Effective Altruism

peanuts-altruism

Effective altruism reading material for busy people is a useful link-list for people who’d like a quick guide to the Effective Altruism (also called EA) movement.

Here’s a quote from an EA primer by Scott Siskind, which is included in the link-list:

But they are decidedly not natural when facing a decision about charitable giving. Most donors say they want to “help people”. If that’s true, they should try to distribute their resources to help people as much as possible. Most people don’t. In the “Buy A Brushstroke” campaign, eleven thousand British donors gave a total of ÂŁ550,000 to keep the famous painting “Blue Rigi” in a UK museum. If they had given that ÂŁ550,000 to buy better sanitation systems in African villages instead, the latest statistics suggest it would have saved the lives of about one thousand two hundred people from disease. Each individual $50 donation could have given a year of normal life back to a Third Worlder afflicted with a disabling condition like blindness or limb deformity..

Most of those 11,000 donors genuinely wanted to help people by preserving access to the original canvas of a beautiful painting. And most of those 11,000 donors, if you asked, would say that a thousand people’s lives are more important than a beautiful painting, original or no. But these people didn’t have the proper mental habits to realize that was the choice before them, and so a beautiful painting remains in a British museum and somewhere in the Third World a thousand people are dead.

If you are to “love your neighbor as yourself”, then you should be as careful in maximizing the benefit to others when donating to charity as you would be in maximizing the benefit to yourself when choosing purchases for a polar trek.

This is the sort of thing I find tremendously alienating, because it sets up supporting the arts, or supporting historic artifacts, as a bad thing. This is pretty common among EA rhetoric, I suspect because many EA people genuinely don’t care about art – especially “high” art – and think that people who do care are just preening for attention.

It’s true, of course, that money is fungible and therefore ten bucks donated to preserve a painting could instead have been used to protect three to six people from malaria for six years. But the same could also be said about the money spent on a video game, or on internet access, or on taking a trip, or eating out with friends, or on going to a movie, or anything else that EA folks might like doing. There isn’t an either-or choice between giving to help the needy and supporting the arts, any more than there’s an either-or choice between giving to help the needy and occasionally going out to a movie. Most people in a position to give to charity, can do both.

Unless the expectation is that 100% of every person’s money beyond the bare minimum needed for survival must be spent on saving lives, it seems weird that EA people often pick on the arts in particular. To be honest, this is the sort of thing that made me go “fuck EA!” when I first heard about it.

Nonetheless, I do like giving money to help people in need. And, given that this is one of my goals, I definitely want to give that money in a way that will be the most helpful possible. I think EA’s evidence-based approach is great, and I’m glad sites like The Life You Can Save and Givewell exist and can help me make decisions.

I don’t think I’d like it if EA guided everyone’s donations to charity. I don’t feel certain that the metrics they use are necessarily correct. Evidence-based is good, but sometimes evidence-based thinking is vulnerable to the streetlight effect. A scattershot approach, in which people use a zillion different approaches to deciding what charities to give to, is less vulnerable to the streetlight effect than a focused approach.

But in the real world, not everyone uses EA’s approach, and it’s not realistic to worry that everyone will. And so I find EA a useful and positive movement. And I do think that it’s a good idea for a large number of people (but short of everyone) to give to charity based on where their money can do the most good for the greatest number of people.

Anyway, as it happens, I’ve been put in charge of giving away $5000 to the charities of my choice. I was thinking of using The Life You Can Save’s Best Charities to Donate to page as a guide, probably giving the largest amounts to Against Malaria and to The Fistula Foundation, and smaller amounts to some other charities there. But I’d be interested in anyone’s else’s thoughts or suggestions.

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36 Responses to Effective Altruism

  1. 1
    Pesho says:

    The very premise is flawed.

    People who donate time or money to an ‘altruistic’ cause do not do it because they want to help people. They do it because they want to feel good about themselves. It is hard to feel good about something that is far away, or foreign to you.

    This is of course completely different from donating or volunteering towards a cause that you internalize. I am neither altruistic or good, whatever that means, but I have volunteered (I have taught programming, fencing, martial arts, Computer Science, which are part of my self-identity) , I have donated to the Space Program (I’m a big SciFi geek, and my sister and two of my best friends work in the field) and I support the Glendora School system with cash in addition to time (because I want my neighbors’ kids to be my kind of kids)

    None of the above is altruism. It’s just strengthening the in-group. Blind people in the Third World? It takes a different person than yours truly to get that to light up reward centers.

