⚡️ Towards Ineffective Altruism
Metadata
Highlights
- These bureaucrats, donors, research institutes, and companies are by no means an ideological monolith, nor do they necessarily represent the beliefs of the average effective altruist. However, this web of entities has one key feature — intellectual, institutional, and financial capital. A relatively small cadre of longtermist academics housed within and legitimized by influential institutions can advance ideas that guide how governments and venture capitalists think about and shape the future.
- Besides the moral hazards of advocating these positions, these ideologies provide an overly simplistic formula for doing good: 1) define “good” as a measurable metric, 2) find the most effective means of impacting that metric, and 3) pour capital into scaling those means up.
- Ineffective altruism eschews metrics, because “What does doing good look like?” should be a continuously-posed question rather than an optimization problem. As an ideology of allocating resources, it is recognized as explicitly political, rather than cloaking itself in the discourse of science and rationality. It allows us to get outside of the concept of altruism entirely — a concept that feels limiting in its focus on the actions of the individual — and instead consider a paradigm of collective, democratic mutual aid. Most importantly, ineffective altruism allows us to ask harder questions than effective altruism does: questions about who and what we value.
- How can we depart from a society where those who have the privilege to choose to care about others can, and move towards a society where everyone has the power to care about others and must?
- Seventh-generation decision making, for example, is an indigenous principle that is enshrined in the Constitution of the Iroquois Nation. It mandates Iroquois leaders to consider the effects of their actions over seven generations, encompassing hundreds of years. Seven generations is a long time, but it is also a finite amount of time. Although this framework prioritizes long-term thinking, it doesn’t bring the weight of infinity to bear on the present. And unlike longtermism, the seventh-generation principle doesn’t pretend to be scientific. It doesn’t rely on unfalsifiable guesses about a future we can’t even imagine to assign expected values to different political decisions; rather, it makes thinking about the future a moral imperative.
title: “⚡️ Towards Ineffective Altruism”
author: “reboothq.substack.com”
url: ”https://reboothq.substack.com/p/ineffective-altruism”
date: 2023-12-19
source: hypothesis
tags: media/articles
⚡️ Towards Ineffective Altruism
Metadata
Highlights
- These bureaucrats, donors, research institutes, and companies are by no means an ideological monolith, nor do they necessarily represent the beliefs of the average effective altruist. However, this web of entities has one key feature — intellectual, institutional, and financial capital. A relatively small cadre of longtermist academics housed within and legitimized by influential institutions can advance ideas that guide how governments and venture capitalists think about and shape the future.
- Besides the moral hazards of advocating these positions, these ideologies provide an overly simplistic formula for doing good: 1) define “good” as a measurable metric, 2) find the most effective means of impacting that metric, and 3) pour capital into scaling those means up.
- Ineffective altruism eschews metrics, because “What does doing good look like?” should be a continuously-posed question rather than an optimization problem. As an ideology of allocating resources, it is recognized as explicitly political, rather than cloaking itself in the discourse of science and rationality. It allows us to get outside of the concept of altruism entirely — a concept that feels limiting in its focus on the actions of the individual — and instead consider a paradigm of collective, democratic mutual aid. Most importantly, ineffective altruism allows us to ask harder questions than effective altruism does: questions about who and what we value.
- How can we depart from a society where those who have the privilege to choose to care about others can, and move towards a society where everyone has the power to care about others and must?
- Seventh-generation decision making, for example, is an indigenous principle that is enshrined in the Constitution of the Iroquois Nation. It mandates Iroquois leaders to consider the effects of their actions over seven generations, encompassing hundreds of years. Seven generations is a long time, but it is also a finite amount of time. Although this framework prioritizes long-term thinking, it doesn’t bring the weight of infinity to bear on the present. And unlike longtermism, the seventh-generation principle doesn’t pretend to be scientific. It doesn’t rely on unfalsifiable guesses about a future we can’t even imagine to assign expected values to different political decisions; rather, it makes thinking about the future a moral imperative.