A bit off topic, but this is why I avoid communities for "uplifting news". It sounds like a good concept at first, but then most of the news are based on that.
This is charity, not Socialism. This is providing help at the whim of one person's desires or beliefs. Charity has its place but society should use its resources to offer help to everyone in need.
Edit: And just to be clear, when we talk about socialism, we are talking about democratic socialism. That doesn't mean there isn't free market commerce, it just means that the market is regulated. Even the U.S. regulates its free market.
It's not socialism because it says nothing about the workers owning the means of production
The response is still relevant because the premise of socialism is that the industrial and agricultural revolutions have increased production to such an extent that there is no reason for anyone to go hungry.
Unless it's to give them physical support getting through a voting line designed to make people wonder if they should leave the line for survival sake. In which case they don't want anyone doing it, homeless or not.
From a Christian perspective, I fell like this is actually quite a difficult issue. While Matthew 6:1-4 is very clear that charitable deeds should be done in secret in order to be rewarded by God, but in a cutthroat society such as ours, sometimes I feel like even the idea that someone, somewhere out there is at least trying to do some good in the world can be a worthwhile reminder that kindness is not dead.
Shame on him if it was an attempt to virtue signal to his paying clients, but if it was a genuine attempt to do some good, I can't condemn him.
I mean, they kinda are. And necessary as though they sometimes might be, I think it's a mistake to believe that they are the ultimate solution to everything that ails society, because they always end up creating their own set of problems, like entitlement mentality, welfare dependency, and even fraud.
And perhaps that's what Jesus was onto with the thing about not sounding the trumpet before you when you do it, because isn't that what politicians who promote these sort of things often end up doing? Running on a platform to increase welfare spending is pretty much the definition of tooting your own horn about how much of a good person you are, because it seeks to create the impression that you care more about the poor than everyone else, when you're in fact spending other people's money to do so.
Sorry, but that really has nothing to do with real charity IMO.
Fundamental misunderstanding. Conservatives would actually call this a win for their side IMO. This is because conservatives believe charity > socialism. If I were to be, er, charitable toward conservatives, I would say it's because they distrust government but believe in human generosity. They often really do believe in charity though, at least the comparatively sane ones that I know; it's not something that they just say to deflect.
The problem with charity IMO is that it typically performs quite poorly. The average charity is 100x less effective than the best charities (Givewell), and IIRC this is essentially true regardless of what metric you use for "best." It's also fundamentally not a fair way to distribute wealth; it doesn't help people with different problems equally; and it doesn't necessarily come from different sources in relation to how much they can give. Most people who donate have a narrow moral circle -- they care about some strangers much more than other strangers, based on questionable things like race, proximity, or religion. (Some might object to me citing Effective Altruism here, fair enough, but if you're already coming from the perspective that charity is the best way to improve the lives of those less fortunate, then it's really hard to argue with the research EA has done.)
The way I see socialism is essentially scaled-up, fair, and mandatory charity.
Effective altruism distills all of ethics into an overriding variable: suffering. And that fatally oversimplifies the many ways in which the living world can be valuable. Effective altruism discounts the ethical dimensions of relationships, the rich braid of elements that make up a “good life,” and the moral worth of a species or a wetland.
But setting that aside, the idea of charity is rooted in the theory that you need a popular buy-in before you can achieve significant lasting change.
That's not wrong on its face. But the modern incarnations of charity are so heavily focused on the populism (flashy PR campaigns, obnoxious and invasive marketing strategies, charity as spectacle to drive more engagement) that they often fail to deliver their states goals.
The issue isn't merely of one's moral circle, it is of one's visual range and economic heft. When you're relying on a few plutocrats to dictate philanthropic social policy, you're banking heavily on their omniscience.
I'll read the rebuttal of EA, but I'll trade you if you read this EA unmanifesto.
Effective altruism distills all of ethics into an overriding variable: suffering.
This is actually not true. Givewell, for instance, publishes their findings as spreadsheets and lets you set weights on different aspects of human experience you consider to be good or bad.
Effective altruism discounts the ethical dimensions of relationships, the rich braid of elements that make up a “good life,” and the moral worth of a species or a wetland.
This is also just objectively not true and suggests to me you've never even talked to an effective altruist. But it is generally believed by EAs that horrible suffering, such as the kinds of suffering caused by easily-preventable illnesses, is much worse than any of the subtle and varied experiences of a good life which can be bought with the same amount of money are good. So if you just want to "do good," donate to stopping horrible illnesses before donating to subtler causes.
But setting that aside, the idea of charity is rooted in the theory that you need a popular buy-in before you can achieve significant lasting change.
