The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?
&gt;<i>”But if he established a well-paid private practice in Britain, he would be able to “earn to give”: he’d save “considerably more” lives and still be comfortable… …As the community has expanded, it has also become more exclusive. Conferences, seminars and even picnics held by the Centre for Effective Altruism are application-only.</i><p>Yes, by application only. Because the near-intuitive next step in thinking is that, heck, we can’t <i>all</i> be the comfortable one, <i>someone</i> has got to be the person getting their hands dirty incrementally adding to all of those QALY’s and clearly They’re too enlightened in understanding this to be the one living uncomfortably with dirty hands.<p>So the mathematical inevitability is there needs to be some gate keeping, and why shouldn’t it be the people who realized that also make the decisions about access?<p>Self serving, self reinforcing bullshit. Probably a mixture of honest good intentions and rationalizing of guilt for being better off than others.<p>The modern age makes it just about impossible to <i>not be aware</i> of a lot of awful crap in the world, so it’s no surprise that some of the current generation, finding themselves at or adjacent to the pinnacle of wealth and opportunity through some admixture of at least a little ability and a lot of good fortune and circumstance and some degree— large or small— of actual empathy, become plagued by the cognitive dissonance. By living so well but knowing that <i>right this moment</i> countless people are at the absolute opposite most desperate and miserable end of that spectrum, many soon to be dead, many dead just in the time it took me to type this.<p>Maybe I have it easier, cognitive dissonance wise, by virtue of having just a little of my formative years that 1) preceded a time when easy knowledge of the systemic  awfulness of much of the world was unavoidable before a person hit a double-digit age and 2) Had a fair bit of personal awfulness in them as well. awfulness that was, in terms of the world wide range, still thankfully minor but enough that the dissonance is small.<p>So it’s no surprise that a somewhat cliquish group of the generation around the cultural&#x2F;economic&#x2F;academic centers of the world that, even just by virtue of their location, afford a great deal of opportunity have come up with a line of thinking that justifies their place in the world.<p>My hope is that an extra decade or two of experience and living and seeing how consequences play out slices off some critical mass of those folks who are a bit more self aware. At least enough to recognize that figuring out how to live your life as a decent person isn’t always going to be a problem that’s algorithmicaly or mathematically solvable.<p>Because I’d really prefer the next crop of people who find themselves in positions of wealth, power, and influence— again through some combination of (hopefully) a little merit and a lot of good fortune and circumstance… well, I’d prefer them to not be well intentioned but tragically arrogant assholes trying to figure out things like:<p><i>Is it better to suffer the inconvenience of saving the fleeing refugee on my doorstep? Or should I instead work an extra hour or two a month in order to earn a calculated incremental bonus in pay that might be donated to a cause that might be able to save 10 refugees?</i><p>I don’t want people in positions of power and influence to think that is, in any way, an interesting or worthwhile question to pursue as a mature intellectual use of their brain power rather than a shitty waste of time.