  2. 2
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    This is pretty common among EA rhetoric, I suspect because many EA people genuinely don’t care about art – especially “high” art – and think that people who do care are just preening for attention.

    I think that EA people would respond “hey, we take whatever morals you use, and tell you how to do them effectively. You’re the one saying you value random strangers over much loved local art. Don’t blame us for the results.”

    It’s true, of course, that money is fungible and therefore ten bucks donated to preserve a painting could instead have been used to protect three to six people from malaria for six years.

    Yes.

    But the same could also be said about the money spent on a video game, or on internet access, or on taking a trip, or eating out with friends, or on going to a movie, or anything else that EA folks might like doing.

    Yes, provided that you ignore the “A” in “EA.” Those aren’t altruistic acts. Charitable donations are.

    There isn’t an either-or choice between giving to help the needy and supporting the arts, any more than there’s an either-or choice between giving to help the needy and occasionally going out to a movie. Most people in a position to give to charity, can do both.

    Well, they ARE zero-sum most of the time. I only have so much to give to charity: if I give some to Bob I’ve got less for Laura. And I’m well aware that I could help someone out if gave them money and didn’t choose to go to dinner with a friend tonight. The fact that I can do both doesn’t change the zero sum nature of it.

  3. 3
    Ben Lehman says:

    t160k is fairly great, in terms of art, society, and historical artifacts.

    “Effective Altruism” has always been a fairly dumb endeavor. I actually think it’s considerable worse than just the streetlight effect. Generally speaking, foreign-run charity is ineffective, period, and often has very harmful hidden effects. The more hidden the effects, the more “effective” the charity looks.

  4. 4
    Mandolin says:

    People who donate time or money to an ‘altruistic’ cause do not do it because they want to help people. They do it because they want to feel good about themselves. It is hard to feel good about something that is far away, or foreign to you.

    It’s fine if you want to describe your reaction to stuff, but I’m not sure you’re correct in assuming everyone else’s brains work the way yours does.

  5. 5
    Pesho says:

    It’s fine if you want to describe your reaction to stuff, but I’m not sure you’re correct in assuming everyone else’s brains work the way yours does.

    Well, once you become aware that donations and volunteer work overwhelmingly benefit the actor more than the recipient, as far as self-perceived well-being is concerned, once you read your wife’s research that shows reward center activity tracking the act of ‘doing good’ as opposed to the effects of the act, and once you decide that the ‘new altruism paradigm’ can’t even get its definitions right… (no real surprise there, it’s social psychologists who are pushing it)

    Sure, it’s my own opinion. Of course, not everyone thinks the same way. Hell, there is no universally accepted definition of altruism. Depending on what each psychologist is pushing, they go from narrowing it down to “self-destructive’ which excludes anything but pathological behavior, to describing as altruism carrying for your offspring.

    I have not seen an ‘altruistic’ act that cannot be explained with “A person I admire would act this way. I will act this way so that I admire myself.” Nothing wrong with this, but once you look at it this way, and know that you will experience the ‘reward’ effect regardless of outcome, can you really think that you are being altruistic?

    And anyway. An assumption does not have to be correct to be useful. It just has to describe the observed data, and predict behavior. “People act in the ways that makes them feel good, and the ability to delay gratification is a strong predictor for being successful.” works really well, in my experience.

  6. 6
    Eytan Zweig says:

    Pesho – the problem with armchair psychologising is that coming up with plausible-sounding explanation is too easy. You say in your last paragraph that an assumption doesn’t need to be right to be useful, it just has to predict behaviour. That’s actually not enough – it needs to predict behaviour better than other assumptions. I don’t see why how statement “people just donate money to make themselves feel good” predicts behaviour better than “some people care about other people”. In any case, though, this is probably a derail.

    G&W –

    I think that EA people would respond “hey, we take whatever morals you use, and tell you how to do them effectively. You’re the one saying you value random strangers over much loved local art. Don’t blame us for the results.”

    I think that’s a bit of a red herring, though. Now that I’m a parent, I can say with convinction that I care about my daughter’s well being and future more than I care about practically everything in the world. Certainly, if you’d ask me whether I care about her more than I care about, say, an evening’s entertainment I’d certainly say yes. And yet, I spent money just a few days ago buying a game for my computer that I completed within 3 hours of playing it. That money could have gone towards her food, clothing, college fund, or inheritence. And yet I spent it on myself.

    Does that make my value inconsistent? No, it just means that while I place her *first*, my entertainment needs are still prioritized to a degree where I address them.

    I donate more money to charities that help people which address the basic needs of strangers than I do to charities that support art or culture. But the fact that I value one doesn’t mean I can’t also value the other.

