Ego

Karma: 17

Ego 22 Jan 2016 20:14 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Symbolic Gestures – Salutes For Effective Altruists To Identify Each Other

A flightless bird at the top of a tree is screwed, anyway :-/

Spit my tea on the keyboard.

Ego 22 Jan 2016 19:27 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Symbolic Gestures – Salutes For Effective Altruists To Identify Each Other
Spot on analysis.

EAs focus on eliminating (or mitigating) suffering. The devil is in the definition of suffering.

You would have to change the entire culture of the continent to change their version of interdependence. This is a massive change. African culture has proven to be rather persistent so you would have an uphill battle. Is it possible that the imposition of a capitalist culture might create more suffering (from the African perspective) than relief?

I’m a capitalist. But I was born in a capitalist society and reared by those who shoved me out of the nest to encourage my ability to fly. Imposition of a very different culture on Africa could be tantamount to shoving a flightless bird from the nest at the top of the tree then referring to the resulting splat on the ground as creative destruction. One man’s creative destruction is another man’s disaster. Who gets to decide?

Ego 22 Jan 2016 14:11 UTC
4 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Symbolic Gestures – Salutes For Effective Altruists To Identify Each Other
I like studies and think they are useful. I think EAs are motivated to do good and are motivated to believe that money will solve problems that are further away when they know that it does not solve them close to home.

Also, I think it is impossible to measure certain metrics. For instance, in Africa group interdependence is extremely important. Everyone helps everyone. It is known as Ubuntu in Southern Africa but is common throughout sub-Saharan Africa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_%28philosophy%29

Cash injections from outsiders harm this. But how could you possibly measure it? How could you measure the interdependency of a community? How could you measure the harm done to that critical interdependency?

Ego 22 Jan 2016 13:46 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Symbolic Gestures – Salutes For Effective Altruists To Identify Each Other

How do you think the world would look differently when EAs put more value on helping then being seen as helping?

Ahh. I didn’t understand the question.

EAs would help people very close to them with whom they can empathize. I mean empathize in the truest form of the word. They would be able to understand the plight of those they are helping, understand how they got there, and understand the complex consequences that flow from the administration of charity. Distortions occur with distance and differences.

But EAs are driven by a compulsion to do good so they are forced to reach further afield for problems to solve because they understand the complexities of the problems close to home (homelessness for instance or urban-education). They purposely blind themselves to this intractability by seeking problems far away and seeking solutions with layers of insulation from it. They hire professionals to deal with those frustrating details.

You understand intuitively what would happen if you went to a really bad neighborhood near you and simply gave out cash to poor people no questions asked. So you send it to Uganda with the naive belief that their problems are somehow easily solvable by the injection of cash. Your overwhelming desire to do good in the world blinds you to the fact that problems are as complex there as they are here.

Ego 22 Jan 2016 2:48 UTC
1 point
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Symbolic Gestures – Salutes For Effective Altruists To Identify Each Other
I believe EAs really do want to help people and improve the world. But even more than that they want to be (seen as) altruists who are helping people and improving the world. And/or they want that wonderful drug-like jolt of endorphins produced by doing a good deed. Most importantly, they don’t want to admit that they want to be seen as altruists and they consider it rude when someone points out the very obvious truth that the reason they are doing it is not to help people or improve the world, but to be seen helping people and to get the jolt of good feelings from it.

This is important because the disconnect between the stated desires and the true desires distort whatever help is being given. Those distortions seem irrelevant from the perspective of the giver. They are massive from the perspective of those being helped. Which perspective is more important?

My non-American wife frequently (and gently) mocks me by saying that we Americans (and Euros) are naive like children. And she’s right. We spend so much energy projecting how we want the world to be that we fail to see how it actually is. We think we can fix things without understanding the harsh realities. We easily confuse the appearance of virtuousness with actually being virtuous.

This is the reason the “effective” people don’t actually go into the aid business, they simply fund the aid business with the proceeds of their effectiveness. If they actually spent time on the ground they would see those distortions. Their handiwork would slowly dawn on them. And they would be appalled.

Ego 22 Jan 2016 0:07 UTC
−2 points
on: Symbolic Gestures – Salutes For Effective Altruists To Identify Each Other
I’ve got to admit, I love this idea because it is so very very honest. It gets to the heart of what EAs really want. High status without crass status symbols. That’s probably why your fellow EAs are cringing and attacking. Nobody wants to admit that their status symbol is actually a status symbol.