I think neglectedness is actually the core disagreement between effective altruists and many leftists [...] Leftists emphasize organizing and mass participation. From a leftist perspective, all things equal, the fact that a movement is big is a point in favor of joining it. Leftists believe that nothing you do is going to do much good unless it’s part of a broad, coordinated effort to permanently shift the balance of power. [...] From an effective altruist perspective, all things equal, the fact that a movement is big is a point against joining it: if lots of people are working on janitorial justice, probably the problem is already well-handled.
I don't actually believe this about leftism personally, but I think this should be taken evidence against charity being rooted in the need for a popular buy-in.
When you’re relying on a few plutocrats to dictate philanthropic social policy, you’re banking heavily on their omniscience.
Agreed. You may have missed this, but I'm advocating for socialism, not charity.
Givewell, for instance, publishes their findings as spreadsheets and lets you set weights on different aspects of human experience you consider to be good or bad.
This is still a fixation on an individual subjective human perspective. Which is a bit confusing, given that the EA manifesto explicitly leans on Bayesian statistical analysis. The end result is a round peg (perceptions and emotional priors) being shoved into a square hole (hard numerical figures). It also isn't effective as a policy guide, because the layman fiddling with weights on a spreadsheet still doesn't have any actual control over the scale of political economy that a government or a mega-millionaire commands.
This is also just objectively not true and suggests to me you’ve never even talked to an effective altruist.
We're running into a Jordan Peterson line of argument, wherein "you just don't understand my line of thinking" is used to dismiss critiques you're not equipped to rebut.
Can I counter with "You've never even talked to a non-effective altruist?" and conclude you've been too cloistered to explore ideas outside the EA space? Or would you consider that a personal attack rather than a statistically informed observation?
horrible suffering, such as the kinds of suffering caused by easily-preventable illnesses, is much worse than any of the subtle and varied experiences of a good life
This isn't either/or. You can go back to the old Bill Gates plan to mitigate overpopulation in the third world. He initially tried to push out contraception to the local populations of communities he'd hoped lower birthrates would help. Instead, what he discovered was routine vaccination and standard modernized health care drastically reduced infant mortality and resulted in parents choosing to have fewer kids as a result.
In hindsight, we discovered similar patterns of behavior across the US and Europe, Latin America, India, and China. But as a knock-on effect, we've seen the US/EU focus so exclusively on disease mitigation as a strategy for improving relations in countries they wish to ally with that they neglect their domestic populations (who are comparatively much wealthier, but see the foreign aid as coming at their expense). The iterative result has been a series of claw-backs of positive disease mitigation policy fueled by a popular media that's vilified the very act of disease mitigation and denigrated the people who received it as subhuman. And the true irony of the affair is in how many of these popular media institutions are owned and operated by self-proclaimed EAs.
The EA strategy of trying to decouple and distill policies into their individual components, then min-max solutions at a spreadsheet level, have produced a backlash their narrow focus failed to anticipate.
I think this should be taken evidence against charity being rooted in the need for a popular buy-in.
Until the AI wonderkin can fully divorce themselves from the public at-large, they're going to need to rely on human labor and ingenuity to accomplish large, complex projects. The strongest card that EAs have to play is typically their ability to quickly roll up a highly educated, multi-talented workforce underneath them. Even then, they're notoriously inefficient in their application of these skilled technicians.
But we're already seeing the results of the Bullshit Jobs and Bullshit Bosses, as the bigger Tech companies stumble through the 2020s. Without people who want to work beside you on a project they are deeply invested in, the work slows down and the work product becomes flimsier and more ineffectual. In the end, you're left with Bloomberg 2020 tier work, where you've got tens of thousands of people collecting a paycheck to do nothing.
I’m advocating for socialism, not charity.
Socialism requires a popular consensus to function. You can't impose a collective project by executive fiat.
Bayesianism is about reconciling your squishy priors with hard math. If there's a round peg and a square hole, the square hole is Frequentism.
I don't understand your point about Bill Gates. You're saying he had one plan, but then found another plan worked better. What does this have to do with EA? Givewell isn't an armchair-thinktank, it does pretty solid research and analysis comparing the effectiveness of real-world charities that already exist.
The loss of USAID was really bad. Here's EA Scott Alexander talking about just how bad the scaling back of USAID is. If there were self-proclaimed EA's involved with villifying USAID, that is ironic indeed.
Socialism requires a popular consensus to function. You can’t impose a collective project by executive fiat.
Well I agree. I don't have executive fiat. I'd like to increase the amount of popular buy-in. This is one of the main reasons I post on Lemmy. However, that socialism requires concensus whereas charity does not -- this is exactly Ozy Brennan's point. So I think that we don't disagree at all. Ozy's observation is that EA charity organizations generally focus on the opposite of buy-in; they look for areas of neglect -- places where big strides can be made because other people aren't working hard on those problems yet. Perhaps because they sound strange. Like electrocuting shrimp so they don't feel pain when they die in factory farms (yes this is a real charity).
If there’s a round peg and a square hole, the square hole is Frequentism.