  7. 7
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    Maybe I’m reading EA wrong, which is certainly possible. But my understanding is that so long as one is very up front about relative spending, EA doesn’t force a change.

    After all, the OP starts by saying

    “Most donors say they want to “help people”. If that’s true

    The bolded part is crucial here. As I see it, EA isn’t really designed to encourage a particular outcome. It’s more designed to encourage honesty about your desired outcome.

    If you say “I like this picture. Saving it and keeping it local is more important to me than potentially providing an immunization to some random person that I do not and will not know, even if it would save that person’s life” then EA has nothing on you.

  8. 8
    Eytan Zweig says:

    So, in your opinion, would the EA practitioners feel that I need to say “this game I bought is more important to me than my daughter’s education” in order to justify why I think I could spend money on both?

    I agree with the argument that if I decide to dedicate part of my money for an altruistic purpose, for example to help people in developing country, I should do so in a way that maximizes the benefit from the money I spend. I also realize that from a purely mathematical point of view, my money is a limited resource, and everything I spend on X is money I don’t spend on anything else. Sure. But there’s a weird dichotomy here. I don’t see that the EA’s are saying “live a life of poverty and donate every penny you don’t use to charity”. I’m pretty sure most of them are living a pretty comfortable Western life, eating 3 full meals a day, driving cars, watching movies, reading books, wearing clothes they bought new off the rack, etc. They don’t have a problem with that, because that’s not money going to altruistic causes. But it’s still money that could go to altruistic causes.

    There’s something very weird to me about the judgment that once I decided that this percentage of my income is going to go to causes, then I have to spend that money only on the things I consider the most important, but anything I spend on myself I can do with whatever I like without judgment. I’ve never donated to keep a painting in a particular museum, but I always donate money to museums that have a donation box when I visit them, occasionally more than the recommended donation. Sure, that money could be viewed as money I’m not sending to aid developing countries. It’s also money I’m not spending on ice cream or on clothes or on gambling. It’s just plain odd to say “if you really cared about people, you wouldn’t be giving to museums” without also going on to say “and you wouldn’t spend on yourself, either”.

  9. 9
    desipis says:

    If that’s true, they should try to distribute their resources to help people as much as possible. Most people don’t. In the “Buy A Brushstroke” campaign, eleven thousand British donors gave a total of ₤550,000 to keep the famous painting “Blue Rigi” in a UK museum. If they had given that ₤550,000 to buy better sanitation systems in African villages instead, the latest statistics suggest it would have saved the lives of about one thousand two hundred people from disease. Each individual $50 donation could have given a year of normal life back to a Third Worlder afflicted with a disabling condition like blindness or limb deformity..

    They seem to be advocating something that one might call “Simplistic Global Utilitarian Altruism”.

    People who donate time or money to an ‘altruistic’ cause do not do it because they want to help people. They do it because they want to feel good about themselves. It is hard to feel good about something that is far away, or foreign to you.

    It’s fine if you want to describe your reaction to stuff, but I’m not sure you’re correct in assuming everyone else’s brains work the way yours does.

    At a basic level, the only reason you ever do something is because it feels ‘good’. It’s the reasons why something feels good that makes the difference between altruism and say, sadism. Altruism requires that the good feeling come from the genuine belief that others are benefiting and the self is not. While it makes sense to rationalise about the most ‘effective’ way to utilise people’s altruistic desire (to both maximise the benefit to others and to maximise the amount of ‘good feeling’), it would not make sense to rationalise beyond the reach of the underlying psychology.

  10. 10
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    Eytan Zweig says:
    June 2, 2015 at 7:35 am
    So, in your opinion, would the EA practitioners feel that I need to say “this game I bought is more important to me than my daughter’s education” in order to justify why I think I could spend money on both?

    We’re straying from “altruism” here, so I don’t think they’d care. As I understand it, EA does not propose that only altruism is effective, merely that one should use the available altruism as effectively as possible.

    But assuming for a moment that those were altruistic: yes.

    It’s just plain odd to say “if you really cared about people, you wouldn’t be giving to museums” without also going on to say “and you wouldn’t spend on yourself, either”.

    Well, it’s relative.
    If you really cared about other people more than museums, you wouldn’t be spending on museums. If you really cared about others more than yourself, you’d act solely in a way which would maximize benefit to others. But you can care about people more than museums, and still put both categories lower than your own needs.

    I feel that way, and I admit it. I care about myself and my family MUCH more than other people. I have almost zero care for 95% of the world population–and, I might add, believe the same is true in reverse. I feel less bound to spend my money on feeding many people who I have never met, than I do to send my kid to science camp.

