Effectiveness of effective altruism
Issue 109 - 16 Aug 2022 (8-min read)
When I pay a beggar on the street, am I really helping their situation or just contributing to a vicious poverty cycle? Is it better to pay the charity that feeds homeless people in the city instead?
If you find yourself having the same kind of questions, you may be attracted to Effective Altruism, a movement to do more good in the most good way possible. This week’s The Global Tiller examines what the effective altruism movement is about, why is it becoming popular and what are some issues making this movement not-so-effective?
Thirteen years ago, Scottish philosopher William MacAskill — who was 22 years old at the time — was asking similar questions. It led him to the 1972 work of radical utilitarian Peter Singer, who puts forth thought experiments that pushed people to show the same level or moral outrage and concern no matter the geographical distance. So if $4,000 can save a life in Uganda by something as simple as providing mosquito nets, it is your moral obligation to send that $4,000 to Uganda instead of spending it on travel or eating out. If that sounds a bit like a ‘white saviour’ mentality, don’t worry that’s one of the movement’s critique.
In their own words, effective altruism is a project that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice. It’s both a research field, which aims to identify the world’s most pressing problems and the best solutions to them, and a practical community that aims to use those findings to do good.
It started as a small community of those committed to doing real good. Some had donated kidneys, some were taking high-paying jobs on Wall Street only to give most of it away as charity.
But the movement has come a long way from the simple idea of using science to determine the most efficient use of donor money. It has gained the support of Silicon Valley billionaires and crypto investors whose generosity has made this movement worth at least $26 billion dollars, depending on how well the crypto market is doing.
Now they have moved offices from a basement to a sleek, glass-walled building with a gym, a nap room and catered vegan lunches in Oxford, England. I’ll let you calculate the efficiency of a single dollar spent on a vegan lunch with the cost of monthly groceries in a poor country. What started as a critique of the inefficiency of current philanthropic practices has moved steadily towards conventional charity, political donations, elite-university fellowships and the likes.
What’s also changed more recently is their vision. From finding the best way to solve an existing problem, the movement has embraced longtermism — the idea that it’s not only important to care equally about everyone living on the planet right now, but also those who will come to inhabit it long into the future. As a philosophical idea though, especially the one that’s very popular in the Silicon Valley-Oxford University circle, longtermism minimises the cost of existential threats, like those from climate change, in favour of what it deems are bigger threats, such as the lost and unfulfilled potential of humanity in case of complete human extinction. By that logic, the loss of a few island nations to rising sea levels could be acceptable as long as those who have the skills and ability to push humanity further are able to survive for the longterm future.
It does, in any case, seem convenient that a group of moral philosophers and computer scientists happened to conclude that the people most likely to safeguard humanity’s future are moral philosophers and computer scientists.
As the effective altruism movement becomes mainstream, it is crucial to ask some questions before jumping on the bandwagon. Why does it ignore structural issues, such as racism and colonialism, as Ethiopian American AI scientist Timnit Gebru asks. Why is the movement that aims to care equally for everyone in the world only concentrated among a handful of elite-school philosophers and tech billionaires?
Although he talks about elite philanthropy in general but writer Anand Giridharadas summarises it best:
The initiatives mostly aren’t democratic, nor do they reflect collective problem-solving or universal solutions. Rather, they favor the use of the private sector and its charitable spoils, the market way of looking at things, and the bypassing of government. They reflect a highly influential view that the winners of an unjust status quo— and the tools and mentalities and values that helped them win—are the secret to redressing the injustices.
Until next time, take care and stay safe!
Hira - Editor - The Global Tiller
Dig Deeper
Despite its criticism, longtermism is an intriguing concept and William MacAskill’s thinking is important in understanding the philosophy behind it. If you are interested in this concept, you may find Ezra Klein’s conversation with him thought-provoking.
…and now what?
What is “being efficient”? How do you measure efficiency? Does everything have to be permanently or consistently efficient? Can efficiency be judged on a short-term view or a long-term view?
While reading about the Efficient Altruism movement, I keep thinking of economist John Kay’s book, ‘Obliquity’. In this fascinating book that will make you review the way you understand goal-setting, he tells us how sometimes our very (too) rational mind’s ability to imagine acts and consequences in a very linear way leads to less efficient outcomes. The best example of the difference between linear goal and obliquity can be seen in urban spaces. Brasilia, Canberra, Naypyidaw are all examples of beautiful, well-designed cities that were planned to be perfect cities, architecturally speaking. But most of them are devoid of life, while New York City, Paris, Karachi or Dakar are all thriving even if living there can be very often chaotic.
Their inhabitants may always complain…but never leave! Why? As John Kay tells us
“the planners who attempted to rationalise the patchwork evolution of historic cities: all made the same mistake of underestimating the complexity of the system with which they dealt and the value of the traditional knowledge they inherited. And the answer to their problem is not better analysis and more sophisticated modelling, but more humility.”
You may have the best catered intention, but there are many many factors in the process that you will never be able to master, to control or to influence.
The concept of obliquity, as presented by John Kay, leads us to another shortcoming of efficient altruism. Not only can this concept seem too focused on the final outcome that it may exclude many additional important influential factors, but it also seems to be working in theory more than in reality.
The mosquito net project is touted as one of the biggest success story of this movement…until you hear how the population has used those mosquito nets to create fish nets that led to overfishing. The law of unintended consequences can sometimes be a b****. But it fits more the reality that we all know: when you do something and you expect a specific result, it will very often not end up as planned. Even if in your mind it looks perfect!
One can think of so many situations of those unintended consequences that often happen when you lack perspective or the necessary understanding of someone else’s complex context. If those people in Zambia have used those mosquito nets as fishing nets it’s not that they didn’t understand the concept behind it, or that they didn’t care about the health of their families, it’s probably because they had other priorities: some contextual influence came to make them prioritise different actions, different decisions.
As John Kay tells us, this may require a bit of humility and also a change of perspective. That’s the intention of an organisation, such as Give Directly, that provides direct funding to community in need because they “believe people living in poverty deserve the dignity to choose for themselves how best to improve their lives”. Based on this approach, we can probably understand that if we want community to thrive, we may not need to decide for themselves what’s best for them, even with the “smartest” decision-making tools, we just need to provide them with what they lack unlike us: money.
At the end of the day, effective altruism has risen from good intentions but with the twist of thinking that everything can be controlled, under the assumption that as developed societies seemed to have followed a clear identifiable path we just need to replicate it efficiently. But things always look more obvious once you reach the end goal and you look backwards and you’ve let aside all the things that could have gone wrong but didn’t, and all the unintended consequences that have been absorbed and dealt with.
The question eventually is this one: is efficient altruism a powerful tool that will revolutionise the field of philanthropy, or is it just an illusion of efficiency that can make rich donors feel good because they wouldn’t have to give up so much to feel impactful? I guess we will know this once we’ll be able to learn from the unintended consequences of this new system, a system based on decision-making through indicators, an efficiency-driven system aiming to gather people around the concept of using money wisely for the benefit of others…perhaps exactly what governments have been trying to do for decades…
Philippe - Founder & CEO - Pacific Ventury