Open Thread, April 27-May 4, 2014

NancyLebovitz

You know the drill - If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

And, while this is an accidental exception, future open threads should start on Mondays until further notice.

You know the drill - If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

And, while this is an accidental exception, future open threads should start on Mondays until further notice.

this piece is about whether earning to give is the best way to be altruistic.

but I think a big issue is what altruism is. do most people mostly agree on what's altruistic or good? have effective altruists tried to determine what real people or organizations want?

you don't want to push "altruism given hidden assumptions X, Y and Z that most people don't agree with." for example, in Ben Kuhn's critique he talks about a principle of egalitarianism. But I don't think most people think of "altruism" as something that applies equally to the guy next door and to a person in Africa. Maybe smart idealistic Anglophone folks in the 2010s do. And some people think religion has equal or greater importance than physical human life does. So if you can convert a person to Christianity then you've done a huge good. And abortions and adultery are grave sins and so forth. Also, making political improvements is not a core part of EA.

maybe you should talk about apolitical egalitarian secular altruism.

but there is also another thing effective altruists favor that I think is clearly good: they use evidence. We do want evidence-based altruism. Kinda like evidence-based policy.

I think once you get beyond apolitical secular egalitarian altruism there are lots of different possibilities and it's as hard to figure out where you stand as it is to maximize impact. so maybe we should add something like reflection-based altruism.

I wonder if you can have more political impact through "earning to give" to political causes or through direct political involvement. the answer may vary with the type of cause. We might include the three types of economically left (e.g. socialism), economically neutral (e.g. abortion) and economically right (e.g. abolish estate taxes)

I do find it disconcerting just how little I see EA talk about changing society. The charity sector's budget in any given country is ridiculously smaller than the government budget; EA advocates talk about directed giving as the best way to change the world, but this appears to me to be deliberately ignoring systemic problems in favour of enshrining personal charity as a substitute for government.

"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist." (Hélder Câmara)

(I realise Singer's original ideas are all about systemic change.)

2ChristianKl12y

The Swiss EA people did try to get a referenda passed. They engage with the political system. Getting university cafeterias to be vegan is a political agenda. It's just not the classic political agenda that you find in the mainstream political debate. 21st century politics is strange. The story that TV news media tells is still so strong that young people seem to think that politics is about fighting the battles of their parents instead of fighting their own battles. [...] That's no effective catch phrase. You know, EAs actually care about effectiveness ;) [...] This is kind of funny. At the Community Weekend in Berlin Jonas spoke about EA movement building and how one should use the label that most effective for a community. Calling it Effective Altruism is a PR move. [...] I think that largely depends on your skill set. The core political goal should be to get decent people into positions of political power. Maybe some of the people who do today EA movement building also build the kind of skills in the process that they need to run political campaigns in 10 years. Of course at that point they need other EAs to fund their campaigns (at least in the US).

2Jayson_Virissimo12y

That the effects of abortion are economically neutral seems like an extraordinary claim. What kind of evidence did you have in mind? If those anti-abortion people that hang out on campus are right, then roughly 50 million abortions have taken place in America since Roe v. Wade. How could an extra 50 million people have a neutral effect on the economy?