I get it! It’s so darn frustrating that you can’t really distinguish, you know, the really good people from the regular schmoes. A gesture would be helpful.

For what it’s worth, altruists would not do a handshake. That’s too fez-headed Masonic. They’d bow. While gently cupping their oversized hearts.

Ego 19 Jan 2016 21:01 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Gleb_Tsipursky’s comment on: Intentional Insights and the Effective Altruism Movement – Q & A
Apologies. I did not intend to call you a liar. Sorry if it came across that way.

Ego 19 Jan 2016 19:03 UTC
0 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Intentional Insights and the Effective Altruism Movement – Q & A

Once we had overproduction someone decided that shipping grain to Africa is better than burning it but the grain doesn’t get produced to feed Africans. It get’s produced for other reasons.

Absolutely. We agree.

I don’t know your industry, but let’s say you are a Water Engineer in an American city. Now imagine that suddenly the Swiss developed portable desalination processing ships that created clean water and supply it to the whole of the U.S. for free… for generations. You lose your job and we as Americans lose the skills to supply water ourselves.

We are at the mercy of the benevolent Swiss who have their own reasons for providing us water. Their benevolence makes us weaker.

Ego 19 Jan 2016 18:53 UTC
0 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Intentional Insights and the Effective Altruism Movement – Q & A

Why should I accept what she says rather than what, say, Jeffrey Sachs says?

In the end she is giving her opinion. I am giving mine. I am telling you what I saw and how I came to my conclusions. You can do with them as you choose.

The thing I find deeply troubling is that I know good people would not do what they are doing if they knew the consequences. They would not toss the quarter into the cup of the homeless guy.

It is very common for those outsiders who work on the front lines of aid/charity to talk (to rage!!!) about the fubar consequences while they are there together in the muck. But the moment they come home they sing a different tune. It is very frustrating to see that when they are back home and faced with their own deep investment in it, they forget the lessons. Very frustrating.

Ego 19 Jan 2016 18:24 UTC
0 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Intentional Insights and the Effective Altruism Movement – Q & A

It succeeds at the goals it’s designed to fulfill.

Is that tongue in cheek?

The program takes our desire to be good and uses it as a tool for a particular special interest. Yes, it fulfills its goals.

Ego 19 Jan 2016 17:54 UTC
2 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Intentional Insights and the Effective Altruism Movement – Q & A
Yes, I believe the government efforts with regard to ebola were more effective. I also believe that many government programs are terrible. We buy excess corn here and give it for free there, killing local markets.

Ego 19 Jan 2016 17:49 UTC
2 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Intentional Insights and the Effective Altruism Movement – Q & A

Sure, one can postulate situations in which sending a lot of mosquito nets to Africa does a lot of damage by putting a lot of local mosquito-net makers out of business. But is that actually happening?

Pick an industry that is thriving in, say, South Africa and compare it to the same industry in a high-aid country like Uganda. Inevitably you will find that the more sector-aid they receive, the worse their industries produce. It is hard to out-compete free. I gave the Malawi-medical example below but they are everywhere.

I was there this time last year and saw that the rhino horn crisis was actually being encouraged by officials who had positioned family and friends as the ready solution for the deep pockets aid organizations to buy.

How about orphans. Who could be against helping them? There are the countless orphan scandals across Africa and South Asia where parents rent or sell their children to the orphanage. https://www.zammagazine.com/chronicle/chronicle-12/217-child-abuse-in-the-name-of-voluntourism

Chances are, if you live in a U.S. city you will walk past a homeless person today. You can continue walking without dropping a coin in their cup because you have empathy (you understand the complexities of his/her plight) and realize that by giving the quarter you will do more harm than good. But we want to be good so we pick people far away with whom we cannot empathize (in the truest sense of the word.… able to walk in their shoes) and then send them money.

This idea is objectionable to your mind (and mine) because we desperately want to help people. So we become good at ignoring the fact that our help actually hurts.

Google Moyo and watch a few of her interviews.

