Well reasoned, but I fail to see much difference between a version of Effective Altruism stripped of its many flashy fallacies down to just its insightful core and... plain old fashioned altruism? Maybe there is some aspect of being pickier about what projects you support but that concept is just like good governance, it doesn't need a whole name brand movement.
Ray: I don't think it is different than altruism. Fundamentally, I think it really IS just about making your altruism more effective. Which, in my mind at least, is about doing two things:
1. As you say, being pickier about the projects you support. EA, to my mind, asserts that it is not enough to simply give, but that you should also some time and effort to be sure that you're giving in ways that will best accomplish your goals.
2. Second, it's about doing some introspection to make sure that one's giving aligns with one's values. So it might thinking hard about whether the kinds of causes one is supporting are the best way to realize those values.
You're right that it's really just altruism. But I think it's about putting the same energy and thoughtfulness into altruism that one puts into spending or investing money for oneself. And I think that hasn't been how most people think of altruism.
Ray, this is a useful and essential discussion. But try this example. Some people give generously to save individual sea lions at tremendous cost at The Marine Mammal Center. This is altruistic, but it can’t even increase their population, so some other sea lion will die unseen. Compare that to saving a human child for the same cost. That too is altruism.
So technically you’re right they are both just altruism. But one is effective and one is not. As it turns out, people are very often driven to ineffective, and even counterproductive, altruism by thoughtless emotions. It’s all altruism, but ...
Think of a five-year-old painting your home vs a professional. It is similar, as you note, to “good governance,” but also note that you needed a “whole extra word” — “good” — in this case. And so we need “professional” for the paint job, and why not “efficient” for altruism. I’d prefer “thoughtful,” but we need some word for such a crucial concept.
Gordon has made the same point. But I think it deserves a lot more emphasis. The amount of waste and damage caused by confusing “plain old fashioned altruism" (e.g. missionaries and revolutionaries) is phenomenal.
Tune in next week as Yascha explains the devastating importance of ignoring this concept for climate change.
Great piece, both in recognizing things we should keep and areas where EA goes astray.
I'm a little emotionally reactive about EA (and utilitarianism in general); I feel like the movement is basically a continual mantra of "you're not good enough" which tends to upset me. So take what I say below with that in mind.
One of my biggest frustrations is that I feel like EA smuggles in the idea of *what is moral* under the idea that they are simply talking about how *effective* one's altruism is. It's not "Effective [Altruism as Defined by You]." It's "Effective [Altruism as Defined by Us]." So it seems innocuous; who could argue with the idea that we should try to avoid inefficiency in our giving?
But by "efficient" they mean achieving quantitatively more good of the type they favor. If I favor donating to a local music school that provides scholarships for poor students who couldn't afford either lessons or instruments, they don't really care if I do that effectively or not; the goal itself is a waste because I could "so much more good" by donating the same amount of money to, say, mosquito nets. Go mind your own business I don't have to do *your* idea of good. It's not *immoral* for me to decide to give in a different manner, any more than it's immoral for me to decide that there *is* a difference between a child drowning as I walk by and a child dying of hunger 10,000 miles away (there is a difference, and it has to do with knowledge of the context and the solution, the extremely short timeframe over which the intervention takes place, the total lack of intermediation...and on and on; there's a difference and it's not small, and the fact that an EA thinks there's not simply indicates to me how distorted their premises are).
I agree. And I think Yascha likely does too, as this seems quite close to what he calls "Providentialism," or as Bob Dylan put it, "And you never ask questions when God's on your side." Ironically, those of us singing along were sure we had "right" on our side.
That view is very hard to escape, so I think the antidote must be to take small steps and change direction any time things aren't getting better. Of course that won't completely solve the problem you're pointing to, but it will derail the worst excesses, and that's about the best result I have any hope for.
I don't think believers in EA would say that there is NO difference between a child drowning as you walk by and a child dying of hunger far away. Obviously, the differences you point out are real. What I think they would suggest is that both lives have equal value, and we should consider that fact as we think about our lives and our giving.
Certainly, a belief in EA doesn't mean that you can't support a local music school, or, to bring up a different example, eat occasionally at a nice restaurant. Believing in EA doesn't require a vow of poverty and channeling all the money that you would have spent to GiveWell.
But I think it does ask us to look at our lives and to ask whether we could do more to live by our values, both with how we spend our time and our money. To share with you how I have answered the latter question, about 40% of my philanthropic giving now goes to GiveWell, another 30% goes to my temple and an organization where I'm on the board, and another 30% goes to other organizations I feel a connection to (either because they are local, I believe in their causes, or friends have asked me to give).
And while I think it's fine for others to give differently, I do think it's important and valuable to be thoughtful about one's giving and whether it reflects the kind of person you want to be. Ultimately, I think EA is really just about putting the same energy and attentiveness about how one gives one's money away as the energy and attentiveness you put into spending or investing it for oneself.
That's the side of EA that I'd like to see emphasized. I think there are two big reasons EA emphasizes giving 10%: 1) because it gets people who don't give very much a way to increase it with a concrete goal, and 2) it puts a fence on the logical conclusion of EA, which is that I should give every cent that I don't need to sustain myself (and maybe my family, provided that a family isn't somehow calculated to be a less "good" use of my resources). There's a little bit of what uncharitably would be called a motte and bailey, and what probably more charitably would be considered using EA principles like a tool and not like a bible. If EA is simply an ideal to be strived towards generally, but never achieved and not even really tried to achieve, that's great; there are a lot of useful ideals that work in that manner (e.g., the golden rule).
