Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Contra Stone On EA

Jun 23, 2024

Lyman Stone discusses his critique of Effective Altruism, questioning the impact of spatial distribution on charitable giving. The podcast explores various altruistic causes supported by EAs, analyzes the effectiveness of EA donations, and delves into ethical dilemmas of extreme measures like terrorism. It also touches on animal welfare, evolutionary perspectives on caregiving, and the role of philosophy in moral decision-making.

31:29

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Episode guests

Lyman Stone

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Quick takeaways

Effective altruist searches concentrate in the Bay Area and Boston, with minimal impact on overall charitable giving.

Diverse priorities in effective altruism challenge focused efforts, raising efficiency and impact assessment concerns.

Deep dives

Spatial Distribution of Effective Altruism Searches

Searches for effective altruism concentrate in the San Francisco Bay area and Boston, according to Google Trends. Despite slightly higher charitable giving in these areas, the impact of effective altruism on overall charitable contributions remains minimal. With about 7,400 active effective altruists in 2020, their demographic representation in regions like the Bay Area is statistically underpowered to detect notable effects.

Intro

6min

Exploring a Wide Range of Altruistic Causes and Critiquing EA's Approach

13min

Exploring Extreme Measures and the Ineffectiveness of Terrorism

2min

Exploring the Impact of Actions on EA, Animal Welfare, Human Evolutionary Programming Errors, and Philosophy's Role in Morality

4min

Challenges and Critiques of Effective Altruism

6min

Lyman Stone wrote an article Why Effective Altruism Is Bad. You know the story by now, let’s start with the first argument:

The only cities where searches for EA-related terms are prevalent enough for Google to show it are in the Bay Area and Boston…We know the spatial distribution of effective altruist ideas. We can also get IRS data on charitable giving…

Stone finds that Google Trends shows that searches for “effective altruism” concentrate most in the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston. So he’s going to see if those two cities have higher charitable giving than average, and use that as his metric of whether EAs give more to charity than other people.

He finds that SF and Boston do give more to charity than average, but not by much, and this trend has if anything decreased in the 2010 - present period when effective altruism was active. So, he concludes,

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-stone-on-ea

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Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Contra Stone On EA

Episode guests

Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

Deep dives

Spatial Distribution of Effective Altruism Searches

Breadth of Effective Altruism Cause Areas

Challenge of Program Assessment in Effective Altruism

Reflections on Animal Welfare and Evolutionary Sympathies

Remember Everything You Learn from Podcasts