It’s been showing up in eerie conversations I can’t legally share
It’s just rich people lying to themselves to justify doing whatever they wanted to do anyway and pretend it’s somehow in humanity’s long term interests. It’s not, and nothing the rich do ever is.
Effective Altruism is a plausible-sounding framework, but the practitioners are literal insane people. Should you donate a fixed part of your earnings every pay period to the most effective charities? Yes! But after that, it basically all falls apart and suddenly you’re in Yudowsky’s weird sex cult donating money to some weird crypto scheme.
It’s a shallow, pointless ideology for super-rich motherfuckers who need a way to morally justify their tax evasion and the effects of the poverty that their lifestyles and business practices create.
Possibly the scariest cult.
It’s just capitalism and econ101 duct-taped and stapled to utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham is crying.
It’s for psychopath tech bros who’ve got spiders in their brainz.
For example, imagine a myopic billionaire who imagines himself “saving” humanity. If his contributions happen to cause suffering to people alive today, so what? He’s saving “trillions” of people, just in the future. Obviously this means that of all people alive, this billionaire is the only one who really matters. Certainly not Ukrainians who die because he turned off their battlefield communication… hypothetically.
We should have required some basic social science or political science courses in comp sci from the start
Just billionaire bullshit like the rest of the TESCREAL movement
To me it just means donating money for mosquito nets, vitamin a supplements, and other “boring” ideas that have a high impact without costing a lot, and doing it through companies that have low overhead costs, so as large a fraction of my donations go to the ones who need it.
But I reckon from the replies to this post that people feel it’s been hijacked by the super rich to feel better about themselves?
Tangent: I went to a Rotary Club meeting once, and it was just a bunch of rich people patting each other on the back for being nice to the poors.
Oh yeah, isn’t that the point of rotary, to be a club for internal admiration?
they are enormously genorous for not just ending the homeless problem with mass execution
Sounds like post-modern Western BS. Altruism/prosociality/solidarity are already words, the “effective” just makes it sound like something a scammer would say.
To me it always sounded like victim blaming TBH. Some poor people don’t deserve to be helped, so us effective altruists (who do things to make people poorer) will weigh their souls and help those who want to be helped.
This is worth a listen for some background on how EA thinking has been influencing the AI world:
https://podcastaddict.com/better-offline/episode/235206311
Short version is that it’s a cult that believes that they are about to bring about a god, and need to ensure they are the ones in control.
Tricle down economics with a different name.
I think that they face a fundamental problem in Hume’s guillotine, where trying to rigorously define “the best” outcomes can lead to strange results when done in an echo chamber. This is best exemplified when taken to the extremes, e.g. the Zizians, an offshoot group of EA who have been rightly disavowed.
This is the funniest thing I’ve read in a while I was just telling a friend about the trolley problem this morning thank you
The modern Effective Altruism movement is a quasi cult loosely connected to another quasi cult called the “rationalist movement,” and all of this is loosely organized around the Bay Area.
Don’t get me wrong. Rationalism has a long intellectual and scholarly history. Effective Altruism is based on the philosophy of utilitarianism, with its own long scholarly history. Subscribing to these ideas alone doesn’t put you into a cult.
But there definitely is a loose, quasi cult system, originating out of the Bay Area, using these names and ostensibly claiming to promote the ideas.
These people also go pretty hard on AI doomerism, and AI singularity as a coming end times sort of event. They’ve been taking this position since long before LLMs ascended to where they are now.
Lesswrong is the pen name and Internet handle of one Eliezer Yudkowsky. It is also the name of an Internet “community blog” where I think a lot of the rationality side of the group got organised, and maybe where they still organise. I don’t really keep up with the goings on.
!sneerclub@awful.systems is/was a Lemmy community dedicated to critiques and criticism of the rationality / EA system or nexus or whatever. (I have a hard time coming up with names for this. It’s definitely not organised like the Mormons or Scientologists or so on.)
No opinion, but the only guy I personally, know who is into it, is a poly-sex-fiend-genocide-denier.
So it kind of tracks with recent posts about EA.
It’s complicated, but first things first you need to differentiate between the philosophy and the EA “movement”, led by Giving What We Can and others. The latter is shill bullshit and rich people power plays.
The former, set out mostly by Will MacAskill, is an application of future conscious utilitarianism within a capitalist system.
Or in a less wanky way, given you as a poor schmuck can only afford to give a few quid to charities each month, how can you “help the most”.
At the simplest level, giving £5/m to a local soup kitchen ran by volunteers who spend all of that money on food is probably more effective than giving the same amount to a major charity with hundreds of employees.
I hope that example also suggests how it itself is not actually straight forward. The local charity with volunteers may just objectively be shit at what they are trying to do, and all the money is wasted.
Point being, you, nor EA, know that unless you do the work to find out. While the principal of harm reduction is absolutely valid, it does not replace advocating for changes to the underlying system.