    Provided that I assert those values as base assumptions, my understanding is that EA would not cause me to change my behavior: what I think and say largely matches what I do. Giving money to my local food bank isn’t the most effective way to “help people” or “feed people,” but it is the most effective way to “help feed poor people in my immediate area,” which is what I choose to do.

    That’s why I call it more of an “honesty” thing than an “action” thing. EA seems really designed to make people question generalist assumptions and face their decisions more clearly.

  11. 11
    nobody.really says:

    [T]en bucks donated to preserve a painting could instead have been used to protect three to six people from malaria for six years. But the same could also be said about the money spent on a video game, or on internet access, or on taking a trip, or eating out with friends, or on going to a movie, or anything else….

    I find no fault with this statement. It reflects the world as I understand it. To put it in stark terms, my choice to go to the movies may cost people their lives.

    Yet I go.

    It’s a harsh realization, and my mind desperately seeks ways to hide from it. I try to shield myself by denying this dynamic, or by finding fault with the people who ask me to confront it. So I found these remarks regrettably familiar:

    [T]en bucks donated to preserve a painting could instead have been used to protect three to six people from malaria for six years. But the same could also be said about the money spent on a video game, or on internet access, or on taking a trip, or eating out with friends, or on going to a movie, or anything else that EA folks might like doing….

    Unless the expectation is that 100% of every person’s money beyond the bare minimum needed for survival must be spent on saving lives, it seems weird that EA people often pick on the arts….

    See? If the people who ask me to confront uncomfortable truths are hypocrites, or if there is a social norm that permits me to spend money on myself, then it’s ok to ignore the larger dynamic, right?

    There isn’t an either-or choice between giving to help the needy and supporting the arts, any more than there’s an either-or choice between giving to help the needy and occasionally going out to a movie. Most people in a position to give to charity, can do both.

    See? There are no real trade-offs, right? If we gave some money to malaria protection, that justifies not giving more, right?

    Alternatively, I can acknowledge that I choose to spend money on myself, even though it may cost other people their lives. No pretense. No excuse.

    I care about my daughter’s well being and future more than I care about practically everything in the world. Certainly, if you’d ask me whether I care about her more than I care about, say, an evening’s entertainment I’d certainly say yes. And yet, I spent money just a few days ago buying a game for my computer that I completed within 3 hours of playing it. That money could have gone towards her food, clothing, college fund, or inheritence. And yet I spent it on myself.

    Does that make my value inconsistent? No, it just means that while I place her *first*, my entertainment needs are still prioritized to a degree where I address them.

    Or, to rephrase, the concept of “priority” is an oversimplification. We all have multiple interests, and except under the most dire circumstances our minds are constantly seeking opportunities to advance all those interests simultaneously. In short, you value your child’s well-being and computer gaming – and at some level, you’re willing to trade off some measure of one good in order to secure some measure of the other.

    But let’s be clear: You are making a trade-off; you are sacrificing some level of good for your kid in order to secure that computer game.

    Reinhold Niebuhr noted, “Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their own esteem are insufferable in their human contacts.” We may be able to reduce the extent to which others find us insufferable, but it may involve a loss of innocence.

  12. 12
    Lirael says:

    A problem that I have with EA (and to be fair, EA people are hardly the only charity-involved people with this problem) is that it focuses on direct service – and direct service around a very specific subset of problems – at the expense of working to make the direct service less necessary. For instance, simple interventions to stop poor people in developing countries getting a lethal disease are great! But why are those people so screwed in the first place? Why isn’t there more money for eradicating those diseases? What can be done to un-fuck the context that these people live in? To what degree are problems in our own society (racism, legacies of colonialism or imperialism, warmongering or other bad foreign policy, our homophobes exporting their homophobia to Africa, etc) contributing to the problems in the context that these people live in, that cause them to have to be the beneficiaries of Western charity? These are political problems. They’re social change problems. What’s more, some of them are social change problems that involve changing our own society’s culture and our own government. They’re problems that require having good and just civil society in our own countries (it’s not exactly going to help the people in non-powerful countries if the conditions in the powerful countries that have such outsized impact on them go to shit, or if the powerful countries are run by misogynists, or whatever). Direct service without organizing, without social change, is just a bandage.

