I love ineffective altruists.
There’s a weird tendency in effective altruism to hate on ineffective altruism. For instance, Singer points out that “you can pay to provide and train a guard dog for a blind American, which costs about $40,000. But with that money you could cure 400 to 2,000 people in developing countries of blindness from glaucoma, which costs about $20 per person”. Therefore, he argues, we should direct our charity dollars away from guide dogs for blind Americans and towards curing glaucoma.
However, I have some concerns. My first concern is that there are two responses people can have to Singer’s illustration:
- “Wow! Donating to training guide dogs is really ineffective! I should stop donating to training guide dogs and start donating to curing glaucoma.”
- “Wow! Donating to training guide dogs is really ineffective! I should stop donating to training guide dogs and buy a new TV.”
Let’s be real here: donating to pretty much any charity creates more utility than spending the money on yourself. (That’s not strictly true. Autism Speaks is worse. Don’t donate to Autism Speaks.) As expensive as blind dogs are, they are still a better use of your money, from a utilitarian perspective, than Starbucks coffee. It is important that our message be “charity can do better,” not “charity is doing badly.”
I think that some people believe that the amount of money donated to charity is a fixed amount and the only issue is allocation. That is not true. Humans are lazy fuckers. Bashing ineffective altruism will leave some people with the thought “it is bad to donate money to charities that are less good.” And since not donating money to ineffective causes is easy, and donating money to effective causes is hard and involves giving things up, some people will do the former and then bask in the glow of their success.
Anecdotally, I am aware of several effective altruists who realized that, say, being vegetarian is ineffective altruism compared to donating extra money, stopped being vegetarian, and didn’t donate any extra money. As much as I feel like a buzzkill pointing this out, that logic doesn’t work unless you actually donate more money to charity. Just noticing that something is ineffective and not doing it doesn’t help.
This is an ordinary case of moral licensing and ultimately harmful to our cause.
There is a second reason that we should embrace ineffective altruism which is this: even ineffective altruism can be more effective.
People are always going to want to donate to warm fuzzies charities. Some people want to donate to rape relief because they were raped and they don’t want to donate to anything else. Some people feel really sad when they see sick American kids and want to donate to sick American kids. Some people are just incapable of connecting to schistosomiasis because it is totally fucking unpronounceable. But those people can still direct their money in the most effective way possible?
I mean. Is there perhaps some reason why quantification isn’t helpful if you’re limiting your quantification to “number of sick American children helped”? Does money stop going farther in the developing world if it only goes to rape survivors rather than some more effective charity? Do randomized controlled trials stop working when we apply them to food banks instead?
Think of it as harm reduction. Or perhaps the opposite: happiness enlargement.
This is why I adore Animal Charity Evaluators. I am skeptical of the argument that the Humane League is the best place to donate your money. However, some people want to help cute fuzzy animals. If they are going to help cute fuzzy animals, they should probably help the most cute fuzzy animals possible. Animal Charity Evaluators is here for this goal.
We should totally expand this into alternate areas. I want Effective Social Justice. Effective Cancer Research. Effective Arts Funding, for fuck’s sake. If people care about something, even if it’s something they maybe shouldn’t care about, I want them to care about it well.
blacktrance said:
Donating X dollars to an effective charity doesn’t cost a cent more than donating the same amount to an ineffective one. You spend a few minutes doing research, then donate the same amount you would’ve given otherwise. If you’re already willing to donate to an ineffective charity, donating to an effective one isn’t giving anything up – if anything, since it’s more effective, you can spend less money to do the same amount of good, and thus give up less.
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code16 said:
I’m going to assume here that you’re a person for who doing research is easy. That is really, really not the case for everyone. Speaking for myself, this kind of research basically approaches the impossible for me. And, feeling like I ought to do it makes my effectiveness basically go to zero, because I end up with the process of ‘before I do this, I need to do that research’, and since it’s pretty much guaranteed that I will put off that research indefinitely, I will never do the thing (where the thing here is donating) at all.
(In fact, the reason I like the EA movement is that it involves *other people doing the research*. And I would be made very happy by that system getting extended more. Like, the essentially the main reason I’m not doing EA (er, the action, not the community) right now is that what I know suggests that the people currently doing the EA evaluation have different priorities than me, so their conclusions are not ones it would seem to make sense for me to just follow. (Also, a bunch of these priorities seem to be implicit rather than stated, so it’s also really hard to actually figure out). I would love it incredibly (and keep looking for, in as much as I am able though as noted that is not much) if I could have some EA type information about the things that do reflect my priorities – and this is also likely to majorly increase my effectiveness, since it would facilitate me actually doing what I can, donation-wise, rather than nothing.)
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blacktrance said:
As I use the term, looking up GiveWell’s recommendations for effective charities counts as research.
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Godzillarissa said:
blacktrance: As long as you’re talking about digital natives that works. As soon as we look at people who think that ebay needs to be installed to be used*, “looking up GiveWell’s recommendations” might not be as easy as you think.
*real life example, not suggesting code16 does that
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Martha O'Keeffe said:
And everybody donates to the most effective charity until some mythical 100% of funding, couldn’t use another cent, limit is reached, then the overflow goes to the second most effective charity on down.
Meanwhile, less effective charities which were still doing necessary work have all withered and died on the vine because the Effective Altruists were pouring every penny into the one cause. Which is fine, I say eliminate malaria, send out those nets! If that is the most effective charity. And yes, let’s eliminate waste and unnecessary expense as much as possible. But in the meantime, all the blind people who could be participating in society are confined to their homes because we think they’re too privileged to deserve the expense of training guide dogs for them.
Then again, Singer would say that their parents should have humanely euthanized their blind children when they were still in the pre-personhood stage of infancy, so it’s all society’s fault there are blind people who need guide dogs. I have to say, whenever I read “Singer says….”, I think “Ah – more talking out of his arse”. If we could set up a charity to Get Peter Singer To Shut Up, I’d donate!
Effective Altruism of that sort reminds me of the “Eat up, there are children starving in Africa!” way of encouraging children to eat their vegetables. Yes, it’s very important that children learn to eat a balanced, varied and healthy diet, and yes, it’s a shame to waste food when there are people in want of food. But me eating my cauliflower or not eating my cauliflower is not going to make one damn bit of difference to someone in Africa dying of hunger right this minute.
Let people donate to guide dogs for the blind and all the other causes that are not the maximally efficient Number One most bang for the buck cause. There’s enough suffering to go round in the world, we don’t need to grade it on a scale of “How good will this make me feel when I boast about it to my progressive-minded pals?”
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LTP said:
I agree. Well, I lean towards virtue ethics, so I find this whole line of thinking from Ozy to be a bit absurd 😛
But even from a utilitarian point of view, maybe there is value in investing to reduce suffering in rich and middle income societies. After all, what’s the point of eliminating deaths due to easily treatable illness if the world those people are surviving into doesn’t care to try to tackle “less bad” problems like helping the blind live functional lives? It’s not obvious to me that a world where nobody dies of easily treatable diseases but where other needs and problems are completely ignored is better from a utilitarian point of view than a world where maybe some more people die of malaria but where a multitude of problems and needs are actively being worked on by people and society. You have to be building a world worth living in for those people who’s lives have been saved.
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blacktrance said:
If you don’t assign any particularly special value to blind people, this is the inevitable tradeoff – but the alternative is that more people will suffer. If we want to do as much good as possible per dollar, and don’t want to impoverish ourselves, some people who’d benefit from ineffective charity would lose out – but there’s still more good done in net, even if there are salient groups who end up worse off. Otherwise, we’d have to prefer a worse world-state to a better one.
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ozymandias said:
I agree that it is bad when blind people can’t participate in society. That is why I think we should make sure the most possible blind people can participate in society, and therefore if we have one option that could help four hundred blind people we should choose that over the option that would help one blind person.
Effective altruists are aware of the risk of not funding promising interventions, which is why GiveWell’s the Open Philanthropy Project is specifically looking into new and promising interventions.
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Martha O'Keeffe said:
The thing is, I had a quick look at GiveWell’s site and they seem to have their pet charities. Now, they say “These are the ones we consider to be most effective by our criteria”, to which I say “That’s nice, dear, but your criteria seem a little opaque”.
