This is a special post for quick takes by Viliam. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Today I learned that our friends at RationalWiki dislike effective altruism, to put it mildly. As David Gerard himself says, "it is neither altruistic, nor effective".
In section Where "Effective Altruists" actually send their money, the main complaint seems to be that among (I assume) respectable causes such as fighting diseases and giving money to poor people, effective altruists also support x-risk organisations, veganism, and meta organisations... or, using the language of RationalWiki, "sending money to Eliezer Yudkowsky", "feeling bad when people eat hamburgers", and "complaining when people try to solve local problems".
Briefly looking at numbers of donors in the surveys and trying to group the charities into categories (chances are I misclassified something), it seems like disease charities got 211+114+43+16=384, poverty charities 101, Yudkowsky charities 77+45=122, meta charities 46+21+14+10+10=101, animal charities 27+22=49, and Leverage 7 donors. So even if you think that only disease charities and poverty charities are truly altruistic, it would still be 63% of donors giving money to truly altruistic charities. Uhm, could be worse, I guess.
Also, this is a weird complaint:
GiveWell has also recommended that people spam the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) with all (except if they are billionaires, obviously) the money they have set aside to donate, on the grounds that they think it's the best charity, even at the risk of exhausting the AMF's room for more funding, amongst other dubious decisions.
Like, without any evidence that AMF's room for funding was actually exhausted, this all reduces to: "we hate EAs because they do not send money to best charities, and also because they send them more money than they can handle". But sneering was never supposed to be consistent, I guess.
There are over 100 edits in this article. Many, especially of the large ones are made by David Gerard, but there is also Greenrd and others.
It would be nice to have better tools for exploring wiki history, for example, if I could select a sentence or two, and get a history of this specific sentence, like only the edits that modified it, and preferably get all the historical versions of that sentence on a single page along with the user names and links to edits, so that I do not need to click on each edit separately and look for the sentence.
It is also inte... (read more)