I think many are missing the article's thesis since it's very, _very_ poorly written: "I would argue that altruism is really meant to help the altruist, not the altruee."
The critical flaw of the essay is that the only evidence to back this point up is (1) "look, a bunch of people donated to the NY opera!" and (2) "look what some effective altruist said; he must represent all altruists". All in all, the essay's erratic logic is only rendered worse by its incomprehensible thesaurus mangling. Of course, intentional obfuscation is a hedge against criticism.
There's poorly-written philosophy and well-written philosophy. This is neither.
Edit: My apologies for the caustic comment, but I felt it warranted, given the glib tone of the article
As someone who doesn't read much philosophy, it this article is really weird. Generally I expect glibness to signal that a work will be accessible, "I'm cutting through the bullshit, here are the essential bits." But despite the glibness here, it seems to be completely steeped in lingo and some ongoing argument.
It seems to me quite odd that moral philosophy seems always to get so bogged down in lingo. You'd think the study of "how to be good" should be something that values directness and accessibility. What is the point of a moral philosophy that only a couple academics can follow?
Philosophy never got over Wittgenstein, who had a point that "most philosophical problems aren't real and are just confusion caused by unclear use of terminology". (Most common example on HN: people talking about "artificial general intelligence" without defining "intelligence".)
Analytic (Anglo/UK philosophy) philosophy tries to solve this by being extremely clear about everything to the point of looking like a math paper. This turned out to not work because math can't do that, but it still means there's a lot of specific -isms.
Continental (French/German) philosophy seems to just lean into it and can be nearly unreadable; some of this is translation issues, some people say this is because their points are so deep they can't be expressed in clear language, and some people say this is because French people don't respect philosophers unless they don't understand what they're talking about.
As for what you can do about this - well, maybe you could just ask them what they meant?
The article's thesis is that EA's moral realism stance (which finds it's apotheosis in utilitarian moral calculus) is ill-supported and highly questionable, especially when combined with theological anti-realism.
It's definitely not written to win over any EA supporter, that's for sure.
Is EA predicated on moral realism? That seems like a straw man. I don't see any contradiction between abandoning realism (i.e. admitting that there is no objective way to measure goodness or other moral qualities) and EA.
We probably just define EA differently. When I'm elected dictator, it'll be illegal to write an essay like this without supplying your working definition of the thing you're against.
Who is this written for then? It seems to me that the author just builds up a few explicit strawmen and expects that the reader is already on board with the idea that they are obviously idotic.
It's not really against EA then, it's against all morality and ethics as such. Rightly title the article "Against trying to be a decent person" and it's obvious why it's a piece of junk.
The article is nothing more than a rant. That is absolutely okay as long as it encapsulates some beautifully written outrage and at least some portion of self aware wit. Neither of those were detectable while reading. As a philosopher myself (though I left the university many moons ago), this is unfortunately the de facto standard of internet philosophy,
The field seems to attract mostly curious people and overthinkers but also a very vocal minority of people that don’t seek answers or even very good questions but want to ramble in a seemingly eloquent way about very broad topics - so broad that philosophers seldom dare to write books about them without decades of sincere chipping at academic details under their belt.
This blog post I just dragged myself to read until the end has nothing to do with philosophy - that’s not a dig at the author, more at the audience which assumes that a post about moral philosophy obviously has to be philosophy. By typing this out I hope to be able to illustrate the logical error that lead to this top comment along its children.
It’s just a blog post that was obviously crafted with a certain audience in mind and more of a cheeky rambling than an honest attempt to talk about moral philosophy in a way that transcends the discussion of pretty well read people with too many alcohol in them at the ugly and tired end of a drawn out social event.
The rant is at times funny to read because of the use of so many exclamation marks, italics and whatnot. I imagined a person gesturing wildly with a counterpart gasping in the pauses to try for a rebuttal but finally nodding apathetically while swaying his glass of wine.
TL,DR: This is not philosophy but a blog post and you guys should keep that in mind while discussing its content.
> The critical flaw of the essay is that the only evidence to back this point up is (1) "look, a bunch of people donated to the NY opera!" and (2) "look what some effective altruist said; he must represent all altruists"
The book 'The Elephant in the Brain' by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler describes this position and has references to a lot of research.
This article makes for a fun guessing-game to determine what the ideological background of the author is. Effective Altruism definitely seems like one of those heavily-blogged about fads that's in vogue now with the tech-adjacent Rationalist set, so always curious to see who ends up opposing it.