Basically, they come right out and say “We like charities that tackle the topics we think are most effective, which is mosquito netting and de-worming”.
And y’know, nothing wrong with that. But that means if you’re not a mosquito nets/deworming charity, tough luck with getting ranked up there as one of the most effective! And just possibly, other health problems are important too?
I’m not criticising them for doing what they say they’re doing: not ranking “Best of/worst of all charities”, but rather picking a few that they think are the most cost-effective.
But I remain to be convinced that they should be considered the alpha and omega of “If you want to find out the best way to donate, check this site”.
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Lion said:
So, this gets into one of my broader concerns regarding the EA philosophy – the idea that we should consider our obligations to other people solely through a universalist framework. The premise seems to be something along the lines of “The ethical thing to do is to donate all of your charitable donations to malaria nets in Africa” or similar causes because that will help the most people. At one level, that’s admirable. I’m all about maximizing the impact of charitable donations – as someone who has seen a lot of non-profits engage in horrific waste, I’m pleased that folks are calling that out. But I think it fails to take into account that, as human beings, we have particularist obligations, not just universalist ones.
For example, most people (perhaps not some utilitarians, admittedly) would agree that helping your child takes precedence over helping that of another family. This might extend even to the point of paying for things – like college or advanced educational opportunities – for one’s own child before paying for more basic things for another person’s child. The same principal applies when considering other people one has bonds to, depending on what communities are relevant in your own life. For example, my identity as a Jew and as a disabled person is important to me, so I will prioritize Jewish and disability rights related causes because I feel that I have a stronger obligation to ‘my people’ than I might others. I don’t ignore other causes and I still give to them, but I also don’t feel that my giving to lesser needs of people who are closer to me is in any sense inefficient or ineffective. I am discharging my obligations, taking into account both the impact I can have and who I am and what I owe the people I am connected to.
This isn’t to say that one doesn’t have obligations to children of other families (or communities, or countries, for that matter), but that we have stronger obligations to those who we have particularist bonds to. To borrow from Shulchan Aruch (an odd text to be citing, given the audience, but what the hell, why not?), “The poor of his household take precedence over the poor of his city; and the poor of his city take precedence over the poor of another city.”
In the modern day and age, I think it’s more reasonable to read this as being less about geography and more about the concentric circles – be they geographic, ideological, religious or reflective of any other facet of identity or community – that define us. And I do think it is still quite fair to point out the hypocrisy or inefficiency of someone giving exorbitant sums to alleviate comparably minor need close to home while doing nothing about far greater need far away from them (i.e: endowing a concert hall in your neighborhood, but not giving anything to alleviate poverty elsewhere in your city/region/country/world). But that criticism should be more about the degree to which proximity or communal obligation discounts greater social ills occurring further away, rather than the very idea that our particularist ties have relevance and should shape how we define our obligations.
In short, the problem I have with EA philosophy is it’s failure to take into account the fact that we are not – nor should we be – all acting from an abstract third person viewpoint of universalist values. We are human beings that exist in communities, and communities come with particularist obligations to other community members. While some might call that unfair bias – and taken to extremes, it most certainly is – I think that in moderation, consideration of those communal obligations are in fact very important. Our status as human beings in communities matters, and it should be taken into account when we decide how we discharge our ethical obligations.
Would love to discuss this further with someone who subscribes to EA philosophy, either to learn if I’m misunderstanding their point of view or to debate the underlying concepts with someone who disagrees with them.
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ozymandias said:
I am a bad person to debate this with, because this is one of those issues that brings out my inner Gryffindor primary and I just wind up going “YOU SHOULDN’T DO THAT BECAUSE IT’S WRONG. WHY DO YOU WANT TO DO WRONG THINGS” and it’s not a terribly productive discussion. 😛
That said, I do think you’ve hit on the difference: a lot of EA thought explicitly denies the idea that it is ethical to care more about people close to us (sometimes quite snarkily).
I agree to a certain extent about particularist obligations, but I end up grounding them in universalist values. The reason I comfort my girlfriend when she’s sad, but I don’t comfort arbitrary sad people, is that I’m better at comforting my girlfriend because I know her well, and I have affection for her so the opportunity cost is lower. Similarly, me attempting to take care of every child equally is going to wind up with some children with serious attachment issues. 🙂 But those arguments end up being a lot less particularist than most people are right now.
At the same time, people aren’t perfect utilitarians. I think that the concept of “supererogatory” is really important for humans attempting to be utilitarians, even if it’s not technically in the philosophy. 🙂 A person who gives all their money to the poor is a saint, but most people can’t be saints. (Yet! Growth mindset!) And certainly it is more virtuous to use your money to help those you love than to use it to buy additional flatscreens, and it is important to encourage people in taking steps towards virtuousness instead of bashing them for not being all the way there.
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osberend said:
@Lion: I’m not a big fan of any of the Abrahamic faiths, but apart from that, your post. All of it. Seconding. Bits of it seem spookily like what I was going to say prior to reading it, other bits are stylistically different, but substantively similar, and also excellent.
And while I can’t speak for anyone else, I’m down with quoting good messages, regardless of where they’re from.
As a purely optional side note (and subject to house rules about relevance), I’m always up for a good debate about religion and the philosophy thereof, if that’s the sort of thing you’re interested in.
@ozymandias: “YOU SHOULDN’T DO THAT BECAUSE IT’S WRONG. WHY DO YOU WANT TO DO WRONG THINGS”
Funny, that’s how I feel about complicity (including the passive complicity of walking away) in Omelas. Or Yudkowsky’s torture chamber. Or the repugnant conclusion. Or . . . well, essentially all of the uglier sort of failures of utilitarianism. Having glanced very briefly at the linked site, I’m not sure if I would also count as a Gryffindor primary or not.
That said, I do think you’ve hit on the difference: a lot of EA thought explicitly denies the idea that it is ethical to care more about people close to us (sometimes quite snarkily).
A literal (geometric distance) interpretation, giving rise to the panhandler silliness, is clearly off. But at base, I think that the core idea is right: We owe something to all humanity (and at least some animal species as well), but we owe more to those we are closer to. Of course.
At the same time, people aren’t perfect utilitarians. I think that the concept of “supererogatory” is really important for humans attempting to be utilitarians, even if it’s not technically in the philosophy.
It seems to me that if you’re trying to make a philosophy for human beings, it probably should not be utterly unworkable for actual human beings without introducing elements from rival philosophies whose basic validity you deny. :p That said, I absolutely agree that a concept of the supererogatory is necessary for functioning humans, including those who are trying to be utilitarians.
A person who gives all their money to the poor is a saint, but most people can’t be saints. (Yet! Growth mindset!)
I think Orwell put it best:
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code16 said:
I think the community thing is better derived from the point that there’s an important sense in which a lot of the resources you have decision power over aren’t actually just yours, in that it’s thanks to community things that you have them. If you go to public museums, or have benefitted from an at least partly donation-funded medical thing, or that person with the guide dog is a customer at your business, or your employees sometimes depend on the local food pantry – and so on, through a whole lot of degrees of separation.
This is a reason having a government is nice, because when the benefits you got were government funded, you discharge this through your taxes. But it’s likely private stuff contributed too, and if you aren’t discharging that because you’re decided to reallocate those resources of yours, then you’re doing damage to the very things that got you in a position to make that decision.
Now, the fact that my community has these kinds of resources while others do not is very much a problem, and it’s good to do things that deal with it. But unless you’re doing it in a thought out/organized/etc manner on *both* sides (on the side of where the money is coming from as well as the side where it is going) then there’s going to be a problem.
To use the girlfriend example, let’s say I have a group of 5 friends who are awesome and supportive to me. But, I have decided that the emotional energy I might otherwise spend on my friends, I will instead spent on a different thing that will instead help 20 people. This is probably going to become a problem. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do anything – maybe my friends might also consider this a good cause, and we will decide that I will spent 1/5 of that emotional energy on them, 4/5 of it to help 16 other people, and they will look at their greater allotment of emotional energy as supporting this cause they agree with. But *only* looking at the question of 5 people vs 20, as a pure numerical thing, is missing some important parts of the situation. (Note: I do not think that money and stuff like emotional resources are actually perfectly comparable, and treating them like they are generally causes issues. But, often it makes for a useful analogy, so I use it.)
