I'm glad to see more of this criticism as I think it's important for reflection and moving things forward. However, I'm not really sure who you're critiquing or why. My response would be that your critique (a) appears to misrepresent what the "EA mainstream" is, (b) ignores comparative advantage, or (c) says things I just outright disagree with.

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The EA Mainstream

Perhaps the biggest example of this is the prevalence of “earning to give”. While this is certainly an admirable option, it should be considered as a baseline to improve upon, not a definitive answer.

I imagine we know different people, even within the effective altruist community. So I'll believe you if you say you know a decent amount of people who think "earning to give" is the best instead of a baseline.

However, 80,000 Hours, the career advice organization that basically started earning to give have themselves written an article called "Why Earning to Give is Often Not the Best Option" and say "A common misconception is that 80,000 Hours thinks Earning to Give is typically the way to have the most impact. We’ve never said that in any of our materials.".

Additionally, the earning-to-give people I know (including myself) all agree with the baseline argument but believe earning to give either as best for them relative to other opportunities (e.g., using comparative advantage arguments) and/or believe earning to give to actually be best overall even when considering these arguments (e.g., by being skeptical of EA organizations).

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Contrast this with, for instance, working at a start-up. Most start-ups are low-impact, but it is undeniable that at least some have been extraordinarily high-impact, so this seems like an area that effective altruists should be considering strongly. Why aren't there more of us at 23&me, or Coursera, or Quora, or Stripe?

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this:

If you're asking "why don't more people work in start-ups?", I don't think EAs are avoiding start-ups in any noticeable way. I'll be working in one, I know several EAs who are working in them, and it doesn't seem to be all that different from software engineers / web developers in non-startups, except as would be predicted by non start-ups providing even better hiring opportunities.

If you're asking "why don't more people start start-ups themselves?", I think you already answered your own question with regard to people being unwilling to take on high personal risk. 80,000 Hours advises people to do start-ups in essays like "Should More Altruists Consider Entreprenuership?" and "Salary or Start-up: How Do Gooders Can Gain More From Risky Careers". Also, I can think of a few EAs who have started their own start-ups on these considerations. So perhaps people are irrationally risk-averse -- that is a valid critique -- but I don't think it's unique to the EA movement or we can do much about it.

If you're asking "why don't more people go into start-ups because these start-ups are doing high impact things themselves and therefore are good opportunities to have direct impact?", then I think you've hit on a valid critique that many people don't take seriously enough. I've heard some EAs mention it, but it is outside the EA mainstream.

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We want to know what the best thing to do is, and we want a numerical value. This causes us to rely on scientific studies, economic reports, and Fermi estimates. It can cause us to underweight things like the competence of a particular organization, the strength of the people involved, and other “intangibles” (which are often not actually intangible but simply difficult to assign a number to).

I think the EA mainstream would agree with you on this one as well -- GiveWell, for example, has explicitly distanced themselves from numerical calculations (albeit recently) and several EAs have called into question the usefulness of cost-effectiveness estimates, a charge that was largely lead by GiveWell.

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Comparative Advantage

And beyond the “obvious” alternatives of start-ups and academia, what of the paths that haven't been created yet? GiveWell was revolutionary when it came about. Who will be the next GiveWell? And by this I don't mean the next charity evaluator, but the next set of people who fundamentally alter how we view altruism.

I definitely agree that fundamentally altering how people view altruism would be very high impact (if shifted in a beneficial way, of course). But I don't think everyone has the time, skills, or willingness to do this -- or that they even should. I think this ignores the benefits of some specialization of trade.

Likewise, instead of EAs taking classes on global security for themselves, many defer to GiveWell and expect GiveWell to perform higher-quality research on these giving opportunities. After all, if you have broad trust in GiveWell, it's hard to beat several full-time saavy analysts with your spare time. GiveWell has more comparative advantage here.

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It also can cause us to over-focus on money as a unit of altruism, while often-times “it isn't about the money”: it's about doing the groundwork that no one is doing, or finding the opportunity that no one has found yet.