    Now, I’m not against bandages (I am a street medic and trained as an EMT, after all)! Nor against direct service! I actually do a lot of direct service volunteering myself. And both literal and metaphorical bandages can save lives and relieve pain. It’s just that when you have severe problems, they might be necessary but they aren’t sufficient. To drop the bandage metaphor, you have to address the sociopolitical context to truly address the problem. The organizations for which I do direct service, they all have a strong organizing/social change aspect as well (and there are also organizations where I’m on the organizing/social change side of the operation). There’s also the question of how you do your direct service – are you using methods that empower people, or disempower them? Are you modeling better ways of doing it?

    I don’t think Effective Altruists as a group tend to look hard enough at political context and how they might affect that, because it’s not as visible and immediate a need as “Stop this person from getting malaria.” It’s also a lot harder to quantify impact, and EA likes quantification.

    There’s also the unintended-effects issue, that Ben Lehman alludes to above (and that is true whether you’re talking about direct service, social change, or both). Are you, the Westerner, just mucking it up trying to push change in someone else’s society because you aren’t culturally or politically competent there (this is one reason why doing social change work in your own country while simply providing resources for people on the ground in other countries, is probably better than trying to do social change work in someone else’s country)? Are your interventions screwing up the local economy, or helping it? Are the mosquito nets being used to overfish and thus eventually depleting locals of protein in their diets, as Ben Lehman’s link talks about? Are your methods respectful of locals? Responsible solidarity/charity work should be taking this into account.

    I have a bunch of thoughts, that I will eventually write up, about X-Men: First Class and its illustration of how both individual-focused direct service without caring about the political context of your work, and organizing without caring about or attending to the needs of individuals, are recipes for going terribly wrong.

    As far as charity recommendations go, are there any particular types of charities that you’re looking for? I’d certainly be happy to make suggestions if I know anything of the right type. I’m afraid I’m not much good on art/historical preservation organizations, though as you are yourself a cartoonist you might be interested in Cartoonists’ Rights Network International, which works to protect and rescue cartoonists from violence and persecution all over the world, and which I originally learned about from a cartoonist who has faced state brutality for her work (I also learned from her that most free press organizations don’t cover cartoonist, which makes an organization like this even more important).

  13. 13
    Eytan Zweig says:

    G&W – I’m finding it hard from your latest response to understand if you are trying to explain EA to me, or whether you are trying to argue for their position (or whether you think that if someone understands EA, they’ll have no choice but agree with them). It makes it a bit difficult for me to know how to respond because I think we have a pretty similar understanding of EA’s position, I just think it’s a flawed position that is based on some rather arbitrary groupings of people’s outgoing money.

  14. 14
    queenshulamit says:

    I don’t have time to write a full response now. However, I’m posting this comment to remind myself to write a post on my blog in response to this.

  15. 15
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    So, let’s summarize EA as a computer program.

    1) State altruistic goals and moral principles.
    2) Propose action.
    3) Compare stated goals to proposed action, and to viable alternative actions. Act only in accordance with stated principles.
    4) If proposed action is better than alternatives at reaching stated goals, perform proposed action and end routine.
    5) If alternative actions are better than proposed action at reaching stated goals according to stated principles, then
    . a) Revise goals and start again; OR
    . b) select new proposed action and start again; OR
    . c) Revise moral principles and start again.

    What is a “flawed position that is based on some rather arbitrary groupings of people’s outgoing money?”

  16. 16
    Eytan Zweig says:

    The idea that I use different spending principles for my altruistic goals than I do for the rest of my non-essential expenditures.

    Also, the idea that I have an algorithem that is calcuated dollar-by-dollar rather than on my pot of money as a whole. In other words, if for each dollar I spend I would think “let me just spend this on the thing I think is most important”, than I’d end up with something very much EA. But that’s not how I distribute my money. What I think is more along the lines of “People being able to live is extremely important, but museums are also important. Therefore, I will donate 10% of my money this month to aid charities, and 5% of it to art charities”.

    You can argue that I’m being inefficient, or that my values are wrong and that art simply isn’t important when anyone is dying. But you can’t argue I’m being dishonest when I say “I value these two things, though not equally, and I want to spend some money on both”.

  17. 17
    Eytan Zweig says:

    (Note – in the sake of honesty, the above percentages do not represent the actual percentage of my disposable income I spend on charity; I haven’t calculated the real number but it’s definitely a lot less. That is probably a fair thing to criticise me on, but it’s one that EA has no bearing on, since, as you point out, they never compare altruistic spending to non-altruistic spending).

  18. 18
    Ampersand says:

    I don’t have time to write a full response now. However, I’m posting this comment to remind myself to write a post on my blog in response to this.

