this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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Fundamental misunderstanding. Conservatives would actually call this a win for their side IMO. This is because conservatives believe charity > socialism. If I were to be, er, charitable toward conservatives, I would say it's because they distrust government but believe in human generosity. They often really do believe in charity though, at least the comparatively sane ones that I know; it's not something that they just say to deflect.
The problem with charity IMO is that it typically performs quite poorly. The average charity is 100x less effective than the best charities (Givewell), and IIRC this is essentially true regardless of what metric you use for "best." It's also fundamentally not a fair way to distribute wealth; it doesn't help people with different problems equally; and it doesn't necessarily come from different sources in relation to how much they can give. Most people who donate have a narrow moral circle -- they care about some strangers much more than other strangers, based on questionable things like race, proximity, or religion. (Some might object to me citing Effective Altruism here, fair enough, but if you're already coming from the perspective that charity is the best way to improve the lives of those less fortunate, then it's really hard to argue with the research EA has done.)
The way I see socialism is essentially scaled-up, fair, and mandatory charity.
Abstractly. But as soon as they see it happening in person, they begin frantically dialing the police.
That's why Houston Food Not Bombs needed to get a court order forbidding the police for repeatedly ticketing them for no reason.
It's not.
But setting that aside, the idea of charity is rooted in the theory that you need a popular buy-in before you can achieve significant lasting change.
That's not wrong on its face. But the modern incarnations of charity are so heavily focused on the populism (flashy PR campaigns, obnoxious and invasive marketing strategies, charity as spectacle to drive more engagement) that they often fail to deliver their states goals.
The issue isn't merely of one's moral circle, it is of one's visual range and economic heft. When you're relying on a few plutocrats to dictate philanthropic social policy, you're banking heavily on their omniscience.
I'll read the rebuttal of EA, but I'll trade you if you read this EA unmanifesto.
This is actually not true. Givewell, for instance, publishes their findings as spreadsheets and lets you set weights on different aspects of human experience you consider to be good or bad.
This is also just objectively not true and suggests to me you've never even talked to an effective altruist. But it is generally believed by EAs that horrible suffering, such as the kinds of suffering caused by easily-preventable illnesses, is much worse than any of the subtle and varied experiences of a good life which can be bought with the same amount of money are good. So if you just want to "do good," donate to stopping horrible illnesses before donating to subtler causes.
I actually think this is the idea of socialism, not charity. Ozy Brennan again, on difference between leftism and EA:
I don't actually believe this about leftism personally, but I think this should be taken evidence against charity being rooted in the need for a popular buy-in.
Agreed.
This is still a fixation on an individual subjective human perspective. Which is a bit confusing, given that the EA manifesto explicitly leans on Bayesian statistical analysis. The end result is a round peg (perceptions and emotional priors) being shoved into a square hole (hard numerical figures). It also isn't effective as a policy guide, because the layman fiddling with weights on a spreadsheet still doesn't have any actual control over the scale of political economy that a government or a mega-millionaire commands.
We're running into a Jordan Peterson line of argument, wherein "you just don't understand my line of thinking" is used to dismiss critiques you're not equipped to rebut.
Can I counter with "You've never even talked to a non-effective altruist?" and conclude you've been too cloistered to explore ideas outside the EA space? Or would you consider that a personal attack rather than a statistically informed observation?
This isn't either/or. You can go back to the old Bill Gates plan to mitigate overpopulation in the third world. He initially tried to push out contraception to the local populations of communities he'd hoped lower birthrates would help. Instead, what he discovered was routine vaccination and standard modernized health care drastically reduced infant mortality and resulted in parents choosing to have fewer kids as a result.
In hindsight, we discovered similar patterns of behavior across the US and Europe, Latin America, India, and China. But as a knock-on effect, we've seen the US/EU focus so exclusively on disease mitigation as a strategy for improving relations in countries they wish to ally with that they neglect their domestic populations (who are comparatively much wealthier, but see the foreign aid as coming at their expense). The iterative result has been a series of claw-backs of positive disease mitigation policy fueled by a popular media that's vilified the very act of disease mitigation and denigrated the people who received it as subhuman. And the true irony of the affair is in how many of these popular media institutions are owned and operated by self-proclaimed EAs.
The EA strategy of trying to decouple and distill policies into their individual components, then min-max solutions at a spreadsheet level, have produced a backlash their narrow focus failed to anticipate.
Until the AI wonderkin can fully divorce themselves from the public at-large, they're going to need to rely on human labor and ingenuity to accomplish large, complex projects. The strongest card that EAs have to play is typically their ability to quickly roll up a highly educated, multi-talented workforce underneath them. Even then, they're notoriously inefficient in their application of these skilled technicians.
But we're already seeing the results of the Bullshit Jobs and Bullshit Bosses, as the bigger Tech companies stumble through the 2020s. Without people who want to work beside you on a project they are deeply invested in, the work slows down and the work product becomes flimsier and more ineffectual. In the end, you're left with Bloomberg 2020 tier work, where you've got tens of thousands of people collecting a paycheck to do nothing.
Socialism requires a popular consensus to function. You can't impose a collective project by executive fiat.
Bayesianism is about reconciling your squishy priors with hard math. If there's a round peg and a square hole, the square hole is Frequentism.
I don't understand your point about Bill Gates. You're saying he had one plan, but then found another plan worked better. What does this have to do with EA? Givewell isn't an armchair-thinktank, it does pretty solid research and analysis comparing the effectiveness of real-world charities that already exist.
