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gjm comments on Mark Zuckerberg plans to give away 99% of his facebook wealth over his lifetime - Less Wrong
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Comments (50)
Effective altruists care about effectiveness. If the claim we're assessing is "Zuckerberg is only pretending that this money will be used to do good; actually it's a pure tax-avoidance scam and it'll all end up being spent on his family" then sure, effective altruists care. But if it's "Zuckerberg really is putting all this money into trying to improve the world, but his motive for doing so is that he wants to look good" then no, effective altruists shouldn't care why he's doing it, only what he's doing.
... But: our visibility of "what he's doing" probably isn't very good, so our estimates of "why he's doing it" may actually factor into our guesses about what will actually end up being done with the money. (E.g., if what he mostly cares about is looking good for giving away a lot of money, he doesn't have much incentive to make sure it really does have good effects. On the other hand, if he cares about looking good for saving lots of lives, he has the incentive.) So to that extent the critics may have a point.
I remark that the last one is from the Daily Mail. If the Mail printed a story saying that the sky is blue, I'd look out the window to check it hadn't actually turned green. (The Atlantic has a better reputation. I know nothing at all about the Irish Examiner.)
Our reaction to his donation isn't only about
guesses about what will actually end up being done with the moneyis also about shapping cultural values. If the press reacts negatively to billionaires giving away their wealth that disincentivies further donations from billionaires.I agree. (And, in the other direction but I think probably much less important, if the press responds with uncritical adulation when a billionaire gives the impression that he's giving away lots of money, without anyone checking what he's actually doing with it and whether it'll do any good, that incentivizes donating billionaires not to bother making their donations actually do much good.)
The articles that were linked above don't do that. If you would want to do that you would look at Mark Zuckerberg's past record with his donations towards education. That would need actual work on the part of the journalists. It's much easier to do the kind of criticism where you focus on the future and speak about possible future problems.
It worthwhile for journalists to check in a year what the Chen Zuckerberg Initiative actually did but now it's time to celebrate.
Neither did I claim they did.
The first article definitely mentions his past education donations.
Effective Altruists & Consequentalists tend to be vain with plausible deniability, always making a show of their set of beliefs, coming into the room loudly and attracting attention always repeating "effectiveness" "consequences". It gets annoying. I wish some would have taste.
It sounds as if you're complaining about something someone's written in this thread, but I'm having trouble working out what (and what you dislike about it, other than maybe a more general grievance against consequentialism or EAism). Would you care to clarify?
On the face of it your complaint is that EAs are attention-seeking and try to hijack other discussions onto their favoured hobby-horse. But I don't see that that happened here. helldalgo mentioned a common criticism of Zuckerberg's recent actions and disagreed with it, no part of which seems unreasonable; LessWrong introduced the topic of EA but doesn't identify as an EA so nothing s/he wrote can possibly be an example of what you describe; I corrected what looked to me like a wrong statement about EAs, which seems like an obviously unobjectionable thing to do.
What am I missing?