    Cool! I hope you’ll post a link here once your post is up. :-)

  19. 19
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    Eytan Zweig says:
    June 2, 2015 at 9:37 am
    The idea that I use different spending principles for my altruistic goals than I do for the rest of my non-essential expenditures.

    I don’t actually think that you do. I merely think that one of them is more personal, and therefore none of my business.

    Also, the idea that I have an algorithem that is calcuated dollar-by-dollar rather than on my pot of money as a whole. In other words, if for each dollar I spend I would think “let me just spend this on the thing I think is most important”, than I’d end up with something very much EA. But that’s not how I distribute my money.

    Honestly I think this is sort of a distinction without a difference. You simply plug different things into #1.

    What I think is more along the lines of “People being able to live is extremely important, but museums are also important. Therefore, I will donate 10% of my money this month to aid charities, and 5% of it to art charities”.

    Er… OK. You seem to think that this is an EA-opposed outcome.

    EA would say that if your goal is “people being able to live,” then you should effectively focus on maximizing the number of people who are able to live, rather than (for example) improving the quality of life, or prioritizing local neighbors.” Of course, if your priority is “improving QOL for local neighbors” that’s OK too, at which point EA would ask how to do THAT most effectively.

    You can argue that I’m being inefficient,

    But you’re not. There is no objective efficiency which exists in a vacuum. There is a comparison between what you say you want to do on the one hand, and what you actually accomplish on the other hand.

    You can reach 100% accomplishment level merely by changing your goals and still be entirely within EA principles. The only thing that doesn’t work is claiming that I value “helping people and treating everyone equally” when I actually value something else.

    or that my values are wrong and that art simply isn’t important when anyone is dying.

    Some people think art isn’t important so long as anyone is dying. Other people think the reverse. Both groups of people should understand the consequences of their decisions, and act accordingly. Neither is bad, they are what they are.

    But you can’t argue I’m being dishonest when I say “I value these two things, though not equally, and I want to spend some money on both”.

    Of course not, which is why I have not said any such thing!

  20. 20
    Ampersand says:

    Nobody Really:

    See? There are no real trade-offs, right? If we gave some money to malaria protection, that justifies not giving more, right?

    Alternatively, I can acknowledge that I choose to spend money on myself, even though it may cost other people their lives. No pretense. No excuse.

    Of course there are trade-offs. (Wow, was that an unfair reading of what I wrote!) But to me, the admission that I’m not a saint and I’m not going to sacrifice all I can to help save lives – and, in fact, I frequently spend money on things that could be better spent saving lives – isn’t a painful or difficult admission. I’m not a saint; I’ve known I’m not a saint for decades; I fully accept that I’m not a saint.

    EA doesn’t seem to really expect people to be saints, either. The site I linked to asks people to pledge to give 1% of their income to EA causes. On Tumblr, I’ve seen EA people talking about giving 10%; some actually do this, others have this as an aspiration for when their incomes get higher.

  21. 21
    Eytan Zweig says:

    G&W – what you did say was

    If you really cared about other people more than museums, you wouldn’t be spending on museums

    I’m saying I care about people more than museums and I still spend money on museums.

    I also don’t know that your representation of EA is the same as the one presented in both links that Amp gave at the top of his post. The first one, especially, seems to suggest principles behind EA that go substantially beyond what you are arguing for.

  22. 22
    nobody.really says:

    There isn’t an either-or choice between giving to help the needy and supporting the arts, any more than there’s an either-or choice between giving to help the needy and occasionally going out to a movie. Most people in a position to give to charity, can do both.

    See? There are no real trade-offs, right? If we gave some money to malaria protection, that justifies not giving more, right?

    Of course there are trade-offs. (Wow, was that an unfair reading of what I wrote!)

    It’s not my purpose to make people defensive – but, to me, this is a thread about defensiveness.

    I read the original thread as a defensive reaction EA’s observation that every dollar spend on arts is a dollar not spent on saving lives. At one point Amp concedes the point. But then Amp offers his “There isn’t an either-or choice” argument which, while accurate, is wholly unresponsive to EA’s claims. It remains the case that every dollar spent on art or going out is a dollar not spent on saving lives. Thus, I have difficulty reading Amp’s remarks as anything but a rationalization.

    I won’t claim this to be a fair reading, but it is a sincere one.

    Unless the expectation is that 100% of every person’s money beyond the bare minimum needed for survival must be spent on saving lives, it seems weird that EA people often pick on the arts in particular.

    * * *

    I’m not a saint; I’ve known I’m not a saint for decades; I fully accept that I’m not a saint.

    EA doesn’t seem to really expect people to be saints, either.