However, there seem to be a few people (small numbers, but highly visible examples of leaders in this movement) who take it as a bible. That's where long-termism comes from. Where over-optimizing giving comes from. You (the general you) want to work on / donate to AI alignment? Great. Do that. Stop pretending it's altruistic. Admit that it's both an interest of yours -- that you find it fun and engaging -- and that it's also self-preservation. It's like saying that I'm altruistically trying to reduce nuclear armament, or altruistically trying to increase crop yields.
One - The Shirky Principle: Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” In other words, organizations, like parasites, must be careful not to destroy the very problems they were designed to solve, lest they find themselves without purpose, meaning and work. Related to this, activism is a thing for productive people to do temporarily as they take time off from their productive endeavors. Making a career out of it, or having nothing better to do, corrupts the social benefit which should always be to attempt to achieve some specific outcome and then be done.
Two - The two moral extremes: egalitarianism, and egoism – the view that the system either takes care of everyone or everyone should be free and expected to take care of themselves – have defined the primary ideological battles throughout most of modernity. However, what everyone seems to get wrong is that the design of this Greatest Nation on God's Green Earth that is described as a democratic capitalist constitutional republic is one that leveraged the realization in common human behavior that the latter best derives the former with only a bit of oversight to prevent too much consolidated control... and the resulting tyranny that always results from too much consolidated control.
In other words spending so much energy to engineer outcomes to meet some utopian vision of perfect egalitarianism is counter to both human nature and ultimately causes more egoism and resulting inequity. Actual beneficial activism if the honest goal is a more equal society (and I doubt that is the actual goal for many so committed to their activist identity) would be to advocate for more individual opportunity... paths to economic achievement and general self-sufficiency. A good example of how this might look is activism to retool the public education system to adopt a mission for preparing each and every student for his/her next step toward an economic self-sufficient life and the increased social status that derives from it. The problem with this for the activist is that achieving this goal means that the activist loses their own pursuit of status while also causing more competition having enabled more graduates to achieve at higher levels.
And then this gets us back full circle to the root cause of the problem... that activism is a career and industry and not a temporary endeavor to achieve a specific outcome.
I think what we need in this country is to force all non-profit corporations to establish a mission and goals that have to be adhered to and reported every year, and their non-profit status revoked if failing to both comply with their mission and/or materially fail to achieve their goals. This would prevent mission drift and the Shirky Principle and cause fewer people to defend their NGO career and seek productive work instead.
Your thought #1 is extremely important for analyzing the far left today. DEI comes to mind quickly. But Kendi etc. also spend a lot of time deprecating "respectability politics" by which they actually mean taking responsibility, which is how they themselves succeeded. This has actually been going on since 1965 when Johnson's most ambitious equality proposal was derailed by the, as yet unnamed, Black Power Movement. It might have put them out of job.
- First, the limited version of effective altruism (best embodied by GiveWell) is obviously right. If you're going to give money away philanthropically or spend time on causes, make some effort to give it to those who can make the most of it or to work on causes that are going to do the most good. The idea that somehow SBF's failings somehow undermined this idea is silly.
- Second, that doesn't mean that you have to limit your money to supporting causes like GiveWell. It's wonderful to save lives, but there are other things that matter in the world too. A world where everyone focused only on saving lives' at the expense of the arts, cultivating community, etc. would be a lesser place. It's wonderful that the world had folks like Paul Farmer, and it would be a better place if there were many more like him. At the same time, a world made up of only Paul Farmers would not be such a wonderful world.
- Third, and this is point of Yascha's piece that I most agree with, it's important to know oneself. Spending money, time, and energy on pursuits that aren't philanthropic (or that don't maximize one's philanthropy) is not wrong. But it should be balanced that money, time, and energy that are spent on these causes (at least across societies), and we need to be careful lest this become a justification for hedonism and self-aggrandizement.
I agree. Few, if any, people will ever be purely altruistic, and pushing for the impossible always backfires. Best to allow for quite a bit of self-interest.
Thanks for another fascinating essay. I've completely agreed with your analysis since the late 1960s when I first thought about practicing effective altruism. However, I'd like to share a way in which it can still fail, and explain why this comment is part of a 20-year, last-ditch effort to succeed at it. Wish me luck.
As a senior at UC Berkeley studying math, I took a grad course in finite-state machines (the theory of computers, including AI). My professor, who awarded me an A+ for the course, suggested I go into software and earn a fortune. As was common then, I believed money would corrupt me, so I taught science at a rural middle school instead.
Teaching, given my introversion, proved too difficult. So, I pursued a Ph.D. in economics as a way to apply math to politics. However, I only found a highly ineffective environmentalist job at Berkeley’s lab. Out of the blue, I received a consulting offer that more than tripled my income, and I discovered that money did not corrupt me — my car is 23 years old, and I still find it difficult to spend money. Perhaps your psychology rule should be: Those who think they won't be corrupted, will be, and vice versa.
Now: Why is this comment my attempt at effective altruism?