(I’m going to note here that looking at resources you have as ‘I earned them, they’re fully mine to dispose of however I like’ is a very common libertarian type mindset/worldview, which is probably contributing to how strongly that tends to be invisibly centrally present in EA stuff. Which I will fully agree is much better than that same idea turing into ‘I never got help from anyone so now I should be able to have all the flatscreen TVs I want and not care about anyone else (I don’t super like everything in the linked article, but it’s the example I remembered about), but I still think it’s something to watch out for).
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veronica d said:
I care more about people close to me. Similarly, I care more about people who are *like* me, since I share much with them.
Likewise, as a matter of course, I assume others care more about people close to them and like them. I am not surprised when someone is more loyal to their friends than they are to me, a stranger.
Utilitarians try to convince me I am wrong, but since they don’t have good arguments against wireheading or dust specks, I don’t really worry much about them.
“Hey look, you can invent a fitness function that gives the results you want it to give. Go you!”
Which is to say, there are a finite number of computable functions that can be evaluated in time N on hardware K — but in practice it’s a huge number. So achievable fitness functions are pretty much what you need them to be.
Sure, one life saved is one life saved, but a “true” effective altruist would step over my dying body in the street [1], since you know, that energy could be used to earn another 11 cents to give to people far away.
As with most things, I suggest a mixed strategy, one that takes into account your feelings, the feelings of others, the way humans actually work, and “the big picture,” as best you can tell.
Most people don’t really give a fuck about trans kids, except as a political football, the way white liberals will pontificate endlessly about “poor trans women of color,” but in fact they don’t know any poor trans women of color, nor would they want to, nor do they do anything to materially help trans women of color. (’Cept Janet Mock. They bought her book, which now sits unread on their shelves.)
Anyway, being trans, I *do* care about trans kids, so I have a chance to step up.
But what about the African kids?
Well, I guess I can give some to them also. I’m not likely to find an optimal balance, nor do I suppose GiveWell will either, since they probably don’t think about trans kids expect in some really abstract alive-versus-dead sense.
Yeah, dead sucks. It sucks a lot. But eking out a barely livable existence also sucks. I know something about that.
So *giving nothing* to trans kids sucks and giving nothing to African kids sucks (and yes there are African trans kids), and finding the optimal balance in a dynamic, non-convex fitness landscape is kinda somewhere beyond NP complete — cuz we don’t even have all the data to put into the algorithm.
Plus while a simple, tractable fitness function, such as “one life saved is one life saved,” is intellectually pleasing, it fails to be self-justifying. After all, there is an impulse for “mathy” people to like simple, tractable models of reality, just as their is an impulse for me to like smiling trans kids. But these are things in our minds, not facts in the world. There is nothing that says that human need should be *legible*.
Finding and following a simple, tractable model is its own intellectual compromise. But entropy always wins and you’re surely missing things. We need some people to *not* follow your model.
(You understand why centralized planning fails and distributed markets work better. This is the same thing.)
I kinda think we throw up our hands and pick a fraction we can live with.
And for those of you who say, “But I don’t see any reason to care *in particular* about trans kids” — I know, which is why *I do*.
[1] This statement is possibly hyperbole. But still.
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veronica d said:
Let me add, I’m not saying you *shouldn’t* give to EA charities. If you do, awesome! They seem to do tons of good.
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Susebron said:
@Veronica: The reason that EA generally doesn’t focus on helping trans people is that helping trans people (and blind people, etc.) is hard. If someone is dying in the street in front of you, it’s significantly easier to save them. It happens to be easier, in general, to help kids in Africa, because helping them just a matter of getting more money and the money goes further than it does in the first world. Helping trans people, on the other hand, requires the sort of societal change that’s difficult to accelerate and even more difficult to quantify. And even that is a problem that GiveWell has been working on addressing with the Open Philanthropy Project.
Oh, and here’s GiveWell’s list of all the charities they’ve considered. Here’s a list of questions compiled by GiveWell to ask to charities you’re considering donating to, regardless of what their goal is.
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Lion said:
@osberend Thank you – and sure, a discussion of religion and philosophy of religion sounds fun. If the OP has no objection, kick things off. 🙂
@ozymandias I think you could certainly construct a universalist argument for various types of particularism. I’ve liked a lot of Natan Sharansky’s writings on this, basically making the argument that identity and the resulting particularist bonds that come with it are important elements of giving people the strength to fight for social change in line with universalist values. But I do think that for the types of particularism that are most important to us and that we hold most dear – our loyalty to our families, to our friends and to our loved ones and even our ideological communities – that’s just a justification after the fact.
The concept of “supererogation” is an interesting one. It seems somewhat similar to the line from Pirkei Avot, “Lo alecha hamlacha ligmor, aval lo ata ben horeen le’hibatal memeina” (It is not for you to complete the task, yet neither are you free to abstain from it), but seems to have some significant differences that I can’t quite articulate yet.
Still, even accounting for these ideas as aspirational for the majority of people, I do think that it is generally a bad idea to articulate a moral framework that presumes that giving weight to familial and communal ties is a moral failing. Is it really wise to take a view of ethics that states that loyalty to family, tribe or country is a selfish or immoral value? Certainly, I see the case for excess loyalty (to the point of allowing or inflicting terrible things on others) being ethically problematic, but I have a hard time agreeing with a moral vision – even an aspirational one – that dismisses those bonds as just so much selfishness. Is that really EA’s position? Help me understand if I’m misreading something.
As a side note re “supererogation”, I was interested in @thirqual’s comment that much of the EA community takes inspiration from Catholic concepts. That’s interesting to me, in part because much of the activist culture that I come from is rooted in Jewish thought (Tikkun Olam, Lo Alecha Hamlacha Ligmor…, etc.), even though it’s predominantly a space consisting of secular Jews, atheist Jews and gentiles. Do you find that (EA or rationalism’s connection in Catholic memes) to be true? If so, what are the implications?
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ozymandias said:
Lion: I think that part of the difference is that supererogation implies that you can rest now. It isn’t a moral failing not to do supererogatory things.
Hm. I would sort of go the opposite direction? Like… I care about my partner’s needs very much. The ideal isn’t for me to stop caring about my partner’s needs; it is for me to care about everyone else’s needs as much as I care about his, because every person has an equal right to have their needs fulfilled, simply because they are a person. It is easier for me to recognize that my boyfriend is a person, because I know him and interact with him, but that doesn’t change the fact that people I don’t know and don’t interact with are just as much people. But there’s an important difference between expanding your circle of concern and eliminating it, even if both of those wind up with treating everyone as equals.
(And here I’m talking about agape, not things like affection or friendship, which are quite rightly particular.)
I suspect that what thirqual is actually noticing is that much of the EA stuff he reads is from me and I am fairly influenced by Christian ethics (esp. Catholic)– note my reference to agape. 🙂 The Giving What We Can pledge is ten percent in part as a deliberate marketing decision– people are familiar with tithing. A lot of rationalists are fond of Chesterton and Lewis, and there’s considerable overlap between rationalists and EAs. And we call excessive guilt “scrupulosity” because of my bad influence. But I’m not sure that EA is particularly Catholic in general.
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Lion said:
@Susebron All the more reason to maintain a moral framework that says that improving the lives of blind or trans people is important, because they are a part of one’s communities. Otherwise, we’re stuck with a model that really screws over folks who require more resource-intensive support or social change.
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ozymandias said:
But what about people who need more resource-intensive support and are in communities that are lacking in resources?
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Lion said:
@Ozy I think that’s part of why non-geographic communities are so important, and why the internet has been so great for marginalized communities by facilitating more of them and in stronger forms.
We’re seeing some really good examples of this in the LGBTQ community right now, with the opposition to anti-gay laws in Africa and Russia, and in the disability community, with the development of the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities.
We also see variations on it in our own country – my impression is that there are certainly things that make you feel loyalty and obligation with people you’ve never met been physically close to and perhaps never even interacted with at all, no? There certainly are to me. Those ties form communities and communal bonds, with resulting obligations that should be weighed alongside considerations of effectiveness.
