Critiquing Effective Altruism (with Michael Nielsen and Ajeya Cotra)
Spencer Greenberg, Michael Nielsen, and Ajaya Kotra discuss effective altruism (EA), exploring its definition, intellectual project, and community. They delve into critiques regarding its demanding nature, centralized funding, and the challenge of identifying the most impactful causes, contrasting EA's approach with decentralized efforts and personal values.
Deep Dive Analysis
14 Topic Outline
Defining Effective Altruism and its Core Principles
Separating Intellectual Project from Personal Moral Choice in EA
EA's Focus: Who is Doing the Most Good?
Critiques of EA's Intensity and Demandingness
Comparing EA to Traditional Altruism and Open Source Ethos
Centralization of Funding and Influence in the EA Community
The Role of Expected Value Maximization in EA Funding
Challenges of Expected Value Calculation for Transformative Work
EA's Distinctive Approach to Philanthropy and Cause Selection
The Concept of Legibility and its Limits in EA
Justifying Non-Maximizing Actions: Friendship and Personal Values
Navigating Internal Tension and Moral Conflict in EA
Social Solutions vs. Individual Negotiation for Altruistic Demands
Reflecting on Disagreement and the Value of Critical Engagement
6 Key Concepts
Effective Altruism (EA)
EA is an intellectual project focused on using evidence and reason to determine how to benefit others as much as possible with a given set of resources. It also encompasses a moral or personal decision about how much of one's resources to devote to this goal, and a community built around these ideas.
Bounded vs. Unbounded Optimization
This distinction refers to whether one is optimizing the good done with a *fixed* amount of resources (bounded) or trying to maximize the *total* good done by also deciding how many resources to devote (unbounded). The latter can lead to 'extreme altruism' implications.
Extreme Altruism
A highly demanding form of altruism where individuals feel a moral imperative to constantly convert all personal spending into a 'fractional death counter' of lives that could have been saved. This mindset can lead to significant personal distress and self-deprivation.
Hayekian View (in Philanthropy)
This perspective favors decentralized decision-making in philanthropy, where many individuals pursue diverse projects based on their own judgments and intuitions, rather than relying on a few centralized organizations to dictate what is most effective. It values the potential for outlier successes from a broad range of approaches.
Expected Value Maximization
A core principle in EA that involves identifying actions with the highest probability-weighted outcome of positive impact. While central to EA's spirit, its practical application is often limited to high-level cause selection rather than detailed project evaluation, especially for highly uncertain or novel endeavors.
Legibility
Derived from James Scott's 'Seeing Like a State,' this concept refers to the ability to clearly articulate, quantify, and justify an action or project within a specific framework (like EA's maximizing impact). Many impactful historical actions or personal values (like friendship) can be 'illegible' to such a framework.
10 Questions Answered
EA is broadly defined as using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and then acting on that basis to do the most good possible.
Yes, it can be fruitful to separate the intellectual project of figuring out how to do the most good with resources from the personal decision of how much of those resources to devote, as EA has stronger takes on the former.
People doing the most good are disproportionately EAs, but EAs are not a majority, especially if considering a holistic sense of 'good' that includes for-profit companies or large foundations like the Gates Foundation.
This arises from a clear principle that if money spent on oneself could save a life or do significantly more good elsewhere, choosing personal consumption feels morally horrifying, leading to a constant internal 'fractional death counter'.
EA is distinctive in its thought pattern and framework for cause selection, leading people to focus on empirically unpopular causes like farm animal welfare or existential risk reduction, rather than local community work or general public goods.
There is a concern that a small set of individuals and institutions with significant wealth in EA have a lot of influence, leading to potential blind spots and dynamics where funders' specific views can culturally dominate the movement.
Open Philanthropy navigates a tension between funding based on its 'inside view' (its own specific beliefs about effectiveness) and deferring to other people's judgment, often leading to nuanced decisions about funding levels, feedback, and conditions for grants.
Michael Nielsen argues that expected value calculations are best suited for well-understood 'state spaces' and goal-directed work, but often fail for truly transformative, creative work (like Newton's or Turing's) whose impact only becomes legible long after the fact.
Some EAs attempt to rationalize friendships by arguing they increase personal effectiveness as an altruist. Others, like Ajeya Cotra, acknowledge that humans have many values beyond impartial utility maximization, and that these personal values are often in the 'driver's seat' and not necessarily a moral failing.
Ajeya Cotra suggests there's a 'Laffer curve' for self-demandingness: some tension can motivate greater impact, but too much can lead to burnout and decreased overall effectiveness. Michael Nielsen wonders if an appropriate level of tension might actually be a 'nice feature' of EA.