Since 2003, I’ve studied what’s going wrong with left politics and experimented online with how to fix it. Then on June 30, 2020 I discovered Persuasion:
“... This is why I have grown convinced that we need to build a new community of thinkers, activists, and citizens that is committed to defending and reinvigorating the values of a free and fair society. That is the goal of Persuasion.” —Yascha Mounk
Seeing that you were an effective activist and, very surprisingly, also analyzed things scientifically, I decided Persuasion was my best hope. As a political activist and as a consultant, I’ve always been willing to do whatever was needed (e.g. buying a mimeograph machine and producing thousands of leaflets for the fledgling Berkeley Citizens Action), so I naively thought there would be some way to help out at Persuasion.
After all, its goal was to build a “community of thinkers, activists, and citizens … “ I had the skills, the motivation, time, and a willingness to do whatever was necessary. And I still do.
Despite having consulted for major institutions like the World Bank and the UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change, as well as medium-sized corporations (while never once hanging out my shingle to let it be known that I was available) I've found the bureaucracy within the realm of political altruism to be surprisingly perplexing. It seems that even with your profound insights, achieving success in effective political altruism remains a challenge.
I assure you, I've explored every avenue I can imagine. My strongest suspicion is that my lack of journalistic experience is the obstacle. Regardless, I'm enthusiastic about your new weekly essay blog, and I'm hopeful it might provide a way to connect.
Each week I download and carefully study your essay, striving to contribute a constructive comment. I also try to encourage others in the hopes of inspiring some sense of community. We seem to think about things almost identically, and I’m sure there must be some small way in which I could help the Persuasion community succeed.
In fact, I still believe, as you wrote on July 5, 2020, that “a bunch of us … really [could] make a difference to the future of free societies in the United States and around the world,” if we form a community."
PS. This might be seen as "Providentialism." However, as long as we don't "dispense with the requirements of ordinary morality," and strive for constant progress rather than revolution, I believe we can remain safe from excess hubris.
The first time I heard of effective altruism on a couple of podcasts that interviewed MacAskill, the core insight seemed so reasonable. Sure, there were bits that seemed very collegiate and abstract, but that’s just philosophy, I said.
But the commitment to give practically and effectively, and to try to overcome cognitive biases seemed smart.
So, at a family holiday gathering, I tried to chat about it with a relative who works for Guidestar, the organization that collects info on and rates charities. It seemed like a topic that was perfect for him, and that he’d have good insights to add. He became very uncomfortable and quickly changed the subject. I sensed that I had stumbled into being “that guy” at the family party.
I obviously was missing a big part of the picture. When the stuff about SBF came out soon afterward and how weirdly tech bro-ish EA had become, I understood my relative’s polite refusal to engage. Ugh. I was merely naive and lightly informed, but he feared I was one of them.
As Yascha indicates here, there’s a core insight worth saving but the “brand” of EA is probably forever tarnished by the weirdness. No wonder my relative wanted nothing to do with it.
In the end, it’s probably best to simply use something like Guidestar and other resources to give sensibly.
And it’s also important to constantly check one’s actions for delusions and self serving bias. The history of development aid and NGO giving is marred by arrogance, a preference for showy but ineffective projects, and self dealing. Along comes EA to combat some of those tendencies, and ends up with the same self inflicted harms.
Sometimes, trying to be a decent, effective human is like playing a game of never-ending whack-a-mole against ourselves. We have a hard time getting out of our own way and not creating ironic situations left and right.
Altruism may be considered from two perspectives: the genetic balance between the will to be and the, albeit still selfish, will to belong, and the abstract ideal of altruism as a cultural phenomenon, though the two perspectives are inseparably entwined. Organic empathy declines inversely with distance, with the decline of perceived relevance to the near world of personal interactions. By contrast, the ideal of altruism is a cultural abstraction of the organic allowing inclusiveness beyond the intuitive boundaries of group solidarity. Charity is said to begin at home. Altruism as an artifact of cultural abstraction is considered by advocates of effective altruism as transcendent of distance, whether that of physical relationship or of times to come beyond the scope of the present moment.
Characteristics of heritable altruism are found most clearly in the social insects and work their way up through degrees of behavioral complexity to the level of the higher animals, including the great apes and humans. Human altruism, in the sense of genetically determined propensities, is presumed to extend no further than close kinship and to those with which we have bonded organic relationships, i.e., one on one close associations and mutual dependencies. Such genetic propensities are reinforced by the societal structures built around these principles of human nature.
Human culture may be said to expand symbiotically with that of human consciousness. Inclusiveness may be seen as expansive of security, co-option through cultural exchange more efficient than war and allies useful in confronting still greater threats. However, altruism, in the organic since of emotive compulsion anterior to reason, may be limited to groups not much exceeding one hundred individuals, such as those of closely affiliated families that may have shared a preagricultural territory. Such groups would have been characterized both by competition for status and by cooperation in pursuit of the welfare of the group, and by fierce insularity regarding strangers and other groups, though such insularity not precluding the possibility of trade, exchange of females, and cooperation in matters of mutual interest.
Societies expand beyond the limits of the insular group by the abstraction of the innate characteristics of altruism, by creation of the cultural artifacts of the ideals of altruism upon which concepts of inclusiveness necessary to the creation and maintenance of civilizations depend.
