Post

Effective altruism seems to contrast with "affective altruism" or what Catherine Liu has designated "virtue hoarding." Maybe the rich should just pay some damn taxes? Maybe the state should play a greater role in assuring material well-being? Tax the rich! Feed the poor! #Medicare4All #UBI

Ahh, effective altruists, the world's most verbose wallet inspectors

Not aligned with Ayn Rand, who detested the idea of altruism.

Interesting. It really does sound a lot like Scientology, both in method and mythology. The 10^45 billion future sentients made me think of thetans, though the timeline is inverted.

"i'll help anyone and everyone in need! As long as I never have to check whether I'm actually helping them"

That’s good and thank you for doing it. I just don’t see the argument for criticizing people who are also donating and sharing but thinking about how they can stretch their contributions further by, e.g., considering people in very poor countries.

Some people really do need Jesus

This is one of the key points that EAs have traditionally made.

There is a great book called *Progress* by Samuel Miller McDonald about how narratives of progress have been used throughout history to rationalize/justify economic parasitism. Often a utopian future w/o a due date--same with EA--is part of that narrative. It was integral to all versions of fascism.

Taking his reasoning even more extreme saving a billionaire's life is even more important, given the influence they can wield. And we can see where that has gotten us.

I can’t believe this trash is what earns you a PhD at Rutgers these days. 🙄

It's such an easy argument to invert. Almost no one can meaningfully and directionally influence the far future, but what you can do is increase the future's options by increasing the diversity of the people that arrive there. Basic ecology.

fucking ew. god longtermism is such a cancer

“What if our sense of generosity reflected our racist priors? What would that be like?”

just comes out and says it ... 13 years ago. yeesh

Lol welcome to the party y’all

Altruism. They keep using this word. I do not think it means what they think it means.

“Everyone knows the mighty have never fallen!”

Seems like simply making the case for taking care of your own first, which connects with a certain percentage, would've sounded less sterile and inhumane.

This sentiment dovetails nicely with Larry Summers' infamous "observation" that Africa is not polluted enough. Neither the people nor the environment of the global south are "worth" what those in the north are worth.

"The future" (phenomenologically) is necessarily a function of our own expectations and biases. bsky.app/profile/shau...

bsky.app/profile/rgat...

It's especially telling that their takeaway from the fact that "richer countries have substantially more innovation, and their workers are much more economically productive" is that we should ignore suffering in poor countries, rather than try to turn more poor countries into rich countries

6 billion people never fly The jet set is set on destruction

*Padme voice* ...for good, right? They can influence the far future for good??

Published at the same time as MattY's Bangladesh workers rationally don't want safety at their factory piece.

bsky.app/profile/ebha...

Galbraith’s Law

This is disgusting.

There is no doubt that “people in rich countries are better able to influence the far future,” but all the evidence is that they influence it in disastrous ways. So we should be doing all we can to reduce the influence of rich countries.

The effective part is the mass murder for more money while the altruist part is not caring about the consequences. bsky.app/profile/fain...

"We should prioritize saving people like me from this crisis" says member of group most responsible for said crisis.

Fuck me, that's disgusting.

The people I know doing reforestation work in the Amazon foothills in Ecuador are probably doing more and better to influence the far future than some rich guy wanking over Culture novels.

Nobody knows which countries will be rich or poor in 200 years

You can get a PhD for any bullshit now

BUT ALSO if he's all for housing-first and everyone carrying narcan in rich countries to save those lives, at least that position would be consistent. Bets?

The people who are most convinced that they know how to benefit humanity in a million years seem to represent some of the greatest threats to humanity today. Weird how that works. Also, the hubris is unbelievable.

The ghost of Charles I, richest man of richest country, begs to differ

This is absolutely one of the worst things I have read in my life. Totally abhorrent.

EA has always been IGMFY compressed down to two characters.

Extermination of "poor people" is a moral requirement under that belief system, if it helps the "rich people". For instance, by ending all humanitarian aid to Africa, or letting Gazans be slaughtered and starved. It's also pretty much functionally identical to racial supremacy.

But EAs are strongly advocating for slowing down, regulating or pausing AI development. That’s probably the biggest emphasis at the moment.

Yes, exactly. It seems obvious that striving to provide a decent living standard worldwide would unleash far more human potential and therefore have a much greater positive outcome on the “far future.”

... kid who already has the resources available to ID them, it's clear that the RATIONAL expenditure of humanity's wealth is to give all marginal wealth in the rich areas (i.e. what isn't needed for subsistence) should go to the poor. A worldview so easy to knock cracks in is worthless

thank you for sharing this

I think this underplays how much Singulatarian weirdness was in the community all along. repository.uantwerpen.be/docman/irua/...

ICYI, Mary Townsend wrote a terrific, searching essay for us in 2023 that touches these issues (it's very good on the seductive psychological appeal of "solving" the terrifying questions of freedom and ethical obligation by externalizing and quantifying the latter) www.thebulwark.com/p/effective-...

I guess it makes sense that these are often the same people scared to death of the paperclip factory AI; it's the same thought process of mindless statmaxxing that leads you to conclude that only lives in rich countries matter. They just picked the stat they're maxxing in a selfish manner.

Measuring the impact of philanthropic giving seems sort of unquestionably good. Like, there's a lot of giving that does nothing. I take the point that Givewell cuts down the possibility for a wider range of organization (and that many important things are not measurable)!

Indeed, rich people are much more likely to "influence" the future, if by "influence" you mean "destroy humanity"

Amazing how they've constructed a theory that, by pure coincidence I'm sure, disproportionately aids rich white men. What are the odds?