> Let me also say that atheism for the masses, in retrospect, was an enormous error. Organized religion as a social technology is invaluable and the modern atomized welfare state is a pathetic replacement. Atheism for the intellectual class is perfectly alright, but in the age of mass literacy there is really no barrier between them and the rest of society. Was atheism inevitable? Perhaps. But the New Atheists certainly didn't help. Extrapolating this line of reasoning is left as an exercise to the reader.
As fun as it is to re-litigate the culture wars of yesterdecade, I don't really think the post-Bush administration diminishment of public Christianity in the U.S. is creating the society that the New Atheists want(ed). Conspiracy theories and irrational memeplexes have completely run rampant in the public sphere in the U.S. and the western world. Superstition and magical thinking is all over the place, the objects of devotion just happen to center around modern politics and items from the news, rather than figures from ancient history. If anything, many people are less firm atheists and more like apatheists - people just sort of believe whatever their social circle and social media reinforces.
I‘m pretty agnostic but I see the benefits of religious societies. One trend that surprises me is the upturn of astrology especially among well-educated people. When I frame it as just another religion I received confusion in return because apparently they see it as a rational thing to believe in. This was just a personal anecdote from my experience using Bumble and Tinder in a middle eastern country and in the US until I actually checked it on google trends:
The interesting thing about astrology is that there probably ARE personality differences between, say, a cohort who were the youngest at school versus the oldest, or who just made the cutoff point for a sports team for the year versus those who were almost a year older. Those small differences can become magnified (e.g. Malcolm Gladwell's essay on why most Hockey players were born in December - they are older, so they look like they are more competent, so they get more training, so they become more competent).
Even things like the amount of exposure to sunlight in early years may influence personality. Would be an interesting thing to look at, skipping all the woo stuff about planetary alignment etc.
Or one might consider something like Insight Meditation. I went for a number of meetings here in San Francisco. I never heard anything theistic mentioned; it was just meditation practice in the Buddhist tradition, followed by a talk on meditation. Lovely people, nice community, perfectly rational in the small-R sense of the term. One could call it religion or not, but it served some of the same social functions.
Another good example is Death Cafe, local groups that meet regularly to have tea and talk about death. The ones I went to were profound and meaningful without being theistic: https://deathcafe.com/what/
> One trend that surprises me is the upturn of astrology
I'm not sure astrology ever went away. Nancy Reagan famously consulted her astrologer in the 80s. It was big in the 60s/70s too. There may be some cyclicity to the popularity of astrology where it tends to pop up every 10 or 20 years, but we've been in a rational age for a couple of hundred years where you'd think it would've just completely gone away, but it hasn't. A lot of people are superstitious and want to look for causality where there is none even in modernity.
I think it was Leslie Newbigin in the 80s who predicted that as less people identified as Christian in the West that more people would begin to deify politics and that this would lead us to a very bad place.
Edit: Found a quote from one of Newbigin's books: “The sacralizing of politics, the total identification of a political goal with the will of God, always unleashed demonic powers.” From his book Foolishness to the Greeks published in 1986.
Also curious about who would oppose EA. My first thought is people who would be threatened by expectation that we measure the actual impact of social efforts.
The unloyal opposition being people who want to donate to local charities, people who hate charities because they're billionaire conspiracies, people who want to keep their money, and humanities types who don't like STEM types and want to do radical poetry reading meetings instead[0]. And people who've noticed the "longtermists" don't actually have positions that involve being "long term"[1].
I'm not sure if you're actually reading this (mess) right:
> The neoconservatives, for example, are a showcase of what happens when the moralogian takes hold of the reins of foreign policy—and it is a consistent ideology that genuinely seeks to spread the values it values.
I know Bush himself was elected as "religious right", but the author seems to view the neocons as atheist ("moralogian"), and Bush himself was kind of a well-meaning puppet puppy... I always thought "atheism for the masses" got rolling much earlier in '92 (I think of Clinton as "nihilist pseudo-liberal conservative" but that's just me).
I don't even know what to call the current moment - batshit delusionalism? That kinda works...
I wasn't really referencing the article directly when I mentioned the Bush administration, but that's a good point. I just brought up the Bush era because that was the New Atheist's heyday and the last time when the existence of God was a hot button public discussion topic, as it was also the heyday of Islamic terrorism and Christian evangelicals. Nowadays when people try to push atheism too hard they just get called cringe Redditors, even though public religiosity in traditional religions have declined.
Neocons are pretty secular so the moralogian reference isn't inaccurate. But it's probably more compatible with Bush's evangelical Christian worldview than the distinction between moralogian and theologian makes it to be.