But the strength of civilization is built upon the strength of its constituent elements. The original altruistic group has been replaced by the community from which the state arises. Within the community the organic and the abstraction of the organic are strongly combined in the interest of mutual benefit. Socially beneficial effects of altruistic abstraction are complementary of selfish genetic interests, are allowed of genetic principles, but move beyond genetic determinism to enlarge the scope of individual will, of human causality. But the capacity of abstract altruism is limited by its relationship to organic altruism. The ideal is an extension of the principles of the human condition. The construct cannot escape the nature of its materials. Civilization is built on a blueprint suggestive of its range of possibilities, and while a player of itself, is built upward from the nature of community cohesiveness. Inclusiveness cannot outrun the strength of its constituencies.
The predisposition toward charity naturally begins with the security of the individual and that of his immediate dependencies, spreads outward with affluency, is first of proximity: a friend or family in need, a beggar on the street, a project of local improvement that begs assistance. The concepts of effective altruism miss the point entirely, the point of charity being first of personal involvement in the close at hand. To give on impulse, to spend one’s time in community projects where other’s efforts are perhaps sufficiently employed, or to guild the lily by contributing to one’s affluent alma mater may be seen as inefficient as compared to cost ratios generated by mathematical models based on utilitarian concepts. But community involvement is the bedrock of the democratic process and the source of national vitality, and contribution, whether by money or constructive engagement, to the community at hand is perhaps the most noble and effective of altruistic endeavors. The end is not a utopian world but to conserve and expand the good we have by mutual effort.
The consequence of charitable contributions at distance are subject to misdirection or may have unintended consequences. Contributions made within one’s own community require the conscientious sensitivity of the giver to corruption or unintended consequences or the relative measure of success of initiatives where relevant information may be readily accessible. Such requires community involvement. To think of oneself as charitable when giving at a distance requires little personal involvement beyond commitment to the algorithm. Contributions outside of one’s community are important but should be of lower priority until potentials for local improvements have been addressed. One is reminded of missionary movements where congregations were urged to contribute to the salvation of the benighted in exotic places on the other side of their familiar world while local causes were ignored or seemed less worthy. Much of charity is about the gratification of the giver, and those directed by abstract ideals elevated by association with those ideals or, as in the case of effective altruism, made to feel more cleaver by adoption of the complexities of theory and more pure by the light of mathematical certainty.
Utilitarian concepts fail when ‘the good’ is assumed to be universally attainable by top-down distributive directives or by efforts to establish equality of outcome at the expense of the pursuit of excellence. Attempts to guide charity by altruistic abstractions divorced from their organic basis may fail to meet their stated ends. Concepts of effective altruism often fail by having mistaken the model from which the concept was constructed for the thing itself. The problem of simplistic, overly reductive explanations of complex issues is that policies become tailored to the problems described in terms of their simplification, those abstracted models, useful as they often may be, having insufficient basis in reality. The real problem is often irreducibly complex and exists within an ecosystem of complexities; or, despairing of understanding, the symptom comes to be regarded as its cause. If the problem of malaria may be significantly reduced by netting, why have local communities thus afflicted not addressed the issue? Such might give pause to those who would solve the problems of those communities by addressment from afar.
The most effective altruism may be that of addressment of issues of greatest proximity, and the understanding of complex problems, while often informed by detachment, requiring proximate engagement. Charity may be most effective as the diffusion of surplus from productive communities, patterns to be emulated by other communities both proximate and at distance. The extended abstraction of altruism, of charity, from that which most immediately confronts our empathetic awareness to that of utilitarian formulary would seem to dehumanize the concept of what it is that we owe to each other.
Thank you for your thoughtful essay. A related question I've been thinking about over the last few years: where does this reasoning leave donating to causes that are not the most important ones around. I mean donating to things like the arts, or local neighborhood projects. Does all our available income and time have to go towards the most acute problems?
" He was 27 when he founded his crypto exchange, started to get seriously rich, and became accustomed to his lavish lifestyle. He was 31 on the day he was apprehended for stealing from his customers at a massive scale."
Did he "start to get seriously rich" before he started stealing at a massive scale, or is stealing at a massive scale how he got seriously rich? My impression was it's the latter, but I'm not certain.
I think it's the former Unset. Pretty much if you were big into crypto early, you made a ton (at least "on paper"). Now, I think making a ton on in crypto is, at best, the moral equivalent of making a ton gambling. But it's certainly possible to do so without stealing. And since I believe everyone who deposited money with SBF has actually been made whole (although I'm not certain about that), I think that suggests that Yascha had it right.
Gordon writes, "Making a ton on in crypto is, at best, the moral equivalent of making a ton gambling. But it's certainly possible to do so without stealing."
Apropos of that, a true story. I'm 74 now (and still single); this happened around 30 years ago:
I'd picked up a guy in San Francisco, and we were on our way to my place for an intimate encounter -- but I was a bit wary; he seemed quite rough around the edges. As we walked from the car to my apartment, I asked him where he was from. He said, "Cleveland."
Then he added, in a low, gravelly voice, "And I want you to know something: I'm Jewish -- and Jews don't steal."
"Really? That's interesting," I responded. "I'm also Jewish! But how about Meyer Lansky?"
His instant retort -- delivered in a solemn snarl:
Well reasoned, but I fail to see much difference between a version of Effective Altruism stripped of its many flashy fallacies down to just its insightful core and... plain old fashioned altruism? Maybe there is some aspect of being pickier about what projects you support but that concept is just like good governance, it doesn't need a whole name brand movement.