JFC. I am done with humanity.

how about people in rich countries use considerably more resources and produce more pollution than people in poor countries therefore it is actually better for the planet to save the lives of poor people extending this, if we eradicated billionaires we could meet all our global climate goals

As well as being morally repulsive, the logic fails on its own terms. People in rich countries are vastly more likely to create the killer AI that they fantasise is going to wipe us all out. Ditto for nuclear war, climate change, bioweapons. If anything we need fewer rich people!

The rich have viewed the poor as disposable for thousands of years, and invented numerous excuses to justify shitty behavior, and this asshole is talking about it like a novel concept.

Both morally gross and intellectually lazy and also wrong, nice combo. I wonder how the author feels about "scientific" racism.

1. I can do whatever I want right now. 2. ??? 3. People in the far future derive maximum benefit.

God, there's a load of shit written under the guise of philosophy.

It's enough to drive a person to religion

Damn, we really are just rebranding and rehashing 1920s and 30s fascist ideals, huh? "Sorry honey, but you know how it is... survival of the fittest!" I say as I push the old lady crossing the street into traffic so that I can cross it slightly faster and book it before the scream and crunch.

Why stop at countries? Why not stop at states or counties? If all other things are equal, then why would we even allow red states to vote? They're not contributing to the "rich country" and are only welfare states

EA seems to be a fine argument for more generous immigration policies, moving people from poorer countries to richer countries. In the U.S. (historically) immigrants have thrived. I bet the EA folks say, “No, no, that’s not what we meant!” But it fits their effective altruism model perfectly.

How is it that he wrote that without ever considering trying to lift people in poor countries out of poverty? Oh, it's because he still wants the people in the poor countries to be the industrial base for the rich countries without benefiting from it themselves.

Just neeeever even occurs to him that working to alleviate conditions that impoverish a nation (with programs like USAID) might improve its economic productivity and innovation, and have a bigger impact than, say, whether some billionaire gets his third yacht. Tax the rich. Like a piñata.

Using donations to give me a bigger house so I can host more elaborate sex parties will in the long term broadly save thousands of lives over the next millennium. Sure dude.

“let them eat shit”

What gets my blood boiling is that I quite liked HPMOR And like The way that EA has turned out means that either the dude who WROTE the story didn't understand it, or I didn't understand it, or both.

That was kind of, I once assumed, the POINT of stuff like EA

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops" Stephen Jay Gould in 'The Panda's Thumb' Gould was smarter than the techbros & more humane.

Poor are survivalists. Rich are not. Buying what you need to survive means you are dependent on a system to provide things for you. Money doesn’t mean squat when all the things you are dependent on disappear.

We're bringing Enshittification to Altruism, trying to get the best Return on Investment at the expense of millions of people.

wonder how many normies' lives your average EAer reckons a tech billionaire's life is worth

I feel so blessed to be poor in a rich county because I’m already used to $6.00 gas and no stores within a mile.

Not quite. Givewell disbursed almost $400,000,000 for the 3rd world in 2024. EA's practical focus is far far more 3rd world oriented than conventional philanthropy. (I was going to snarkily ask about what you've done, but I've see you write about drones and the Ukraine. Sincere props for that.)

This is also written in the voice of a bloodless ghoul. Why can’t you see that?

Yeah it is, because Bergstrom spent a good portion of his career advocating for charity for the 3rd world. Which he states in the above note. Heck, he writes in the same dissertation, "...this consideration wouldn’t normally get much weight in deciding which lives to save (p 72)." This is a smear.

What dickheads. The only way to contribute to good outcomes in the far future is to strive hard to make the present as good as it can be.

“Effective” huh? Effective self-altruism more like it

I thought "effective altruism" died as an unlamented scam when SBF got found out. Sadly, it did not...

The assumptions make no sense. Given the time horizon, it's impossible to predict which factor could be meaningful in the future.

This is eugenics, just wrapped in modern language.

Because this philosophy is wrong doesn't make the arguments of P(doom) wrong

Peeling the "effective altruism" sticker off the box and seeing a label for "fascism" underneath My shocked face 🫨

Imagine sayng we should save rich people not poor people and calling that "altruism". Say what you will about objectivism, they were not pretending it was anything other than selfish.

These chuckleheads seem not to have heard of the heat death of the universe.

I mean even at his most absurd moments in Foundation, Asimov wouldn’t have gone this far in his fictional discipline of psychohistory ffs

Torres is a crank who gets as much or more wrong than he does right tbh.

Since it seems very clear that "helping the global poor" is simply no longer a particularly important topic to big EA players - this piece laid it out well: strangecosmos.substack.com/p/the-sad-de...

is EA charity/philanthrophy more skewed towards rich countries than charity/philanthropy in general (or resource allocation in general)? my guess would be that even after longtermist stuff it's probably overall less skewed, not more, but maybe someone with real information can correct this?

yikes

the parallel drawn between people in poor countries and animals in factory farms makes this even worse than it looked from Emile's excerpt, IMO, by a big margin

yeah thats the more straightforward read, plus the other contact @mattweiner19.bsky.social posted

American Universities really just be doling out PhD titles to reductivist eugenicists writing with all the oice and insight of a freshman. I should be surprised, but then I remember Cofnan had a career on 'prestigious' universities.

So we're at the coming out of the closet stage of the story. And for the people that now think to themselves, whew thank God I live in a rich country, that same argument also works at home. The rich are more valuable people and get into the lifeboat first. And that's what they like about EA.

Yes, it also started with Singer’s example of saving a child drowning in a lake. That didn’t include a quick calculation of the kid’s value to the future.