Keeping Tabs on Effective Altruism: 21st Century Capitalism's Twisted Moral Compass

[eoin_k]

I couldn't find any posts on Effective Alturism, so I thought it deserved its own thread:
Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and How You Can Make a Difference.

This school of applied ethics, which emerged from Cambridge University (IIRC), seems to be getting a lot of media attention at the moment.

For example, William MacAskill has recently written three pieces for the Guardian:
http://www.theguardian.com/profile/william-macaskill.

His trust's website has further links to press coverage they've recieved:
Media

I haven't done any research, apart from following some reports in the media, but it seems to echo nineteenth-century, radical liberalism in twenty-first century garb. Jeremy Bentham gave us the panopticon, I wonder what delights this lot have to offer?.

One of the founders has pledged to live off £20,000 a year, giving the rest of his earnings to good causes. Who among us had not lived on less than £20,000 a year? Sure, but most of us aren't Hedge Fund managers. This is supposedly an ethically-neutral means to make large sums of money, which can then be distributed to charities that will distribute them effectively (presumably based on neo-paretian welfare economics).

There is no room for subjective solidarity with specific groups of other people (migrants, disaster victims, labour rights activists...) or any critique of capitalism, just a utilitarian calculus for working how to distribute personal wealth efficiently to maximise human well being, by for example distributing cheap anti-worming medicine.

Can we see these pro-capitalists saints getting wheeled out more frequently as the world goes to hell in a hand cart? Lets find out...

 

[Pickman's model]

can i altruistically suggest you edit the thread title?

 

[eoin_k]

can i altruistically suggest you edit the thread title?

Done.

By the way, did the previous title suggest to you that I was looking for a functional and public-spirited time piece?

Or, perhaps advice on how I could get better at spotting good deeds?

 

[Pickman's model]

Done.

By the way, did the previous title suggest to you that I was looking for a functional and public-spirited time piece?

Or, perhaps advice on how I could get better at spotting good deeds?

it suggested you were in a rush: altruism not alturism

 

[eoin_k]

Ooops

 

[butchersapron]

Very good piece in the LRB a few months back that revealed some very nasty logic in the 'movement':

Stop the Robot Apocalypse

That emphasis on ‘your’ is something that utilitarians often find conceptually mystifying, or at least a moral distraction. Here, for example, is MacAskill talking about his visit to the Hamlin Fistula Hospital in Addis Ababa, and his later decision not to donate to its main charitable benefactor:

I’d hugged the women who suffered from this condition, and they’d thanked me for visiting them. It had been an important experience for me: a vivid first-hand demonstration of the severity of the problems in the world. This was a cause I had a personal connection with. Should I have donated to the Fistula Foundation, even knowing I could do more to help people if I donated elsewhere? I do not think so. If I were to give to the Fistula Foundation rather than to charities I thought were more effective, I would be privileging the needs of some people over others for emotional rather than moral reasons. That would be unfair to those I could have helped more. If I’d visited some other shelter in Ethiopia, or in any other country, I would have had a different set of personal connections. It was arbitrary that I’d seen this particular problem at close quarters.​

That word ‘arbitrary’ is striking. It is indeed arbitrary that MacAskill went to this hospital and not another, in Ethiopia and not some other country, just as it is arbitrary that we have the family, friends, lovers and neighbours we do. But doesn’t such arbitrariness come to mean something else, ethically speaking, when it is constitutive of our personal experience: when it becomes embedded in the complex structure of commitments, affinities and understandings that comprise social life? We might even think that the arbitrariness of time and place is transformed into something else, ethically speaking, through the exchange of a fleeting hug or thanks. What’s more, MacAskill’s talk of fairness is too easy. It is no doubt unfair that some of the world’s worst off are helped while others aren’t. But isn’t it just as unfair that the Ethiopian women MacAskill met are victims of a debilitating condition that is too costly to be ‘worth’ funding? And what of the victims of austerity or rising inequality in the first world? MacAskill’s reminder that these people are still among the world’s richest is cold comfort (it also obscures what all those trampled by the ruling class everywhere may have in common).

 

[Mation]

Ah. I think this is related to the venture philanthropy bollocks one of the directors where I work came back enthused by having gone to a 'sharing innovative business ideas' type conference in New York.