Right. But not everyone has the time or talents to do this groundwork. So it seems best if we set up some orgs to do this kind of groundwork (e.g., CEA, MIRI, etc.) and give money to them to let them specialize in these kinds of breakthroughs. And then the people who have the free time can start projects like Effective Fundraising or .impact.

If you're already raising a family and working a full-time job and donating 10%, I think in many cases it's not worth quitting your job or using your free time to look for more opportunities. We don't need absolutely everyone doing this search -- there's comparative advantage considerations here too.

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Outright Disagreement

How many would have pointed out that saying that charities vary by a factor of 1,000 in effectiveness is by itself not very helpful, and is more a statement about how bad the bottom end is than how good the top end is?

I think this has been very helpful from a PR point of view. And even if you think flow-through effects even things out more so that charities only differ by 10x or 100x (which I currently don't), that's still significant.

And whether that's condemnation of the bad end or praise for the top end depends on your perspective and standards for what makes an org good or bad. At least, the slope of the curve suggests that a lot of the difference is coming from the best organizations being a lot better than the merely good ones as opposed to the very bad ones being exceptionally bad (i.e., the curve is skewed toward the top, not toward the bottom).

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Quantitative estimates often also tend to ignore flow-through effects: [...] These effects are difficult to quantify but human and cultural intuition can do a reasonable job of taking them into account.

But can it? How do you know? I think you should take your own "research over speculation" advice here. I don't think we understand flow through effects well enough yet to know if they can be reliably intuited.

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Outright Agreement

an effective altruist makes a bold claim, then when pressed on it offers a heuristic justification together with the claim that “estimation is the best we have”. [...] It can appear to an outside observer as though people are opting for the fun, easy activity (speculation) rather than the harder and more worthwhile activity (research).

I agree this is an unfortunate problem.

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Conclusion

Lest this essay give a mistaken impression to the casual reader, I should note that there are many exemplary effective altruists who I feel are mostly immune to the issues above

This is where I get to the question of who your intended audience is. It seems like the EA mainstream either agrees with many of your critiques already (and therefore you're just trying to convince EAs to adopt the mainstream) or you're placing too much burden on EAs to ignore comparative advantage and have everyone become an EA trailblazer.

I would argue (perhaps self-servingly) that academia is another example of such a path

Academia is, in my mind, the textbook example of people doing something because it's familiar, not because they've searched for it and it's the right choice. Most of the academics I know will freely state that it only makes sense to go into academia for fame, not for money- and so it's not clear to me what you think the EA benefit is. (Convincing students to become EA? Funding student organizations seems like a better way to do that.)

"Why haven't more EAs signed up for a course on global security, or tried to understand how DARPA funds projects, or learned about third-world health? I've heard claims that this would be too time-consuming relative to the value it provides, but this seems like a poor excuse. If we want to be taken seriously as a movement (or even just want to reach consistently accurate conclusions about the world)."

This one worries me quite a bit. The vast majority of EA's (including myself) have not spent very much time learning about what the large players in third world poverty are (e.g. WHO, UN). In fact you can be an "expert" in EA content and know virtually nothing about the rest of the non-profit/charity sector.

The history of effective altruism is littered with over-confident claims, many of which have later turned out to be false. In 2009, Peter Singer claimed that you could save a life for $200 (and many others repeated his claim). While the number was already questionable at the time, by 2011 we discovered that the number was completely off. Now new numbers were thrown around: from numbers still in the hundreds of dollars (GWWC's estimate for SCI, which was later shown to be flawed) up to $1600 (GiveWell's estimate for AMF, which GiveWell itself expected to go up, and which indeed did go up).

Another good example is GiveWell's 2009 estimate that "Because [our] estimate makes so many conservative assumptions, we feel it is overall reasonable to expect [Village Reach's] future activities to result in lives saved for under $1000 each."

It seems to me that the effective altruist movement over-focuses on “tried and true” options, both in giving opportunities and in career paths. Perhaps the biggest example of this is the prevalence of “earning to give”.

I would have guessed that the biggest example is the focus on poverty reduction / global health initiatives that GiveWell and GWWC have traditionally focused nearly all their attention on. E.g. even though Holden has since the beginning suspected that the highest-EV altruistic causes are outside global health, this point isn't mentioned on GiveWell's historical "top charities" pages (2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008), which emphasize the important focus on "tried and true" charitable interventions.