Frequentism won't work with a contained set of inputs. But now we're getting into Abstract Algebra rather than probability.
I don’t understand your point about Bill Gates. You’re saying he had one plan, but then found another plan worked better.
I'm saying he kept coming at the problem dead on without exploring the second and third order consequences of did policies.
Lots of maths up front but the models were shit. The end result was a reactionary mess precisely because Gates and his lackeys didn't care about the popular politics of their policies.
Ozy’s observation is that EA charity organizations generally focus on the opposite of buy-in; they look for areas of neglect
The observation that mosquitoe nets and medical interventions have a long term benefit isn't a problem on its face. But, again, Ozy is attacking a complex problem of supply chains and sustainable development from a very boiled down "do things that look good on my spreadsheet" as the "Effective" solution.
When these plans fall apart, because the proponents fail to account for second order problems, they denounce everyone else as another problem they need to strike head on, rather than considering where they went wrong.
Poverty and food insecurity are the main reasons why some fishermen in Malawi use mosquito nets as illegal fishing nets, an analysis conducted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs has found.
Because the focus was on disease and food security was discounted as a less pressing problem, the primary tool for mitigating disease spread became an environmental catastrophe.
I'm legitimately curious how Abstract Algebra relates here. I thought that was all about group theory and such.
Lots of math but the models were shit
Mkay, but, this doesn't mean math is wrong. It means actual research is needed. Trials and case studies and comparative analysis and so on. Fortunately, that's exactly what givewell does. You can criticize Gates for not predicting second and third order consequences, but I'd argue the only thing we can do in the world where the higher-order consequences are somewhat predictable in advance is preserving the status quo.
The misuse of mosquito nets for fishing is bad, yes -- and depressingly ironic -- but you should check out the Against Malaria Foundation's response, where they say basically the misuse of malaria nets is not very widespread.
In abstract algebra, group theory studies the algebraic structures known as groups. The concept of a group is central to abstract algebra: other well-known algebraic structures, such as rings, fields, and vector spaces, can all be seen as groups endowed with additional operations and axioms.
I got a degree in it, so I know a few things.
this doesn’t mean math is wrong
The application of a model to a set of data which fails to predict outcomes reliably is "Wrong Math".
The big problem with EAs is empirical. They don't deliver on their promises.
The misuse of mosquito nets for fishing is bad, yes – and depressingly ironic – but you should check out the Against Malaria Foundation’s response
The distribution of nets had failed to yield the promised benefits. I site the misuse as a very prominent example of how EAs misjudge externalities, but its one data point in a much broader picture.
If you really want to drop the hammer on EAs - particularly chronic fraudsters like SBF and the Zuckerberg CZI - it is that they're fair more interested in self-enrichment than altruism in the basic sense.
I cite the mosquito netting distribution effects as a very straightforward calculation error, because it is at least superficially a sincere effort with lackluster results. But once you get under the tip of the iceberg, EAs are as riddled with con-artists and bullshitters as any Clinton Foundation or UN Food for Oil initiative.
Well that's why I said "essentially." Specifically, I meant the observable result. I agree that it's not charity if it's mandatory. I'm okay with highway robbery if the spoils are divided fairly. ("Fair" doesn't necessarily mean "evenly," though.)
Yes, if you're conservative you probably don't want "those people" getting charity. You want to pick and and choose and even weaponise through coercion who gets help, but you can't come out and just say that. People will know you're a manipulative asshole. So, you have to loudly call it robbery and theft until enough people fall for it.
I'm not really sure what the point of this comment was. Do you think that a conservative will become more likely to abandon conservatism if they read this?
Yeah, insulting the people you'd like to receive charity from isn't likely going to win you a lot of friends, and neither is threating them with robbery. And I'm not saying that if they're serious about their faith, they shouldn't at least try and make an effort to have mercy on someone who acts like this anyways (Love your enemies and all that), but you have to at least be willing to recognize that this is perhaps THE single most difficult teaching in the Bible for most people to accept, and few ever reach that level of perfection in their faith, so you're likely going to be waiting a very long time.
Exactly. In an ideal world this type of thing would be enough, but that's not the world we live in, and charity like this is just not going to cut it. That's not to say that it isn't a kind gesture, though.
Why would the person that goes through the bins go to the front of the shop to look at a piece of paper on the glass. Surely you'd post this on the bin that night?
Feels like I could write a hand written receipt from oxfam, thanking me for the 8 figure donation, and put it on my tinder profile.
The love the idea of performative goodness which costs them less than a dollar one time which they can then milk endlessly for good vibes with their fellow man buuuuut they really don't want to come off $300 every month so that the young woman who works in the same establishment can have enough to feed her kids well. It costs a lot more it scales and nobody personally thanks them or sees them being a good person when they pay the IRS to fund this. If they pay the IRS that is.
