[If I have made an error or bad argument in this post, please correct me in the comments and I will update this post.]
I’ll be honest: I am exactly the kind of globalist, cosmopolitan technocrat you imagine when you read the word “effective altruist.” But I also believe in working with people who have different sets of values than mine on issues that are important to both of us, and given how talent-constrained most effective altruist causes are, I think cooperation and collaboration are much better strategies than yelling at people. And I’m not a fan of making the perfect the enemy of the good: if you’re not going to help eradicate malaria or factory farming no matter what I do, I’d much rather you go about doing whatever other thing you’re doing well. Scared Straight doesn’t help anyone.
So, you’re not an effective altruist, because you support..
…local causes!
Many people believe that they have a special duty to their family, their friends, their city, or their country. That is perfectly fine; your values are your values. However, believing in a special duty to those close to you is not incompatible with being an effective altruist. Most people don’t have literally zero interest in humanity as a whole; if you care about humanity a little bit, you can be an effective altruist a little bit. For instance, some effective altruists who believe in that duty pair each donation to a friend, family member, or local/national cause with a donation to a global cause. You can also decide what percentage of your resources you want to devote to global causes and use those resources.
If you are determined to only care about local causes, I encourage you to take the following steps:
- Choose a highly important local cause area. For instance, in US policy, many effective altruists believe that land use reform, criminal justice reform, farm animal welfare, immigration policy, and macroeconomic stabilization policy are the most important. If you think existential or global catastrophic risks pose a threat to humanity, remember that you and those close to you are also part of humanity. You might think that another cause area is the most important. Think about tractability (whether you can do something about it), scale (how many people does it affect), and neglectedness (how many other people are already doing something about it).
- Take an evidence-based approach. Take care to avoid ineffective interventions. Encourage nonprofits you work with to collect information about the good they’re doing or even run randomized controlled trials. When you donate, don’t just consider overhead; think about how much good the charity does per dollar you donate.
- Consider sharing information you discover with the effective altruism community. There are a lot of world problems, and we really really don’t have enough talented people. If you’re working on a highly important cause area, we need your expertise, even if you don’t 100% share our values.
…anti-overpopulation charities!
I have seen a lot of people argue that they don’t want to save the lives of people in the developing world because they’re afraid of overpopulation. However, there are several options the overpopulation-concerned effective altruist could take.
First, the evidence appears to suggest that averting the deaths of children– as the Against Malaria Foundation does– tends to reduce fertility. If you think that argument’s true, then you don’t have to worry much about overpopulation effects. If you consider the evidence to be fairly weak, consider donating to a deworming charity or Give Directly, neither of which save lives; instead, they help people become richer. Since rich people tend to have fewer children, this also reduces world overpopulation in expectation.
If you’re skeptical about such indirect effects and want to have a direct effect on people in the developing world, consider donating to a reproductive health charity. Population Services International is a former GiveWell standout charity; it’s still believed to do very good work. You can also donate to IPPFAR, which is the Planned Parenthood organization that caters to Africa. If the topic interests you, consider researching other reproductive health organizations; if you can present evidence that a charity is comparable with GiveWell top charities, maybe other effective altruists will switch to supporting it.
…structural change!
Great! We, too, like structural change. I don’t think anyone’s ideal vision of the world is “everyone in the developed world takes the Giving What We Can pledge; ten percent of the GDP of every developed country goes to the developing world for the rest of time as a sort of international welfare program”.
A lot depends on whether by “structural change” you mean something along the lines of “reform of foreign aid” or something along the lines of “global communist revolution”. If the former: I encourage you to check out 80,000 Hours, which has a lot of advice about how you can use your career to make structural change. For instance, depending on your skills, you can consider joining the civil service, becoming a journalist, becoming a foundation grantmaker, economics research, working for an effective nonprofit, researching structural change charities for an organization like Open Philanthropy Project, or founding a startup like Wave. You’ll probably want to concentrate on advocacy, research, and direct work careers, rather than earning to give.
If you’re not capable of getting work in any high-impact careers, consider donating to charities which may lead to structural change. For instance, GiveWell’s malaria and deworming charities both help with the eradication of their respective diseases, through reducing transmission and infection rates. If that isn’t structural enough for you, I’d like to gently suggest that– whether or not genuinely structural change is the best– we’re not talking about what’s the best thing to do overall. We’re talking about what the best thing to do is for you. There’s no shame in doing the best you can– particularly if the best you can is literally saving the lives of children. Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good. It’s much better to help some people– even if you aren’t fixing everything in the world– than to help no one at all.