12 Actionable Insights
1. Separate Altruism Commitment & Strategy
Distinguish between the personal decision of how much time, energy, or money to devote to altruism and the intellectual project of figuring out how to use those resources most effectively. This separation helps clarify one’s engagement with effective altruism.
2. Prioritize Impact in Career Choice
When picking a career, consider ‘impact’ as an important criterion. Evaluate how your work can contribute to doing the most good possible, aligning personal fit with altruistic goals.
3. Manage Burnout in Altruistic Work
Recognize the importance of finding a personal fit in altruistic careers and actively manage the risk of burnout. Sustaining your efforts over the long term requires balancing demanding work with personal well-being.
4. Regularly Question Career Effectiveness
Continuously question whether you are using your time in the most effective possible way and if your career’s focus makes sense. Reflect on your beliefs about long-term, big-picture questions that could inform your actions.
5. Focus on Unserved Constituencies
Direct altruistic efforts towards groups that markets structurally fail to serve, such as the global poor, animals, and future generations. These areas often present opportunities for high impact where traditional economic mechanisms fall short.
6. Frame Altruism as a Quest
Approach your altruistic efforts as a continuous quest to identify the most important thing you could do with your career or money. This mindset encourages ongoing learning and adaptation to new information.
7. Distrust Centralized Cause Prioritization
Be wary of overly centralized systems, especially those driven by money, that dictate cause prioritization. Instead, foster a decentralized approach where individuals pursue their own well-reasoned intuitions about impactful work.
8. Find Balanced Self-Pressure
Recognize that there’s a ‘Laffer curve’ for self-pressure; a non-zero amount of pushing yourself is beneficial, but too much can lead to burnout and reduced motivation. Aim for an appropriate level of tension to sustain long-term commitment.
9. Acknowledge Diverse Personal Values
Integrate and acknowledge that you have multiple personal values beyond strict utilitarianism, such as friendship or family. Understand that these values often drive behavior and contribute to a more settled sense of self, even if they don’t directly maximize global utility.
10. Use Uplift App for Mood Control
If feeling down, out of sorts, or agitated, use the Uplift app to better control your mood and relieve stress and depression. It guides users through customized cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) skills.
11. Explore ClearerThinking.org Tools
Utilize the free interactive tools and tests on clearerthinking.org, such as the rationality test or common misconceptions game, to improve critical thinking, make better decisions, and achieve goals.
12. Subscribe to One Helpful Idea
Sign up for the ‘One Helpful Idea’ email newsletter at clearerthinkingpodcast.com to receive one valuable idea in 30 seconds each week, along with new podcast episodes, essays, and event announcements.
5 Key Quotes
My inner voice in early 2016 would automatically convert all money I spent, for example, on dinner to a fractional death counter of lives and expectation I could have saved if I donated it to good charities. Most EAs I mentioned that to at the time were like, ah, yeah, seems reasonable.
Nick Camerata (quoted by Michael Nielsen)
When Julia was young, she felt so strongly that her choice to donate or not donate meant the difference between someone else living or dying that she decided it would be immoral for her to have children. They would take too much of her time and money. She told her father of her decision. And he replied, it doesn't sound like this lifestyle is going to make you happy. To which she responded, my happiness is not the point.
Peter Singer (quoted by Spencer Greenberg, about Julia Wise)
I think the more you bring in kind of pretty specific philosophical assumptions about what the nature of the good is... then the set of people who could possibly be doing the most good has shrunk a lot because you've changed the values to kind of cut out Amazon and the Gates Foundation and all those other people.
Ajeya Cotra
I just tend to trust more the decentralized view that says, I like just a little bit more chaos where there's a lot of people going around and doing sort of what they have decided on the basis of them and a few of their friends is the most effective thing for them to be doing. Most of those people will be wrong. You may get the sort of the median may be worse, but I think that sort of the nature of the returns in this situation is that in fact, a few sort of outliers really make up for a lot.
Michael Nielsen
A lot of the things that I think have just been most transformative through all of history, very difficult to make work. I should make a caveat to what I said earlier when I said that expected value maximization was core to EA. I think the spirit of that, like what at the highest level we conceive of ourselves as doing when we set out to do EA projects, expected value maximization is at the core of that in terms of trying not to be scope insensitive and trying not to be risk-averse beyond what the empirical risk aversion that would be necessary for maximizing impact. The actual practice of doing expected value calculations is honestly something that when I got to OpenPhil, I was surprised we did a lot less of than I thought we would.
Ajeya Cotra