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Susebron said:
@Lion: With a given amount of resources, screwing over people who need more resource-intensive support screws over fewer people than screwing over those who need less intensive help.
And what about communities that don’t have access to the Internet, or people don’t have a huge amount in common with rich people? How many poor African kids do you know on the Internet? How much of a sense of kinship do you have with them? How much do you expect others in first-world countries have a sense of kinship with them?
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Lion said:
Ozy: Hm. I would sort of go the opposite direction? Like… I care about my partner’s needs very much. The ideal isn’t for me to stop caring about my partner’s needs; it is for me to care about everyone else’s needs as much as I care about his, because every person has an equal right to have their needs fulfilled, simply because they are a person. It is easier for me to recognize that my boyfriend is a person, because I know him and interact with him, but that doesn’t change the fact that people I don’t know and don’t interact with are just as much people. But there’s an important difference between expanding your circle of concern and eliminating it, even if both of those wind up with treating everyone as equals.
@Ozy, That’s valid and I understand the difference in perspective, but I don’t think that’s a very realistic assessment of how caring for other people works. We don’t have unlimited effort or unlimited resources – this seems to be a reality that EA acknowledges very well. In light of that, weighting the responsibility and obligation we have towards those closest to us is relevant to some degree. Not above all other considerations, but it deserves a place in our considerations alongside effectiveness. We should also work harder to view everyone in humanity as people and recognize we have obligations to them too – but our obligations to those we care about and who are part of the communities that are important to us matters. Otherwise, wouldn’t your ethical system suggest that you should devote no resources – at the very least, easily transferrable resources like money, if not necessarily resources like time – to helping your boyfriend or your friends while others have greater need?
@Susebron We have universal human obligations as well, and we should take those seriously too. All I’m contending is that respecting our obligations to those in our own community – particularism – is something that we should weight alongside metrics of effectiveness. The alternative seems to be a vision of morality in which those who require more resources in our communities – the disabled, the elderly, low-skilled workers, etc. – are ignored in favor of more cost-effective donations elsewhere. Particularism is the morality we practice whenever we support our families or our neighbors or friends instead of putting our time and money into more ‘effective’ pursuits. I don’t subscribe to a vision of morality that sees that as a failure.
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Ampersand said:
@Veronica,
What’s a pro-trans charity that you think deserves a lot of support?
@Lion, I very much agree with you. Givewell seems right to me, but I don’t trust my own discernment enough to be sure I’d perceive it if Givewell is actually using a bad methodology and making bad recommendations. So I donate to Givewell charities, but also to charities I choose in other ways, including some that help people in communities I’m part of.
A scattershot approach, given my own imperfections, seems safer than a focused approach.
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veronica d said:
@Ampersand —
There is nothing specific I’d recommend right now. It’s complicated.
This is exactly my point. A false confidence in an optimization procedure, if it becomes widespread, can be *less optimal* than its absence. Which is why state socialism fails. It’s a game of information, computation, and modeling.
I have no doubt GiveWell does pretty good. In fact, I expect they do better than chance.
But they do so under the assumption that *not everyone listens to them*.
Which is really weird and deep actually. We have moral statements whose truth depends on their being sufficiently ignored.
(As an aside, I’ve seen this called “reflexive semantics” — it’s the same reason that the head of Federal Reserve cannot just give bare, truthful assertions, cuz whatever he says affects the system. If he says, “Things look dim,” they’re gonna soon look worse than dim. Similarly, the CEO of a company cannot just say, “We’re facing a huge risk, and there is a 30% chance we will fail this quarter” — if he does, the chance just became greater than 30%.)
Anyway, a group such as GiveWell will *by necessity* have an incredibly simple model. It might include some first-order effects, but it will exclude many, many, many variables. Likewise, I doubt they look to higher order effects. How could they? It’s intractable.
The answer is “do the best you can with the data you have.” And yes. Indeed. Do that.
For instance, if you are sufficiently familiar with dynamic systems theory, you might say, “I’m gonna add some clearly suboptimal fuzz to my output strategies to guard against overfitting and getting caught in bad equilibria.”
(Oh, neat trick: when optimizing over complex, changing spaces, sometimes using trite coordinate descent methods, until loose, partial convergence, can in practice outperform better-on-paper algorithms — since not only is the *sampled data* changing, but insofar as this is *social*, the underlying behaviors themselves are changing. Your “samples” are always behind the times. They were drawn from a no-longer-valid model. Even stuff like 5-way cross validation can *still* overfit. Just punt the ball and use a sloppy method. You’ll outperform the best with your bad data.)
(For example: if you sample your user base and get a measure, then by the time you deploy the new behavior, your awesome product gets talked about on CNN, and now your user base has measurably changed.)
Anyway, yeah. Math is awesome. Trans kids are awesome too.
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Susebron said:
@Veronica: The entire point of the Open Philanthropy project is to open them up to things that don’t necessarily look good from the perspective of their basic model.
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blacktrance said:
That depends on what their preferences and goals are. If you’re not willing to donate money but are willing to be a vegetarian when you have a mistaken idea about how effective vegetarianism is, it can be rational to stop being a vegetarian and not donate any more money when your beliefs about vegetarianism become more accurate – if your preferences are “be vegetarian if vegetarianism is effective” > “do nothing” > “be vegetarian if vegetarianism isn’t effective” >= “donate money effectively”. Is it wrong for them to “bask in the glow of their success” when they’re satisfying their preferences more effectively?
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ozymandias said:
The argument I was making in that paragraph is that if you accept that vegetarianism improves the world, and you accept that it improves the world less than donating money to charity, it is utility-maximizing to be like “okay, I will donate more money to charity and not be vegetarian”, but it is not utility-maximizing to be like “I will not be vegetarian and not donate any more money to charity.” You seem to be arguing that it is rational to not be vegetarian if you believe vegetarianism doesn’t improve the world. That is a different argument.
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stillnotking said:
I’m skeptical of moral licensing theory (your link is broken). It seems like one of those phenomena that show up in the lab, and maybe have some minor impact in the real world, but spectacularly fail to explain observed behavior at the macro level. For instance, vegans are not over-represented in prisons. Most people display fairly consistent levels of conscientiousness; we might license ourselves to eat a sundae after a workout, but we don’t license ourselves to steal because we gave to charity, or cheat on our partners because we took out the garbage.
I do make an effort not to bash charities, unless I really think they’re doing more harm than good, because someone who stops donating to United Way probably won’t start donating to Doctors Without Borders. (This involves biting my tongue a lot during pledge drives at the office.)
This is basically the project of groups like Human Rights Watch and Freedom House, no? Controlled experiments are probably impossible, but comparisons are useful. Of course, the bigger problem is that different people have different definitions of “social justice”.
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Totient said:
> It is important that our message be “charity can do better,” not “charity is doing badly.”
I completely agree with this sentiment.
Thinking in terms of opportunity costs; well, it’s economically correct, but for me (and, I suspect, most people) it’s too painful a lot of the time when thinking about charity.
Saying that “Hey, we can do even better” instead of “Hey, you’re not maximally effective” may be something of a psychological hack, but human reasoning is so broken that we need psychological hacks.
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Taymon A. Beal said:
Are there any good studies on how people decide which charities to donate to, and how much to donate to them? That’s how we can resolve this question.
In the meantime, it seems to me that plenty of EAs support non-EA-approved causes while recognizing that doing so doesn’t discharge their ethical obligations. I certainly do this (although not as much as I would if I had actual income), and I’m in favor of generalizing it as much as we can.
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MCA said:
“This is why I adore Animal Charity Evaluators. I am skeptical of the argument that the Humane League is the best place to donate your money. However, some people want to help cute fuzzy animals. ”
They’re worthless.
Every single one of their “top charities” is just an animal rights front that makes lots of noise and accomplishes fuck-all except preaching to the converted and making a pointless scene somewhere everyone will ignore them. Hell, they’ve even got links to HSUS, which is a total scam, and grey2k, a pack of known liars and frauds, neither of which has ever helped an animal in their lives. Oh, look, they also list PETA, which has known links to domestic terrorist organizations.
