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Great piece by @xriskology.bsky.social on how the effective altruism cult has helped destroy actual philanthropy - with dangerous and deadly results for many people in need:

Nick Beckstead, noted longtermist and "effective altruist,” just comes out and says it: "But it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal."

And another: bsky.app/profile/fain...

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-...

Deleted an initial post drawing a distinction between "normal donation optimization" (Givewell, Givedirectly), and the EA movement since they came up with those which seem more or less good (certainly better than gifts to alma maters) But this piece is interesting and make me rethink a bit.

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)!

I used to work for non-profits in an LMIC (Cambodia), so I'm sensitive to the point of this piece. But how do we assess "good philanthropy" without meaningful (and standardized, on some level) methods and evaluation. For now I just use givedirectly, but I'm open to being persuaded of a better path