Ray: I don't think it is different than altruism. Fundamentally, I think it really IS just about making your altruism more effective. Which, in my mind at least, is about doing two things:
1. As you say, being pickier about the projects you support. EA, to my mind, asserts that it is not enough to simply give, but that you should also some time and effort to be sure that you're giving in ways that will best accomplish your goals.
2. Second, it's about doing some introspection to make sure that one's giving aligns with one's values. So it might thinking hard about whether the kinds of causes one is supporting are the best way to realize those values.
You're right that it's really just altruism. But I think it's about putting the same energy and thoughtfulness into altruism that one puts into spending or investing money for oneself. And I think that hasn't been how most people think of altruism.
Ray, this is a useful and essential discussion. But try this example. Some people give generously to save individual sea lions at tremendous cost at The Marine Mammal Center. This is altruistic, but it can’t even increase their population, so some other sea lion will die unseen. Compare that to saving a human child for the same cost. That too is altruism.
So technically you’re right they are both just altruism. But one is effective and one is not. As it turns out, people are very often driven to ineffective, and even counterproductive, altruism by thoughtless emotions. It’s all altruism, but ...
Think of a five-year-old painting your home vs a professional. It is similar, as you note, to “good governance,” but also note that you needed a “whole extra word” — “good” — in this case. And so we need “professional” for the paint job, and why not “efficient” for altruism. I’d prefer “thoughtful,” but we need some word for such a crucial concept.
Gordon has made the same point. But I think it deserves a lot more emphasis. The amount of waste and damage caused by confusing “plain old fashioned altruism" (e.g. missionaries and revolutionaries) is phenomenal.
Tune in next week as Yascha explains the devastating importance of ignoring this concept for climate change.
Great piece, both in recognizing things we should keep and areas where EA goes astray.
I'm a little emotionally reactive about EA (and utilitarianism in general); I feel like the movement is basically a continual mantra of "you're not good enough" which tends to upset me. So take what I say below with that in mind.
One of my biggest frustrations is that I feel like EA smuggles in the idea of *what is moral* under the idea that they are simply talking about how *effective* one's altruism is. It's not "Effective [Altruism as Defined by You]." It's "Effective [Altruism as Defined by Us]." So it seems innocuous; who could argue with the idea that we should try to avoid inefficiency in our giving?
But by "efficient" they mean achieving quantitatively more good of the type they favor. If I favor donating to a local music school that provides scholarships for poor students who couldn't afford either lessons or instruments, they don't really care if I do that effectively or not; the goal itself is a waste because I could "so much more good" by donating the same amount of money to, say, mosquito nets. Go mind your own business I don't have to do *your* idea of good. It's not *immoral* for me to decide to give in a different manner, any more than it's immoral for me to decide that there *is* a difference between a child drowning as I walk by and a child dying of hunger 10,000 miles away (there is a difference, and it has to do with knowledge of the context and the solution, the extremely short timeframe over which the intervention takes place, the total lack of intermediation...and on and on; there's a difference and it's not small, and the fact that an EA thinks there's not simply indicates to me how distorted their premises are).
I agree. And I think Yascha likely does too, as this seems quite close to what he calls "Providentialism," or as Bob Dylan put it, "And you never ask questions when God's on your side." Ironically, those of us singing along were sure we had "right" on our side.
That view is very hard to escape, so I think the antidote must be to take small steps and change direction any time things aren't getting better. Of course that won't completely solve the problem you're pointing to, but it will derail the worst excesses, and that's about the best result I have any hope for.
I don't think believers in EA would say that there is NO difference between a child drowning as you walk by and a child dying of hunger far away. Obviously, the differences you point out are real. What I think they would suggest is that both lives have equal value, and we should consider that fact as we think about our lives and our giving.
Certainly, a belief in EA doesn't mean that you can't support a local music school, or, to bring up a different example, eat occasionally at a nice restaurant. Believing in EA doesn't require a vow of poverty and channeling all the money that you would have spent to GiveWell.
But I think it does ask us to look at our lives and to ask whether we could do more to live by our values, both with how we spend our time and our money. To share with you how I have answered the latter question, about 40% of my philanthropic giving now goes to GiveWell, another 30% goes to my temple and an organization where I'm on the board, and another 30% goes to other organizations I feel a connection to (either because they are local, I believe in their causes, or friends have asked me to give).
And while I think it's fine for others to give differently, I do think it's important and valuable to be thoughtful about one's giving and whether it reflects the kind of person you want to be. Ultimately, I think EA is really just about putting the same energy and attentiveness about how one gives one's money away as the energy and attentiveness you put into spending or investing it for oneself.
That's the side of EA that I'd like to see emphasized. I think there are two big reasons EA emphasizes giving 10%: 1) because it gets people who don't give very much a way to increase it with a concrete goal, and 2) it puts a fence on the logical conclusion of EA, which is that I should give every cent that I don't need to sustain myself (and maybe my family, provided that a family isn't somehow calculated to be a less "good" use of my resources). There's a little bit of what uncharitably would be called a motte and bailey, and what probably more charitably would be considered using EA principles like a tool and not like a bible. If EA is simply an ideal to be strived towards generally, but never achieved and not even really tried to achieve, that's great; there are a lot of useful ideals that work in that manner (e.g., the golden rule).
