Difference between revisions of "Effective altruism"

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{{cquote|You know what? This isn't about your feelings. A human life, with all its joys and all its pains, adding up over the course of decades, is worth far more than your brain's feelings of comfort or discomfort with a plan. Does computing the expected utility feel too cold-blooded for your taste? Well, that feeling isn't even a feather in the scales, when a life is at stake. Just shut up and multiply.|||{{wpl|Eliezer Yudkowsky}}}}
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{{cquote|When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.|||{{wpl|Hélder Câmara}}}}
  
'''Effective altruism''' is a movement to change the world through, among other things, carefully-targeted charitable donations, activism, and career choices. The movement mostly traces its roots to philosopher [[Peter Singer]], who is still its most well-known public advocate.<ref>http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_singer_the_why_and_how_of_effective_altruism.html</ref>. Singer earned a lot of attention with his aggressive argument that most people in developed nations have enormous moral obligations to the global poor. HIs most famous though experiment: would you ruin your shoes to save a drowning child? Would you be morally obligated to do so? If so, why is it morally acceptable to let children starve in other countries while we spend our money on things like shoes? Your mileage may vary, of course, on how convincing that is. Even effective altruists aren't all persuaded by it, though to his credit Singer has at least done a great deal of legwork in patiently answering all the major criticisms.<ref> Singer, Peter. "Practical Ethics", 2011, Cambridge University Press. p 198. </ref> Recently, though, the drivers of effective altruist activism are much younger. Organizations associated with the effective altruism movement like charity-evaluator GiveWell, career-choice advisor 80,000 hours and pledge community Giving What We Can were all founded by twenty-something graduates of elite U.S. and U.K. schools. This is the source of one of the major criticisms thrown at the effective altruist movement: that it's been shaped largely by a fairly intellectually uniform group of people with a specific focus on quantifiable impact, evidence and metrics.
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'''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. Although it has a very definite point, in that some "[[charity|charities]]" spend more on the leaders than the people they are supposed to help, direct intervention will almost never solve systemic problems. Effective Altruism is therefore pushed very hard by [[San Francisco|Bay Area]] [[libertarianism#"Techno-libertarians"|technolibertarians]] who think that the world is set up pretty well and don't really want to see any major social changes towards equality that would diminish their own positions. [[LessWrong]] also pushes the concept heavily, seeing itself as an obvious beneficiary.
  
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Philosopher [[Peter Singer]] started the idea and buys into it big time, pushing it hard wherever he goes.<ref>http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_singer_the_why_and_how_of_effective_altruism.html</ref> However, the Singer version &mdash; which he considers a categorical imperative for pretty much ''every'' comfortable first-world citizen, with the specific aim of systemic changes &mdash; and the observed manifestation are not the same at all. In practice, it consists of well-off libertarians somehow being pleased about their moral position, donating to carefully selected charities while working ethically questionable jobs. They tend not to question the system that provides the underlying causes to the problems these charities fight against. This is akin to a person who sells firewood and also funds the fire-fighters, never wondering why there is a fire in the middle of the otherwise unheated orphanage.
  
That's not entirely a fair criticism, though, because people who call themselves Effective Altruists vary wildly in which causes they support. GiveWell, a charity-evaluation organization, is the focal point of the 'metrics and QALYS' branch of effective altruist thinking. QALYs - quality-adjusted-life-years - is a simplified metric for figuring how much good a charity does for the people it's affecting. Cure someone who is dying of malaria, and who has a life expectancy of 50 more years? That's 50 QALYs for you. Treat 100 HIV-positive people with a drug that will keep them in remission for a year? To figure out how many QALYs that is, we compare the quality of life of a person with full-blown AIDS to that of a person with HIV that's being successfully treated. It's a complicated metric to say the least, and it has some vocal detractors.<ref> http://www.ispor.org/meetings/invitational/QALY/Paper6.pdf</ref> The critics come from all angles - disabled rights groups think that it's ableist and discriminatory to say that healthy lives count for more than disabled ones, while lots of people object to the idea that people in Africa are worth as much as people living here. GiveWell and effective altruists who think like them, though, will argue that QALYs whatever their flaws are superior to any other way of describing how well interventions work.
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The idea of EA is that utilitarianism is true (and you can do arithmetic on it with meaningful results), that all lives (or Quality-Adjusted Life Years) are equivalent (so those poor people in Africa are equivalent to the comfortable first-world donor, which is fine) and that some charities do better at this than others. Thus, it should be theoretically possible to run the numbers and see which is objectively the most effective charity per dollar donated; and to offset the horrible things your job does to people in your own country with charitable donations to other countries. It's like buying "asshole offsets".<ref name=replaceability/>
  