If by “structural change” you mean scrapping our entire political/economic system and replacing it with a new one… well, you’re definitely ambitious, and that’s awesome. It’s going to take ambition to solve the world’s problems. You’ve probably also noticed that the effective altruism movement is somewhat lacking in people who agree with you.
I don’t think that necessarily means it’s a bad idea for you to participate in effective altruism. Effective altruism is marked by its fondness for super-weird ideas; there’s no reason to believe that effective altruists won’t be willing to adopt your unusual ideas, if you back them up with evidence and reason. And, selfishly, if it turns out that the best thing to do is working on replacing our entire economic and political system, then I really want to know about that! If you can convince me, I want to be convinced!
If you decide not to work with effective altruists, I still think an emphasis on effectiveness is important for prospective revolutionaries. A really common way that leftist groups fail (and probably also rightist groups, although I’ve spent less time around them) is that they wind up wasting all their time in petty infighting, abstruse theorizing, or attempting to figure out whose life choices are the most Problematic. This is, uh, not great. Unfortunately, unlike local causes, this isn’t something where I can point to EA research about the most effective strategies. But I think some of the habits of mind are still useful: an emphasis on quantification; paying attention to tractability, neglectedness, and scale; monitoring whether the thing you’re doing has the effects you think it has, possibly including randomized controlled trials.
In addition, I would be remiss not to point out the existence of AI charities. I encourage everyone who’s primarily interested in structural change to pick up a copy of Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence. While many people (including me) don’t really buy his arguments, you really can’t get much more structural than building a benevolent superintelligence to improve everyone’s lives.
Thing of Things 
Thanks, Ozy! What would your response be to “I’m not an effective altruist because I’m time- and/or money-poor, but would like to be an EA one day?”
In other words, what if one doesn’t have 6 months of non-discretionary spending saved nor have time to donate?
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There is absolutely no requirement for a person to sacrifice their own health, happiness, or financial stability to be an effective altruist. As someone who’s had a hard time working in the past because of mental health issues, I’ve never had someone suggest that I ought to not identify as an effective altruist because of it.
I’d suggest making a small donation of whatever you can handle– even if it’s just five dollars a month. That builds the habit of giving. If your finances improve, you can up your donation.
Incidentally, no less an authority than Peter Singer is on the record as saying that he believes a donation of one percent of your yearly income is satisfactory for anyone making less than $100,000/year. I’m not suggesting that you have to do that– I know that’s out of reach for a lot of people. But if you are capable of giving one percent, then you aren’t an effective altruist ‘someday’– you’re an effective altruist right now.
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Woah, really?
I actually think Singer’s view there should be getting way more press in EA outreach (though I’m not up on any discussion on this point). 1% sounds really doable, like those “$2 a day” ads. In purely emotional terms, it sound more than 10x as easy as 10%. (It’s probably >10x easier in real terms, too, if you have set costs like 30% to housing.)
I definitely understand the logic of 10%, and it’s my eventual goal, but it’s a big number. I’m not there yet, because it’s a scary change while dealing with debt and a shortage of savings. I don’t feel super bad about this, I’m ok with saying “I’ll pay off my debt so it doesn’t compound, then pay to charity”, but I don’t feel great about it. I am (scrupulosity warning) basically on board with Singer’s Drowning Child bit, so hearing him give support to 1% is jaw-dropping for me.
More broadly, I sometimes worry that pushing 10% too vocally interferes with advancing EA ideas among people who aren’t aiming for that. I know “Who is an EA?” is a thorny discussion, but I certainly think that EA values are good to spread at any charity level. I’d much rather people give an annual $100 to bednets than the Salvation Army, and I think talking up 1% might be a less distracting number with which to advance the efficiency topic.
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My understanding is that this is a deliberate decision by GWWC. Peter Singer’s system is quite complicated, with multiple brackets of donations that don’t let themselves well to slogans; The Life You Can Save has a calculator to figure out how much you should donate. “Ten percent”, on the other hand, is really easy to remember. It’s likely to turn off poor people who can’t afford to give ten percent, but poor people can’t give much anyway, and their donations are particularly likely to be trading off against their own well-being. The problem with just saying “one percent” is that it lets richer people off the hook: someone making 150k really does need to donate more than 1%.