However, there seem to be a few people (small numbers, but highly visible examples of leaders in this movement) who take it as a bible. That's where long-termism comes from. Where over-optimizing giving comes from. You (the general you) want to work on / donate to AI alignment? Great. Do that. Stop pretending it's altruistic. Admit that it's both an interest of yours -- that you find it fun and engaging -- and that it's also self-preservation. It's like saying that I'm altruistically trying to reduce nuclear armament, or altruistically trying to increase crop yields.
Two thoughts related to this.
One - The Shirky Principle: Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” In other words, organizations, like parasites, must be careful not to destroy the very problems they were designed to solve, lest they find themselves without purpose, meaning and work. Related to this, activism is a thing for productive people to do temporarily as they take time off from their productive endeavors. Making a career out of it, or having nothing better to do, corrupts the social benefit which should always be to attempt to achieve some specific outcome and then be done.
Two - The two moral extremes: egalitarianism, and egoism – the view that the system either takes care of everyone or everyone should be free and expected to take care of themselves – have defined the primary ideological battles throughout most of modernity. However, what everyone seems to get wrong is that the design of this Greatest Nation on God's Green Earth that is described as a democratic capitalist constitutional republic is one that leveraged the realization in common human behavior that the latter best derives the former with only a bit of oversight to prevent too much consolidated control... and the resulting tyranny that always results from too much consolidated control.
In other words spending so much energy to engineer outcomes to meet some utopian vision of perfect egalitarianism is counter to both human nature and ultimately causes more egoism and resulting inequity. Actual beneficial activism if the honest goal is a more equal society (and I doubt that is the actual goal for many so committed to their activist identity) would be to advocate for more individual opportunity... paths to economic achievement and general self-sufficiency. A good example of how this might look is activism to retool the public education system to adopt a mission for preparing each and every student for his/her next step toward an economic self-sufficient life and the increased social status that derives from it. The problem with this for the activist is that achieving this goal means that the activist loses their own pursuit of status while also causing more competition having enabled more graduates to achieve at higher levels.
And then this gets us back full circle to the root cause of the problem... that activism is a career and industry and not a temporary endeavor to achieve a specific outcome.
I think what we need in this country is to force all non-profit corporations to establish a mission and goals that have to be adhered to and reported every year, and their non-profit status revoked if failing to both comply with their mission and/or materially fail to achieve their goals. This would prevent mission drift and the Shirky Principle and cause fewer people to defend their NGO career and seek productive work instead.
Your thought #1 is extremely important for analyzing the far left today. DEI comes to mind quickly. But Kendi etc. also spend a lot of time deprecating "respectability politics" by which they actually mean taking responsibility, which is how they themselves succeeded. This has actually been going on since 1965 when Johnson's most ambitious equality proposal was derailed by the, as yet unnamed, Black Power Movement. It might have put them out of job.
Nice! So many nuggets in that comment that I shall cut and paste it to remember them all.
A few thoughts:
- First, the limited version of effective altruism (best embodied by GiveWell) is obviously right. If you're going to give money away philanthropically or spend time on causes, make some effort to give it to those who can make the most of it or to work on causes that are going to do the most good. The idea that somehow SBF's failings somehow undermined this idea is silly.
- Second, that doesn't mean that you have to limit your money to supporting causes like GiveWell. It's wonderful to save lives, but there are other things that matter in the world too. A world where everyone focused only on saving lives' at the expense of the arts, cultivating community, etc. would be a lesser place. It's wonderful that the world had folks like Paul Farmer, and it would be a better place if there were many more like him. At the same time, a world made up of only Paul Farmers would not be such a wonderful world.
- Third, and this is point of Yascha's piece that I most agree with, it's important to know oneself. Spending money, time, and energy on pursuits that aren't philanthropic (or that don't maximize one's philanthropy) is not wrong. But it should be balanced that money, time, and energy that are spent on these causes (at least across societies), and we need to be careful lest this become a justification for hedonism and self-aggrandizement.
I agree. Few, if any, people will ever be purely altruistic, and pushing for the impossible always backfires. Best to allow for quite a bit of self-interest.
Thanks for another fascinating essay. I've completely agreed with your analysis since the late 1960s when I first thought about practicing effective altruism. However, I'd like to share a way in which it can still fail, and explain why this comment is part of a 20-year, last-ditch effort to succeed at it. Wish me luck.
As a senior at UC Berkeley studying math, I took a grad course in finite-state machines (the theory of computers, including AI). My professor, who awarded me an A+ for the course, suggested I go into software and earn a fortune. As was common then, I believed money would corrupt me, so I taught science at a rural middle school instead.
Teaching, given my introversion, proved too difficult. So, I pursued a Ph.D. in economics as a way to apply math to politics. However, I only found a highly ineffective environmentalist job at Berkeley’s lab. Out of the blue, I received a consulting offer that more than tripled my income, and I discovered that money did not corrupt me — my car is 23 years old, and I still find it difficult to spend money. Perhaps your psychology rule should be: Those who think they won't be corrupted, will be, and vice versa.
Now: Why is this comment my attempt at effective altruism?