Really? I would have said that was a learned behaviour, with all those feel-good stories (& the hype & how it makes them respectable).
I have noticed I initially immediately distrust "charitable" people bcs at best I discovered their empathy is purely visual (like the shellshock of a crying child, but directly confronting to or advancing the causes of that are outside of view so fuck that child, we all gotta do what's best for us). Not to mention, it has to be public charity, ie they need to get something in return.
Beyond emotional support, charities are only for cases when society already grossly failed, not something we want to see more of.
So many people needing charity for things that arent even scarce, is just horrific & should make us want to make whether changes needed to fix the system.
My immediate reaction is that the owner probably took the picture himself trying to go viral and immediately took it down. Nothing gets solved in this country anymore unless there's a dollar to be made and looking like a good person is somehow more important than being a good person. Why would the person even read it on the front door? Why not discretely package some food and put it next to the dumpster with a note stuck to it? Nothing about this makes sense when you analyze it. The few real heroes of this country are unsung, the rest is just virtue signaling.
Fundamentally it feels like saying, "a good deed is only good if done for the right reason".
That might be important for religion or some other way to measure individual morality, but as a society it really doesn't matter. In fact, having some sort of reward for helping others is useful, since it encourages people to be kind.
I would be pleased as punch if the wealthy and powerful were admired for how much they made the world a better place, instead of because of the size of the swimming pool filled with gold coins in their basement.
There may well be much healthier stuff in their dumpster than peanut butter and jelly. Why not offer to make an arrangement with the person in question to let them take stuff that's about to expire? Or, like, separate food that's being marked out into its own bag and maybe even put it in a cooler or something?
There was a time in my life when I did a fair bit of this myself and I was mostly getting like prepared foods that had been marked out the same day I was getting them. Peanut butter and jelly would have been a downgrade from pulling a couple of days worth of meals with like meat and cheese and veggies and stuff rather than just sugar and nuts and bread.
Not to say that this isn't nice, but it may well be a less viable option on its own in the long term. I suppose they could always do both.
OOP better take that post down (and our OP probably should, too) before they get arrested for inducing potentially fatal aneurysms in the conservatives who happen to see this.
Socialism has absolutely nothing to do with this. Socialism is worker democracy and this guy is unlikely to be a worker. What you want is government social services, thats got nothing to do with socialism.
You realize that people still work for pay in a socialist society correct? Difference being is that the means of production is owned by the state rather than the individual.
Socialism isn't giving charity to people it's ensuring equality amongst the general population.
How is it that so many people don't know what the basics of socialism is and yet they defended it with their dying breath like it's the salvation of our society.
There hasn't been a single socialist country that has been successful in the history of human kind.
Your comment to me was nonsensical eluding to some kind of epiphany that I just can't get to because of my own ignorance I guess.
It's funny that you say that nobody will engage in discussion with me when you yourself can't even make a statement that makes sense to discuss in the first place.
“no questions asked” is this some American thing, maybe they would like a chat, is this necessary?
They could just point them in a helpful direction where they can get a selection of food, rn, for free. Does this not exist in America? It’s an attempt at “socialism” but it’s very pb&j fisted
"Yes, gtfo of our dumpster. When we are here we will give you free food, including protein and fresh produce, without hassling you about whether you deserve it or are 'needy enough'."
...but that's not good enough for you because instead of fixing an immediate need like someone's currently growling stomach, this establishment should tell them to go somewhere else?
There is a difference between forced socialism where the government uses their monopoly on violence to compel participation in distribution of resources under duress and personally giving of what you do not need to those who have less.
The store management willingly being charitable in their own community is fantastic and should be encouraged. It is the right way. The community should respond by giving them more business.
The government raising taxes to fund organizations that accomplish nothing of value at a high price while their management grows wealthy should be abolished.
An example is LA spending over $24B over 5 years to address homelessness without meaningful results. That average of $42,000 per person per year should easily handle the problem, even in LA metro. If they spent $75k per person per year, that should result in more than 5x the 45k homeless people LA has being set up in better circumstances. They tout 4.5k people getting off the streets last year as a win.
Compare that to Abode Services that helps 4.4k people every year with an operating budget of $29m.
Letting the government get involved only leads to waste and fraud as entities bid for contracts that they will commit fraud with the funds and nothing of value is done. It creates bloated administrative bodies that are only self-accountable and only have to report some progress to keep being awarded more and more money.
Exactly, there’s a difference between socialism and empathy. A small business should not feel like they have to be charitable toward non customers just to show human decency, to make up for the gaps in our society and to have basic respect for another human. We should feel ashamed that there is such a need. Our society can and should ensure everyone gets basic needs met
Localized charity like that just increases inequality in the bigger picture. Individuals and individual businesses tend to help the issues they see around them, but they are blind to stuff they don't know about, and no individual can keep tabs on everything. So people they don't see (like people who live farther away) are less likely to get help.
