Effective altruism is not effective
This article completely mischaracterizes the beliefs of most of the people quoted or referenced, then engages with those beliefs only via asserting the opposite without any supporting argument. I&#x27;m disappointed.<p>For example:<p>&gt; The most charitable explanation of Singer’s dismissal of political action is that he is trying to sell being an altruist and he thinks a consumer -hero version is the one people are most likely to buy.  Singer and other effective altruist philosophers believe that their most likely customers find institutional reform too complicated and political action too impersonal and hit and miss to be attractive.<p>Interestingly, the author quotes part of Singer providing an argument <i>against</i> the effectiveness of institutional reform, but does not himself provide an argument <i>for</i> it, just an assertion that political change is &quot;the most obvious and powerful tool we have.&quot; (I think that&#x27;s far from obvious!) Instead, he jumps straight to accusing Singer of arguing in bad faith. This is actually the opposite of charitable.<p>For another example, I&#x27;m deeply confused about how the author of this piece could cite Will MacAskill and Toby Ord, then write:<p>&gt; The underlying problem is that effective altruism&#x27;s distinctive combination of political pessimism and consumer-hero hubris forecloses the consideration of promising possibilities for achieving far more good.<p>Ord and MacAskill co-founded an organization, 80,000 Hours[1], which advocates mostly not for effective giving (which the author derides as a &quot;consumer hero&quot; approach) but rather for spending your career working on one of the world&#x27;s most pressing problems; notably including for instance several types of policy change.<p>EDIT: and I missed this one the first time around:<p>&gt; One could spend at most a few tens of millions of dollars on anti-mosquito bed nets before returns start dramatically diminishing because everyone who can be helped by them already has one.<p>A single bednet charity, the Against Malaria Foundation, has literally already raised 10x this amount without substantially diminishing returns: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Against_Malaria_Foundation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Against_Malaria_Foundation</a>