didn't already have an ax to grind with him that probably wouldn't bother me that much.
Perhaps that is just the difference in who we've been exposed to. In my own experience I've found the EA advocates much more sympathetic than libertarians. But if the people you've encountered have made you feel the opposite . . . I can see why you'd be critical of EA.
Spot on. Effect Altruism is a hoax. Animal rights activists are rightly up in arms about it because it often focuses on welfare issues rather than the root of animal exploitation (the entire system of industrial animal agriculture). And the whole longterm thing – surely the best way to guarantee a more just future is to improve people's lives and the state of the world in the here and now. Peter Singer (who now has a Substack!) has a lot of answer for. I give my money to small grassroots charities because I trust activists and marginalised communities to tell me what is effective more than big charities.
I think rich people forget that they are just regular people who happen to have massive amounts of resources at their disposal. They are not gods, even if it feels that way from their sparkling lives. They don’t have a corner on intelligence or virtue- just more time and space to develop those qualities. They refuse to listen to people they feel are “less than”-even if those people are literally the experts in what they need. They needed to create a machine to listen to, because poor people can’t possibly know what they need./s
This is so similar to how hearing people treat Deaf people, and have since the Milan “conference” of 1880 that banned speakers of signed languages and Deaf people from that conference and ultimately only admitted one Deaf ASL speaker from the American/Gallaudet University delegation, and the Gallaudet people found themselves the only ones who argued passionately for signed languages, and all the other hearing people decided that Deaf people really needed all signed languages to be banned and an emphasis on spoken speech was what Deaf people needed.
From that time on, language deprivation has been rampant. And when hearing aids exploded in usage in the 1980s, hearings decided that Deaf people, regardless of their audiogram results, really needed heading aids, and double down on speech therapy, to reverse the pervasive language deprivation and inability to speak of most Deaf people up to that point. You do understand what came next? In the early 2000s hearings expanded cochlear implants so that very young Deaf babies could be implanted, and they would benefit the most from the noise machines! Alas, same results, exactly as useless as hearing aids.
If only they listened to Deaf people at any point since 1880, they would hear the same consistent desire that all Deaf children and their families learn ASL, and that Deaf children all attend school together, because it is life altering to not struggle for crumbs of communication or community.
Effective altruism, but for no one. And Bill Clinton’s agreeing with right wingers to make sure that no one got ahead on federal dollars is a pernicious scourge, especially to those on SSI, even now.
Peter Singer is one of the grandfathers of EA and of course he's notorious for his disdain for disabled people.
Peter Singer?
Sigh.
I completely glommed onto his notion of concentric circles of caring. How could he fucking drop the ball like this?
For ref, my AWSOME baby sister and BFF and her story
https://www.google.com/search?q=cece+bell&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari
That’s not a toxic combination at all 😬
This is a good takedown of the latest, Tech-centered version of EA. But I remember being turned off of it 10+ years ago when it was "regular" people going "I'm more virtuous than you because I work at a hedge fund and give away 400k per year". Like sure, the people who are helped by that 400k definitely appreciate it, but the whole philosophy of EA rests on the fact that some people will not be helped because others need it more (and, like you pointed out, he with the money chooses). But where did that 400k come from??
There's no possible way that working at a financial institution is doing less than 400k worth of extraction when it provides 400k worth of salary to an I-banker. And that's my problem with the EA-ers: they're just not thinking big enough (or to the extent that they are, it's like you've pointed out, sidetracked by the imagined billions of descendants rather than the real billions of people right here).
Effective Altruism is just one way (of several that I have witnessed -- former FAANG eng here) for people to justify high-status-yet-hopelessly-immoral jobs.
that's kind of the problem with charity in general; it's often a justification for inequity rather than an effort to change inequity.
Everytime I see a self congratulatory advertisement for some big corp, I want to scream “JUST PAY YOUR FAIR SHARE OF TAXES, you f$)k!”
Thank you for putting voice to my discomfort with EA. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why it was so repulsive, and you eloquently answered that question. Arrogance of the very rich. Some of the very rich think that $$$ = intelligence, sadly untrue.