Since 2003, I’ve studied what’s going wrong with left politics and experimented online with how to fix it. Then on June 30, 2020 I discovered Persuasion:
“... This is why I have grown convinced that we need to build a new community of thinkers, activists, and citizens that is committed to defending and reinvigorating the values of a free and fair society. That is the goal of Persuasion.” —Yascha Mounk
Seeing that you were an effective activist and, very surprisingly, also analyzed things scientifically, I decided Persuasion was my best hope. As a political activist and as a consultant, I’ve always been willing to do whatever was needed (e.g. buying a mimeograph machine and producing thousands of leaflets for the fledgling Berkeley Citizens Action), so I naively thought there would be some way to help out at Persuasion.
After all, its goal was to build a “community of thinkers, activists, and citizens … “ I had the skills, the motivation, time, and a willingness to do whatever was necessary. And I still do.
Despite having consulted for major institutions like the World Bank and the UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change, as well as medium-sized corporations (while never once hanging out my shingle to let it be known that I was available) I've found the bureaucracy within the realm of political altruism to be surprisingly perplexing. It seems that even with your profound insights, achieving success in effective political altruism remains a challenge.
I assure you, I've explored every avenue I can imagine. My strongest suspicion is that my lack of journalistic experience is the obstacle. Regardless, I'm enthusiastic about your new weekly essay blog, and I'm hopeful it might provide a way to connect.
Each week I download and carefully study your essay, striving to contribute a constructive comment. I also try to encourage others in the hopes of inspiring some sense of community. We seem to think about things almost identically, and I’m sure there must be some small way in which I could help the Persuasion community succeed.
In fact, I still believe, as you wrote on July 5, 2020, that “a bunch of us … really [could] make a difference to the future of free societies in the United States and around the world,” if we form a community."
PS. This might be seen as "Providentialism." However, as long as we don't "dispense with the requirements of ordinary morality," and strive for constant progress rather than revolution, I believe we can remain safe from excess hubris.
The first time I heard of effective altruism on a couple of podcasts that interviewed MacAskill, the core insight seemed so reasonable. Sure, there were bits that seemed very collegiate and abstract, but that’s just philosophy, I said.
But the commitment to give practically and effectively, and to try to overcome cognitive biases seemed smart.
So, at a family holiday gathering, I tried to chat about it with a relative who works for Guidestar, the organization that collects info on and rates charities. It seemed like a topic that was perfect for him, and that he’d have good insights to add. He became very uncomfortable and quickly changed the subject. I sensed that I had stumbled into being “that guy” at the family party.
I obviously was missing a big part of the picture. When the stuff about SBF came out soon afterward and how weirdly tech bro-ish EA had become, I understood my relative’s polite refusal to engage. Ugh. I was merely naive and lightly informed, but he feared I was one of them.
As Yascha indicates here, there’s a core insight worth saving but the “brand” of EA is probably forever tarnished by the weirdness. No wonder my relative wanted nothing to do with it.
In the end, it’s probably best to simply use something like Guidestar and other resources to give sensibly.
And it’s also important to constantly check one’s actions for delusions and self serving bias. The history of development aid and NGO giving is marred by arrogance, a preference for showy but ineffective projects, and self dealing. Along comes EA to combat some of those tendencies, and ends up with the same self inflicted harms.
Sometimes, trying to be a decent, effective human is like playing a game of never-ending whack-a-mole against ourselves. We have a hard time getting out of our own way and not creating ironic situations left and right.
Scott Alexander has a long response to this piece that is worth reading:
https://substack.com/@astralcodexten/note/c-70099973
Altruism may be considered from two perspectives: the genetic balance between the will to be and the, albeit still selfish, will to belong, and the abstract ideal of altruism as a cultural phenomenon, though the two perspectives are inseparably entwined. Organic empathy declines inversely with distance, with the decline of perceived relevance to the near world of personal interactions. By contrast, the ideal of altruism is a cultural abstraction of the organic allowing inclusiveness beyond the intuitive boundaries of group solidarity. Charity is said to begin at home. Altruism as an artifact of cultural abstraction is considered by advocates of effective altruism as transcendent of distance, whether that of physical relationship or of times to come beyond the scope of the present moment.
Characteristics of heritable altruism are found most clearly in the social insects and work their way up through degrees of behavioral complexity to the level of the higher animals, including the great apes and humans. Human altruism, in the sense of genetically determined propensities, is presumed to extend no further than close kinship and to those with which we have bonded organic relationships, i.e., one on one close associations and mutual dependencies. Such genetic propensities are reinforced by the societal structures built around these principles of human nature.
Human culture may be said to expand symbiotically with that of human consciousness. Inclusiveness may be seen as expansive of security, co-option through cultural exchange more efficient than war and allies useful in confronting still greater threats. However, altruism, in the organic since of emotive compulsion anterior to reason, may be limited to groups not much exceeding one hundred individuals, such as those of closely affiliated families that may have shared a preagricultural territory. Such groups would have been characterized both by competition for status and by cooperation in pursuit of the welfare of the group, and by fierce insularity regarding strangers and other groups, though such insularity not precluding the possibility of trade, exchange of females, and cooperation in matters of mutual interest.
Societies expand beyond the limits of the insular group by the abstraction of the innate characteristics of altruism, by creation of the cultural artifacts of the ideals of altruism upon which concepts of inclusiveness necessary to the creation and maintenance of civilizations depend.
