“Money Can’t Buy the Smile on a Child’s Face As They Look at A Beautiful Sunset... but it also can’t buy a malaria free world: my current understanding of how Effective Altruism has failed” by Hazard

episode

LessWrong (30+ Karma) not yet transcribed

▲ 0

Transcript

This episode hasn't been transcribed yet Upvotes decide what gets transcribed next — 0 so far. Sign in to upvote

More from LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Claude Opus 4.5 Achieves 50%-Time Horizon Of Around 4 hrs 49 Mins” by Michaël Trazzi 3 min · 20 Dec 2025

All episodes from LessWrong (30+ Karma) →

Report any issue

Source

Recorded21 Jan 2026

Publisherfeeds.type3.audio ↗

Handlerec:15429321

Show notes

I've read a lot of Ben Hoffman's work over the years, but only this past week have I read his actual myriad criticisms of the Effective Altruism movement and its organizations. The most illuminating posts I just read are A drowning child is hard to find, GiveWell and the problem of partial funding, and Effective Altruism is self recommending. This post is me quick jotting down my current understanding of Ben's criticism, which I basically agree with. The original ideas of the EA movement are the ethical views of Peter Singer and his thought experiments on the proverbial drowning child, combined with an engineering/finance methodology for assessing how much positive impact you're actually producing. The canonical (first?) EA organization was GiveWell, which researched various charities and published their findings on how effective they were. A core idea underneath GiveWell's early stuff was "your dollars can have an outsized impact helping the global poor, compared to helping people in first world countries". The mainstream bastardized version of this is "For the price of a cup of coffee, you can safe a life in Africa", which I think uses basically made up and fraudulent numbers. The GiveWell pitch was more like [...] --- First published: January 20th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gKdnTcqQfpasfyZjP/money-can-t-buy-the-smile-on-a-child-s-face-as-they-look-at --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Ask this episode

“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.