by nonameiguess | 2025-11-18 12:47:38+00:00
As always, topics like this end up becoming a chance for HN commenters to get on soapboxes.

Origins of some movement or school of thought or whatever will have many threads. I worked in charity fundraising over 20 years ago as one of the first things I did after first getting out of college, and the first organization I am aware of that did public publishing of charity evaluations was GuideStar, founded in 1994. This is the kind of thing that had always been happening in public foundations and government funding agencies, but they tended not to publish or well organize the results such that any individual donor could query. GuideStar largely collected and published data that was legally required to be public but not easy to collate and query, allowing donors to see what proportion of a donation went to programs versus overhead and how effective each charity was at producing the outcomes it was designed to produce. GiveWell went beyond that to making explicit attempts at ranking impact across possible outcomes, judging some to be more important than others.

As I recall from the times, taking this idea to places like Google and hedge funds came from the observation that rich people were giving the most money, but also giving to causes that didn't need the money or weren't really "charitable" by most understanding. Think of Phil Knight almost single handledly turning the University of Oregon into a national football power, places like the Mozilla Foundation or New York Met having chairpersons earning 7 or 8 figure salaries, or the ever popular "give money to get your name on a hospital wing," which usually involves giving money to hospitals that already had a lot of money.

Parallel to that is guys like Singer trying to make a more rationally coherent form of consequentialism that doesn't bias the proximate over the distant.

Eventually, LessWrong latches onto it, it merges with the "earn to give" folks, and decades later you end up with SBF and that becomes the public view of EA.

Fair enough and understandable, but it doesn't mean there were never any good ideas there, and even among rich people, whatever you think of them, I'd say Bill and Melinda Gates helped more with their charity than Phil Knight and the Koch brothers.

To me, the basic problem is people, no matter how otherwise rational they may be, don't deal well with being able to grok directionality without being able to precisely quantify, and morality involves a lot of that. We also don't do well with incommensurate goods. Saving the life of a starving child is probably almost always better than making more art, but that doesn't reduce to we want or should want a world with no art, and GiveWell's attempts at measuring impact in dollars clearly doesn't mean we can just spend $5000 x <number of people who die in an average year> and we can achieve zero deaths, or even just zero from malaria and parasitic worms. These are fuzzy categories that involve uncertain value judgments and moving targets with both diminishingly marginal utility and diminishing marginal effectiveness. Likewise, earning to give clearly breaks down if you imagine a world with nothing but hedge fund managers and no nurses. Funding is important, but someone still has to actually do the work and they're "good" people, too, maybe even better.

In any case, I at least feel confident in stating that becoming a deca-billionaire at all costs, including fraud and crime, so you can helicopter cash onto poor people later in life, is not the morally optimal human pursuit. But I don't know what actually is.