I'm too dumb to understand what this article is talking about. I thought Effective Altruism was about maximizing goodness/dollar when donating to charity. I assumed the measure of goodness was treated as an axiom, and up for critique. Number of lives saved per dollar seems to be a common metric, and one can argue why or why not that's a good measure.
The article, as far as I can follow it, seems to be trying to discredit the idea that we can know what a good measure is, objectively. Okay, I guess I can see that. But who cares? Lives/dollar seems like a good measure to me, and I like it. No more reasoning required. It's my money and I decide what to do with it. And I can still think people who disagree with me are wrong.
Moral realism, metaethics, what is all this crap? Is there more to Effective Altruism that I am unaware of? What are they even trying to argue? On either side?
> Is there more to Effective Altruism that I am unaware of?
You've got the concepts right.
However, Effective Altruism (with capital letters) has evolved into a collection of organizations, communities, bloggers, and personalities who exist adjacent to the "rationalist" community and spend a lot of time debating about things. There's also a large sect of the EA community that believes the risk of artificial intelligence becoming sentient and taking over the world in the future is the biggest risk to the world and therefore deserving of a lot of EA funding. Different people will give you different answers about how relevant this group is to the broader EA movement.
The more I read about Effective Altruism, the more I think it's best to stick to the high-level concepts and not get involved with all of the drama that surrounds self-labeled Effective Altruist communities or "movements". It gets weird, quickly.
With moral realism, why should I care about your personal moral preferences? Whether moral statements are facts says nothing about whether your preferences are the right ones. And either way, moral statements being fact isn't actually a reason to act morally since the universe only punishes you for being immoral if religion is real. What's stopping anyone from rejecting the True moral statements in favor of ones they personally prefer?
You don't have to care about that. You just look at the metrics for goodness I'm using, and the assumptions underlying that, and see if you agree with them. Some of them are pretty common, such as human life having value in itself. I guess I see the point of the article now, if EA people are saying their way of measuring goodness is the only way. That does deserve skepticism and requests for proof.
You don't need moral realism to arrive at a set of mutually agreed upon moral values. You don't have to agree with your friends on what's the best food in the world is in order to choose a place to have dinner.
There is an argument that you don't like the process by which the moral values were arrived to, but that's hardly a reason to indulge in moral nihilism.
I also, finding the post at least interesting to think about, and somewhat more compact, wrote my own version of the it, and followed up with some abbreviated notes of what I have been thinking of as a reasonable response/cure to the mentioned problems (ie, as a kind of establishment of a basis for value ethics):
The author of this piece doesn't seem to understand the basics of systems thinking and the entropic effects of non-moral action on human collectivism.
EA won't produce the proper outcomes. It's the 80,000 hours people are likely more attracted to and the job listings that come with it. In most instances, positive outcomes for humans begin with negative perspectives because that's how our psychology works.
Practical Altruism isn't about what people deserve it's about what they need. It's not enough to teach a man to fish if he is unwilling to learn. You have to make them believe there will be a crop shortage so they need to learn.
True altruists will change their methods of effecting change for the situation, people, times, and needs. Because, if not we as humans will find a way to corrupt it.
Adam Smith was a moral philosopher. Which is why the invisible hand acts the way it acts.
> The author of this piece doesn't seem to understand the basics of systems thinking and the entropic effects of non-moral action on human collectivism.
But why should I care about these effects if I am not in charge of such systems?
I'm a moral anti-realist, but that doesn't stop me from acting according to my morals. Much like existentialism doesn't stop you from creating internal meaning to life moral anti realism doesn't stop you from having moral opinions. Just because moral statements aren't facts doesn't mean I don't get utility from acting on my chosen moral preferences. In fact, in a non-spiritual world there is no reason for realists and anti-realists to behave differently at all. If there aren't consequences for behaving immorally the only reason to do so is because of how it makes you feel.
This article is written in such a scattered/hectic style that I’m honestly kind of worried for the author. Has the vibe of a manic episode and was almost impossible to follow.
Not sure I would go so far as to be worried for the author as I believe we all have such thoughts when trying to grapple with complex and competing theories, but it's definitely a stream of consciousness and not a coherent essay written for effective communication.
Based on how this gets operationalized in argumentation, 99% of people would not. Being confronted with Singer led me to reject ethics, not to become more ethical.
If you're caught on camera saving the child, and become famous doing it, then your status has been raised! If the child goes on to be the next Hitler, are you responsible?
I'm not serious about the above, of course, but one can tie theirself in knots overthinking the moral consequences of every action. Which is, I believe, a critique that works equally well against both EA and anti-EA.
Do the right thing. If you fuck that up, try to learn and do the right thing tomorrow. Don't overthink it.
