[nolverostae]

I kind of regret reading this article. It's very long and doesn't have all that much interesting information.

It starts with the author discovering that some charities are not effective, especially when rich people go to poor countries and try to do direct actions. Then it somehow uses this as an argument that trying to measure the effectiveness of charities is bad and that giving money to charities in general is bad because sometimes charities are mismanaged.

Half of the article is basically complaining that charities in general are sometimes ineffective or have unintended negative side effects (for example malaria bed nets being used for fishing).

Guess what - the fact that it's a difficult problem to tell how to do good is exactly why EA exists - to at least try and bring order into chaos. What's the alternative? The article just keeps complaining about collecting data and statistics and trying to estimate good by saying "but sometimes the estimates are wrong!", but it presents zero alternatives. It's basically just advocating against charity in general, saying that it should be the job of the governments. Or it's arguing that you people need to only support things they are emotionally invested in, because "unsentimental calculations" are evil.

The other half of the article is citing random billionaire's opinions on the world and complaining that they are self-important and weaving in lots of random things about the SBF trial for some reason.

There's some valid criticisms of effective altruism in the article, specifically: criticizing how they try to put a value on everything (even when it is a hard problem or not exact) and criticizing longtermism (because it's difficult to say whether to weigh the present or the future more). It also mentions the common discussion about doing direct action yourself versus spending more time working and donating more money. But I think those are already the obvious discussions about EA that everyone knows about.

[matthewdgreen]

> But I think those are already the obvious discussions about EA that everyone knows about.

I assure you that everyone does not know about them. And more to the point, reading the EA forums, it does not appear that the EA community has even settled on any sort of strategy for addressing them; other than “hope we can minimize the issues until people run out of attention span and we can treat this as old news.”

[Dylan16807]

> The article just keeps complaining about collecting data and statistics and trying to estimate good by saying "but sometimes the estimates are wrong!", but it presents zero alternatives.

The article is pretty clear in its call for givewell (and things like it) to estimate both the good and the bad, and to publicly share the estimates for both.

They're not bringing order to chaos with their current methods.

[mif]

I had a hunch, came to the comments first, and found your summary. Thanks for that.