They should just stfu and PAY THEIR FAIR SHARE OF TAXES, dammit. They are making money off common resources and common infrastructure but act as though the rest of us hoi polloi are just there for them to squeeze, not nice versa.
Thanks Noah! You make me smarter.
Emile Torres discusses these issues a lot; he's worth checking out if you haven't. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-acronym-behind-our-wildest-ai-dreams-and-nightmares/
I shall, thanks!
:: That led to a focus on means-testing poverty programs, as in Bill Clinton’s welfare reform package. ::
Which ended up helping nobody, and making it HARDER for those who needed welfare the most to get it, while making it easier for the kind of Red State White Trash who oppose welfare "in principle" (i.e., when it's given to minorities!) to nonetheless get the lion's share of it.
People are saying America might not recover from Trump's Presidency—I think he was just the finishing move of Clinton NeoLiberalism. The Clintons did more to destroy America than even Reagan can take credit for, because the Clintons were supposed to be on Our Side....
Biden's notably moved away from the neoliberal consensus in important ways (on student debt relief, economic stimulus, antitrust actions.) He hasn't gotten a lot of credit for it, which makes me worry that the momentum won't be sustained...
I will say that Biden's action in those areas is a pleasant shock—it's like he actually LISTENED to what Bernie Sanders was saying, rather than trying to fob him off onto some "outreach" program like Schmuck Schumer did! I don't think it's enough action or fast enough, but it's momentum in the proper direction—more importantly, it's giving Progressives a reason to hope we CAN turn this boat around in time.
That's why watching his slow-walk reactions to the Gaza Genocide is so saddening, and his condoning police attacks on college protesters so upsetting—I just want to shake him and say, "Snap out of it, Joe! It's not 1968, and you're not Richard Nixon. It's time for you to stand up and lead, and we really need you to do that now...."
He did just stop weapons sales, and has spoke out forcefully against the Rafah invasion. So that's hopeful...though I don't know that it's enough to stop Bibi, who knows that he's out of office and maybe in jail as soon as the war ends.
fwiw, I think Elizabeth Warren was the point person on student loans (also Warnock and Harris.) Maybe Bernie on stimulus and antitrust more?
I know Bernie Sanders was big on Student Loan Forgiveness when he was running for President, so I associate that with him. Good to hear he's not the only one pushing for that....
I saw that, and it's a hopeful sign.
Maybe it's just impatience because there's So Much To Do—and there's Old Uncle Joe, Movin' Kinda Slow....
https://youtu.be/dwgM8cJJguQ?si=d5gsDgiOwjUlNkbp
What are your thoughts about Give Directly, an organization I know of from GiveWell? They make direct cash payments to the poorest people in the world.
I haven't looked into it, alas.
Here's a starting point. It has the benefit of empowering the recipient to decide how best to spend the money. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/19/africa-malawi-extreme-poverty-aid/
There's much that I agree with in this post and yet, it irks me. I'm still sorting through my thoughts, but I'll start with an attempt at a short version --
Trying to figure out how to make the future (and the present) more humane, more fair, or more just isn't only difficult it's a wicked problem ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem ) . Any theory which purports to solve it is likely to fall short in crucial ways. That is certainly true of EA, and it's important to recognize how and why it falls short.
And yet . . . while I don't think the keys to the future (or the budget) should be completely turned over to EA, I think it can add value in important ways. To what extent should people's thinking about charity (or development) bend in the directions indicated by EA? The answer shouldn't be 100%, but it shouldn't be 0 either. I worry that your post will be read by people as a reason to dismiss EA -- both the organized movement with the name and the variety of ideas under that banner -- without trying to think about the value that it does offer, and I think that would be a mistake.
I mean, I really think it's worthless. EA didn't invent the idea that charity should be cost effective, or that you should try to make sure you're actually doing good with your money. It just claimed to be able to do those things with new and great accuracy and virtue, even though it couldn't. SBK's crash and burn (and Musk's endorsement) should pretty much put the kibosh on it, imo.