Here’s a simple, perfect, 100% guideline for animal-based charities: if you cannot point to a single individual animal, by name, that the charity has specifically helped, it’s nothing but a front for animal rights extremists.
Want to actually help animals? Go down to the local shelter and donate or volunteer, or do likewise with any of the many independent groups (most of which are 100% volunteer run).
Effectiveness means real, concrete results. “Consciousness-raising” and “protests” and “social media” are not results. I’ve had real results: Peyton, Brett, Sybyl, Coachin, Konnie, Loader, Darvish, Sweet Pea, and Marley.
It reminds me of when MA shut down greyhound racing – tons of self-righteous jackass smugly informed us of how they’d “helped” by voting for the ban (which, incidentally, shut down the best and most well-regulated tracks in the country), yet how many of them actually adopted a dog, or even donated? Damn near none of them, and certainly not enough to cover the labor and financial cost of every group suddenly having dozens of dogs dropped on them at once. If we didn’t have a member whose house was about 60% overflow kennel space, we’d’ve been in deep shit.
If your hands aren’t dirty, you haven’t done shit. Period.
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Martha O'Keeffe said:
Okay, I don’t know anything about bans on greyhound racing, but it strikes me that if it’s banned, it’s not worth the cost of keeping the greyhounds if they can’t race, so they’ll be put down (people don’t generally keep greyhounds as pets).
Ex-racing dogs are probably going to be tough to re-home: they need large area with lots of exercise and are accustomed to a specialised diet. Owners may keep a few dogs that they feel attached to, but if you have a kennel full of racing animals that can’t pay for themselves and nobody will buy them off you, they’re going to be put down humanely (or otherwise).
How is this supposed to be helping greyhounds?
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MCA said:
Actually, they’re excellent and popular pets in the US and UK, and thanks to a wide array of groups, they almost all find homes (including after the ban, though we had to scramble). They’re actually extremely lazy (they’re sprinters with no endurance, hence the nickname “45 mph couch potato”) and can eat basically any decent quality dog food. An adopter once described them as “that dog with all those perfect traits you always wanted but never got in one package, until you got a greyhound”.
But yes, just banning the racing either means mass euthanasia or a whole lot of scrambling and expense and overflow issues for the adoption community, usually without corresponding increases in adoptions, foster homes, or donations.
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Ginkgo said:
“Ex-racing dogs are probably going to be tough to re-home:”
Normally that’s quite true but greyhounds are different because typically they are either coming directly from the track or have boarded a short time. Basically your home will be their first home.
Greyhounds don’t need much exercise. Mine doesn’t much like walks even. He sleeps about 20 hours a day.
You are also quite right that just banning the racing and dumping a bunch of dogs on the adoption system is going to result in dogs being killed. this is a gap in the laws. some states, like mine, have pretty strict laws against abuse – it’s a felony – http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Legislation-makes-animal-neglect-a-felony-1171992.php
We just need stricter laws on this. These are the crimes that should people away for decades, rather than drug offenses. If a human abuses or neglects an animal – animal hoarding should call for a death penalty – just fuck him or her – I don’t have a lot of regard for people who fail in their trust. You won’t find a dog ever doing that.
Oh, and we don’t think getting our dog was any kind of charity, except to us.
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theunitofcaring said:
Causing measurable reductions in the number of animals factory farmed is several thousand times more valuable, according to my values, than saving one animal. Your values might be different, and that’s fine, but it’s wildly inaccurate to present your preference as some sort of objective metric of effectiveness.
ACE is great for finding organizations with a track record of converting people to vegetarians, getting more ethical practices implemented, or otherwise raising the social costs of factory farming. If you value animal suffering ACE’s charities are the best option. If you value knowing the names of cute dogs that were specifically saved by your actions, then obviously don’t give to ACE.
Giving $50 to ACE does more good-by-my-values than $50,000 to your local animal shelter, though, so I think it’s probably worth it to try to convince more animal activists to care about effectiveness, even if you can only convince 1/100.
Also, MCA is a convenient example of my larger objection to this post, which is that at least some of the ineffective altruists are actively doing harm, in MCA’s case by spreading malicious lies about effective organizations (PETA is not endorsed by ACE and also does not have ties to domestic terror groups by any reasonable definition of any of those words, HSUS is not a scam, etc), calling the work of all organizations who don’t 100% conform ideologically to their beliefs “worthless”, popping up all over the internet to trash animal activists, and characterizing effective activism as “terrorism” and “extremism” and so forth. If MCA literally did nothing about animals for the rest of their life, animals would be significantly better off, and I don’t think this is an isolated case.
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MCA said:
“Causing measurable reductions in the number of animals factory farmed is several thousand times more valuable, according to my values, than saving one animal.”
Prove that they’ve done that.
Seriously, show me how a single action, by this single charity, has actually done jack squat. Not “they may have inspired someone to go vegan”, show me a legislative action they passed.
“If you value animal suffering ACE’s charities are the best option.”
Unless you value human life – all of them oppose animal testing.
Your homework – go to your local Children’s hospital, find a child dying of cancer, and tell them and their grieving parents *exactly* how many lab rats their child’s life is worth.
No cheap philosophical evasions – either do it and post a video, or you’re utterly unserious and not worth conversing with.
“PETA is not endorsed by ACE and also does not have ties to domestic terror groups by any reasonable definition of any of those words”
http://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/the-threat-of-eco-terrorism
PETA has funded two known terrorist organization, the ELF and ALF. Case closed, you’re wrong, thanks for playing.
“HSUS is not a scam”
Then show me one scap of good they’ve done.
And let’s not forget their outright misinformation on various topics. Their entire web presence on the topic of exotic animals could be debunked by a 3rd grader with google and moderate critical thinking skills, or possibly a sufficiently smart chimp. Either they’re too lazy to fix it, too stupid to do basic research, or to corrupt to own up to their mistakes.
“popping up all over the internet to trash animal activists”
That’s because they’re idiots. Want me to stop? Go get some beliefs about animals that aren’t based on Disney films.
Seriously, I have *NEVER* met an animal rights activist who could go toe-to-toe with me in a debate. 99% have never directly interacted with anything that hasn’t got fur or feathers, much less anything that actually hunts humans for food. Not a single one can actually stand realizing just how brutal and vicious nature really is, because they’ve insulated themselves from it.
Go on, prove me wrong. Tell me of a single time a substantially-sized predator (>50 lbs) has ever deliberately tried to kill and eat you. Tell me when you’ve looked into the eyes of a species so ancient that it was eating our ancestors before they even lost their tails, that sees us as nothing temporarily inaccessible meals.
Until you, personally, haven’t been on the top of the food chain, you have zero idea what the natural world is really like. You’re a bunch of soft, coddled children.
“characterizing effective activism as “terrorism” and “extremism” and so forth”
What’s firebombing? Arson? Theft? Intimidation campagins? Because those are terrorism.
I *personally* know someone whose lab was trashed by these vandals. Don’t lie and tell me they’re harmless or, worse, “Effective’.
“If MCA literally did nothing about animals for the rest of their life, animals would be significantly better off, and I don’t think this is an isolated case.”
Awww, that’s cute, you think I give a shit what you think.
I’ll live feed one of my pythons tonight, just for you. How’s that? Gonna have a cry?
Moron.
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ozymandias said:
MCA: You seem to be very heated about this topic. While a certain amount of calling each other malicious liars and soft coddled children and so on is all part of debate, please refrain from insults that don’t actually make an argument and are just about causing your opponent pain, such as your last three paragraphs. I would not like to ban you, but if you aren’t capable of adhering to basic civility, I will.
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Patrick said:
MCA, have you considered the possibility that the reason animal rights activists can never take you on in a debate isn’t because of your l33t skillz, but possibly because you aren’t capable of recognizing a good argument when you hear it, and are in fact getting pwned 24/7 without realizing it?
“Your homework – go to your local Children’s hospital, find a child dying of cancer, and tell them and their grieving parents *exactly* how many lab rats their child’s life is worth.
No cheap philosophical evasions – either do it and post a video, or you’re utterly unserious and not worth conversing with.”
Replace “lab rats” with “children in the third world dying of malaria” to illustrate the point.