Of course, this is a feature to some people, for whom it's really important to only help people they deem worthy. This unsurprisingly often means only helping their in-group, like their church congregation or their local community. But the people in most need of assistance and the ones the most capable of providing it rarely live in the same area.
It would be far more efficient if a larger-spanning entity (like a larger non-profit charity or government) provided assistance to everyone in a larger area, ensuring everyone has a baseline standard of living. In my experience the Nordic model, where money or subsidized housing is provided by the government to everyone needing it, works quite well. This does not in fact trash the economy, because most people are willing to work to achieve a higher than baseline standard of living.
This reasoning is founded on the idea that there is at any given time a reasonably just distribution of wealth and the capability of the market to fill most any niche that society needs. Neither is even close to true the best way to get more wealth isn't to do anything in particular it is to already possess it and those who hold the overwhelming majority of wealth act to continually tilt the game board to ensure more of it fills their pockets and absent laws limiting their power and redistributing their wealth inevitably until their entire society collapses.
We and others have been flogging the idea of the market as the solution to all ills for about 3 centuries and their isn't a nation on earth that is anything remotely like purely capitalistic because there is no fucking reason to believe such a thing could ever work. Every functional nation has a central government which subsists on either a massive pile of material wealth it has appropriated for itself like Saudi Arabia or taxes its citizens to perform many functions that the market is ill suited to provide. If Libertarianism worked why has nobody done it in centuries?
You point out the money spent by LA to address homelessness and treat waste as a natural law when it is a function of a defective system not a specific failing which it so obviously is. We burn a bunch of money pretending to solve homelessness because we are shits. Finland solves it by housing nearly everyone because they are not. Hell social security, medicaid, and medicare proves the government CAN if it sets it's mind to it help people successfully.
I don't know about you, but any sweetened drink like that just dehydrates me more. Regular drinking water or mineral water, that's it. Nothing else for thirst.
I like some flavor personally. A bit of squeezed lemon or lime is just the right fit.
Though just go an infuser bottle from a friend and fresh cucumber from the garden, so thats this weeks drink of choice!
Edit: Okay slight correction, some of the cucumbers, mint, and lavender will be made into syrups for some homemade cocktails and sodas for some summer night drinks.
Another poor soul saved from the orphan crushing machine. How heartwarming.
A bit off topic, but this is why I avoid communities for "uplifting news". It sounds like a good concept at first, but then most of the news are based on that.
I don't want my tax money saving people from destitution. I want that guy to do it so I can read about it on social media.
And they call it doomscrolling! I do it to pat myself on the back!
This is charity, not Socialism. This is providing help at the whim of one person's desires or beliefs. Charity has its place but society should use its resources to offer help to everyone in need.
Edit: And just to be clear, when we talk about socialism, we are talking about democratic socialism. That doesn't mean there isn't free market commerce, it just means that the market is regulated. Even the U.S. regulates its free market.
It's not socialism because it says nothing about the workers owning the means of production
The response is still relevant because the premise of socialism is that the industrial and agricultural revolutions have increased production to such an extent that there is no reason for anyone to go hungry.
It's true, most conservatives want to be entertained and heart-warmed by the idea of feeding the homeless but they don't want to do it themselves.
And they're willing to pay more money to not do it rather than do it!
That's what Jesus is for, outsourced Goodness^(tm)^
Unless it's to give them physical support getting through a voting line designed to make people wonder if they should leave the line for survival sake. In which case they don't want anyone doing it, homeless or not.
“But I want credit for my acts of kindness.”
-The Righteous Right
How can I get into heaven if I don't get the points myself? Collective good works are only half credit.
I think a lot of people read this as “I want credit for my kindness”
I actually think the real animator of the right is much worse.
They want to choose who is deserving of their kindness.
They want to be able to choose who gets help. Person that did something they don’t agree with, no help. Person that’s sympathetic to them, help.
That’s the reason they dislike systematic assistance. Because someone that doesn’t deserve help might get some.
From a Christian perspective, I fell like this is actually quite a difficult issue. While Matthew 6:1-4 is very clear that charitable deeds should be done in secret in order to be rewarded by God, but in a cutthroat society such as ours, sometimes I feel like even the idea that someone, somewhere out there is at least trying to do some good in the world can be a worthwhile reminder that kindness is not dead.
Shame on him if it was an attempt to virtue signal to his paying clients, but if it was a genuine attempt to do some good, I can't condemn him.
Oh, agreed. I’m not condemning the owner for charity. I’m condemning those who are critical of social programs as a form of ‘forced charity.’
I mean, they kinda are. And necessary as though they sometimes might be, I think it's a mistake to believe that they are the ultimate solution to everything that ails society, because they always end up creating their own set of problems, like entitlement mentality, welfare dependency, and even fraud.
