Doing Two Things at Once

I have some nostalgia for old-school Effective Altruism, back when more of the discussion was around getting everyone to donate 10% of their earnings to Malaria Consortium or GiveDirectly [1]. 

I don’t miss old-EA just because I think those global health causes remain incredibly important (though they are). I miss the promise of a more sane world. Charity is a world, free from our usual sanity-forcing constraints of profit and loss, that can be especially insane. Consider this video which recently circulated of conceptual art classes for Afghan women: 

There’s a lot that could be said about the implicit politics of this video (many have had takes). But even if someone were basically sympathetic to this work, I can’t imagine anyone making the case that this was the most effective use of charitable resources. The classes clearly exist not because of a widespread demand among Afghan women for conceptual art classes over, say, improved healthcare for their children, but because of something else.

The classes are symptomatic of a broader tendency in philanthropy: randomly pairing two things. Usually, the pairing is two personal interests, in this case, Afghan women and conceptual art, but it’s far from the only example. 

Some of these are obviously contrived and unforgivable: giving musical instruments to people with food and housing insecurity; using art to end climate change. There are some that seem like someone just got a bit too clever for their own good. The famous example from Will MacAskill’s Doing Good Better is Playpumps, merry-go-rounds that were supposed to generate electricity (they did not work well).

Sometimes these ideas sound more plausible but could be dismissed by even a cursory look to scale. Consider decarbonization initiatives in Africa, despite the fact that Africa creates a tiny amount of overall carbon emissions. 

Or consider anti-waste initiatives in the US and Europe, ostensibly about preventing marine pollution, despite the fact that the amount they emit is negligible.

EA organizations like Givewell discovered a solution for this: to check whether a charity is impactful or not before donating to them. No matter how many “takedowns” of EA I read, I always come back to this: “Would you rather have people donating to something completely useless?”

I don’t mean to imply that there’s never a reason to skip up Maslow’s Hierarchy, that water must come before food and food before shelter. Refusing to help with anything but the bare necessities could constitute its own form of paternalism. Instead, it’s a matter of actually caring about the people you are trying to help to ask what they want and caring enough about the problem you are trying to solve to actually figure out what it would take to make an impact on it.

So even if everyone isn’t going to become an EA, we might all consider two lesser mandates: to not simply randomly pair things and to try to think a bit about what the person you’re trying to help actually wants and needs. Charitable giving is 2% of the GDP and we should probably try to make it not useless. [2]

[1] EA is better off focused on longtermism, all things considered.

[2] If EA is going to concentrate its intellectual energy on longtermism, I’m keen to see who picks up this project.