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I’m also poor-ish (ie: a grad student), and I’ve been trying to smart small and increment my donations up a bit every year (sort of stress-testing giving, I guess). I started with a couple percent a month and went up from there.
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*slides AMF $900* Can I Officially Join this movement, then? Am I a Real EA?
Seriously, though, I think you’re supposed to do what you can. I got a part-time job a few months ago, primarily so I could donate. I had to stop a couple weeks ago because they were regularly asking us to work 10+ hour shifts without overtime pay, and it was interfering with my schoolwork. So I quit. No more donating for a while. But I think just the thought process of prioritizing studies and a degree (one that will allow me to do far more good over time–I want to be a teacher, I hear we have a shortage of those) over a minimum-wage job that won’t bring in as much or directly help as many people… that’s the sort of thought process that being an EA is all about, yes? You do what measurably does the most good, not what makes you feel best or most righteous.
If that looks like looking out for your own needs and investing in yourself so you can give more and do more in a few years, you do that. And if you do have $5 right now that you can give without making things harder for yourself, you give that and then don’t beat yourself up about it not being more.
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What about, “I’m not an effective altruist because I don’t want to waste my resources helping my competition.”
Some people just aren’t altruists.
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Then… this post is not aimed at you? I am not going to try to convince a non-altruist to be an altruist. That sounds like a waste of time.
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Myself, I’d encourage that person to consider viewing other people in ways other than “competition.”
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That is a bit of a luxury though. For many people having a job is key to their self-respect and ability to have a decent life. Compound this with the hateful victim blaming that is often directed at the jobless and it makes perfect sense that a lot of people consider it crucial to defend their job from a greater supply of labor.
Frankly, a lot of people who are against the ‘viewing other people as competition” seem to have jobs that don’t see much competition from ‘outsiders’ (or even benefits from them). If one has a moral position where the consequences are primarily felt by others, I have difficulty seeing that as less selfish than a person who has the opposite moral position, which happens to work best with their life circumstances.
Personally, I am in favor of a ‘third way,’ where we do try to help people improve their own countries*, rather than let lots of people migrate. The latter leads to a brain drain and the people who favor progressive change abandoning their country, rather than fixing it.
I also think that no matter what we do, there will be plenty of suffering, so it may be best to focus on the long game. Currently, I see a strong focus on naive and vision-less short term help for individuals, which can very well create more suffering overall, long term.
* This is still their responsibility, as they have agency and have more expertise on their culture than us, so we can support, encourage and push a bit, but not do it for them.
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Thanks Ozy, that post definitely helped – I used to be weary about labeling myself as an effective altruist precisely because of the things you mentioned here – first of all I’m a student with no income, just some really modest savings and in the past I aimed at donating 1% of all my spending to AMF – which is the only number I’m comfortable with at the time.
The second thing was my concern that I could cause a net negative effect through my donations, with the increase of overpopulation – but if there really is a link reducing fertility I think I could rest easier.
EA in general caused some amount of shame in my life in the past – I felt I can’t justify any spending when people are literally dying – but I’ve gotten over it (mainly by realizing just how small of a fish I am in such a big pond and rereading Meditations on Moloch).
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I feel like in order for Effective Altruism to be successful, it has to have goals. The GiveWell website cannot simply have two links, one to the “Soros fund for electing left-wingers” and another to the “Koch fund for electing right-wingers”. These cancel each other out, giving you the least effective charitable website imaginable.
There are core questions up here. If you come to believe that overpopulation is a significant worry, you have to dramatically revise your beliefs about what constitutes “doing good”. And the notion that the best good you can do involves donating to some of the top charities on thelifeyoucansave.org is, well, ludicrous. As is the notion that organizations devoted to saving lives should recommend population control charities. The opposition between these ideas is real.
Likewise for the “communist revolution”, though I don’t think you were being too serious there. I don’t think you want a substantial percentage of EA resources to be devoted to communist causes. For that matter, I don’t think you want a substantial amount of EA brainpower and blogspace spent arguing about communism! Is that going to save lives?