One in six Yale graduates go into finance and consulting, seemingly due to the simplicity of applying and the easy supply of extrinsic motivation. My intuition is that this ratio is higher than an optimal society would have, even if such people commonly gave generously.

Because those one-in-six don't all give generously, we can't conclude whether it's right at the margins for graduates to go into earning to give, even if we grant the assumption about the ratio in an optimal society.

I agree that it's worth looking at a wider spread of career possibilities, but this isn't the argument to use to get there.

careers in finance and software (the two most common avenues for this) are incredibly straight-forward and secure.

What are you talking about? Investment Banking, at least, has a huge attrition rate. Careers in IB are short and brutal.

(This comment is on career stuff, which is tangential to your main points)

I recently had to pick a computer science job, and spent a long time agonizing over what would have the highest impact (among other criteria). I'm not convinced startups or academia have a higher expected value than large companies. I would like to be convinced otherwise.

(Software) Startups:

1) Most startups fail. It's easy to underestimate this because you only hear the success stories.

2) Many startups are not solving "important" problems. They are solving relatively minor problems for relatively rich people, because that's where the money is. Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram are examples.

3) Serious problems are complicated, and usually require more resources than a startup can bring to bear.

4) Financially: If you aren't a founder, your share of the company is negligible.

(Computer Science) Academia:

1) My understanding is that there are dozens of applications for each tenure-track opening. So your chance of success is low, and your marginal advantage over the next-best applicant is probably low.

2) I trust markets more than grant committees for distributing money.

3) It seems easier to get sidetracked into non-useful work in academia

Thanks for the interesting critique. I agree with you that EAs often make over-confident claims without solid evidence, although I don't think it's a huge issue that people sometimes understate how much it costs to save a life, as even the most pessimistic realistic estimates of this cost don't undermine the case for donating significant sums to cost-effective charities.

Am I right in understanding that you think that too many EAs are pursuing earning to give careers in finance and technology, whereas you think they'd have greater impact if they worked in start-ups? If so, could you provide some more explanation of why you think this? It seems plausible to me that earning to give is one of the highest-impact career options for many EAs, given the enormous amount of good that donations to the most effective charities can do.

Finally, you say you "worry that effective altruists may actually be less effective than “normal” altruists". That's a pretty striking claim! Can you expand on it a little? In particular, could you give a typical example of 'normal' altruism, and explain why you think it might be more effective than pursuing an earning to give career and donating large sums to a charity like SCI?

What is particularly worrysome to me is that the positive effects of interventions such as improvements in the education are much harder to qualitatively calculate.

Say, an individual can make the choice to be a judge in the US, or to be a banker and donate a lot of money to the charities. The straightforward calculation does not take into account the importance of good people among the justices; without such people US would probably have been in no position to send aid (and would need monetary aid itself).

Effective Altruism (and critiques of it) need to think at the margin. If I give $X to an organization doing good chances are this won't displace someone else from giving the organization money. In contrast, if I get a job at such an organization I have probably displaced someone else from taking that job. This kind of marginal analysis greatly strengthens the value of the “earning to give” path of effective altruism.

Naive efficient-market analysis suggests that if finance and computer programming are predictable and lucrative careers, there should be some less stable career option which is even more lucrative on average. For someone who's genuinely earning to give, and planning to keep only a pittance for their own survival regardless, that variability shouldn't matter.

This still feels like a "we need fifty Stalins" critique.

For me the biggest problems with the effective altruism movement are:

1: Most people aren't utilitarians.

2: Maximizing QALY's isn't even the correct course of action under utilitarianism - its short sighted and silly. Which is worse under utilitarianism: Louis Pasteur dying in his childhood or 100,000 children in a third world country dying? I would argue that the death of Louis Pasteur is a far greater tragedy since his contributions to human knowledge have saved a lot more than 100,000 lives and have advanced society in other ways. But a QALY approach does not capture this. That's extreme obviously, but my issue is that all lives are not equal. People in developed countries matter way more than people in developing countries in terms of advancing technology and society in general.