 

[bimble]

Very good piece in the LRB a few months back that revealed some very nasty logic in the 'movement':

Stop the Robot Apocalypse

That emphasis on ‘your’ is something that utilitarians often find conceptually mystifying, or at least a moral distraction. Here, for example, is MacAskill talking about his visit to the Hamlin Fistula Hospital in Addis Ababa, and his later decision not to donate to its main charitable benefactor:

I’d hugged the women who suffered from this condition, and they’d thanked me for visiting them. It had been an important experience for me: a vivid first-hand demonstration of the severity of the problems in the world. This was a cause I had a personal connection with. Should I have donated to the Fistula Foundation, even knowing I could do more to help people if I donated elsewhere? I do not think so. If I were to give to the Fistula Foundation rather than to charities I thought were more effective, I would be privileging the needs of some people over others for emotional rather than moral reasons. That would be unfair to those I could have helped more. If I’d visited some other shelter in Ethiopia, or in any other country, I would have had a different set of personal connections. It was arbitrary that I’d seen this particular problem at close quarters.​

That word ‘arbitrary’ is striking. It is indeed arbitrary that MacAskill went to this hospital and not another, in Ethiopia and not some other country, just as it is arbitrary that we have the family, friends, lovers and neighbours we do. But doesn’t such arbitrariness come to mean something else, ethically speaking, when it is constitutive of our personal experience: when it becomes embedded in the complex structure of commitments, affinities and understandings that comprise social life? We might even think that the arbitrariness of time and place is transformed into something else, ethically speaking, through the exchange of a fleeting hug or thanks. What’s more, MacAskill’s talk of fairness is too easy. It is no doubt unfair that some of the world’s worst off are helped while others aren’t. But isn’t it just as unfair that the Ethiopian women MacAskill met are victims of a debilitating condition that is too costly to be ‘worth’ funding? And what of the victims of austerity or rising inequality in the first world? MacAskill’s reminder that these people are still among the world’s richest is cold comfort (it also obscures what all those trampled by the ruling class everywhere may have in common).

Great article that in LRB. The do gooding industry is where I work, shuffling those qalys.

 

[SpookyFrank]

I was once told I should take 'personal responsibility' for the things I wanted to change by giving up activism, becoming a tax accountant and using my wages to pay someone else to do activist stuff for me.

I tried to explain that this would be the exact opposite of taking personal responsibility, but my objections fell on deaf ears.

 

[J Ed]

I was once told I should take 'personal responsibility' for the things I wanted to change by giving up activism, becoming a tax accountant and using my wages to pay someone else to do activist stuff for me.

I tried to explain that this would be the exact opposite of taking personal responsibility, but my objections fell on deaf ears.

If you can't input what you're doing into an Excel spreadsheet then it's worthless to humanity

 

[purves grundy]

Peter Singer emerging as a bit of a player in all of this. Whereas he was once a mere bunny-obsessed utilitarian I had to yawn through doing Applied Ethics in my second year (ok, he was more than that - always been up there since Animal Liberation), he's now heading up his own metrics-laden 'movement'

About Peter Singer - The Life You Can Save

 

[Jeff Robinson]

bunny-obsessed utilitarian

 

[purves grundy]

I don't mean to offend or do him a disservice, obviously a very committed chap who did much for the animal liberation cause, but I hated his approach. All that applied ethics stuff is the most boring part of taught philosophy imho (or it was 20 years ago anyway - maybe it's been surpassed since).

 

[bimble]

If you can't input what you're doing into an Excel spreadsheet then it's worthless to humanity

I've never been so cynical about the world as I am now I've had a chance to learn a bit about this industry, and its spreadsheets.

 

[purves grundy]

Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/12/facebook-zuckerbergs-charity-gates-philantrophy/

 

[two sheds]

I've never been so cynical about the world as I am now I've had a chance to learn a bit about this industry, and its spreadsheets.

How would you rate that, say on a scale from 1 to 10?

 

[mather]

I don't mean to offend or do him a disservice

You should, Singer is a complete cunt who advocates for infanticide. A nasty individual who in no way deserves to be considered an ethicist.

 

[likesfish]

I was once told I should take 'personal responsibility' for the things I wanted to change by giving up activism, becoming a tax accountant and using my wages to pay someone else to do activist stuff for me.

I tried to explain that this would be the exact opposite of taking personal responsibility, but my objections fell on deaf ears.

You could make an arguement if you could make shed loads of money being a tax accountant you could hire several activists to do activisting stuff for you.
Although if your just advising big companys and the rich to avoid paying tax then do several more full time activists counter balance the loss of income to a goverment.
If said goverement is going to splurge it on dammanation missiles possibly but now my head hurts

 

[SpookyFrank]

You could make an arguement if you could make shed loads of money being a tax accountant you could hire several activists to do activisting stuff for you.
Although if your just advising big companys and the rich to avoid paying tax then do several more full time activists counter balance the loss of income to a goverment.
If said goverement is going to splurge it on dammanation missiles possibly but now my head hurts

This stuff all seems a bit like digging a hole forty feet deep to earn enough money for a six foot ladder tbh.