Sometimes the answer has to be “you’re wrong, here’s some sources.” Effective altruism isn’t just about the most effective way to do X, forall X, it’s about altruism. And that requires some accord about what constitutes doing good.
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Being able to have children when one wants to (rather than remaining fully at the whims of the other factors involved) absolutely saves lives.
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…causes I find emotionally compelling. (I’m not sure there’s a way around that – I have shit enough executive function and some other things that I don’t manage to give at all more often than not, so if there’s something I know makes a difference I’m sure leveraging it). For me this mostly means ‘people in crisis’, so that’s pretty much always going to be inefficient. (I currently lean Doctors Without Borders though I’m totally open to changing based on info).
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This seems like as big a contender as the ones in the main post, though I wonder how many people are self-aware on this point. Without presuming about your situation, two approaches come to mind?
The first is a bit of selective focus – looking over info about efficient charities and seeing if you can find something that catches emotional hooks into you. I’m not trying to be condescending here; I’m totally on board with the idea of “well, if I’m buying bednets, I’ll feel better about it by looking at some pictures of people I’m helping”. I might be uncommonly good at self-deception here, I don’t know, but I can push for emotional responses even when I know I’m doing it.
The second is efficiency within your target charity, like the “local” advice. DWB/MSF is pretty solid within the limits of what I know; the GiveWell page mentions that they’re a preferred disaster-relief option and were considered for a deeper top-charity investigation. That’s way more promising than something like the Red Cross Haiti efforts, which seem to have been incredibly wasteful. Crisis donation can be inefficient, but there seems to be a huge gulf between good and bad crisis relief, and it looks like you’re on the EA side of that line.
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You don’t come across as condescending!
And, that’s a good thought! Which also actually helps me break that particular thing into two pieces. One is the one that addresses – adding emotional hooks. [[1] I do realize I’d be a better person if I didn’t need that, but better_person!me is not available for giving money, so, it’s going to have to be me].
The other is basically going in the other direction. Having something horrible happen and being desperate for recourse and having no recourse is, to me, one of the worst emotional situations. [[2] I also do realize this is me applying my own experience to other people in a bad way. But outside of the personal side, this isn’t something I actually know research on? And while obviously it’s more efficient to prevent crises, I see how that works for malaria, but I haven’t seen any effective charities that would effectively prevent, say, war. So I think people on the already in crisis side of that are likely to keep existing for a while]. The idea of actively working to give help but not doing anything about that is untenable to me.
I did look up MSF in Givewell when I found out about Givewell and that is one of the reasons they remain my top choice right now! Research is definitely beyond my executive function, so I’m in the category of my top choice staying there unless I come across better.
At this point it looks like a good option for me might be trying the 1% option and splitting between MSF and something like the malaria people, and watching out for better crisis relief options should they come up. ~Wanders away pondering budget~ Thank you to the thread!
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You can’t prove that any wars were prevented obviously, but it does seem clear that NGOs often play an important role in peace negotiations.
I would argue that charities like HRW and Freedom House do a decent job documenting human rights violations and thereby pressure states into non-violent conflict resolution.
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It seems to me that preventing wars is a side effect of pretty much all effective charities. By raising the standard of living and increasing the capacity for trade, people have more to lose from war, and more to gain from peace (sometimes tongue-in-cheek referred to as the “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention”, as no two countries that both have McDonalds franchises have ever gone to war).
Promoting democracy might look like a more direct way, but when an economy develops away from the relying on the primary sector, it has no other choice than becoming more inclusive along the way. You can whip people into digging mines and plowing fields, but you can’t force them to think. So we’re back to health and infrastructure again.
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I used to have ideas such as ‘trade = good’ and ‘people getting richer means less war’, but I’ve since realized that reality is much more complex.
Economic development and trade can increase the divide between groups (the various ‘populist’ movements in the EU and US are partly due to this). Economic development can also result in a mismatch between the economic situation and the culture/system that regulates how people behave.
For example, I would argue that rise of communism, fascism and social-democracy in Europe in the early 1900’s was a consequence of the industrial revolution making the old class-based system obsolete. The result was a scramble for new ideologies that worked for the new circumstances. This trial-and-error process did result in a lot of dead people, by war and otherwise.
Except Ukraine & Russia. And Israel and Lebanon.