Readit News
The critical flaw of the essay is that the only evidence to back this point up is (1) "look, a bunch of people donated to the NY opera!" and (2) "look what some effective altruist said; he must represent all altruists". All in all, the essay's erratic logic is only rendered worse by its incomprehensible thesaurus mangling. Of course, intentional obfuscation is a hedge against criticism.
There's poorly-written philosophy and well-written philosophy. This is neither.
Edit: My apologies for the caustic comment, but I felt it warranted, given the glib tone of the article
It seems to me quite odd that moral philosophy seems always to get so bogged down in lingo. You'd think the study of "how to be good" should be something that values directness and accessibility. What is the point of a moral philosophy that only a couple academics can follow?
Analytic (Anglo/UK philosophy) philosophy tries to solve this by being extremely clear about everything to the point of looking like a math paper. This turned out to not work because math can't do that, but it still means there's a lot of specific -isms.
Continental (French/German) philosophy seems to just lean into it and can be nearly unreadable; some of this is translation issues, some people say this is because their points are so deep they can't be expressed in clear language, and some people say this is because French people don't respect philosophers unless they don't understand what they're talking about.
As for what you can do about this - well, maybe you could just ask them what they meant?
It's definitely not written to win over any EA supporter, that's for sure.
We probably just define EA differently. When I'm elected dictator, it'll be illegal to write an essay like this without supplying your working definition of the thing you're against.
The field seems to attract mostly curious people and overthinkers but also a very vocal minority of people that don’t seek answers or even very good questions but want to ramble in a seemingly eloquent way about very broad topics - so broad that philosophers seldom dare to write books about them without decades of sincere chipping at academic details under their belt.
This blog post I just dragged myself to read until the end has nothing to do with philosophy - that’s not a dig at the author, more at the audience which assumes that a post about moral philosophy obviously has to be philosophy. By typing this out I hope to be able to illustrate the logical error that lead to this top comment along its children.
It’s just a blog post that was obviously crafted with a certain audience in mind and more of a cheeky rambling than an honest attempt to talk about moral philosophy in a way that transcends the discussion of pretty well read people with too many alcohol in them at the ugly and tired end of a drawn out social event.
The rant is at times funny to read because of the use of so many exclamation marks, italics and whatnot. I imagined a person gesturing wildly with a counterpart gasping in the pauses to try for a rebuttal but finally nodding apathetically while swaying his glass of wine.
TL,DR: This is not philosophy but a blog post and you guys should keep that in mind while discussing its content.
The book 'The Elephant in the Brain' by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler describes this position and has references to a lot of research.
Yourself included, apparently
> Let me also say that atheism for the masses, in retrospect, was an enormous error. Organized religion as a social technology is invaluable and the modern atomized welfare state is a pathetic replacement. Atheism for the intellectual class is perfectly alright, but in the age of mass literacy there is really no barrier between them and the rest of society. Was atheism inevitable? Perhaps. But the New Atheists certainly didn't help. Extrapolating this line of reasoning is left as an exercise to the reader.
As fun as it is to re-litigate the culture wars of yesterdecade, I don't really think the post-Bush administration diminishment of public Christianity in the U.S. is creating the society that the New Atheists want(ed). Conspiracy theories and irrational memeplexes have completely run rampant in the public sphere in the U.S. and the western world. Superstition and magical thinking is all over the place, the objects of devotion just happen to center around modern politics and items from the news, rather than figures from ancient history. If anything, many people are less firm atheists and more like apatheists - people just sort of believe whatever their social circle and social media reinforces.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...
Even things like the amount of exposure to sunlight in early years may influence personality. Would be an interesting thing to look at, skipping all the woo stuff about planetary alignment etc.
And I should add that it's a mistake to think there's no intersection between atheism and religious societies. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_Buddhism
https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe/beliefs/atheist-...
Or one might consider something like Insight Meditation. I went for a number of meetings here in San Francisco. I never heard anything theistic mentioned; it was just meditation practice in the Buddhist tradition, followed by a talk on meditation. Lovely people, nice community, perfectly rational in the small-R sense of the term. One could call it religion or not, but it served some of the same social functions.
Another good example is Death Cafe, local groups that meet regularly to have tea and talk about death. The ones I went to were profound and meaningful without being theistic: https://deathcafe.com/what/
I'm not sure astrology ever went away. Nancy Reagan famously consulted her astrologer in the 80s. It was big in the 60s/70s too. There may be some cyclicity to the popularity of astrology where it tends to pop up every 10 or 20 years, but we've been in a rational age for a couple of hundred years where you'd think it would've just completely gone away, but it hasn't. A lot of people are superstitious and want to look for causality where there is none even in modernity.