 

[purves grundy]

Can ‘effective altruism’ really change the world?

 

[purves grundy]

A short but effective takedown of EA in this recent review in Radical Philosophy.

 

[redsquirrel]

How much cross-over is there between this and the type of crap Han Rosling and Steve Pinker peddle? Both very much arguments for liberalism as is.

 

[purves grundy]

The crossover as I see it is empiricism. An obsession with the quantitative, datasets, and associations between collections of observable atomistic objects means an inability to penetrate beneath the surface, a world exhausted by its appearance and defined by how we can come to know it. Hence these folk have no capacity to engage with the unobservable - most seriously, with social structures. From Pinker we learn nothing about what causes peace and stability, or conflict and instability (again, all defined according to observables - no possibility of structural violence), and without a causal explanation, no right to confidence that such a trend will continue anyway. From Singer and the EA crew, social change is restricted to doing actions that make a difference to the numbers and / or a technocratic expertise around 'analysis' of the numbers: no deeper understanding of why the world is the way it is and what would be necessary to transform it.

 

[Jeff Robinson]

Since the last post on this thread, the EA movement has mostly switched to a philosophy called 'longtermism' - basically the idea that we should be concerned with maximising wellbeing for distant future generations. The weird - and disturbing - views of this outlook are explored in detail here: The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk” ❧ Current Affairs

Longtermism has particularly appealed to silicon valley billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel (co founder of PayPal) and the fraudulent, recently disgraced former crypto-billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried. In the aftermath of the scale of SBF's fraud, some light has been shone on the murky underbelly of the EA movement, including its widespread cult-like sexual predatory culture:

EA circles, much like the group house in Bahamas (where SBF and his clique operated from), are widely incestous where people mix their work life (in EA cause areas), their often polyamorous love life and social life in one amalgomous mix without strict separations. This is the default status quo. This means that if you’re a reasonably attractive woman entering an EA community, you get a ton of sexual requests to join polycules, often from poly and partnered men. Some of these men control funding for projects and enjoy high status in EA communities and that means there are real downsides to refusing their sexual advances and pressure to say yes, especially if your career is in an EA cause area or is funded by them. From experience it appears that, a ‘no’ once said is not enough for many men in EA. Having to keep replenishing that ‘no’ becomes annoying very fast, and becomes harder to give informed consent when socializing in the presence of alcohol/psychedelics. It puts your safety at risk.

Women and Effective Altruism — LessWrong

A lot has been talked about SBF/FTX/EA but this coverage reminds me that is time to talk about the toxicity of the culture within EA communities, esp…

www.lesswrong.com

This is Caroline Ellison's (a high ranking member of the EA movement) view of EA's poly culture:

“When I first started my first foray into poly, I thought of it as a radical break from my trad past,” she wrote in 2020, “but tbh, I’ve come to decide the only acceptable style of poly is best characterised as something like ‘imperial Chinese harem’. None of this non-hierarchical bullshit. Everyone should have a ranking of their partners, people should know where they fall on the ranking, and there should be vicious power struggles for the ranks.”

Polyamory, penthouses and plenty of loans: inside the crazy world of FTX

After the crypto firm collapsed, the executive who handled the Enron debacle was brought in – and said he’d never seen anything like it

www.theguardian.com

 

[Jeff Robinson]

Turns out the father of the 'longtermist' cult is an extreme racist:

Prominent AI Philosopher and ‘Father’ of Longtermism Sent Very Racist Email to a 90s Philosophy Listserv

"Blacks are more stupid than whites," Nick Bostrom wrote in an email sent to a transhumanism listserv in the 1990s that he apologized for in a letter.

www.vice.com

This piece of shit has issued an e-mail repudiating the 'racial slur' in the e-mail, but not the racist claim that black people have lower 'IQs':

https://nickbostrom.com/oldemail.pdf

The movement is infested with such filthy racist scum. Here are the thoughts of another:

... saving lives in poor countries may have significantly smaller ripple effects than saving and improving lives in rich countries. Why? Richer countries have substantially more innovation, and their workers are much more economically productive. By ordinary standards - at least by ordinary enlightened humanitarian standards - saving and improving lives in rich countries is about equally as important as saving and improving lives in poor countries, provided lives are improved by roughly comparable amounts. But it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal.

https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/40469/PDF/1/play/