I found the distinction between taking the world seriously and getting caught up in the status games around doing good particularly interesting... especially the reminder that even a movement built around questioning social incentives can develop its own version of them. I’ve often wondered how much of what we believe is genuinely thought through and how much is inherited from the people and communities around us. The idea of sitting down and writing out what we actually value, and whether our actions align with it, is uncomfortable in a useful way. I also appreciated your honesty about EA being both valuable and dangerous... that willingness to question a framework without dismissing everything it has taught you feels far more intellectually honest than either wholehearted devotion or complete rejection.
I love that you point out that EA becomes its own social status system - a competition for the highest expected value. All the while, those EAs believe they are "rational" and without cognitive illusions, “Reason and evidence” aren’t magic words that exempt any of us from bias. EV becomes its own "religion."
Thank you for bringing this up. I know it doesn't apply to all EAs.
My own framing is slightly different. Primarily, I care about preventing the most severe suffering. Suffering doesn't simply “sum” across individuals. That's where EV goes off the rails.
But we are still left with the same question: given limited time and money, at the margin, how can we actually prevent the worst experiences? I thank the EA community (and the pre-EA folk like Peter Singer and Jason Gaverick Matheny) for this.
Love this! Your quote of Peirce's essay (imagining the reasoning of philosophy as a multi-stranded cable) had me thinking about how evolution in natural systems tends to favor resilience vs optimization. A healthy and resilient ecological system (like a forest) relies on a diversity of plants, as opposed to our present-day, optimized monocultures. Healthy, self-governing communities rely on having and maintaining a diverse set of perspectives and opinions, and this is one of the fundamental premises of constitutional democracy. From what you write, EA was never supposed to be about cultivating a monoculture, but rather to urge criticality and first-principles thinking to doing good. But firstly, as soon as you put a number to it (money spent per life saved, or QALYs produced), the optimization game begins. (And secondly, the point you made: it's easier to be told what to do than to think critically yourself, so around the EA core philosophy another social bubble formed with its own set of social status games)
Your point about how we so easily stumble back into social status-seeking games (which manifest differently for each person) and therefore miss some of the most basic, reasoned levers available to us really hits home. The diversity of decision choices each of us has in every moment is truly staggering, and we block it out moment-to-moment by heuristics like personal habit and social conditioning. Letting that all in is truly overwhelming.
Coincidentally, the recent controversy around the insect post from Bentham's Bulldog reminded me of The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe, which also left quite an impression on me. I will check out "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities" on your recommendation, great post!
Characteristically excellent post. I wonder if it'd be worth doing a sparknotes version of this for easy sharing among people who simply don't have the concentration to read something of this length, as I think there are a few core ideas here which are particularly likely to convince.
ea for ea sake vs ea for social stake is an interesting delineation. and is the proximity arguement based on the fact that it we are now living in these hyper-connected "small villages" or that it is morally equivalent to donate irregardless of location/distance, that if it is morally required to donate locally the same applies to across the globe. also can being "too" ea be detrimental? like does supererogation exist for ea's? very interesting post as i hope to learn more about ea/utilitarianism. and also what is your view on the bidirectional implications of ea and utilitarianism, that is does one imply the other or both imply other? thanks!
"Social cohesion was a matter of life and death, and relied on members of the group not randomly getting some idea in their heads that seemed logical and right but didn’t fit what the group needed from them."
That is *exactly* what kept humanity in starvation, famine, constant war, and appalling levels of infant mortality and primitive ignorance for virtually the entirety of human existence. Until around the 18th century. The problem, the massive mountainous elephant taking a dump in the room and screaming fire level of emergency problem, with EA is it -alongside most other ethical systems- pays basically zero attention to the problem of human, individual liberty and its relationship to production, without which we go back to starving tribes of savages murdering each other.
Ethics, properly, is about the human requirements of both living and living well. Loved ones, neighbors, are all higher values, in the case of children perhaps a higher value for me than my own life. To say that ethical values require self destruction in the name of strangers on different continents is to render "ethics" so convoluted and upside down, that it is no wonder most people simply tune it out completely.