Also, this is a rather weak argument since it was only true for a while because the world was divided into NATO and USSR blocks, where the former group obviously were the ones with McDonalds and also obviously the ones with a strong shared agenda/culture. Most wars were between countries allied to different blocks (like Iraq vs Iran, which was a US vs Russia proxy war).
Also, multinationals tend to stay away from highly unstable countries.
Or…China. More and more autocratic countries are realizing that you can indeed ‘fool all of the people, all of the time’ (or at least, enough that the dissidents are no more than a nuisance).
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It’s trivially true that reality is always more complex. But when you want to predict an exception from a general trend, you need specific evidence for that individual case. Just saying “the trend does not hold true in 100% of cases” is not enough.
Why would you believe that improved health care and economic development destabilizes, say, Africa in particular?
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You were the one that claimed: ‘preventing wars is a side effect of pretty much all effective charities.’ That is a very strong claim. My argument was merely that this is not a given.
You demand that I argue in favor of a much stronger claim than I am willing to make, which I won’t do. I am plenty arrogant, but not so much that I think that I can predict the future to such an extent that I know how interventions will work out, in cultures that I am not intimately familiar with & when there are many other factors that effect this as well.
I’ve found that it works much better if I go in with 20/20 hindsight and explain: ‘of course this could never work, duh.’ For example, in hindsight, it is obvious that our interventions (including big donations to pro-Western NGOs) to make Ukraine more Western contributed to the war(s) there. It’s hard to argue that our interventions weren’t effective, the pro-Russian government was overthrown, after all. Yet…
Anyway, my suggestion is not: stop giving to charities. My suggestion is: don’t delude yourself into thinking that your good intentions will necessarily have good outcomes.
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I don’t see my claim as that strong, so you may be reading more into it than I intended to say (I imagined more emphasis on “effective” than on “all”).
So I’ll try to be more clear about what I do and do not mean.
I do not claim that raising the standard of living will prevent all wars, or that it will make all possible situations more peaceful. I only observe that this is the general trend, and that I expect it to be followed more often than not, absent strong evidence to the contrary.
FWIW, I think the Ukraine is a poor example in many ways, since first the interventions were not mostly on healthcare and infrastructure, and second much of the “support” was being granted with the intent of contesting the sphere of influence of a foreign power. “Poking the bear” is exactly the kind of strong evidence to the contrary I was talking about, and I would be equally reserved about political interventions in China’s back yard.
Do note that I did explicitly not include “promote democracy” in the list of effective primary interventions (instead advocating to wait for it as a secondary effect of development), as this is too often code for “promote US-friendly governments in a rival’s SoI”. It is very hard to prevent even well-intentioned political interventions from becoming corrupted into some kind of power struggle.
(And I grant you that I should not have brought the Golden Arches theory into it. I wasn’t entirely when serious doing it, and I now see that it derailed the discussion way more than I can justify in hindsight).
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What if you think EA is deadly to African children?
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If the proponents of this belief provide actual arguments instead of cryptic claims without evidence, then perhaps I will have something to say to them.
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By increasing the speed at which very poor countries get richer, EA is going to limit the duration of the demographic transition, hence result in a lower number of African children in the long run. So if you think that potential people are important, Michael Vassar has a point, kind of.
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I don’t see how ‘fewer Africans are born’ can be called ‘deadly to African children.’
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Plenty of people have argued against the efficacy of aid in a very general manner. You can educate yourself. As it is, I don’t think that you have responded to Ben’s many recent relevant posts.
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I think it is quite rude to suggest that other people educate themselves when you are the person who initiated the conversation. You made the claim; it behooves you to defend it.
I am not certain which Ben you are referring to, as there are many Bens in the rationalist/EA community, and it is possible you are referring to some other Ben (perhaps an aid skeptic Ben?). This is why many people consider it a good idea to link to the posts that they are referencing, or at least include a surname.
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It seems like Roodman and Givewell interpret his findings a little differently: “Overall, it appears that life-saving interventions unaccompanied by other improvements, where access to contraception is weak, are likely to lead to some acceleration of population growth.” http://blog.givewell.org/2014/04/17/david-roodmans-draft-writeup-on-the-mortality-fertility-connection/
Anyway, here’s a great overview of all the benefits of expanding contraceptive access: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21679781-fertility-rates-falling-more-slowly-anywhere-else-africa-faces-population I don’t understand why we are still funding malaria nets. Family planning seems way better. In addition to the benefits discussed in the link, population decrease also has a positive effect on global warming, decreases the number of factory farmed animals, and aids global stability.