Just to give a specific example, I often think about Dylan Matthews piece about donating a kidney: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/4/11/12716978/kidney-donation-dylan-matthews
He open the piece talking about the ideas that influenced his decision and doesn't specifically mention EA, but he has a later piece talking about the EA movement, and how it has affected him personally: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/8/8/23150496/effective-altruism-sam-bankman-fried-dustin-moskovitz-billionaire-philanthropy-crytocurrency
I find the later piece equally worth engaging with -- he talks about the rapid growth of EA, and the concerns that exposes, but also what it is that he continues to find compelling -- I don't think any of the things he describes require that EA movement, as it exists today, but I also think it would be a tragedy to throw dirt on the EA movement without trying to develop other ways to cultivate the spirit that Matthews found in EA:
----------------quote--------------
Things have indeed gotten weird in EA. The EA I know in 2022 is a more powerful and more idiosyncratic entity than the EA I met in 2013. And as it’s grown, it’s faced vocal backlash of a kind that didn’t exist in its early years.
A small clique of philosophy nerds donating their modest incomes doesn’t seem like a big enough deal to spark much outside critique. A multi-billion-dollar complex with designs on influencing the course of American politics and indeed all of world history … is a different matter.
...
I encountered effective altruism while I was a journalist covering federal public policy in the US. I lived and breathed Senate committee schedules, think tank reports, polling averages, outrage cycles about whatever Barack Obama or Mitt Romney said most recently. I don’t know if you’ve immersed yourself in American politics like that … but it’s a horrible place to live. Arguments are more often than not made in extreme bad faith. People’s attention was never focused on issues that mattered most to the largest number of people. Progress for actual people in the actual world, when it did happen, was maddeningly slow.
...
Finding EA was a similarly transformative experience for me. The major point for me was less that this group of people had found, once and for all, the most effective ways to spend money to help people. They didn’t, they won’t, though more than most movements, they will admit that, and cop to those limits to what they can learn about the world.
What was different was that I now had a sense that there was more to the world than the small corner I had dug into in Washington, DC — so much so that I was inspired to co-found this very section of Vox, Future Perfect. This is, in retrospect, an obvious revelation. If I had spent this period as a microbiologist as CRISPR emerged, it would have been obvious that there was more to the world than US politics. If I had spent the period living in India and watching the world’s largest democracy emerge from extreme poverty, it would have been obvious too.
...
My anxieties about EA’s evolution, as it tends toward longtermism and gets more political, are bound up in pride at that achievement, in the intelligent environment that the movement has fostered, and fear that it could all come crashing down. That worry is particularly pronounced when the actions and fortunes of a handful of mega-donors weigh heavily on the whole movement’s future. Small, relatively insular movements can achieve a great deal, but they can also collapse in on themselves if mismanaged.
My attitude toward EA is, of course, heavily personal. But even if you have no interest in the movement or its ideas, you should care about its destiny. It’s changed thousands of lives to date. Yours could be next. And if the movement is careful, it could be for the better.
I guess what bugs me about EA is that it has the distinct whiff of Andrew Yang's "Techno-Libertarians for UBI" song-and-dance to it—which is the 21st Century's version of Gilded Age Robber Barons endowing libraries and concert halls as a way to "buy their way into Heaven", after a lifetime of exploiting their workers and destroying the environment to get rich.
As has already been said about "Billionaire Charity"? Just pay your Gods-Damned taxes instead!
Yes, perhaps the difference in my perspective comes down to the question of what degree you see it as a top-down vs bottom-up process. If you see EA as being guided by the vision of (as Noah referenced) SPF or Musk (or Andrew Yang), that's not something that's very attractive to get involved with.
If you see it as a large group of (younger) people trying to do some good in the world and arguing endlessly about that constitutes "doing good in the world" -- that has obvious strengths and weaknesses but is much more sympathetic, and that's closer to the impression I have of EA.
I can't figure out which is you and which is your quoting, NickS.
Everything after "----------------quote--------------" is a quote from Dylan Matthews.
Sadly I don't know a good way to format long quotes in comments.
In Substack comments? There isn't.
Thank you for making it clearer.