And perhaps that's what Jesus was onto with the thing about not sounding the trumpet before you when you do it, because isn't that what politicians who promote these sort of things often end up doing? Running on a platform to increase welfare spending is pretty much the definition of tooting your own horn about how much of a good person you are, because it seeks to create the impression that you care more about the poor than everyone else, when you're in fact spending other people's money to do so.
Sorry, but that really has nothing to do with real charity IMO.
Wouldn't this work better if it was on the dumpster?
Having it on the door makes it performative, doesn't it
Yep. If it was on the dumpster, they might actually have to give a plate or two away.
You guys are assuming there isn't one on the dumpster with no evidence of that. You're creating your own realities based on bias.
Fundamental misunderstanding. Conservatives would actually call this a win for their side IMO. This is because conservatives believe charity > socialism. If I were to be, er, charitable toward conservatives, I would say it's because they distrust government but believe in human generosity. They often really do believe in charity though, at least the comparatively sane ones that I know; it's not something that they just say to deflect.
The problem with charity IMO is that it typically performs quite poorly. The average charity is 100x less effective than the best charities (Givewell), and IIRC this is essentially true regardless of what metric you use for "best." It's also fundamentally not a fair way to distribute wealth; it doesn't help people with different problems equally; and it doesn't necessarily come from different sources in relation to how much they can give. Most people who donate have a narrow moral circle -- they care about some strangers much more than other strangers, based on questionable things like race, proximity, or religion. (Some might object to me citing Effective Altruism here, fair enough, but if you're already coming from the perspective that charity is the best way to improve the lives of those less fortunate, then it's really hard to argue with the research EA has done.)
The way I see socialism is essentially scaled-up, fair, and mandatory charity.
Abstractly. But as soon as they see it happening in person, they begin frantically dialing the police.
That's why Houston Food Not Bombs needed to get a court order forbidding the police for repeatedly ticketing them for no reason.
It's not.
But setting that aside, the idea of charity is rooted in the theory that you need a popular buy-in before you can achieve significant lasting change.
That's not wrong on its face. But the modern incarnations of charity are so heavily focused on the populism (flashy PR campaigns, obnoxious and invasive marketing strategies, charity as spectacle to drive more engagement) that they often fail to deliver their states goals.
The issue isn't merely of one's moral circle, it is of one's visual range and economic heft. When you're relying on a few plutocrats to dictate philanthropic social policy, you're banking heavily on their omniscience.
I'll read the rebuttal of EA, but I'll trade you if you read this EA unmanifesto.
This is actually not true. Givewell, for instance, publishes their findings as spreadsheets and lets you set weights on different aspects of human experience you consider to be good or bad.
This is also just objectively not true and suggests to me you've never even talked to an effective altruist. But it is generally believed by EAs that horrible suffering, such as the kinds of suffering caused by easily-preventable illnesses, is much worse than any of the subtle and varied experiences of a good life which can be bought with the same amount of money are good. So if you just want to "do good," donate to stopping horrible illnesses before donating to subtler causes.
I actually think this is the idea of socialism, not charity. Ozy Brennan again, on difference between leftism and EA:
I don't actually believe this about leftism personally, but I think this should be taken evidence against charity being rooted in the need for a popular buy-in.
Agreed. You may have missed this, but I'm advocating for socialism, not charity.
This is still a fixation on an individual subjective human perspective. Which is a bit confusing, given that the EA manifesto explicitly leans on Bayesian statistical analysis. The end result is a round peg (perceptions and emotional priors) being shoved into a square hole (hard numerical figures). It also isn't effective as a policy guide, because the layman fiddling with weights on a spreadsheet still doesn't have any actual control over the scale of political economy that a government or a mega-millionaire commands.
We're running into a Jordan Peterson line of argument, wherein "you just don't understand my line of thinking" is used to dismiss critiques you're not equipped to rebut.
Can I counter with "You've never even talked to a non-effective altruist?" and conclude you've been too cloistered to explore ideas outside the EA space? Or would you consider that a personal attack rather than a statistically informed observation?
This isn't either/or. You can go back to the old Bill Gates plan to mitigate overpopulation in the third world. He initially tried to push out contraception to the local populations of communities he'd hoped lower birthrates would help. Instead, what he discovered was routine vaccination and standard modernized health care drastically reduced infant mortality and resulted in parents choosing to have fewer kids as a result.
In hindsight, we discovered similar patterns of behavior across the US and Europe, Latin America, India, and China. But as a knock-on effect, we've seen the US/EU focus so exclusively on disease mitigation as a strategy for improving relations in countries they wish to ally with that they neglect their domestic populations (who are comparatively much wealthier, but see the foreign aid as coming at their expense). The iterative result has been a series of claw-backs of positive disease mitigation policy fueled by a popular media that's vilified the very act of disease mitigation and denigrated the people who received it as subhuman. And the true irony of the affair is in how many of these popular media institutions are owned and operated by self-proclaimed EAs.