Ethics shouldn't be able gimmicky games involving railroad tracks switches, or war scenarios involving crying babies and the SS - but about how to choose the values you need daily to build your life.
Once you understand that doesn't involve lying, cheating, and stealing- that those methods are necessarily self destructive, and not 'cheat codes' to do well - witness the lives and mental conditions of even 'successful' Dictators and criminals- then the rest fills itself in.
Hey. If you're the big time CEO making trillions and you want to give some away, great. But honestly- if you've *earned* a trillion in a free market building something that incredibly valuable, then you've probably transformed daily human life. Jeff Bezos transformed life for the better - I get to read any book, anywhere, in easy on my eyes ink, and spend time with my kid instead of shopping for things because I can click a few things on my phone in about 1 minute. Guys like that - they're probably better off just doing what they did to get rich, if you're talking about helping humanity.
That's how you get cheap, affordable Healthcare, longer life-spans, and even the things you want to make life worth living and enjoyable. Not figuring out formulas for how many mosquito nets someone in some corner needs - by all means, do it- but it's amazing how quickly that marginal utility turns into burning the rich to feed the poor, and everyone being equal in misery and poverty.
Although I, personally, don't think that Zuckerberg has made life better. But only because he amplified the worst of people, not because he created evil.
When you say things like "social status" and "status markets" when the phenomenon that is being described is more like a popularity contest. People are likely to do things they think are popular. People copy things they see popular people do. "Regina George cut the tits out of her tank top. So I did, too." type of vibes. Perhaps EAs would profit from studying Mean Girls.
Why did the ice bucket challenge get so many people to donate to ALS research? Because it seemed like the thing everyone was doing at the time. Friendly-seeming celebrities were doing it, your aunt was doing it, you could do it too.
There is no analysis involved in these kinds of decisions. Most people are not, in fact, asking what the most effective use of their money is for saving lives across the world. They are asking what it is that a nice person like them should be doing with their money. What is their family doing? What are their neighbours doing? What are their coworkers doing? What are influencers doing?
The problem is that the EA brand is weirdo silicon valley technocrats. Sam Bankman-Fried. This is not a group that most people see themselves being part of. Who are the popular appealing EA figureheads? Who would a normal person point to and say "this person donates their money to shrimp welfare, so I will too"?
Wytham Abbey is super nice, good choice for an HQ. When I run out of people within a few hundred miles of me that need my little bits of help, I will start worrying about malaria in Congo.
How many of my malaria treatments or mosquito nets go to combatants? Literally how many times have I "built a well" or "given animals" or "trained farmers on crop techniques" to learn that the pipes and pumps were stolen and sold, the animals were slaughtered when we left, or that the people reverted to their terrible crop practices after three years. The school I built in Haiti was turned into the local gang club house, or a predatory regime is largely funded by the 50% seizure of the donations made by Westerners ...
You point out excellent ethics. In the 21st Century, the real world now, the only reason anyone, anywhere, needs food, water, shelter, education, is that there are 100s of millions of terrible humans grifting on the others. We're not solving "people suck" by giving them anything at all. Someone here mentions that, essentially, loosely directed capitalism has done more for the world than all the charities of the 21st Century. I reckon that's probably true.
> How many of my malaria treatments or mosquito nets go to combatants?
Well, let's start by putting an upper bound on that number that's easier to measure, so we know how big of a problem this might be: How many malaria treatments or mosquito nets have you donated in total, regardless of who it went to?
Okay, so then what was the purpose of your original comment? Are you trying to persuade people who *do* donate malaria nets to stop doing so? Are you worried that GiveWell neglected to take into consideration corruption and/or misuse of nets when performing their effective calculations? Some sort of social signaling thing?
The point of my comment is that we should direct our efforts in charity to the people around us, and not entrust them in efforts to alleviate suffering in distant places.