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The trouble is that EA is a mechanism to push the libertarian idea that charity is a replacement for government action or funding. Individual charity has nothing like the funding or effectiveness of concerted government action &mdash; but EA sustains the myth that individual charity is ''the most effective way to help the world''. EA proponents will frequently be seen excusing their choice to work completely fucking evil jobs because they're so charitable, and disparaging the foolish people who actually work on the ground at the charity for their ineffectiveness compared to the power of the donors.<ref name=replaceability>Todd, Benjamin. [http://www.academia.edu/1807196/Which_Ethical_Careers_Make_a_Difference_The_Replaceability_Issue_in_the_Ethics_of_Career_Choice Which ethical careers make a difference? The replaceability issue in the ethics of career choice] (Master's thesis)</ref>
  
Other EAs are involved in activism on behalf of animals and animal-rights charities. There's a organization (titled, creatively, Effective Animal Activism) that is attempting to become the GiveWell of advocacy for animal-suffering related causes. Here's where you'll find lots and lots of vegetarians and vegans and quite a few people who believe very sincerely that animal suffering is the most pressing problem in the world today. Others just point out that reducing animal suffering is a lot cheaper and easier to measure than reducing human suffering, and lots of the complicating factors in human charity are absent. To start a fight in a room full of animal-rights EAs, just ask whether wild animal suffering is a problem and whether killing all animals is a reasonable solution. Believe it or not, this is a sincerely debated question <ref> http://www.animalcharityevaluators.org/research/foundational-research/wild-animal-suffering/ </ref> on which the community is about equally divided.
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The ideas have been around a while, but the current subculture that calls itself Effective Altruism got a big push from LessWrong, who considered themselves ''obviously'' the most effective charity in the world<ref>They claim <capture>[http://lesswrong.com/lw/6w3/the_125000_summer_singularity_challenge/4krk "8 lives saved per dollar donated".]</capture></ref> 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.<ref>[http://lesswrong.com/lw/cbs/thoughts_on_the_singularity_institute_si/ Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI)] (Holden Karnovsky, LessWrong, 11 May 2012)</ref><ref>Bostrom, Nick [http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/pascal.pdf Pascal's Mugging]</ref>
  
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This is not the only example of conflicts within the Effective Altruism movement. For example, reducing wild animal suffering is generally a major branch of the movement.<ref>Muehlhauser, Luke [http://www.effective-altruism.com/four-focus-areas-effective-altruism/ Four focus areas of effective altruism.]</ref> Furthermore, within the Effective Altruism movement, 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.<ref>Wiblin, Robert. [http://robertwiblin.com/2010/01/21/just-destroy-nature/ Why improve nature when destroying it is so much easier?]</ref> In fact, some members of the Effective Altruism movement identify as negative utilitarianism, meaning that preventing suffering is the only thing that matters. As critics within the Effective Altruism movement have pointed out, negative utilitarianism seems to imply that we should be willing to destroy the entire world to prevent one person from suffering a pinprick.<ref>Ord, Toby. [http://www.amirrorclear.net/academic/ideas/negative-utilitarianism/ Why I'm Not a Negative Utilitarian]</ref>
  