The EA strategy of trying to decouple and distill policies into their individual components, then min-max solutions at a spreadsheet level, have produced a backlash their narrow focus failed to anticipate.
Until the AI wonderkin can fully divorce themselves from the public at-large, they're going to need to rely on human labor and ingenuity to accomplish large, complex projects. The strongest card that EAs have to play is typically their ability to quickly roll up a highly educated, multi-talented workforce underneath them. Even then, they're notoriously inefficient in their application of these skilled technicians.
But we're already seeing the results of the Bullshit Jobs and Bullshit Bosses, as the bigger Tech companies stumble through the 2020s. Without people who want to work beside you on a project they are deeply invested in, the work slows down and the work product becomes flimsier and more ineffectual. In the end, you're left with Bloomberg 2020 tier work, where you've got tens of thousands of people collecting a paycheck to do nothing.
Socialism requires a popular consensus to function. You can't impose a collective project by executive fiat.
Bayesianism is about reconciling your squishy priors with hard math. If there's a round peg and a square hole, the square hole is Frequentism.
I don't understand your point about Bill Gates. You're saying he had one plan, but then found another plan worked better. What does this have to do with EA? Givewell isn't an armchair-thinktank, it does pretty solid research and analysis comparing the effectiveness of real-world charities that already exist.
The loss of USAID was really bad. Here's EA Scott Alexander talking about just how bad the scaling back of USAID is. If there were self-proclaimed EA's involved with villifying USAID, that is ironic indeed.
Well I agree. I don't have executive fiat. I'd like to increase the amount of popular buy-in. This is one of the main reasons I post on Lemmy. However, that socialism requires concensus whereas charity does not -- this is exactly Ozy Brennan's point. So I think that we don't disagree at all. Ozy's observation is that EA charity organizations generally focus on the opposite of buy-in; they look for areas of neglect -- places where big strides can be made because other people aren't working hard on those problems yet. Perhaps because they sound strange. Like electrocuting shrimp so they don't feel pain when they die in factory farms (yes this is a real charity).
Frequentism won't work with a contained set of inputs. But now we're getting into Abstract Algebra rather than probability.
I'm saying he kept coming at the problem dead on without exploring the second and third order consequences of did policies.
Lots of maths up front but the models were shit. The end result was a reactionary mess precisely because Gates and his lackeys didn't care about the popular politics of their policies.
The observation that mosquitoe nets and medical interventions have a long term benefit isn't a problem on its face. But, again, Ozy is attacking a complex problem of supply chains and sustainable development from a very boiled down "do things that look good on my spreadsheet" as the "Effective" solution.
When these plans fall apart, because the proponents fail to account for second order problems, they denounce everyone else as another problem they need to strike head on, rather than considering where they went wrong.
Case in point
Because the focus was on disease and food security was discounted as a less pressing problem, the primary tool for mitigating disease spread became an environmental catastrophe.
I'm legitimately curious how Abstract Algebra relates here. I thought that was all about group theory and such.
Mkay, but, this doesn't mean math is wrong. It means actual research is needed. Trials and case studies and comparative analysis and so on. Fortunately, that's exactly what givewell does. You can criticize Gates for not predicting second and third order consequences, but I'd argue the only thing we can do in the world where the higher-order consequences are somewhat predictable in advance is preserving the status quo.
The misuse of mosquito nets for fishing is bad, yes -- and depressingly ironic -- but you should check out the Against Malaria Foundation's response, where they say basically the misuse of malaria nets is not very widespread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_theory
I got a degree in it, so I know a few things.
The application of a model to a set of data which fails to predict outcomes reliably is "Wrong Math".
The big problem with EAs is empirical. They don't deliver on their promises.
The distribution of nets had failed to yield the promised benefits. I site the misuse as a very prominent example of how EAs misjudge externalities, but its one data point in a much broader picture.
If you really want to drop the hammer on EAs - particularly chronic fraudsters like SBF and the Zuckerberg CZI - it is that they're fair more interested in self-enrichment than altruism in the basic sense.
I cite the mosquito netting distribution effects as a very straightforward calculation error, because it is at least superficially a sincere effort with lackluster results. But once you get under the tip of the iceberg, EAs are as riddled with con-artists and bullshitters as any Clinton Foundation or UN Food for Oil initiative.
That's the wages of unilateralism in a nutshell.
But mandatory charity is not charity at all, it's just highway robbery. Doesn't matter how fairly the spoils are divided.
Well that's why I said "essentially." Specifically, I meant the observable result. I agree that it's not charity if it's mandatory. I'm okay with highway robbery if the spoils are divided fairly. ("Fair" doesn't necessarily mean "evenly," though.)
Alright, well, I disagree with your methods but I appreciate your honesty.
glad we can agree to disagree amicably.