The loss of USAID was really bad. Here's EA Scott Alexander talking about just how bad the scaling back of USAID is. If there were self-proclaimed EA's involved with villifying USAID, that is ironic indeed.
Well I agree. I don't have executive fiat. I'd like to increase the amount of popular buy-in. This is one of the main reasons I post on Lemmy. However, that socialism requires concensus whereas charity does not -- this is exactly Ozy Brennan's point. So I think that we don't disagree at all. Ozy's observation is that EA charity organizations generally focus on the opposite of buy-in; they look for areas of neglect -- places where big strides can be made because other people aren't working hard on those problems yet. Perhaps because they sound strange. Like electrocuting shrimp so they don't feel pain when they die in factory farms (yes this is a real charity).
Frequentism won't work with a contained set of inputs. But now we're getting into Abstract Algebra rather than probability.
I'm saying he kept coming at the problem dead on without exploring the second and third order consequences of did policies.
Lots of maths up front but the models were shit. The end result was a reactionary mess precisely because Gates and his lackeys didn't care about the popular politics of their policies.
The observation that mosquitoe nets and medical interventions have a long term benefit isn't a problem on its face. But, again, Ozy is attacking a complex problem of supply chains and sustainable development from a very boiled down "do things that look good on my spreadsheet" as the "Effective" solution.
When these plans fall apart, because the proponents fail to account for second order problems, they denounce everyone else as another problem they need to strike head on, rather than considering where they went wrong.
Case in point
Because the focus was on disease and food security was discounted as a less pressing problem, the primary tool for mitigating disease spread became an environmental catastrophe.
I'm legitimately curious how Abstract Algebra relates here. I thought that was all about group theory and such.
Mkay, but, this doesn't mean math is wrong. It means actual research is needed. Trials and case studies and comparative analysis and so on. Fortunately, that's exactly what givewell does. You can criticize Gates for not predicting second and third order consequences, but I'd argue the only thing we can do in the world where the higher-order consequences are somewhat predictable in advance is preserving the status quo.
The misuse of mosquito nets for fishing is bad, yes -- and depressingly ironic -- but you should check out the Against Malaria Foundation's response, where they say basically the misuse of malaria nets is not very widespread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_theory
I got a degree in it, so I know a few things.
The application of a model to a set of data which fails to predict outcomes reliably is "Wrong Math".
The big problem with EAs is empirical. They don't deliver on their promises.
The distribution of nets had failed to yield the promised benefits. I site the misuse as a very prominent example of how EAs misjudge externalities, but its one data point in a much broader picture.
If you really want to drop the hammer on EAs - particularly chronic fraudsters like SBF and the Zuckerberg CZI - it is that they're fair more interested in self-enrichment than altruism in the basic sense.
I cite the mosquito netting distribution effects as a very straightforward calculation error, because it is at least superficially a sincere effort with lackluster results. But once you get under the tip of the iceberg, EAs are as riddled with con-artists and bullshitters as any Clinton Foundation or UN Food for Oil initiative.
That's the wages of unilateralism in a nutshell.
Please explain. I took a few courses in group theory, ring theory, etc., though I was never particularly good at it. How does it relate to probability?
Zuckerberg/CZI are not EA, and SBF was disowned by EA. It's not obvious to me that SBF was not interested in altruism, I think he was just catastrophically bad at it.
AMF stopped 20 million cases of malaria in 2023.
Sure, let me just dust off my notes from a decade ago.
It has to do with the available range of outputs given all available inputs. And the degree to which iterative actions can have a feedback effect.
But the math on this kind of thing gets hairy fast.
Zuckerberg hires from the community and its affiliates. Sarah Wynn-Williams being an excellent example.
SBF being disowned after he went broke is hardly a point in the movement's favor.
FFS, they printed this in November of 2023. Really getting out ahead of your skis, when you're a data driven organization that's making claims on total reduction in cases before the period is even closed.
To date, I can find no evidence of a 10% drop in malaria cases in any of the targeted countries between '22 and '23.
On the contrary, the WHO reports an 11M case rise from the prior year. Neither have we seen a plunge in cases in '24 or the Q1 & Q2 of '25.
But mandatory charity is not charity at all, it's just highway robbery. Doesn't matter how fairly the spoils are divided.
Well that's why I said "essentially." Specifically, I meant the observable result. I agree that it's not charity if it's mandatory. I'm okay with highway robbery if the spoils are divided fairly. ("Fair" doesn't necessarily mean "evenly," though.)
Alright, well, I disagree with your methods but I appreciate your honesty.
glad we can agree to disagree amicably.
Yes, if you're conservative you probably don't want "those people" getting charity. You want to pick and and choose and even weaponise through coercion who gets help, but you can't come out and just say that. People will know you're a manipulative asshole. So, you have to loudly call it robbery and theft until enough people fall for it.
I'm not really sure what the point of this comment was. Do you think that a conservative will become more likely to abandon conservatism if they read this?
Yeah, insulting the people you'd like to receive charity from isn't likely going to win you a lot of friends, and neither is threating them with robbery. And I'm not saying that if they're serious about their faith, they shouldn't at least try and make an effort to have mercy on someone who acts like this anyways (Love your enemies and all that), but you have to at least be willing to recognize that this is perhaps THE single most difficult teaching in the Bible for most people to accept, and few ever reach that level of perfection in their faith, so you're likely going to be waiting a very long time.