A friend of mine mentioned the article, and here’s what I wrote.
Some of it seems pretty unfair. The early anecdote about charity work in Bali seems to be used to criticize the EA ethos, when “rich westerners flying to poor countries to do manual labor (and possibly post on social media about how virtuous they’re being)” is the classic case of something EAs consider to be an ineffective and wasteful charity. (Though perhaps EAs might not go so far as to expect it to be net harmful.) I don’t think most EAs would agree to the “bet the Earth on a 51% chance” scheme. As the author says, “SBF consistently made terrible choices” even according to SBF’s own goals, so I don’t think one can point to his bad outcome as evidence that his goals were bad, except perhaps via a psychological argument that having his grand goals and being a powerful player led him to think “good-for-me-now and good-for-everyone-always started to merge into one” (and subsequent self-serving bias), which would be a general argument against having grand goals and being a powerful player.
But the thing of “lots of aid money ends up in the hands of corrupt middlemen and oppressive rulers and might make the whole thing net negative” is a good point; the specific things that went wrong are good to know about; and the thing of GiveWell not taking seriously and honestly the harm caused by the aid (which, given how they operate, would indeed mean publicly writing up calculations) is a very good point. They should take “tracking the negative consequences” into their routine practice; e.g. there exists N such that >$N being given to a cause justifies having a person go and investigate what’s happening.
I hadn’t checked any of the specific claims about GiveWell’s charities going wrong, or about what they have or haven’t written about the downsides; I basically took the author’s word on that.
A friend of mine mentioned the article, and here’s what I wrote.
I hadn’t checked any of the specific claims about GiveWell’s charities going wrong, or about what they have or haven’t written about the downsides; I basically took the author’s word on that.