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I haven’t looked into the statistics, but don’t people tend to have more children when they are uncertain whether their children will survive? On an individual level, taking family planning decisions you might bitterly regret doesn’t seem to make sense.
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They do, but they also have more children when there is no safety net for old people. In many countries, old people are taken care off by their children. If you have no (or few) children, you tend to be screwed.
This also works the other way, in China the traditional safety net is greatly weakened by the 1 child policy (and migration to cities) and this forces the development of a safety net.
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Read the Economist article. Africa is unusual.
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Africa is unusual in that they had a huge drop in life expectancy due to AIDS, around the time that their economy started growing pretty fast (again).
This is a rather unusual pattern.
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Well, the Economist does say:
And then it says that one of the proposed explanations for the slower demographic transition in Africa is the lack of access to contraception and contraception-related information.
To me it seems like the logical conclusion is that both decent health care and support for family planning are necessary for people to have a few healthy children instead of many ailing ones.
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Thank you for this, I’ve been reluctant to call myself EA because I only give about half my donations to EA-approved causes and the other half to local causes. It’s hard for me to rationally justify *why* I do this, I prefer that my city have less poverty and more justice but surely that can’t be as important as lives I could save elsewhere? So maybe that gets at the root of my reluctance to call myself EA, I can’t come up with one coherent ethical rationale that explains all of my giving.
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I don’t see why it is wrong to mix selfish reasons with altruism, as long as you don’t pretend that it is pure altruism.
I would argue that we all have a decent amount of selfish desires that we are unwilling to compromise on, including a pleasant environment to live in. By adding altruistic elements to your selfish needs (or vice versa), you are probably willing/able to give more overall and achieve more optimal outcomes on both the ‘what makes me happy’ and ‘what helps other people most’ scales.
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There are a few reasons why I call myself an ineffective altruist. I have been able to manage the 1% threshold but the 10% threshold seams to be out of reach for me. For the past few months I’ve eaten less then 7 times a week. I live in the US and am one of those people who will likely always consume more then they produce (though in the past I’ve been able to feed myself and I plan on getting back there within a year). At the moment I survive with the charity of my family which isn’t “ideal.” I have been exposed to the true claim that I’m still one of the richest people on the planet and I have a moral obligation to those less privileged then me. I agree with this and I do my best but my best may not be good enough (it rarely is).
The real reason why I don’t call myself an effective altruist is that I don’t want to claim to be maximally effective or even claim that as a goal. I don’t think it’s possible for me to be maximally effective in anything and I don’t want to delude myself into thinking I am. I also don’t want to convince myself that I’m morally superior to people with other philosophies.
Given the wide range of values of people who consider themselves effective altruists, it is almost guaranteed by most coherent philosophies that someone is wasting a lot of money. Different philosophies would point at different people. I don’t want a label that I apply to myself that may encourage me in thinking that I am more effective then someone else simply because I have a different philosophy on the duty to local people vis a vis disparate people, for example.
I value both moderation and humility as core virtues. I may be mistaken but I don’t know if the Effective Altruism movement shares these values. In any case it is literally true that I am not completely effective in my altruism by anybody’s philosophy. I suspect there is value in claiming to be an ineffective altruist.
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Neb already touched on this above, but:
What about academia? What about the arts?
I intend to give half of my charitable donations this year to a GiveWell-approved charity or a selection of charities, and the other half to one or more institutions that are not even on the same continent as being GiveWell-approved.
Personally, I would not want to live in a world without art galleries, the orchestra, etc, and I think that the fine arts are among the few things that humanity has accomplished that don’t have downsides. Likewise, I have a deep fondness for the colleges I went to (OK, one more than the other) and think it is worthy to support that sort of thing. The former are more dependent on donations than the latter, as I understand it.
Does this just not fall under “altruism” at all? I will acknowledge that if one is being altruistic, it’s self-evident that it should be as effective as possible. Likewise, if one were to donate to an orchestra, probably best to pick the one that is going to use the money the best.
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