That there is NOT actually an equivalence for all human lives, or, a duty of feeding all individual people, or, various other givens suggested in the source article. My duty to save a child in a fountain from drowning, or, feeding a person in my community, or, providing medical care for a homeless person here, is unlike the alleged duty to feed Congolese child soldiers, or, care for hungry or sick Hezbollah soldiers. Sadly, no, I wouldn't spend $5 to cure a murdering pedophile so that that scumbag can then do some more murdering or pedophilia. And, no, I have no obligation to use my excess resources to help people who want to harm, kill, injure, or otherwise corrupt me and my community.
This is very interesting because it feels totally different than what I think the original story is, although you obviously have a lot more of the "inside view". I think the argument in Famine, Affluence, and Morality is:
1. We could save lives far away from us with not that big of a sacrifice.
2. We all agree that morality demands this of us in some situations.
3. The actual situation is not morally different.
Thus, you should give significantly more money to Oxfam than you're doing now, if you're a middle class westerner. Furthermore, giving money to the local symphony obviously saves fewer lives than giving to Oxfam.
Singer also held a bunch of other views, notably that animals were morally significant, but they didn't connect that much.
Then, some philosophy grad students decided that they should live by the conclusions of these arguments, and started giving away a lot of money. As a result, people became interested in the question of "which place to give money will help people the most", and they started evaluating this.
Then, thanks to the internet and various other means, people in this space became connected with the rationalist community (whose sources were different people with different moral commitments). Also, some of the philosophers became interested in classic philosophical discussions about the limits of utilitarianism, which led them to various strong conclusions about the future.
The rationalism is where all the ideas you're foregrounding come in: market failure, thinking correctly, status, evolutionary psychology, etc. Additonally, rationalism is where the focus on AI comes in -- they were thinking a lot about AI well before Oxford moral philosophers were.
Yeah I’ll try to write out more of the history as I see it in future posts. I think the “override your local status system when it looks robustly good, we live in a hyper-globalized world” argument is a key implicit argument in FA&M, even if he didn’t develop it further
I think this is very wrong about what Singer is saying. He says that previously we might not have known about or been able to influence far away events, but that's not at all about status. He replies to a variety of objections about commonsense morality, but he does not attempt the sort of genealogy of morality or account of its social basis that you're writing about here. I think the whole way of thinking that your post includes is heavily influenced by a different set of intellectual precedents (eg, Robin Hanson -> EY -> LessWrong) that Singer would find surprising.
it seems like you feel that andy is utilitarian and that, as such, he's focused on maximizing utility, which is only one narrow aspect of "the good". maybe you think (lmk if i'm wrong) that he doesn't understand that "goodness" is complex and cannot be understood through this one framework.
to me, this feels untrue. for one, i don't know that andy is utilitarian. for another, i think he's super aware of the dangers of believing in one ideology. a quote from this piece:
"Right now this middle ground, where EA is one important idea but deathly serious idea among many, feels like the most authentic way I can use it."
im not sure i addressed what you meant, since im also a bit confused, but i would love to understand more abt what you mean.
It sounds like you intend to criticize the author and/or some of his ideas.
Maybe if you were more precise, e.g. "You claim that 'This is the first post in a series on the core things I get out of the cluster of ideas that effective altruism (EA) offers as a package.', but this is clearly false, because here is a different post in which you write about the core things you get out of EA", it'd be easier to understand your position and evaluate whether or not it's reasonable.
Otherwise, to directly answer your question: Yes, it seems extremely likely that the author is aware of what a "tradeoff" is.
Lots of good beats here
I found the distinction between taking the world seriously and getting caught up in the status games around doing good particularly interesting... especially the reminder that even a movement built around questioning social incentives can develop its own version of them. I’ve often wondered how much of what we believe is genuinely thought through and how much is inherited from the people and communities around us. The idea of sitting down and writing out what we actually value, and whether our actions align with it, is uncomfortable in a useful way. I also appreciated your honesty about EA being both valuable and dangerous... that willingness to question a framework without dismissing everything it has taught you feels far more intellectually honest than either wholehearted devotion or complete rejection.
