Tom Scocca: This piece is weirdly tortured by the inability to get past the fact that "effective altruism" is an ideology cooked up five minutes ago by broadly ignorant dumbasses (minoring in eugenics) and you can throw it all in the trash without giving up on the concept of making altruistic efforts effective

This piece is weirdly tortured by the inability to get past the fact that "effective altruism" is an ideology cooked up five minutes ago by broadly ignorant dumbasses (minoring in eugenics) and you can throw it all in the trash without giving up on the concept of making altruistic efforts effective

Opinion | Effective Altruism Is Flawed. But What’s the Alternative?www.nytimes.com The movement can’t answer our deepest moral questions, but it still has wisdom to offer.

love to write an article about effective altruism without showing even a passing understanding of its place in the history of philanthropic fads

Gonna start a new religion called "The Only Actually Correct Religion." Two years later, in the NYT: "Yes, the abuses that followed were shocking. But its critics have yet to explain what could be more correct than the only actually correct religion."

Ineffective altruism? Like what? Being kind and shit?

‘I handed out paper towels to hurricane victims, and the intolerant left STILL hates me. Being nice doesn’t work!’

Exactly! I been saying this

Like giving tens of millions of dollars to Harvard or the Met

It’s just WWJD rationalization for the online atheist set.

More specifically, it's Prosperity Gospel for atheists.

So much this. It's a more gentle alternative to the shittiness and inherent clownishness of objectivism, but the results are the same- Telling rich people to keep doing exactly what they're doing anyway because it's actually the right thing to do.

prosperity gospel for atheists

Better

“What’s the sensible alternative to this half-assed plan I wrote on the back of the receipt I found on the floor of my car?”

If you believe “national socialism” is bad…

Very funny

Frankly, I don't see any alternative after you turn "How can my money and effort do the most good?" into "Fuck poor people, I'm just going to do what I want."

Here's a gift link: www.nytimes.com/2024/06/17/o...

Opinion | Effective Altruism Is Flawed. But What’s the Alternative?www.nytimes.com The movement can’t answer our deepest moral questions, but it still has wisdom to offer.

Thank you

Thank you!!

Driving drunk to work is flawed, but what's the alternative?

There really is a dril for everything.

effective altruism is a Harry Potter fanfiction writ large bsky.app/profile/los7...

Also Idk if you care about geopolitics but eliezer yudkowski has Opinions About Worm. It’s probably what inspired him to write his Harry Potter fanfiction. There’s a sentient ai in the book, and a plot line which essentially morphs into “effective altruism.”

& im not joking shatterzone.substack.com/p/rationalis...

Rationalist Harry Potter and the Collapse of Cryptoshatterzone.substack.com I promise you are not ready for how stupid this gets.

"The only good fan fiction is HPMOR" is a red flag the size of a bedsheet.

There are papers that show that effective altruism is a modern form if facism but so far I only heard of their existence. Need to track them down and read them.

well even in the fanfiction effective altruism is first introduced by Voldemort so like???

It kinda tracks, ngl

This clod in particular is evidence that homeschooling misses the formative learning and growth of getting mocked for being an idiot in grade school. The corollary benefit of getting in a couple of fights I think would have in this case provided a bit of desperately needed humility.

*coked up ideology

and the “big successes” that kicked it off, mosquito nets and deworming pills, were revealed to be largely statistical scams

Wait, really? God damn it.

“Scams” is strong, but not nearly as cost-effective as they looked in early studies. (Nets are great, but once theyre widespread people start wasting them and mosquitos change habits to evade them. Deworming pills have side effects and do not dramatically help kids who aren’t dramatically infected).

the whole push behind them was “these cost pennies and do so much good!” but most of the good came not from just giving a pallet of pills, but with all the additional doctors and training and monitoring regimens which… cost a lot! that’s why i called it a “statistical scam”

Yeah, that makes sense. And also, argh.

Also there were already deworming pills available to people, but they were mostly only taking them when they were... infected. The Altruism! fad was just giving them out to all the children whether or not they did. (In at least one case without telling the parents, which nearly ended very badly.)

The actual idea of focusing on the most impactful ways to save lives and trying to create a uniform measure of moral exchanges is interesting but they use it to speculate about completely unrealistic nonsense in a way that can’t be fact checked and allows for infinite self-dealing

Yeah the path from "buy malaria nets" to "amass enormous wealth and stock the gene pool with my issue" was quite the slingshot.

Answering the question to: "How can I tell these goddamn bums on the street to fuck off and still not feel like a complete shit-heel?"

Silicon Valley seem obsessed with ‘value for money’ for philanthropy: let’s spend 3c per person to get Vit A pills for Africans and ignore the poor in our own towns. I’m not saying this is wrong, it just ignores vital community bonds that ought to be made.

you could end your post after the word 'money' and the point would stand. even in general economies, but especially in philanthropy, a strictly transactional approach of 'value for money' misses volumes of the human engagement.

The real purpose of effective altruism, especially paired with longtermerism, is to give people with inherently immoral amounts of money an alternative to the clown show of Objectivism so that they can feel "moral" about doing the horrible shit they're already doing.

Also the idea that something taking place among some of the most wealthy people in the world can be called a “movement” that can be “joined” speaks to how starved for mass political movements our era is

oh, the fun little bad faith rhetorical trick used by Peterson, Carlson, et al. "Sure, this thing is bad but *I'm not aware of* anything to the contrary. Therefore they don't exist, and if the strawmen I create are operating logically my preferred outcomes are the only conclusions."

the alternative is solidarity. check out "Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea" By Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/740355... interview of with the authors on majority report: www.youtube.com/live/TCRn_GU...

Solidarity by Leah Hunt-Hendrix, Astra Taylor: 9780593701249 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Bookswww.penguinrandomhouse.com A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • From renowned organizers and activists Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor, comes the first in-depth examination of Solidarity—not just as a rallying...

Taxing the rich isn't even considered as an alternative nowadays, I see

Effective altruism seems awfully Objectivist adjacent.

It's aimed at the same end result but is a little more refined so it's less obviously evil and a *bit* more internally consistent. But you're right, it's a replacement for objectivism for people with a modicum of self-awareness.

“Effective” and “altruism” are just synonyms for good. People calling their movement “effective altruism” are just calling themselves good, twice. See also “rationalism” (in the online sense, not the previous philosophical sense)

It's just using utilitarianism to convince yourself that you really *should* have all the money in existence because then you could do so much more good once you get there, and that actually helping people isn't as useful as going to Mars.

The former premier of my province literally said, “…in order to be a compassionate and generous society, you must be a prosperous one first.” A phrase that promises to kick the can down the road indefinitely.

It's a grand liberal tradition.

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