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theunitofcaring said:
MCA: It might be a good idea for you to step away from animal advocacy until you stop thinking “i’ll kill animals to hurt people who disagree with me” is an acceptable form of interaction. I wish you the best and I’ve just made a donation to ACE in your name.
I do want to respond to one specific thing, which is the debate over whether the (non-ACE-endorsed) charity PETA is, as you claimed, tied to domestic terrorism. I wrote: “PETA does not have ties to domestic terror groups by any reasonable definition of any of those words.”
You said “PETA has funded two known terrorist organization, the ELF and ALF. Case closed, you’re wrong, thanks for playing.”
Firstly, ALF is like Anonymous, it’s a name chosen by people who take actions ‘furthering the cause of animal liberation’, it is not an organization. You can’t fund it. ELF is the same thing, though it at least has /sorta/ leadership, the claim is not quite as patently absurd.
Secondly, neither group has killed anyone and both have announced that they abhor actions that cause harm to any human or nonhuman animals, making them at most very noncentral examples of terrorist organizations. They have caused economic damage. Though not a fraction as much as, say, Goldman Sachs.
PETA hasn’t funded ALF as a group, since ‘ALF as a group’ doesn’t exist, but it /has/ contributed to the legal defense of ALF members. “Paid for lawyers for the defense of people who identified as members of a movement that has never killed anyone and has a mission statement that forbids hurting anyone but which the FBI in 2002 said was a terror group’ is not ‘has ties to domestic terror groups’, any more than the ACLU, which keeps funding the legal defense of terrible people, therefore has “ties to the Ku Klux Klan’ and “ties to ISIS’. Though as I’ve said, a better parallel would be “ties to Anonymous”, which really emphasizes the absurdity of claiming ‘ties’ with a name that’s a banner, not an organization.
In any event, PETA is not endorsed by ACE. The organizations that are endorsed by ACE tend to convert vegans with advertising, since that happens to be a very cheap way to reduce animal suffering. And thanks to this conversation, they’ll have $50 more with which to do that work! (That’s the ‘drama deterrent’ I make myself donate when I’m indulging the temptation to poke trolls and shoot fish in a barrel and otherwise engage terrible human beings.)
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thirqual said:
“I’ve just made a donation to ACE in your name”
AMC’s post was low on merit and high on BS, but this is at best petty, on the level of the smug “I’ll pray for you” directed at atheists.
The comparison is of course chosen because many EA here appear to be using catholicism as a source for their inspiring memes. Strong cultural constructs are attractors in ideas space, and they will reproduce unwanted aspects of catholicism too. Scratch will in fact, because the use of “tithe” and “saint”, the awful discourse on a return to colonization (for the good of those poor people, of course), the purity signaling are already well present.
(note that this is independent from other objections on {how to|can we} compute utility meaningfully and what is the best effective action in the long-term)
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theunitofcaring said:
thirqual: When people do something specifically because they believe it will hurt me, I donate to effective charities in their name, bonus if there are effective charities they don’t like. I think the game-theoretic reasons for this are fairly straightforward, I would not be sad if everyone did this (so it universalizes well, which is always a good thing to check), and it successfully deters people from behaving the way MCA is. This policy has made my life significantly better and I highly recommend it.
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Heinrich Kunrath (@HKunrath) said:
To buttress this argument on a more abstract level, we ought to embrace scalar consequentialism, or something like it.
Like total, average, act, rule, and two-level, Scalar and Satisficing are different flavors of consequentialist and utilitarian theory.
Most traditional moral reasoning is satisficing—it assumes there is a minimal standard that must be satisfied, or a threshold that has to be passed, in order for an action (or omission) to be considered right. A satisficer might say that after witnessing a crime, if you don’t report it to the proper authorities immediately and make yourself entirely available to answer their questions, you are In The Wrong. In this discussion, a satisficer might say that unless you’re giving all your disposable income to the most effective, best-vetted charity, you’re bad.
Scalar consequentialists, on the other hand, don’t think in terms of “entirely wrong or entirely right,” but instead talk about a continuous scale of goodness and badness. A scalar utilitarian could say that it’s good to anonymously report a crime the day after it happens, better to report it immediately but anonymously, even better still to report it immediately and under your own name, etc., and that all of these are to be encouraged. Likewise, the scalar utilitarian would say ineffective altruism is better than buying a second flatscreen, and that effective altruism is better than ineffective altruism and flatscreens. Better is always better, but good can be good enough.
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alwhite56 said:
I am aware that many people dislike Autism Speaks but I didn’t think it was at such a low level as to be actively discouraged against. What makes Autism Speaks such a terrible organization that it gets singled out as a terrible organization?
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Heinrich Kunrath (@HKunrath) said:
It’s an organization by for the parents of autistics, not autistics themselves. They’ve utterly failed to address people on the spectrum prioritize for themselves (e.g. unemployment; ending stigma; and achieving accommodations for nonverbal communication, stimming, and various cognitive and sensory issues, etc. Consequentially, autistics, even ones with average and high IQs, have a lower rate of workforce participation than do other low-IQ people with mental disabilities). Instead, Autism Speaks talks about “curing” autism, and compares it to cancer and an epidemic that must be halted. Since many autistic people (including myself) consider the quirks and interests engendered by autism to be inextricable from their identity, this sort of rhetoric is extremely offensive to us. There has only ever been one member of their board of directors on the spectrum, John Elder Robinson, and he resigned in disgust over the organization’s attitudes towards people like him.
Some of the research they fund is actively harmful to autistics—and everyone else. They support autistic behavior analysis (ABA) treatments. ABA affords some autists the ability to function in an NT world, but others find traumatizing or dehumanizing. (It’s a form of reward-and-punishment-based operant conditioning, based on behaviorist applied psychology, which was mainly used in the midcentury to train animals. Kids going through ABA may get snacks and toys when they comply with NT-approved behaviors like talking while making eye contact; or they might be punished with spray bottles or other noxious stimuli, if they fail to comply.) Also, they kept funding research on the autism-vaccine link for years after it was debunked.
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Heinrich Kunrath (@HKunrath) said:
I’m sorry, that second sentence should read “They [Autism Speaks] has utterly failed to address the issues autistic people prioritize…”
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osberend said:
Minor nitpick: ABA actually stands for “Applied Behavior Analysis.”
Otherwise, a solid summary. Autism Speaks is fucking awful.
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hkunrath said:
Gaah, this was sloppy. I’ve been informed that Robison was never on AS’s board of directors, but only the Science Advisory Board.
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avorobey said:
It seems like most of what you said can be summarized as “They hurt the feelings of people with high-functioning autism”. Let’s see:
1. They don’t focus on the things you want them to focus. All those things you list matter to high-functioning and are mostly irrelevant to low-functioning and nonverbal people, with the exception of “nonverbal communication”, which Autism Speaks seems to address at least in its promotional materials on its site.
2. They speak of trying to cure autism and it offends you. Having interacted with little kids as they grow up nonverbal despite all the efforts to help them, and with parents of those kids, I can’t rightly express how little I think of your offended feelings and how little consideration I think they should merit against the merest hope of helping such families. Honestly, those memories still make me want to scream in rage at the world more than just about anything else does.
3. They promote ABA which you proclaim to be actively harmful based on… you’re saying that it helps some and hurts others, and I don’t even know how to read that charitably. Experts in the field seem to agree that ABA is the most efficient therapy compared to alternatives (with still very limited efficiency as is anything when autism is concerned).
4. They used to be anti-vax idiots, but no longer are.
So is there anything good they do? Apart from raising awareness, lobbying Congress etc. (in ways that some high-functioning autistics apparently find offensive, but I wonder what parents of low-functioning and nonverbals think of them), they seem to be funding genetic research into autism, with a recently announced effort to sequence 10,000 people with autism and members of their families, and make all the data freely available to researchers. That seems an obviously great and wonderful idea that trumps by far all the drawbacks listed above. Based on that alone, I’m really tempted to donate to them.