Another sub movement focuses on existential risks <ref> http://www.effective-altruism.com/the-timing-of-labour-aimed-at-reducing-existential-risk/ </ref> (things that might destroy the world or at least humanity); the argument here is that an asteroid strike or Skynet scenario, while unlikely, cause such tremendous suffering that it's worth doing some research on how to prevent them. Some people don't even believe that end-of-humanity-as-we-know-it scenarios are even that implausible. There's some loose overlap between the rationality/futurist/transhumanist communities and the effective altruist one (probably because rationality site LessWrong has hosted some articles and arguments<ref> http://lesswrong.com/tag/effective_altruism/ </ref> about effective altruism and because both groups draw from the same geeky utilitarian technophilic subculture.) Accordingly, there are futurist EAs who believe that drastic transitions in the human relationship with technology are on the way and the most altruistic thing we can do is mediate the change. AI research group MIRI is commonly cited by x-risk focused EAs as a good giving opportunity, while non-x-risk focused EAs tend to regard it as a pretty bad one<ref> http://lesswrong.com/lw/cbs/thoughts_on_the_singularity_institute_si/ </ref> (or at least as impossible to quantify).  
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The Effective Altruists are probably making the world a better place than they would spending ''all'' their money on blow. But that doesn't mean you should take seriously their claims of virtue, and ''particularly'' not their claims of being an example to emulate.
  
 
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A complication for this viewpoint is that many members of the EA movement, notably its centres in Berne and Oxford, are left-liberal in political sympathies, not libertarian. Likewise, though some members of the movement have well-paid jobs, [[Fellow traveler|other members]] are debt-ridden students or unemployed.
If people who want to avert the robopocalypse and people who just want to know which anti-malaria charity will get the most bang for their buck both consider themselves effective altruists, what even justifies calling this a movement? Well, aside from the fact that they call themselves that, there are some essential similarities in worldview. Most EAs don't just want to find a charity that works - they talk a lot about finding the single highest-impact charity or the best conceivable form of advocacy for their cause. EAs tend to be empiricism-focused - they want to see evidence of effectiveness on top of evidence of competence, and they'll drop a charity or an activism strategy in a heartbeat if a new one with more evidence for its effectiveness comes along. Nearly all of them are focused on global activism and reject arguments we should look after our own nation first. And they also tend to make significant sacrifices for the cause(s). GivingWhatWeCan asks for pledges to give 10% of income to charity every year. 80,000 hours urges college students to pick a career path that will allow them to do as much good as they can. One recommended EA strategy is to take a high-paying job in finance or programming so you can rake in millions and give it all to charity.  
 
 
 
 
 
'''Criticism:'''
 
 
 
Effective altruists are a pretty self-critical bunch, and many of the most thoughtful critiques<ref> http://www.benkuhn.net/ea-critique </ref> of the movement<ref> http://lesswrong.com/lw/j8n/a_critique_of_effective_altruism/a4zb </ref> have come from within it. GiveWell's written at length about their objections to less quantifiable charitable interventions. <ref> http://intelligence.org/2013/08/25/holden-karnofsky-interview/ </ref> Animal activist groups have often been the ones arguing that saving human lives isn't cost-effective at all. <ref> http://everydayutilitarian.com/vegan-outreach-cost-effectiveness-calculator/ </ref> But especially as EA ideas have become more prominent, and as EAs have started to make the case for their movement in mainstream media, vehement critiques have been voiced by outsiders as well.
 
 
 
 
 
One such critique is that EA is essentially a bandage for the problems of poverty - that individual charity can't solve any of the societal problems EAs claim to care about and that it is, if anything, a means of maintaining a fundamentally harmful status quo. This is easy to dismiss as BS armchair criticism when it's not coming from people who are themselves fighting to overthrow the oppressive capitalist system (and guess what? the critics largely aren't) and also is a little inconsistent with the fact that most EAs are liberals and socialists. It is, though, a reason to doubt that global poverty interventions are as optimal as the raw numbers make them seem. Many critiques of this type seem to assume that EA is entirely focused on earning-to-give, one of the many career strategies EAs endorse for making a difference in the world and certainly the most controversial. Earning to give is the idea that you can take a job even with a company with a morally questionable track record if it'll pay well and enable you to donate to the causes you care about. EAs frequently discuss the objections to this [[strategy for philanthropy.<ref> http://www.benkuhn.net/etg-objections </ref>
 