I love that you point out that EA becomes its own social status system - a competition for the highest expected value. All the while, those EAs believe they are "rational" and without cognitive illusions, “Reason and evidence” aren’t magic words that exempt any of us from bias. EV becomes its own "religion."
Thank you for bringing this up. I know it doesn't apply to all EAs.
My own framing is slightly different. Primarily, I care about preventing the most severe suffering. Suffering doesn't simply “sum” across individuals. That's where EV goes off the rails.
But we are still left with the same question: given limited time and money, at the margin, how can we actually prevent the worst experiences? I thank the EA community (and the pre-EA folk like Peter Singer and Jason Gaverick Matheny) for this.
1 Google Doc page > Vibes
Love this! Your quote of Peirce's essay (imagining the reasoning of philosophy as a multi-stranded cable) had me thinking about how evolution in natural systems tends to favor resilience vs optimization. A healthy and resilient ecological system (like a forest) relies on a diversity of plants, as opposed to our present-day, optimized monocultures. Healthy, self-governing communities rely on having and maintaining a diverse set of perspectives and opinions, and this is one of the fundamental premises of constitutional democracy. From what you write, EA was never supposed to be about cultivating a monoculture, but rather to urge criticality and first-principles thinking to doing good. But firstly, as soon as you put a number to it (money spent per life saved, or QALYs produced), the optimization game begins. (And secondly, the point you made: it's easier to be told what to do than to think critically yourself, so around the EA core philosophy another social bubble formed with its own set of social status games)
Your point about how we so easily stumble back into social status-seeking games (which manifest differently for each person) and therefore miss some of the most basic, reasoned levers available to us really hits home. The diversity of decision choices each of us has in every moment is truly staggering, and we block it out moment-to-moment by heuristics like personal habit and social conditioning. Letting that all in is truly overwhelming.
Coincidentally, the recent controversy around the insect post from Bentham's Bulldog reminded me of The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe, which also left quite an impression on me. I will check out "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities" on your recommendation, great post!
Characteristically excellent post. I wonder if it'd be worth doing a sparknotes version of this for easy sharing among people who simply don't have the concentration to read something of this length, as I think there are a few core ideas here which are particularly likely to convince.
Extremely good stuff
Awesome Post!
Thanks a lot for taking the time to write it!
ea for ea sake vs ea for social stake is an interesting delineation. and is the proximity arguement based on the fact that it we are now living in these hyper-connected "small villages" or that it is morally equivalent to donate irregardless of location/distance, that if it is morally required to donate locally the same applies to across the globe. also can being "too" ea be detrimental? like does supererogation exist for ea's? very interesting post as i hope to learn more about ea/utilitarianism. and also what is your view on the bidirectional implications of ea and utilitarianism, that is does one imply the other or both imply other? thanks!
"Social cohesion was a matter of life and death, and relied on members of the group not randomly getting some idea in their heads that seemed logical and right but didn’t fit what the group needed from them."
That is *exactly* what kept humanity in starvation, famine, constant war, and appalling levels of infant mortality and primitive ignorance for virtually the entirety of human existence. Until around the 18th century. The problem, the massive mountainous elephant taking a dump in the room and screaming fire level of emergency problem, with EA is it -alongside most other ethical systems- pays basically zero attention to the problem of human, individual liberty and its relationship to production, without which we go back to starving tribes of savages murdering each other.
Ethics, properly, is about the human requirements of both living and living well. Loved ones, neighbors, are all higher values, in the case of children perhaps a higher value for me than my own life. To say that ethical values require self destruction in the name of strangers on different continents is to render "ethics" so convoluted and upside down, that it is no wonder most people simply tune it out completely.
Ethics shouldn't be able gimmicky games involving railroad tracks switches, or war scenarios involving crying babies and the SS - but about how to choose the values you need daily to build your life.
Once you understand that doesn't involve lying, cheating, and stealing- that those methods are necessarily self destructive, and not 'cheat codes' to do well - witness the lives and mental conditions of even 'successful' Dictators and criminals- then the rest fills itself in.