    I have no knowledge of or opinion about EA’s expectations. Nor do I understand how they are relevant to this discussion – except to the extent that people try to justify their choices on the grounds of conforming to other people’s expectations.

    Perhaps in the afterlife I’ll spend eternity in the company of all the people I could have helped but didn’t. I don’t know how much relevance they will attach to the idea that I acted in conformance with social expectations. (Then again, I’ll also be in the company of all the people who could have helped me but didn’t. Should be a jolly occasion. Maybe I shouldn’t have read so much existentialism in my youth….)

    All that said, I’m not counting Amp out for sainthood. Not yet.

  23. 23
    Tamme says:

    EA likes to claim to be evidence-based, but they seem totally ignorant of the fact that there is a massive body of work surrounding third world development, and prefer to reinvent the wheel themselves.

    I have never seen a single EA practicioner engage with Development Studies to the degree of actually acknowledging it exists, let alone looking at its conclusions.

    EA seems to be roughly where Development Studies was in the 1960s, e.g. a move away from large scale infrastructure to small scale direct aid.

  24. 24
    S says:

    Hi Tamme, I’m (largely) a practitioner of EA as well as a graduate in Development Studies. I’m curious about your statement that EA avoids DS’s ‘conclusions’. My impression has always been that DS is an incredibly diverse field, in which getting a unified consensus on anything is like trying to fix a thumbtack on a cloud. Would you be able to tease out more of what you mean, perhaps with specific examples?

  25. 25
    Lirael says:

    Amp, I don’t know if this is the short of charity you’re looking for, but The Network/La Red, a Boston-based anti-domestic-violence organization with a focus on LGBTQ, poly, and kinky communities, is raising money to cover a $25K funding shortfall. TNLR is the only domestic violence organization that I’m aware of that provides 101-level training for all its staff and volunteers in LGBQ, trans/gender nonconforming, poly, and kinky cultural competency, issues, and terminology. It offers some services (hotline and referrals, phone-based support group) for people across the US, as well as others (in-person support group, safehome, safe cellphones, courtroom accompaniment, one-on-one meetings) for people who can travel to the Boston area, and does community organizing and training too.

    I’m raising money for them and you can donate through my fundraising page if you’d like. If you have other charities in mind, no worries.

  26. 26
    Ampersand says:

    Ben – Givewell has posted a comment on the bednets-used-for-fishing problem.

    Putting the problem of bed nets used for fishing in perspective | The GiveWell Blog

    We have reasonably high confidence that most people properly use the nets funded by AMF, because AMF requires distribution partners to conduct follow-up surveys on net use. These surveys show that 80% to 90% of households have nets hung up 6 months after distributions (for more detail, see our charity report on AMF). The survey methodology also dictates that interviewers observe whether survey respondents have hung their nets by entering their houses rather than simply asking them if they’ve hung their nets. We believe that the concerns raised in the article largely don’t apply to net distributions funded by AMF.

  27. 27
    Ampersand says:

    Lireal – Thanks for your recommendation (and for your excellent earlier comment as well). I don’t think I can give this money through a fundraising page (there are restrictions on how I can give it), but I can give some directly to The Network/La Red.

    I think the focus on direct-service rather than underlying issues is part of what I meant when I said EA has the lamppost problem. Pretty much by definition, any work on the underlying issues, even if it has positive effects, will have effects that are hard to quantify in the way EA emphasizes.

    On the other hand, although any charity can go wrong, I have more confidence in a direct and simple approach actually working, than I do in efforts aimed at underlying problems, which might be a lot more complex and intractable. I.E., it’s much easier to provide a small life-saving treatment than it is to solve problems like colonization, corruption, and capitalism.

  28. 28
    Ben Lehman says:

    Barry: I’m not sure that’s a coherent response. Overfishing is a problem; the free distribution of mosquito netting is part of that problem. That 80-90% of the nets given out by this particular organization are hung is essentially meaningless (maybe 10-20% of the nets are being used for fishing? Maybe the nets used for fishing are coming from other organizations?) And, of course, this doesn’t mean that free distribution of mosquito nets is necessarily wrong, particularly in a bean-counting EA sense (i.e. it may be that less people will die of starvation because of overfishing than would die of malaria.) It just means that there’s a very large unaccounted cost.

    It’s almost certain that there are other large, unaccounted costs. But those costs are outside of the streetlight.

    yrs–
    –Ben

  29. 29
    Ampersand says:

    That 80-90% of the nets given out by this particular organization are hung is essentially meaningless (maybe 10-20% of the nets are being used for fishing? Maybe the nets used for fishing are coming from other organizations?)

