Effective altruism

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When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.
Hélder Câmara[wp]

Effective altruism is a movement to change the world through making carefully-targeted charitable donations - not only through making carefully-targeted charitable donations, but that is the overwhelming focus. Philosopher Peter Singer started the idea and buys into it big time, pushing it hard wherever he goes.[1] Effective Altruism is also pushed by Bay Area technolibertarians and LessWrong. The latter, of course, considers itself an obvious beneficiary (if not the obvious beneficiary).

The sales pitch is that, if you're going to try make the world a better place for other people, you should try to do the best possible job you can. If you had the choice between helping a local community theater group put on a show or saving African children from from malaria, the right thing to do is, of course, to save the children. (We think.) People face dilemmas like this in real life whenever they donate money to charity: if you're not donating to the most cost-effective charities that you can, you fail at utilitarianism. (It's impossible not to fail at utilitarianism, but you can fail less hard.)

People that call themselves effective altruists commonly endorse the "earning to give" approach: get the highest-paying job you can and then donate as much of it as possible. After all, you can get more done by paying a bunch of other people to solve problems for you than you can do all on your own, right?[2] You can just ignore any problems your job creates; it's like buying "asshole offsets".

Bill Gates is the poster child for this approach. He made billions of dollars by selling everyone Microsoft Windows, and then gave a lot of it to a foundation to do things like saving African children from malaria. The problem with this is that now everyone is stuck using fucking Microsoft Windows, so "earning to give" has not exactly been a huge public relations success for the movement.

[edit] Conflicts within the movement

The ideas have been around a while, but the current subculture that calls itself Effective Altruism got a big push from LessWrong (or MIRI, a related organization), who considered themselves obviously the most effective charity in the world[3] until EA charity guide GiveWell rated donations to them as actually worse for their project (the threat to humanity of Artificial Intelligence) than not donating. GiveWell, unlike LessWrong and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, primarily promotes charities focused on improving health in the developing world. GiveWell's criticism of MIRI argued that MIRI's focus on supposedly trying to save the world and create "Friendly AI" amounted to a form of Pascal's Mugging—promising enormous benefits even though the probability of actually receiving those benefits is tiny.[4][5]

This is not the only example. Reducing wild animal suffering is generally a major branch of the movement,[6] but some people have unusual ideas on how to do this. At least one person has advocated destroying nature in order to reduce wild animal suffering.[7] In fact, some members of the Effective Altruism movement identify as "negative utilitarians", meaning that preventing suffering is the only thing that matters. This implies that we should be willing to destroy the entire world to prevent one person from suffering a pinprick.[8]

[edit] Where "Effective Altruists" actually send their money

According to William MacAskill of "The Effective Altruism Blog"[9], effective altruists currently tend to think that the most important causes to focus on are global poverty, factory farming, and the long-term future of life on Earth. In practice, this amounts to complaining when people try to solve local problems, feeling bad when people eat hamburgers, and sending money to Eliezer Yudkowsky, respectively.

[edit] Footnotes

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