Hey. If you're the big time CEO making trillions and you want to give some away, great. But honestly- if you've *earned* a trillion in a free market building something that incredibly valuable, then you've probably transformed daily human life. Jeff Bezos transformed life for the better - I get to read any book, anywhere, in easy on my eyes ink, and spend time with my kid instead of shopping for things because I can click a few things on my phone in about 1 minute. Guys like that - they're probably better off just doing what they did to get rich, if you're talking about helping humanity.
That's how you get cheap, affordable Healthcare, longer life-spans, and even the things you want to make life worth living and enjoyable. Not figuring out formulas for how many mosquito nets someone in some corner needs - by all means, do it- but it's amazing how quickly that marginal utility turns into burning the rich to feed the poor, and everyone being equal in misery and poverty.
Andy, I think you and I are going to be friends!
E.g.
https://mattball.substack.com/p/how-would-you-like-wealth-beyond
Although I, personally, don't think that Zuckerberg has made life better. But only because he amplified the worst of people, not because he created evil.
When you say things like "social status" and "status markets" when the phenomenon that is being described is more like a popularity contest. People are likely to do things they think are popular. People copy things they see popular people do. "Regina George cut the tits out of her tank top. So I did, too." type of vibes. Perhaps EAs would profit from studying Mean Girls.
Why did the ice bucket challenge get so many people to donate to ALS research? Because it seemed like the thing everyone was doing at the time. Friendly-seeming celebrities were doing it, your aunt was doing it, you could do it too.
There is no analysis involved in these kinds of decisions. Most people are not, in fact, asking what the most effective use of their money is for saving lives across the world. They are asking what it is that a nice person like them should be doing with their money. What is their family doing? What are their neighbours doing? What are their coworkers doing? What are influencers doing?
The problem is that the EA brand is weirdo silicon valley technocrats. Sam Bankman-Fried. This is not a group that most people see themselves being part of. Who are the popular appealing EA figureheads? Who would a normal person point to and say "this person donates their money to shrimp welfare, so I will too"?
Wytham Abbey is super nice, good choice for an HQ. When I run out of people within a few hundred miles of me that need my little bits of help, I will start worrying about malaria in Congo.
How many of my malaria treatments or mosquito nets go to combatants? Literally how many times have I "built a well" or "given animals" or "trained farmers on crop techniques" to learn that the pipes and pumps were stolen and sold, the animals were slaughtered when we left, or that the people reverted to their terrible crop practices after three years. The school I built in Haiti was turned into the local gang club house, or a predatory regime is largely funded by the 50% seizure of the donations made by Westerners ...
You point out excellent ethics. In the 21st Century, the real world now, the only reason anyone, anywhere, needs food, water, shelter, education, is that there are 100s of millions of terrible humans grifting on the others. We're not solving "people suck" by giving them anything at all. Someone here mentions that, essentially, loosely directed capitalism has done more for the world than all the charities of the 21st Century. I reckon that's probably true.
> How many of my malaria treatments or mosquito nets go to combatants?
Well, let's start by putting an upper bound on that number that's easier to measure, so we know how big of a problem this might be: How many malaria treatments or mosquito nets have you donated in total, regardless of who it went to?
I don't do malaria nets. My "how many of my" was a reference to:
These ones ... https://www.givewell.org/research/grants/AMF-LLIN-DRC-June-2024
And these ones ... https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/world/africa/mosquito-nets-for-malaria-spawn-new-epidemic-overfishing.html
I already told you, I now only support people who need help within a few hundred miles of my home.
Okay, so then what was the purpose of your original comment? Are you trying to persuade people who *do* donate malaria nets to stop doing so? Are you worried that GiveWell neglected to take into consideration corruption and/or misuse of nets when performing their effective calculations? Some sort of social signaling thing?
The point of my comment is that we should direct our efforts in charity to the people around us, and not entrust them in efforts to alleviate suffering in distant places.