    I don’t see how it can be meaningless that the nets being “given out by this particular organization” are being 80-90% used for their intended purpose, if the question is whether or not to give money to this particular organization.

  30. 30
    Daran says:

    I don’t see how it can be meaningless that the nets being “given out by this particular organization” are being 80-90% used for their intended purpose, if the question is whether or not to give money to this particular organization.

    It’s irrelevent to the issue of quantifying the hidden costs of the less than 20% of nets possibly being used for harmful alternative purposes.

  31. 31
    Dana says:

    Here’s a random thought for you, speaking of art. We have lots of “starving artists” in this country (USA) and some of them are quite good. So we could look at effective altruism another way. Why are we spending so much money to preserve paintings that were done centuries ago when people who make paintings now are going begging?

    And this is not even getting into how many public schools have had to cut arts programs because God forbid high earners pay a few more thousand in taxes annually.

    It’s funny, we don’t give a rat’s ass about tradition and do our level best to destroy it at every turn and we’d still rather preserve works by artists long dead who frankly DO NOT CARE ANYMORE than ensure that we still have a living arts tradition for generations to come.

    I kinda have a problem with that, whether I agree with the overall EA movement or not.

    You’ve obviously heard of Patreon. Maybe you could highlight other artists’ Patreons as well, as a weekly or monthly feature? Just for a start?

  32. 32
    Dana says:

    and Ben? Seriously? The overfishing happening in this world is being done by industrial boats with mechanized netting of a very large capacity. Your average mosquito net is not large enough to do a tenth of that damage and the kind of person likely to use a mosquito net for fishing is an individual person rather than a company or a corporation, trying to meet their individual family needs rather than feed the entire Eastern seaboard of the U.S. You sound like Jerry Brown imposing water rationing on the residential California population but doing nothing about agricultural or industrial use of water there, not even trying to shut Nestle down who are suckin’ up federal water with no permit.

    Come on.

  33. 33
    Ben Lehman says:

    Dana: You’re conflating two different issues.

    One of the few detailed studies on the issue showed that in several villages along Lake Tanganyika, an essential body of water shared by four East African nations, 87.2 percent of households used mosquito nets to fish.”

  34. 34
    Ampersand says:

    Dana:

    It’s funny, we don’t give a rat’s ass about tradition and do our level best to destroy it at every turn and we’d still rather preserve works by artists long dead who frankly DO NOT CARE ANYMORE than ensure that we still have a living arts tradition for generations to come.

    Preserving the works of a long-dead artist is not something we do to benefit the artist; it is something we do to benefit current and future art lovers & scholars.

    You’ve obviously heard of Patreon. Maybe you could highlight other artists’ Patreons as well, as a weekly or monthly feature? Just for a start?

    I don’t think that highlighting other Patreon users on “Alas” would be very effective, either as a use of my time, or as a means of helping out those artists. Most Patreon artists (according to what I’ve been told by artists on Patreon) get most of their support from social media, and I think it’s more effective for me to occasionally tweet or FB pointers to their patreon (or to their kickstarters), than it would be for me to post about it on “Alas.”

    ETA: Maybe I’ll start including kickstarters and patreons on my “link farm” posts, though. So thanks for the suggestion.

  35. 35
    Tamme says:

    @S: I’ve dipped my toes in quite a few EA spaces and I’ve never once seen a single discussion that referenced the fact that Development Studies exists. Maybe I was just unlucky.

  36. 36
    nobody.really says:

    From The Atlantic’s “The Greatest Good,” by Derek Thompson:

    [Effective altruism] is morally powerful, and its radical implication is that one should devote every spare dollar and every spare moment to helping the world’s poor—eschewing the arts and exercise, banning oneself from all entertainment, subsisting on rice, and giving away all of one’s possessions….

    Some rationalists flirt with extreme levels of selflessness, but I am not seduced by that sort of misery. [William] MacAskill emphatically says that he’s not trying to heal suffering in the developing world by advocating for suffering in the developed world. The organization he co-founded is called Giving What We Can, not Giving All We Have, and it does not argue for the abolition of cake, art, or whiskey. Effective altruism is not a plot to guilt the rich into asceticism.

    “You should spend a good amount of your money trying to make the world as good a place as possible,” said MacAskill, whose non-profit 80,000 Hours offers research and advice for seeking the most meaningful careers. “But you shouldn’t beat yourself up for not donating all your money.” The feasible alternative for most people, he said, is to give a little bit more than they already do—and to focus their donations on scientifically proven outcomes.