I confess that I have not read much of what has been written on the subject, so what I am about to say may be dreadfully naive.
A. One should separate the concept of effective altruism from the mode-of-operation of the various organizations which currently take it as their motto.
A.i. Can anyone seriously oppose effective altruism in principle? I find it difficult to imagine someone supporting ineffective altruism. Surely, we should let our charity be guided by evidence, randomized experiments, hard thinking about tradeoffs, etc etc.
A.ii. On the other hand, one can certainly quibble with what various organization are now doing. Such quibbling can even be quite productive.
B. What comes next should be understood as quibbles.
B.ii. I think GiveWell may be insufficiently transparent abut such things. For example, its explanation of criteria at http://www.givewell.org/criteria does not give a clearcut explanation of how it makes such determinations.
Caveat: this is onlybased on browsing the GiveWell webpage for 10 minutes. I’m open to being corrected on this point.
B.iii. Along the same lines I wonder: had GiveWell, or other effective altruists, existed in the 1920s, what would they say about funding a bunch of physicists who noticed some weird things were happening with the hydrogen atom? How does “develop quantum mechanics” rate in terms of benefit to humanity, compared to, say, keeping thirty children in school for an extra year?
B.iv. Peter Singer’s endorsement of effective altruism in the Boston Review (http://bostonreview.net/forum/peter-singer-logic-effective-altruism ) includes some criticism of donations to opera houses; indeed, in a world with poverty and starvation, surely there are better things to do with one’s money? This seems endorsed by GiveWell who list “serving the global poor” as their priority, and in context I doubt this means serving them via the production of poetry for their enjoyment.
I do not agree with this. Life is not merely about surviving; one must have something to live for. Poetry, music, novels—for many people, these are a big part of what makes existence worthwhile.
C. Ideally, I’d love to see the recommendations of multiple effective altruist organizations with different values, all completely transparent about the assumptions that go into their recommendations. Could anyone disagree that this would make the world a better place?
A.i. Can anyone seriously oppose effective altruism in principle? I find it difficult to imagine someone supporting ineffective altruism. Surely, we should let our charity be guided by evidence, randomized experiments, hard thinking about tradeoffs, etc etc.
I emphatically don’t, but yes, one can. The quantitative/reductionist attitude you’ve outlined here biases us towards easily measurable causes.
Some examples of difficult to measure causes include: 1) All forms of funding-hungry research, scientific or otherwise 2) most x-risks, including this forum’s favorite AI risk 3) causes which claim to influence social, economic, military, and political matters in complex but possiblyhigh impact ways 4) (Typically local and community-driven) causes which do good via subtle virtuous cycles, human connections, and various other intangibles
I confess that I have not read much of what has been written on the subject, so what I am about to say may be dreadfully naive.
A. One should separate the concept of effective altruism from the mode-of-operation of the various organizations which currently take it as their motto.
A.i. Can anyone seriously oppose effective altruism in principle? I find it difficult to imagine someone supporting ineffective altruism. Surely, we should let our charity be guided by evidence, randomized experiments, hard thinking about tradeoffs, etc etc.
A.ii. On the other hand, one can certainly quibble with what various organization are now doing. Such quibbling can even be quite productive.
B. What comes next should be understood as quibbles.
B.i. As many others have pointed out, effective altruism implicitly assumes a set of values. As Daron Acemogulu asks (http://bostonreview.net/forum/logic-effective-altruism/daron-acemoglu-response-effective-altruism), “How much more valuable is to save the life of a one-year-old than to send a six-year-old to school?”
B.ii. I think GiveWell may be insufficiently transparent abut such things. For example, its explanation of criteria at http://www.givewell.org/criteria does not give a clearcut explanation of how it makes such determinations.
Caveat: this is onlybased on browsing the GiveWell webpage for 10 minutes. I’m open to being corrected on this point.
B.iii. Along the same lines I wonder: had GiveWell, or other effective altruists, existed in the 1920s, what would they say about funding a bunch of physicists who noticed some weird things were happening with the hydrogen atom? How does “develop quantum mechanics” rate in terms of benefit to humanity, compared to, say, keeping thirty children in school for an extra year?
B.iv. Peter Singer’s endorsement of effective altruism in the Boston Review (http://bostonreview.net/forum/peter-singer-logic-effective-altruism ) includes some criticism of donations to opera houses; indeed, in a world with poverty and starvation, surely there are better things to do with one’s money? This seems endorsed by GiveWell who list “serving the global poor” as their priority, and in context I doubt this means serving them via the production of poetry for their enjoyment.
I do not agree with this. Life is not merely about surviving; one must have something to live for. Poetry, music, novels—for many people, these are a big part of what makes existence worthwhile.
C. Ideally, I’d love to see the recommendations of multiple effective altruist organizations with different values, all completely transparent about the assumptions that go into their recommendations. Could anyone disagree that this would make the world a better place?
I emphatically don’t, but yes, one can. The quantitative/reductionist attitude you’ve outlined here biases us towards easily measurable causes.
Some examples of difficult to measure causes include: 1) All forms of funding-hungry research, scientific or otherwise 2) most x-risks, including this forum’s favorite AI risk 3) causes which claim to influence social, economic, military, and political matters in complex but possiblyhigh impact ways 4) (Typically local and community-driven) causes which do good via subtle virtuous cycles, human connections, and various other intangibles