That there is NOT actually an equivalence for all human lives, or, a duty of feeding all individual people, or, various other givens suggested in the source article. My duty to save a child in a fountain from drowning, or, feeding a person in my community, or, providing medical care for a homeless person here, is unlike the alleged duty to feed Congolese child soldiers, or, care for hungry or sick Hezbollah soldiers. Sadly, no, I wouldn't spend $5 to cure a murdering pedophile so that that scumbag can then do some more murdering or pedophilia. And, no, I have no obligation to use my excess resources to help people who want to harm, kill, injure, or otherwise corrupt me and my community.
This is very interesting because it feels totally different than what I think the original story is, although you obviously have a lot more of the "inside view". I think the argument in Famine, Affluence, and Morality is:
1. We could save lives far away from us with not that big of a sacrifice.
2. We all agree that morality demands this of us in some situations.
3. The actual situation is not morally different.
Thus, you should give significantly more money to Oxfam than you're doing now, if you're a middle class westerner. Furthermore, giving money to the local symphony obviously saves fewer lives than giving to Oxfam.
Singer also held a bunch of other views, notably that animals were morally significant, but they didn't connect that much.
Then, some philosophy grad students decided that they should live by the conclusions of these arguments, and started giving away a lot of money. As a result, people became interested in the question of "which place to give money will help people the most", and they started evaluating this.
Then, thanks to the internet and various other means, people in this space became connected with the rationalist community (whose sources were different people with different moral commitments). Also, some of the philosophers became interested in classic philosophical discussions about the limits of utilitarianism, which led them to various strong conclusions about the future.
The rationalism is where all the ideas you're foregrounding come in: market failure, thinking correctly, status, evolutionary psychology, etc. Additonally, rationalism is where the focus on AI comes in -- they were thinking a lot about AI well before Oxford moral philosophers were.
Yeah I’ll try to write out more of the history as I see it in future posts. I think the “override your local status system when it looks robustly good, we live in a hyper-globalized world” argument is a key implicit argument in FA&M, even if he didn’t develop it further
I think this is very wrong about what Singer is saying. He says that previously we might not have known about or been able to influence far away events, but that's not at all about status. He replies to a variety of objections about commonsense morality, but he does not attempt the sort of genealogy of morality or account of its social basis that you're writing about here. I think the whole way of thinking that your post includes is heavily influenced by a different set of intellectual precedents (eg, Robin Hanson -> EY -> LessWrong) that Singer would find surprising.
This post by Tony Ord I think basically agrees with my assessment: https://x.com/tobyordoxford/status/2102302585700938147
Is the author aware of what a "tradeoff" is?
What do you mean?
Utility is just one value that can (and does) exist in tension with many others, e.g. personal liberty, national kinship, democratic legitimacy
I'm not a utilitarian and don't think we can reduce human existence to a single comparable axis
it seems like you feel that andy is utilitarian and that, as such, he's focused on maximizing utility, which is only one narrow aspect of "the good". maybe you think (lmk if i'm wrong) that he doesn't understand that "goodness" is complex and cannot be understood through this one framework.
to me, this feels untrue. for one, i don't know that andy is utilitarian. for another, i think he's super aware of the dangers of believing in one ideology. a quote from this piece:
"Right now this middle ground, where EA is one important idea but deathly serious idea among many, feels like the most authentic way I can use it."
im not sure i addressed what you meant, since im also a bit confused, but i would love to understand more abt what you mean.
It sounds like you intend to criticize the author and/or some of his ideas.
Maybe if you were more precise, e.g. "You claim that 'This is the first post in a series on the core things I get out of the cluster of ideas that effective altruism (EA) offers as a package.', but this is clearly false, because here is a different post in which you write about the core things you get out of EA", it'd be easier to understand your position and evaluate whether or not it's reasonable.
Otherwise, to directly answer your question: Yes, it seems extremely likely that the author is aware of what a "tradeoff" is.
just so totally orthogonal to the content of the comment ur replying to
I agreed with 100% of everything in this post and found it well-written.
But not sure I would send it to a friend who has vaguely heard of EA, and maybe only bc of SBF or Trump.
Any idea what our best “pamphlet” or “elevator pitch” material is these days?