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Nita said:
Well, there’s ABA and then there’s ABA. It’s not like a drug that works differently on different people, it’s a bunch of very different practices under one umbrella. So, you might be thinking of compassionate, yet persistent teaching of necessary skills, while other people might be thinking of JRC:
http://nymag.com/news/features/andre-mccollins-rotenberg-center-2012-9/
http://www.autistichoya.com/2013/01/judge-rotenberg-center-survivors-letter.html
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/2008/06/the-shocking-truth/
And even relatively “mild” treatment aimed at making autistic people “act normal” can be cruel:
I don’t see any reason why non-verbal autistics would experience the same treatment that verbal autistics received and hated as more pleasant. So, trusting the reports of verbal autistics on this makes sense to me.
IMO, to prevent therapy from turning into abuse, it must be focused on the interests and well-being of the person being treated. But some people and organizations, including Autism Speaks, seem to have much more compassion for the parents, which is bizarre to me. Isn’t being a non-verbal child with severe sensory issues even more frustrating than raising one?
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illuminati initiate said:
Avorobey, I don’t think you fully understand the implications of what “curing” autism means.
Their is no “normal” child trapped inside autistic children, regardless of how high or low “functioning” they are. A “cure” is not helping them, it is overwriting them.
So yes, I am offended that Autism Speaks wants to enable parents to philosophically murder their children.
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Ampersand said:
If we’re talking about pre-teen children, then there is no action parents can take – including no action – which will maintain the child’s status quo. It is the nature of childhood to be temporary. Therefore, I’m not sure that it makes sense to describe anything the parents do that changes the child as “philosophically murder[ing]” them, since it is inevitable that the child will go through enormous change.
And since humans are not computers, to describe it as “overwriting” seems inaccurate. In both cases, the language you’re using seems needlessly incendiary.
I can definitely imagine supporting some arguments against attempts to cure “low functioning” autistic children – for instance, if there was reason to believe that in the long run, such attempted cures will cause more suffering for the “patients” than available alternatives will. But I don’t think claims of murder and “overwriting” are persuasive.
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avorobey said:
illuminati, have you heard of regressive autism? Imagine watching as your child, 1.5 or 2 years old, slowly forgets the few dozen words they already knew and used confidently. Stops interacting with other kids, then with adults. Stops acknowledging their parents, develops a hysterical reaction to anything outside a fixed routine. Stops communicating, and cognitive development just… stops. You try and try and try, you bring them to therapies and a special needs kindergarten, but a year passes, then two, and at four your child doesn’t know or can do anything over what they knew at two. Any meager scrap of a hint at something they seem to learn lights up an insane fire of anguished hope in your heart. Maybe, you think, maybe if you build a new ABA program, maybe they’ll say MAMA once again like they could at 1.5 years old. Or EAT, you’ll settle for EAT. Maybe next year.
A cure for a low-functioning or nonverbal kid is something that allows the normal process of cognitive development to take place. Philosophical murder, overwriting, what the hell are you talking about? Might as well talk about overwriting a 2yo with a 4yo as the child grows up.
Nobody who looks at this soberly thinks that there’s somehow a “whole normal” person hidden inside a nonverbal autistic kid or adult. Those “facilitated communication” devices that allow a nonverbal kid spell out educated English prose with the help of an aide are cases of tragic self-delusion. A cure would be something that prevents the retardation of normal cognitive development that happens in autistic kids since birth or young age.
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ozymandias said:
I have heard of regressive autism and of nonverbal autistics. I tend to agree with Cal Montgomery— who engages in self-injurious behavior, communicates solely through (unassisted) typing, has a history of institutionalization, and opposes a cure to autism– that whether or not it is possible to divide people into high-functioning and low-functioning, you probably can’t do it based on their political opinions.
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illuminati initiate said:
Posted while mindkilled and probably did not think things all the way through. Ampersand, you might be right about young children but I’m not sure what the implication of that really are. You seem to have exposed a contradiction in my moral intuitions I somehow didn’t notice before.
I still hate Autism Speaks though, and still think that big enough overwrite on someone who has already reached their “adult personality” is equivalent to death. But then I’m not sure how to deal with children…
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illuminati initiate said:
(“Adult personality” is reached well before legal adulthood. Poor phrase choice)
Also bad wording in general.
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hkunrath said:
Avorobey, my first comment did a poor job of distinguishing 1.) my own opinions from 2.) the criticisms of Autism Speaks and ABA that I hear frequently from other autistics. The two overlap somewhat, but not totally.
I didn’t mean to say that AS is an unsalvageable organization, or that no parents should seek out its services. I also expect much good will come out of AS’s genetic database. But since I was answering a question about the objections people have to the organization, and not trying to give a balanced account of all its good and evil, I didn’t mention worthwhile initiatives like the database.
Many of your complaints about my original post revolved around the claim that the grievances I cited are allegedly only voiced by “high functioning” autistics. Not in so many words, you argued the needs of “low functioning” autistics should be prioritized over those of “high functioning.” I agree. Their suffering (and that of their caretakers) is more severe, and therefore more deserving of attention and resources.
However, I also think that the most well-funded autism advocacy group should be able to support some initiatives about concerns shared by both “high” and “low” functioning people (e.g. education about and accommodations for sensory issues and stimming behaviors).
Moreover, if an organization literally claims to speak on behalf of a population, shouldn’t that population’s concerns influence the conduct of that organization? Are people not allowed to lobby for their own interests, just because there are people worse off than they are? Who is the gatekeeper of who is “autistic enough” to complain Autism Speaks doesn’t work for their interests?
(And anyway, many autistic people who get called “high functioning” actually have significant impairments [socialization limitations, sensory overloading, GI tract issues, various mental health comorbidities] and face discrimination after their autistic status is revealed. They may be able to dress themselves, feed themselves, and carry on a conversation, but they’re not a thriving population.)
My discussion of ABA was the least reflective of my own views. And yes, I did mean to say ABA helps some people and hurts others. (Nita also made this point, and I thank them for their contribution.)
I recognize that ABA is regarded as the gold standard of treatment for autism now, and that it helps some autistics lead better lives. However, an unknown number of people are traumatized by the practice. I want their suffering to be acknowledged and reckoned with. Even gold standards can be improved; I want to see ABA methods reviewed and reformed to mitigate, prevent, and punish therapists who hurt children.
The claim that ABA is “dehumanizing” and treats people like animals because it uses operant conditioning is, I think, pure sentimentality, and I don’t endorse it. Just because a practice was originally tested on animals doesn’t mean it’s intrinsically degrading when used on people. However, I felt obliged to mention this criticism in my first post, because I’ve heard autistic people level it against ABA numerous times. (But again, these autistic people I disagree with, on this point. I’m ambivalent about ABA and want it reformed, whereas they hate it and want it abolished.)
One final point: There’s more than hurt feelings at stake in debating Autism Speak’s rhetoric. This would be hard to quantify, but’s possible Autism Speak’s rhetoric about ASD does real harm to even autistics who never hear it. Comparing autism to cancer and AIDS, telling people an autistic child will end their marriage (cite http://ti.me/1cwhisw ), and broadcasting the voices of parents who have considered murdering their children (cite http://bit.ly/1CZIDFQ ) can only deepen the despair and desperation of parents of autistics. This could drive them into increasingly specious “treatments,” like overly restrictive diets, bleach enemas, and vaccine avoidance for their other children.
The seriousness of the problems of the worst cases of autism (like those you have been discussing) have to be acknowledged, but it’s irresponsible to be alarmist about them.
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osberend said:
[content warning: discussion of dehumanizing language, and of torture of nonverbal children]
@avorobey: Nobody who looks at this soberly thinks that there’s somehow a “whole normal” person hidden inside a nonverbal autistic kid or adult.
Sure. But plenty of people don’t look at it soberly. I’ve seen plenty of hard-core curebies whose explicit view is that their kid has suffered reversible brain damage, and once it’s reversed, they’ll have their kid back.
No really, that’s how they talk. I can’t find the link now, but I read a heartbreaking piece once by a young woman whose mother responded to the acquisition of some set of skills or another by hugging her and saying “Welcome back. We’ve missed you so much.” Can you imagine what that must be like?
