The problem with US charity is that it’s not effective enough
www.vox.com
The New York Times painted a misleading picture. Less than 0.2 percent of US charity is ruthlessly optimized.

Quotable quote from our very dear friends:

“Put differently: US philanthropy is still much, much, much more about rich guys like David Geffen slapping their names on concert halls than it is about donating to help people dying from malaria, or animals being tortured in factory farms, or preventing deaths from pandemics and out-of-control AI, to name a few EA-associated causes.”

Anyways, where does buying 20 million dollar castles/crypto fraud/rampant sexual exploitation/and shrimp welfare fit into all of this chief?

  • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
    25·
    4 days ago

    I mean, I feel like the core problem with billionaire philanthropy isn’t that they aren’t effective enough at choosing causes; they’re supporting exactly what they want to, whether it’s saving lives and improving conditions in poor countries or making more classical music happen in rich countries. Rather the problem is that that much money can be thrown around by a single individual at all without public oversight. Like, EAs have a point in that philanthropic activities can mobilize a world-changing amount of resources. But then they do the libertarian thing of assuming that this is a necessary and inevitable fact of the world that must be worked around rather than considering the circumstances that created that ability and the degree to which the existence of billionaires requires African kids to die of malaria.

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    18·
    11 days ago

    I actually have a shrimp torture farm. It brings me infinite joy. However its running costs are quite high and I require donations to keep it going

    • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      11·
      10 days ago

      Thank you. My wife is deathly allergic to shrimp, and I live by the motto

      'If they send one of your loved ones to the emergency room, you send 10 of theirs to the deep fryer. ’

  • mountainriver@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    11 days ago

    Geffen succeeded with a gift of $100 million to Lincoln Center and — perhaps more importantly — Lincoln Center paid $15 million to Fisher’s descendants so they would not sue. What that means is that the most prominent cultural organization in New York City lit $15 million on fire so that Geffen’s name would be on a concert hall.

    No they did not lit them on fire, they payed of people.

    In order to lit money on fire you need to buy something - like servers, electricity - and then just waste it. For example by running crypto schemes.

  • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    13·
    11 days ago

    Shared this on tamer social media site and a friend commented:

    “That’s nonsense. The largest charities in the country are Feeding America, Good 360, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, United Way, Direct Relief, Salvation Army, Habitat for Humanity etc. etc. Now these may not satisfy the EA criteria of absolutely maximizing bang for the buck, but they are certainly mostly doing worthwhile things, as anyone counts that. Just the top 12 on this list amount to more than the total arts giving. The top arts organization on this list is #58, the Metropolitan Museum, with an income of $347M.”

  • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    7·
    10 days ago

    why are EAs still yapping about malaria nets? last year first effective malaria vaccine was approved in Ghana and Nigeria. with little state effort, mass vaccination campaign can make their pet cause… ineffective *rimshot* and at lower cost than nets at that

    • Mike@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      10 days ago

      Mosquito nets are still an effective intervention against malaria, not least as “there’s a vaccine” is a very, very long way from “everyone is vaccinated” especially as really useful interventions such as draining marshland where A. falciparum breeds or attempting to eradicate it with insecticide are substantially harder and, also, take time. Given that half of all deaths from malaria are in children under 5 and that the malaria parasite is not transmitted between humans but from mosquitos to humans the herd immunity effect doesn’t really exist if people are still getting bitten. (FWIW, my dad literally wrote a book called “Malaria”)

      EAs are wrong about a lot of stuff but they’re not wrong about malaria eradication being about more than vaccines.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        10 days ago

        They definitely use actual numbers to try and push their agenda. It’s a classic case of constructing a category. Like how we’re the highest paying company in the industry of high technology, textile workers, teenagers, and dead people. Look at how much good EA-backed interventions like malaria nets are doing! Clearly this means EA-backed programs to make sure Sam Altman develops a computer god before his evil twin Alt Sam-man is also such a good use of resources that you’re basically a murderer if you don’t give.

    • jaschop@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      6 days ago

      After reading his older article, I can totally see how he fits into one of the middle layers of the diagram in the UAntwerp paper. He moved beyond basic followership and knows enough to stan EA to potential recruits. But he hasn’t advanced to the part where you score comfy research positions in backroom deals with rich benefactors. So AI doom is just one of those things he doesn’t really get, but a lot of people he respects take it super seriously, so it’s got to be something.

      Amazing how well he it the nail on the head back then.

      In the beginning, EA was mostly about fighting global poverty. Now it’s becoming more and more about funding computer science research to forestall an artificial intelligence–provoked apocalypse. At the risk of overgeneralizing, the computer science majors have convinced each other that the best way to save the world is to do computer science research. Compared to that, multiple attendees said, global poverty is a “rounding error.”