Edit: Found a quote from one of Newbigin's books: “The sacralizing of politics, the total identification of a political goal with the will of God, always unleashed demonic powers.” From his book Foolishness to the Greeks published in 1986.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/economics-and-philos...
The unloyal opposition being people who want to donate to local charities, people who hate charities because they're billionaire conspiracies, people who want to keep their money, and humanities types who don't like STEM types and want to do radical poetry reading meetings instead[0]. And people who've noticed the "longtermists" don't actually have positions that involve being "long term"[1].
[0] https://twitter.com/lastpositivist/status/146925467086249574...
[1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/whats-long-term-about-longtermi...
> The neoconservatives, for example, are a showcase of what happens when the moralogian takes hold of the reins of foreign policy—and it is a consistent ideology that genuinely seeks to spread the values it values.
I know Bush himself was elected as "religious right", but the author seems to view the neocons as atheist ("moralogian"), and Bush himself was kind of a well-meaning puppet puppy... I always thought "atheism for the masses" got rolling much earlier in '92 (I think of Clinton as "nihilist pseudo-liberal conservative" but that's just me).
I don't even know what to call the current moment - batshit delusionalism? That kinda works...
Neocons are pretty secular so the moralogian reference isn't inaccurate. But it's probably more compatible with Bush's evangelical Christian worldview than the distinction between moralogian and theologian makes it to be.
The article, as far as I can follow it, seems to be trying to discredit the idea that we can know what a good measure is, objectively. Okay, I guess I can see that. But who cares? Lives/dollar seems like a good measure to me, and I like it. No more reasoning required. It's my money and I decide what to do with it. And I can still think people who disagree with me are wrong.
Moral realism, metaethics, what is all this crap? Is there more to Effective Altruism that I am unaware of? What are they even trying to argue? On either side?
You've got the concepts right.
However, Effective Altruism (with capital letters) has evolved into a collection of organizations, communities, bloggers, and personalities who exist adjacent to the "rationalist" community and spend a lot of time debating about things. There's also a large sect of the EA community that believes the risk of artificial intelligence becoming sentient and taking over the world in the future is the biggest risk to the world and therefore deserving of a lot of EA funding. Different people will give you different answers about how relevant this group is to the broader EA movement.
The more I read about Effective Altruism, the more I think it's best to stick to the high-level concepts and not get involved with all of the drama that surrounds self-labeled Effective Altruist communities or "movements". It gets weird, quickly.
In my experience this is true of most things.
There is an argument that you don't like the process by which the moral values were arrived to, but that's hardly a reason to indulge in moral nihilism.
Eg, I could decide that:
1. God exists.
2. God wants me to do/not do these particular things.
3. God will punish me for disobeying.
4. I still don't care and will do whatever I want.
You can't prevent #4 by any means whatsoever. "I don't care" is always an option.
Against ‘Effective Altruism’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28520719 - Sept 2021 (2 comments)
Also (thanks jinpan!):
Effective altruism as a tower of assumptions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32576224 - Aug 2022 (89 comments)
Edit: ok, also these:
The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32386984 - Aug 2022 (185 comments)
‘Effective Altruism’ Is Neither - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32224597 - July 2022 (22 comments)
Notes on Effective Altruism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31609325 - June 2022 (116 comments)
The elitist philanthropy of so-called effective altruism (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31285371 - May 2022 (78 comments)
Effective altruism is not effective - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26813763 - April 2021 (240 comments)
https://mflb.com/fine_1/effective_alturism_morality_out.html
EA won't produce the proper outcomes. It's the 80,000 hours people are likely more attracted to and the job listings that come with it. In most instances, positive outcomes for humans begin with negative perspectives because that's how our psychology works.
Practical Altruism isn't about what people deserve it's about what they need. It's not enough to teach a man to fish if he is unwilling to learn. You have to make them believe there will be a crop shortage so they need to learn.
True altruists will change their methods of effecting change for the situation, people, times, and needs. Because, if not we as humans will find a way to corrupt it.
Adam Smith was a moral philosopher. Which is why the invisible hand acts the way it acts.
But why should I care about these effects if I am not in charge of such systems?
Effective altruism brings opportunities for status, for sure.
But that doesn’t mean trying to help people effectively is a bad thing.
Would you walk past a child drowning in a shallow pond, when you could easily intervene and save them?
I'm not serious about the above, of course, but one can tie theirself in knots overthinking the moral consequences of every action. Which is, I believe, a critique that works equally well against both EA and anti-EA.
Do the right thing. If you fuck that up, try to learn and do the right thing tomorrow. Don't overthink it.