Ego 19 Jan 2016 16:44 UTC
0 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Intentional Insights and the Effective Altruism Movement – Q & A
Dambisa Moyo specifically addresses the bednet issue in her excellent book Dead Aid.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123758895999200083

Even what may appear as a benign intervention on the surface can have damning consequences. Say there is a mosquito-net maker in small-town Africa. Say he employs 10 people who together manufacture 500 nets a week. Typically, these 10 employees support upward of 15 relatives each. A Western government-inspired program generously supplies the affected region with 100,000 free mosquito nets. This promptly puts the mosquito net manufacturer out of business, and now his 10 employees can no longer support their 150 dependents. In a couple of years, most of the donated nets will be torn and useless, but now there is no mosquito net maker to go to. They’ll have to get more aid. And African governments once again get to abdicate their responsibilities.

Ego 19 Jan 2016 14:21 UTC
0 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Intentional Insights and the Effective Altruism Movement – Q & A
Western governments and governmental organizations did so. We had skin in the game. Same with Ebola.

Ego 19 Jan 2016 14:00 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: Gleb_Tsipursky’s comment on: Intentional Insights and the Effective Altruism Movement – Q & A
Words matter. It steals the positive cultural connotations of the word altruism without actually being altruistic.

It exploits the gray area between being vs. seeming to be. There is a word for that. It’s called lying.

Ego 19 Jan 2016 13:23 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Intentional Insights and the Effective Altruism Movement – Q & A

Accountability matters.

Being public does not provide accountability. Is Zuckerberg being held accountable for the Newark schools debacle? No. People are saying, “At least he tried.”

Here’s the thing.… We understand the idea of creative destruction in other realms but fail to see it when our attention is attracted, like a bull to the red cape, to the people who are suffering in the destruction phase. Propping up a dysfunctional system is worse than letting it fail and rebuilding entirely.

Ego 19 Jan 2016 13:15 UTC
2 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Intentional Insights and the Effective Altruism Movement – Q & A
How very convenient that the best thing for millions of desperately poor people is for comfortable Westerners like us to do nothing to help them.

To the contrary, it is very inconvenient.

We naturally want to help. I want to help. More than you could ever know. After being on the ground in Africa for a while I just realized that:
1. Most of the things I could do are more harmful than allowing those desperately poor people to solve their problems themselves.
2. There is an upward spiral of confidence, strength and capability when someone solves their own problems and a downward spiral of dependence when problems are solved for them.
3. It is nearly impossible for my comfortable Westerner eyes to distinguish between those problems I can solve without doing harm and those where I would wreak havoc.
4. My comfortable Western mind is biased toward action. Action makes me feel good. Refraining from action makes me feel bad. This action-bias causes me to do great harm.
5. My presence enables and permits dysfunction in the one organization that could solve these problems: government.
For those trying to solve persistent problems closer to home, look at those points and see how many apply to your pet project.

Ego 19 Jan 2016 4:37 UTC
2 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Intentional Insights and the Effective Altruism Movement – Q & A

If the volunteers stayed around, the locals would have cheap medical care all the time and presumably that’s a good outcome.

No, that’s a terrible outcome. Long-term solutions to persistent, difficult problems come about when capable people with skin in the game take action. Malawian doctors have skin in the African game but are sidelined when Milwaukeean dairy farmers fill in for free.

Further, when we look closer to home we understand that there are many problems for which the best possible solution is to do nothing. That misfit brother who has to learn to stand on his own two feet would be much better off if mom and dad would let him fail a few times. We understand the nuance of the situation because we are part of the culture and part of the family. The further we are removed from the person needing help the harder it becomes to understand that nuance.

Eric Sevareid’s had a wonderful saying, “The chief cause of problems is solutions.”

Ego 19 Jan 2016 3:10 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Intentional Insights and the Effective Altruism Movement – Q & A

Would those African rural outposts have been better off if their first-aid volunteers had all been wearing masks and keeping their identities secret?

They would have to believe that they could obscure their actions from their all-seeing, all-knowing god since their motivations were driven by the belief that they were gaining status toward a day of ultimate reckoning.

Those outposts would have been better had the amateurs stayed home.

Ego 19 Jan 2016 1:44 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Intentional Insights and the Effective Altruism Movement – Q & A

EA doesn’t do that kind of thing.

Ipse dixit and motivated reasoning.

Why not just be absolutely anonymous?