Personal gripe: even their flipping name is condescending, as if everyone who isn’t in alignment with their program is implicitly saying, “No, actually, I prefer ineffective altruism. Excuse me while I light my money on fire like an idiot.”

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you guys seen this one?

Apparently the “long term future fund”, for cutting edge research and such, mainly spends its money on funding EA members’ graduate degrees. Pretty good deal if you’re still in undergrad tbh. Get in there!

Edit: actually saying “graduate degrees” was too generous, many of these people were conducting “independent research”, “upskilling”, “leveling up”, “facilitating conversations” and various other totally real activities. Aaaand a bunch of the money ends up at MIRI as well.

Because its bad in a boring way. Much worth sneering at, too little that is fun to sneer at.

“Effective Altruism” is a dodge by the ultra wealthy to avoid paying higher taxes. When the ultra wealthy are pressured to pay higher taxes they counter with the idea that they know how best to spend their funds and why are you criticizing their charity? I guess your orphans and widows don’t need my cash? Ignoring the fact that if they were paying tax and not paying lobbyists to ensure the government(s) can’t tax them and can’t run effectively said widows and orphans wouldn’t need charity to feed and house them. My two cents.

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On a certain fringe, it tells people the best thing they can do with their lives is to become rich and then give a portion of their lucre to the neediest, “take from the rich and give to the poor” except the rich is yourself. Sounds like one-person redistribution but maybe it’s more like one-person reputation laundering. It allows people in very comfortable and exploitive positions to feel that they’re doing good deeds for the world without examining the broken system that gave them control of such disproportionate resources in the first place. A world in which billionaires donate to end malaria is better than one in which billionaires just hoard money they can’t use, and probably also better than one in which billionaires donate only to opera houses and art museums, but maybe what we should be striving for is a world in which people’s basic survival doesn’t depend on the personal ethical philosophies of billionaires.

We target awful EAers all the time, any worthwhile aspects of the movement are being drowned out by it’s association with rationalism and the associated AI risk robocult. The global poverty side of it has done some good at least though, more focus on evidence and against harmful fake charities is a good thing, albeit with the usual caveats that individual donations can’t really solve systemic problems.

I’ll give credit where credit is due, they convinced me to start giving a percentage of my income to charity (it was around 10% when I started then, little higher these days), but I want nothing to do with them otherwise- partially due to their contributions to MIRI’s bullshit, partially due to how unpleasant they seem to be, partially because fuck utilitarianism, partially because we just have different values, partially because, well… I’m honestly not too impressed with their so-often-vaunted ability to choose good charities. (Most of my donations end up going to independent nonprofit journalism, like ProPublica and The Center for Investigative Reporting, to various environmental organizations, or to the Halo trust, because fuck landmines.)

There’s a decent portion of the movement that is actually pretty wholesome; GiveWell comes to mind, though it does mostly predate EA.

It’s largely just the techbro AI cults and rationalists within that community that suck. I feel like this sub does an appropriate amount of sneering at them.

Peoples’ trust in organizations depends on not thinking about how they!re controlled by people.

And, ironically, trust in people depends on not thinking about how controlled they are by organizations.

Similar with charity donations being seen as more sensible and meaningful than just giving money or food to people on the street, when charities have a long and sordid history of using money in ways that’s worse than useless.

There are plenty of sneer worthy EA individuals and aspects of the EA community, but doesn’t the basic premise make sense? Like we should support charities that actually do stuff, instead of charities that exist as vanity projects for the directors/don’t do anything because they’re poorly run. I feel like most people just donate to whichever charity has the cutest puppy or baby on the marketing materials without checking to see if they do a good job?

Plenty of the critique is from people that want to feel good about donating to no kill animal shelters.

Someone get their Gray Mirror today?