Effective Altruism

kungfuhobbit

3 min readSep 27, 2021

A diligent approach to charity and ethical goals, typically maximising impact

Typical interests:

• Global poverty
• Animal suffering
• Existential risks
• Earning to give

Characteristics:

➤ Focuses on consequences

• Attentive to opportunity costs
• Often measures benefits, maximising the good done per unit of time/money
• ITN framework:
- Importance, eg number of lives saved, amount of suffering decreased
- Tractability: additional resources will greatly address the issue
- Neglectedness: few other people are working on the problem
- …and personal fit

➤ Impartial to location and future generations

EA combines head and heart

“EA is a set of ideas and a community that seeks to use reason and evidence to do more good than we otherwise would.
It’s asking the question “How can I do the most good, with the resources available to me?”
An Effective Altruist is a person trying to be effective at altruism.”

“EA is is a research field and practical community that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice.
…They try to find unusually good ways of helping, such that a given amount of effort goes an unusually long way.”

Defective altruism? Criticisms:

Abstract

• Aim-agnostic, including incommensurability and Actualism/Possibilism
• Decision-agnostic; permissibility of personal fit in decision-making, accommodating special obligations, eg to family, or avoiding overdemandingness means anything goes
• McNamara fallacy; blindness to the non-quantifiable and creates Goodharting
• Ignorance; cluelessness of longrun consequences and hidden zeroes
• Finds local not global maxima eg systemic change
• Aid-dependence

In harsher terms:

A depressive attentiveness to ‘negative responsibility’.
Prioritising “reducing suffering” entails benevolent world explosion aims.
Rights/rules legitimately vie for space in our ethics too and perhaps moral responsibility legitimately attenuates with time horizon/involvement of other agents/causal chains/uncertainty. Should it really be otherwise?

EA evaluators fetishise RCTs from which they draw overly quick inferences.
“If it were so simple, the world would already be a much better place. Development is neither a financial nor a technical problem but a political problem, and the aid industry often makes the politics worse.”

“EA forces all human need to express itself on a single comparable scale because of the rather nerdish requirement that the world possess some sort of measurable order.”

“It’s important for EAs not to spend all our weirdness points on being too extreme.”(?!)

EAs are typically idealistic, overconfident students/graduates who — just like everyone else — know little, live in an ideal world and — just like everyone else — confront problems only to be thwarted by overlooked considerations and social/psychological barriers before settling for pursuing the warm fuzzies — just like everyone else.

“The biggest lesson I learned from my altruistic journey so far: widen your f***ing confidence intervals.
You know nothing about doing good in the world. Seriously.
To be an EA is to find out, again and again and again, that what you thought was the best thing to do was wrong. You think you know what’s highest impact and you’re almost certainly seriously mistaken.
Every single time I have been so damn certain that this was the time we’d finally found the thing that totally definitely helped in a large way.
Every single time I have gone on to be thwarted by:
• Crucial considerations
• Evidence
• Social influence and psychological barriers”