But the strength of civilization is built upon the strength of its constituent elements. The original altruistic group has been replaced by the community from which the state arises. Within the community the organic and the abstraction of the organic are strongly combined in the interest of mutual benefit. Socially beneficial effects of altruistic abstraction are complementary of selfish genetic interests, are allowed of genetic principles, but move beyond genetic determinism to enlarge the scope of individual will, of human causality. But the capacity of abstract altruism is limited by its relationship to organic altruism. The ideal is an extension of the principles of the human condition. The construct cannot escape the nature of its materials. Civilization is built on a blueprint suggestive of its range of possibilities, and while a player of itself, is built upward from the nature of community cohesiveness. Inclusiveness cannot outrun the strength of its constituencies.
The predisposition toward charity naturally begins with the security of the individual and that of his immediate dependencies, spreads outward with affluency, is first of proximity: a friend or family in need, a beggar on the street, a project of local improvement that begs assistance. The concepts of effective altruism miss the point entirely, the point of charity being first of personal involvement in the close at hand. To give on impulse, to spend one’s time in community projects where other’s efforts are perhaps sufficiently employed, or to guild the lily by contributing to one’s affluent alma mater may be seen as inefficient as compared to cost ratios generated by mathematical models based on utilitarian concepts. But community involvement is the bedrock of the democratic process and the source of national vitality, and contribution, whether by money or constructive engagement, to the community at hand is perhaps the most noble and effective of altruistic endeavors. The end is not a utopian world but to conserve and expand the good we have by mutual effort.
The consequence of charitable contributions at distance are subject to misdirection or may have unintended consequences. Contributions made within one’s own community require the conscientious sensitivity of the giver to corruption or unintended consequences or the relative measure of success of initiatives where relevant information may be readily accessible. Such requires community involvement. To think of oneself as charitable when giving at a distance requires little personal involvement beyond commitment to the algorithm. Contributions outside of one’s community are important but should be of lower priority until potentials for local improvements have been addressed. One is reminded of missionary movements where congregations were urged to contribute to the salvation of the benighted in exotic places on the other side of their familiar world while local causes were ignored or seemed less worthy. Much of charity is about the gratification of the giver, and those directed by abstract ideals elevated by association with those ideals or, as in the case of effective altruism, made to feel more cleaver by adoption of the complexities of theory and more pure by the light of mathematical certainty.
Utilitarian concepts fail when ‘the good’ is assumed to be universally attainable by top-down distributive directives or by efforts to establish equality of outcome at the expense of the pursuit of excellence. Attempts to guide charity by altruistic abstractions divorced from their organic basis may fail to meet their stated ends. Concepts of effective altruism often fail by having mistaken the model from which the concept was constructed for the thing itself. The problem of simplistic, overly reductive explanations of complex issues is that policies become tailored to the problems described in terms of their simplification, those abstracted models, useful as they often may be, having insufficient basis in reality. The real problem is often irreducibly complex and exists within an ecosystem of complexities; or, despairing of understanding, the symptom comes to be regarded as its cause. If the problem of malaria may be significantly reduced by netting, why have local communities thus afflicted not addressed the issue? Such might give pause to those who would solve the problems of those communities by addressment from afar.
The most effective altruism may be that of addressment of issues of greatest proximity, and the understanding of complex problems, while often informed by detachment, requiring proximate engagement. Charity may be most effective as the diffusion of surplus from productive communities, patterns to be emulated by other communities both proximate and at distance. The extended abstraction of altruism, of charity, from that which most immediately confronts our empathetic awareness to that of utilitarian formulary would seem to dehumanize the concept of what it is that we owe to each other.
Yascha, brilliant and really enjoyed this "deep dive" essay.
Thank you for your thoughtful essay. A related question I've been thinking about over the last few years: where does this reasoning leave donating to causes that are not the most important ones around. I mean donating to things like the arts, or local neighborhood projects. Does all our available income and time have to go towards the most acute problems?
" He was 27 when he founded his crypto exchange, started to get seriously rich, and became accustomed to his lavish lifestyle. He was 31 on the day he was apprehended for stealing from his customers at a massive scale."
Did he "start to get seriously rich" before he started stealing at a massive scale, or is stealing at a massive scale how he got seriously rich? My impression was it's the latter, but I'm not certain.
I think it's the former Unset. Pretty much if you were big into crypto early, you made a ton (at least "on paper"). Now, I think making a ton on in crypto is, at best, the moral equivalent of making a ton gambling. But it's certainly possible to do so without stealing. And since I believe everyone who deposited money with SBF has actually been made whole (although I'm not certain about that), I think that suggests that Yascha had it right.
Gordon writes, "Making a ton on in crypto is, at best, the moral equivalent of making a ton gambling. But it's certainly possible to do so without stealing."
Apropos of that, a true story. I'm 74 now (and still single); this happened around 30 years ago:
I'd picked up a guy in San Francisco, and we were on our way to my place for an intimate encounter -- but I was a bit wary; he seemed quite rough around the edges. As we walked from the car to my apartment, I asked him where he was from. He said, "Cleveland."
Then he added, in a low, gravelly voice, "And I want you to know something: I'm Jewish -- and Jews don't steal."
"Really? That's interesting," I responded. "I'm also Jewish! But how about Meyer Lansky?"
His instant retort -- delivered in a solemn snarl:
"Meyer LANsky didn't HAVE to steal!" ;-)