And Autism Speaks feeds into that. Here’s a quote from an editorial by their co-founder, Suzanne Wright, published in 2013 and still up on their website, with no disclaimer or repudiation:
And this is not just about hurt feelings. Because you know who talks a lot about leaving no stone unturned? The folks who go to AutismOne. The folks who use chelation therapy, or Lupron, or “MMS” (28% sodium chlorite, i.e. concentrated bleach) [cw repetition: this is the torture of non-verbal children part, and no, I am not exaggerating]:
Does Autism Speaks endorse bleach enemas? Of course not. They just help to foster an environment in which bleach enemas seem like a reasonable thing to do. Leave no stone unturned, right?
The one autistic member of their science advisory board (they’ve never had anyone autistic on their board of directors) resigned after the Wright piece.
So they’re a bunch of neurotypicals claiming to speak on behalf of autistics. But every time an autistic speaks up to criticize them, they or their defenders declare that that person is (by virtue of being able to speak up at all) “high-functioning,” and therefore unable to speak on behalf of “low-functioning” autistics. Contemplate that for a bit.
Also: Autism Speaks made a touring installation, for “autism awareness,” that invited people to try to make eye contact with a simulated child, using a Kinect to detect where the viewer’s eyes were, so that the simulation would look away, regardless of where the viewer stood. I think that’s incredibly telling about who they are—and aren’t—interested in increasing empathy for. It’s sure as hell not the autistic child who’s trying to escape from sensory or emotional overload.
Seriously, they actually presented this to people as “try to make eye contact with this child” who is obviously trying to avoid eye contact, like that’s an okay thing to do. In light of shit like that, I’m not at all surprised that Suzanne Wright apparently attempted to physically force eye contact with an (unrelated![1]) autistic child (cw for the link: discussion (and condemnation) of dehumanizing rhetoric, including a parent contemplating murdering her autistic child):
[1] Being related would not make it okay, but the unrelatedness adds the violation of generally accepted behavioral norms to the violation of bodily autonomy.
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illuminati initiate said:
Clarification- “curing” children is still equivalent to killing them. I just am now confused about ethics and very young children in general.
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illuminati initiate said:
Actually not sure what I was thinking earlier now and am confused about second post.
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Matthew said:
@Nita, as well as almost everyone else here
But some people and organizations, including Autism Speaks, seem to have much more compassion for the parents, which is bizarre to me. Isn’t being a non-verbal child with severe sensory issues even more frustrating than raising one?
I think that is correct, and I don’t think much of Autism speaks. But…
Unlike many people here, I don’t have much meatspace experience of autism. Also unlike most people here, I do have experience of being a parent. I can tell you, for example, that it is really distressing when your child says, “I hate you,” even when you know that they don’t really mean it. I extrapolate to what I expect it must be like to have an extremely low-functioning autistic child, who is basically incapable of expressing or receiving affection in ways that neurotypical parents would be able to recognize, and I am telling you — that would literally be nightmarish.
I’m sure that the parents of low-functioning autistic children aren’t suffering as much as the children themselves are. I’m also sure that some of them are suffering a lot more than the commentariat here seems to be aware of.
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Nita said:
@ Matthew
I didn’t mean to be dismissive of the parents’ suffering. Any kind of life-long disability is a serious problem, and the way we expect a family to magically handle it without a lot of support is ridiculous.
But when a mother describes her murder-suicide fantasy while the child is in the room, I think the reaction should be “oh god, this lady needs help”, and not “well, this is perfectly normal — autism is such a horrible thing, after all”.
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illuminati initiate said:
Ampersand, if that is your objection to calling it equivalent to murder, does that not equally apply to literal murder?
(Also people are still legally under control of their parents when they have a more settled self anyways (this is pre-puberty), and would thus still be at risk).
Also, is it not bad to kill someone with time left even if that time is relatively short?
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avorobey said:
@hkunrath I took your original comment to expand on the post’s [prima facie outrageous] claim that Autism Speaks is net evil and so donating to them is worse than not doing anything. Now that you’ve clarified you’re not arguing that, you’re just explaining why people criticize Autism Speaks, your claims seem much more reasonable, even if I still disagree with many of them.
As one broad counterclaim, consider this. I think you’ll agree that AS’s primary focus in its activities and promo materials is on families with low-functioning and/or nonverbal kids. You say “the most well-funded autism advocacy group should be able…” But have you stopped to consider why it’s the most well-funded group? The funding doesn’t come out of space, or out of state. They get donations, and the donors are people who are moved by their activities/promo materials that are focused on low-functioning and nonverbals. They get so much money because there are so many people who experience THAT plight or are moved by THAT plight. To be blunt, people just don’t care AS MUCH about the plight of someone who can write passionate prose and study in college, but is extremely bothered by eye contact and has ungodly difficulties reading nonverbal behavior. They care, to be sure, just not nearly AS MUCH as they care about a child who grows up unable to communicate and their parents. I think that’s pretty much as it should be, and if I read you correctly so do you.
Given that reality, what does it mean to attack AS on not addressing more of high-functioning autistics’ concerns? Aren’t you basically saying: these are donations of people who [probably] meant their money to help primarily low-functioning nonverbals, and I think it’s unfair and discriminatory [some actually say evil] that they aren’t used more to help high-functioning? That… doesn’t seem virtuous. I guess you could argue something like “they’re named AS, if they wanted to primarily address LF they should have named themselves LFAS”, but even if correct, this argument seems a little petty. The reality of what AS focuses on is out there screaming from their website, activities, annual reports, etc.
@osberend you make some good points, several of which are new to me – thank you. But do you really think that together they establish that AS is net evil, as [my paraphrase, believed accurate] the OP says? That just seems completely unsubstantiated (and bizarre, to say the least) to me. Consider the potential value alone of their funding of open genomics research into autism.
Let me try to step back and look at AS from a bird’s eye view. Their charter in one sentence, as I understand it: “Autism, especially LF/NV, is a fucking awful thing for families, while the general public and the state do not understand and appreciate it enough, and we will work on finding ways to cure autism, to help families, to raise awareness and to lobby the state”. All the things you object to already flow from this charter, given an org that scaled to $100M yearly budget. Given focus on families and donation base of concerned/moved parents, it’s not surprising they will back to some degree the illusion of a child trapped inside. Given commitment to prevent/cure autism, it’s not surprising they will be sympathetic to “leave no stone unturned”. And so on.
But even if these objections are granted, does it mean that the charter is factually wrong, evil, delusional? Of course not, and I would argue it’s correct and virtuous. LF/NV autism *is* a fucking awful thing and that fact *is* severely underappreciated and efforts to try and prevent it *are* incredibly virtuous and so on. The massive public awareness of what LF/NV autism is like for kids and parents is hugely helpful towards generating sympathy and desire to help in the public at large. How do you balance this good against the evil of “perpetuate even more the culture of leave no stone unturned”, especially given that AS’s contribution here is likely to be marginal – parents of LF/NV kids generally go into “leave no stone unturned” mode all on their own for very understandable reasons?
TL/DR: AS is likely to be doing a lot of good by its awareness/outreach/PR programs alone, even if their work at the same time encourages many evil practices. I fucking hate chelation and that harmful quackery, but I still think any reasonable attempt at objective evaluation is overwhelmingly likely to conclude that AS is a massive net source of good.
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zz said:
>Let’s be real here: donating to pretty much any charity creates more utility than spending the money on yourself.
Maybe?. Not counting opportunity cost, donating to a random charity certainly has positive EV, since, for every charity with negative impact, there’s a charity with a positive impact of equal magnitude, but when you count opportunity cost, this becomes a lot less obvious—spending money on yourself is definitely utility-positive.
Also, if bashing ineffective altruism causes 98 people to stop donating and 2 people to donate to causes that are 100x as cost-effective, then bashing ineffective altruism is very, very important. (Note, however, it’s unclear whether bashing ineffective altruism can have such an effect.) That said, “charity can do better” is yet a better message; just don’t underestimate how much value can come out of changing a random resource allocation to an efficient resource allocation.
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Fnord said:
And, along the same lines, if someone give $2 to an effective charity and spends their other $98 on a television*, that’s also a win.
I agree that being mean is generally not an effective recruitment tool. But since the other image problem EA has is “those people who think you need to donate all your money or you’re basically a murderer”, I think emphasizing how much you can do with a little money is sometimes worth a little moral licensing.
*Actually, it’s probably closer to a 10/90 split, using more realistic numbers, but still.
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