Okay, if you think the underlying ideas are better realized under a different banner, where would you point? I'm not saying that EA invented the idea just that, for me, it's harder than I would like to point at institutions who are popularizing that concept.
Perhaps this just reflects my ignorance; I'd be happy if there's an obvious answer to the question.
I mean, utilitarianism has been around for a while, with various pluses and minuses. the EA movement really seems to maximize minuses and minimize pluses.
Has EA created some sort of real uptick in people donating kidneys? people were certainly donating organs before EA existed...
Thinking more about your comment about utilitarianism here's what I'd say.
Yes, EA, in general, seems like an offshoot of utilitarianism and, yes, even by the standard of evaluating charities EA isn't perfect. But I'm curious if there are any other utilitarian groups doing a better job.
For example, Give Directly was mentioned upthread. It doesn't claim that all charity should be replaced with direct cash grants but it does think people should ask the question, "is this other charitable program better or worse than just giving cash directly" and it wants to do programs at large enough scale that there's actual evidence to use to compare program X with cash grants.
Similarly, I wouldn't argue that GiveWell is perfect, or that people should only give money to GiveWell recommended charities, but I think it is a useful point of comparison to ask, "what should I look for to decide whether [Charity X] is better than just giving to GiveWell recommended groups."
I think the linked Kate Manne piece is good, but I don't think that, by itself, should be a reason to not think seriously about what GiveWell is doing as a floor of sorts for evaluating charitable effectiveness. See, for example this article about the deworming controversy: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/19/23268786/deworming-givewell-effective-altruism-michael-hobbes
"That might mean writing a recommendation like the one GiveWell offers for deworming, which reads quite weirdly if you’re used to more typical charity recommendations. It more or less directly says 'we’re very unsure if this works, but if it does, the benefits are sufficiently large that it’s worth doing.'”
I will also say that, while looking up the Dylan Matthews piece, I found FdB's response which, somewhat to my surprise, was reasonable and makes a good point: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-has-a-novelty
I got curious about your question about Kidney donations. It's hard to find historical data, what I did see was this, which doesn't prove anything either way ( https://unos.org/news/2022-organ-transplants-again-set-annual-records/ ). You could argue that EA contributed to the 2019 peak, but I doubt it was a major factor:
"A total of 6,466 people became living organ donors in 2022, slightly fewer than in 2021. Living organ donation has varied considerably over the last several years, reflecting various trends in transplant need and the circumstances where living donation is an option. The all-time record of 7,389 in 2019 was followed by a decrease to 5,726 in 2020, due to effects of the COVID-19 pandemic."
The FDB piece is pretty good. He of course ends by turning it into some sort of weird boast about how he's better at leftism than the other leftists because he got there first and also because he's bored or some such, but if I didn't already have an ax to grind with him that probably wouldn't bother me that much.
My response to the piece was very similar.
Perhaps that is just the difference in who we've been exposed to. In my own experience I've found the EA advocates much more sympathetic than libertarians. But if the people you've encountered have made you feel the opposite . . . I can see why you'd be critical of EA.
Libertarians aren't synonymous with utilitarians, I don't think?
The most high profile EA advocates are SBF and Elon Musk, who I don't find very sympathetic, I'll admit!
Quite right; I was typing too quickly.
Spot on. Effect Altruism is a hoax. Animal rights activists are rightly up in arms about it because it often focuses on welfare issues rather than the root of animal exploitation (the entire system of industrial animal agriculture). And the whole longterm thing – surely the best way to guarantee a more just future is to improve people's lives and the state of the world in the here and now. Peter Singer (who now has a Substack!) has a lot of answer for. I give my money to small grassroots charities because I trust activists and marginalised communities to tell me what is effective more than big charities.
I think rich people forget that they are just regular people who happen to have massive amounts of resources at their disposal. They are not gods, even if it feels that way from their sparkling lives. They don’t have a corner on intelligence or virtue- just more time and space to develop those qualities. They refuse to listen to people they feel are “less than”-even if those people are literally the experts in what they need. They needed to create a machine to listen to, because poor people can’t possibly know what they need./s