 
 
 
 
Another critique, voiced most visibly in the Stanford Social Innovation Review<ref> http://www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/the_elitist_philanthropy_of_so_called_effective_altruism </ref> , is that the 'cold and calculating' approach to charity sucks away 'impulse to help others' that ought to motivate us all. The article also contended that it was immoral to claim that one charity was superior to another or to argue that some forms of giving could do more good than could others. "This approach amounts to little more than charitable imperialism, whereby “my cause” is just, and yours is—to one degree or another—a waste of precious resources," the authors, from charity evaluator Charity Navigator, concluded. These critiques were answered in the SSIR the following month. <ref> http://www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/what_charity_navigator_gets_wrong_about_effective_altruism </ref>.
 
  
 
==Footnotes==
 
==Footnotes==
 
{{reflist}}
 
{{reflist}}
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[[Category:LessWrong]]
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[[Category:Libertarianism]]

Revision as of 08:07, 20 July 2014

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 CâmaraWikipedia

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. Although it has a very definite point, in that some "charities" spend more on the leaders than the people they are supposed to help, direct intervention will almost never solve systemic problems. Effective Altruism is therefore pushed very hard by Bay Area technolibertarians who think that the world is set up pretty well and don't really want to see any major social changes towards equality that would diminish their own positions. LessWrong also pushes the concept heavily, seeing itself as an obvious beneficiary.

Philosopher Peter Singer started the idea and buys into it big time, pushing it hard wherever he goes.[1] However, the Singer version — which he considers a categorical imperative for pretty much every comfortable first-world citizen, with the specific aim of systemic changes — and the observed manifestation are not the same at all. In practice, it consists of well-off libertarians somehow being pleased about their moral position, donating to carefully selected charities while working ethically questionable jobs. They tend not to question the system that provides the underlying causes to the problems these charities fight against. This is akin to a person who sells firewood and also funds the fire-fighters, never wondering why there is a fire in the middle of the otherwise unheated orphanage.

The idea of EA is that utilitarianism is true (and you can do arithmetic on it with meaningful results), that all lives (or Quality-Adjusted Life Years) are equivalent (so those poor people in Africa are equivalent to the comfortable first-world donor, which is fine) and that some charities do better at this than others. Thus, it should be theoretically possible to run the numbers and see which is objectively the most effective charity per dollar donated; and to offset the horrible things your job does to people in your own country with charitable donations to other countries. It's like buying "asshole offsets".[2]

The trouble is that EA is a mechanism to push the libertarian idea that charity is a replacement for government action or funding. Individual charity has nothing like the funding or effectiveness of concerted government action — but EA sustains the myth that individual charity is the most effective way to help the world. EA proponents will frequently be seen excusing their choice to work completely fucking evil jobs because they're so charitable, and disparaging the foolish people who actually work on the ground at the charity for their ineffectiveness compared to the power of the donors.[2]

The ideas have been around a while, but the current subculture that calls itself Effective Altruism got a big push from LessWrong, 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 of conflicts within the Effective Altruism movement. For example, reducing wild animal suffering is generally a major branch of the movement.[6] Furthermore, within the Effective Altruism movement, 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 utilitarianism, meaning that preventing suffering is the only thing that matters. As critics within the Effective Altruism movement have pointed out, negative utilitarianism seems to imply that we should be willing to destroy the entire world to prevent one person from suffering a pinprick.[8]

The Effective Altruists are probably making the world a better place than they would spending all their money on blow. But that doesn't mean you should take seriously their claims of virtue, and particularly not their claims of being an example to emulate.

A complication for this viewpoint is that many members of the EA movement, notably its centres in Berne and Oxford, are left-liberal in political sympathies, not libertarian. Likewise, though some members of the movement have well-paid jobs, other members are debt-ridden students or unemployed.

Footnotes