EA - Effective Altruism: Not as bad as you think by James Ozden

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Effective Altruism: Not as bad as you think, published by James Ozden on November 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Note: Linking this from my personal blog. Written fairly quickly and informally, for a largely non-EA audience. I felt pretty annoyed by misleading opinion pieces slamming EA, and this was the result.It’s been a pretty hectic few weeks if you follow Effective Altruism, crypto, tech firms or basically any news. FTX, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, recently lost all of its value, went bankrupt, and lost about $1 billion in customer funds. News has emerged that the CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, might have been mishandling customer funds and that the mismanagement of money was far worse than in the collapse of energy giant Enron. This is pretty awful for a lot of people, whether it’s the approximately one million people who lost their crypto investments that were stored in FTX, or all the charities that are worried they will have to pay back any donations made by FTX-related entities (of which there was over $160 million).Sam Bankman-Fried has openly spoken about Effective Altruism a fair bit in the past, and committed to giving away almost all of his wealth to charitable causes. For those who don’t know, Effective Altruism (or EA) is a research project and community that uses evidence and reason to do the most good. Tangibly, it’s a burgeoning intellectual movement with close to 10,000 engaged folks globally, across 70 countries (although mostly in the EU and US). People in the effective altruism community focus primarily on alleviating global poverty and diseases, reducing the suffering of animals used for food, and preventing existential risks from worst-case pandemics or misaligned artificial intelligence.Due to the close association between Sam Bankman-Fried and Effective Altruism, EA has gotten a fair bit of criticism recently about potentially not being the ideal do-gooder project it set out to be. But I think some of these critiques miss the mark. Often, they criticise issues that don't actually exist in the community, but sound good. They also seem to glance over evidence that disputes their claims, such as the huge amount of effort that Effective Altruists have put towards improving the lives of some of the most poor people globally. For example, via GiveWell, an EA-aligned charity evaluator, over 110,000 donors have moved over $1 billion to charities helping people in extreme poverty, by providing malaria bed nets, direct cash transfers, or more. This is amazing. GiveWell thinks these actions will have saved over 150,000 lives, as well as providing $175 million in direct cash to the global poor. See below for a breakdown of EA funding to date, as of August 2022.So what are the issues that critics of EA point out? I’ll discuss a few from this recent critique in the Guardian, which, in my opinion, offers a somewhat canonical and oft-heard angle. I’ll paraphrase what I believe some of these common critiques are, but it may not be perfect:Philanthropy concentrates power in the hands of a few wealthy donors. If organisations decide to pursue projects outside the scope of donor interests, then funders can easily pull their giving.EA donors give money to projects they find the most interesting, rather than what actually does the most good. This is partly down to donors defining effectiveness in their own terms, and funding projects that meet their criteria.Effective Altruism doesn’t tackle root issues, such as systems of oppression. Instead, it tinkers around the edge by proposing small reforms to our current capitalist, racist, patriarchal (etc.) system, without attempting to change the status quo.Longtermism, the view that we should be doing much more to protect future generations, is morally dubious, ignores the su...