Yes, if you're conservative you probably don't want "those people" getting charity. You want to pick and and choose and even weaponise through coercion who gets help, but you can't come out and just say that. People will know you're a manipulative asshole. So, you have to loudly call it robbery and theft until enough people fall for it.
I'm not really sure what the point of this comment was. Do you think that a conservative will become more likely to abandon conservatism if they read this?
Yeah, insulting the people you'd like to receive charity from isn't likely going to win you a lot of friends, and neither is threating them with robbery. And I'm not saying that if they're serious about their faith, they shouldn't at least try and make an effort to have mercy on someone who acts like this anyways (Love your enemies and all that), but you have to at least be willing to recognize that this is perhaps THE single most difficult teaching in the Bible for most people to accept, and few ever reach that level of perfection in their faith, so you're likely going to be waiting a very long time.
America was so horrified at the sight of bread lines that we stopped giving the bread
If we could trust every last person to act on charity, and every person to accept charity only when they need it, socialism wouldn't be required.
But will this sign change when a small homeless camp sets up on their doorstep?
Supporting the public comes with its own unique set of problems. You need to do this kind of thing at scale, or it will fracture and fall apart.
Exactly. In an ideal world this type of thing would be enough, but that's not the world we live in, and charity like this is just not going to cut it. That's not to say that it isn't a kind gesture, though.
i fully expect they entirely meant well.
What’s with the Windows 95 style inset border and black border on this?
It's called style, honey
Screenshots have gone too far. Time to learn how to save images properly.
That's right.
Press the Print Screen button and then paste into a new Word Document.
First time I read “incest border”. Time to lay off the pornhub.
Help me step-border, my arm is stuck in the drain again.
Where else should it be stuck? 👀
Why would the person that goes through the bins go to the front of the shop to look at a piece of paper on the glass. Surely you'd post this on the bin that night?
Feels like I could write a hand written receipt from oxfam, thanking me for the 8 figure donation, and put it on my tinder profile.
My first thought as well.
"Why is this on the front door instead of the dumpster?"
The love the idea of performative goodness which costs them less than a dollar one time which they can then milk endlessly for good vibes with their fellow man buuuuut they really don't want to come off $300 every month so that the young woman who works in the same establishment can have enough to feed her kids well. It costs a lot more it scales and nobody personally thanks them or sees them being a good person when they pay the IRS to fund this. If they pay the IRS that is.
It's a design flaw that many people get more satisfaction out of other people's charitable actions than their own.
Really? I would have said that was a learned behaviour, with all those feel-good stories (& the hype & how it makes them respectable).
I have noticed I initially immediately distrust "charitable" people bcs at best I discovered their empathy is purely visual (like the shellshock of a crying child, but directly confronting to or advancing the causes of that are outside of view so fuck that child, we all gotta do what's best for us). Not to mention, it has to be public charity, ie they need to get something in return.
Beyond emotional support, charities are only for cases when society already grossly failed, not something we want to see more of.
So many people needing charity for things that arent even scarce, is just horrific & should make us want to make whether changes needed to fix the system.
Always reminds me of the classic Brecht piece "Saint Joan of the Stockyards" whenever I see celebrations of "charity" like this.
It’s one thing to vicariously be a decent person and virtue signal by sharing such a meme, but actually paying for it? Fuck no.
My immediate reaction is that the owner probably took the picture himself trying to go viral and immediately took it down. Nothing gets solved in this country anymore unless there's a dollar to be made and looking like a good person is somehow more important than being a good person. Why would the person even read it on the front door? Why not discretely package some food and put it next to the dumpster with a note stuck to it? Nothing about this makes sense when you analyze it. The few real heroes of this country are unsung, the rest is just virtue signaling.
These people love the sense of broadcasting their "selfless giving", and totally not for attention and influence.
I'd like to push back on this notion.
Fundamentally it feels like saying, "a good deed is only good if done for the right reason".
That might be important for religion or some other way to measure individual morality, but as a society it really doesn't matter. In fact, having some sort of reward for helping others is useful, since it encourages people to be kind.
I would be pleased as punch if the wealthy and powerful were admired for how much they made the world a better place, instead of because of the size of the swimming pool filled with gold coins in their basement.
Orphan crushing machine
There may well be much healthier stuff in their dumpster than peanut butter and jelly. Why not offer to make an arrangement with the person in question to let them take stuff that's about to expire? Or, like, separate food that's being marked out into its own bag and maybe even put it in a cooler or something?
There was a time in my life when I did a fair bit of this myself and I was mostly getting like prepared foods that had been marked out the same day I was getting them. Peanut butter and jelly would have been a downgrade from pulling a couple of days worth of meals with like meat and cheese and veggies and stuff rather than just sugar and nuts and bread.
Not to say that this isn't nice, but it may well be a less viable option on its own in the long term. I suppose they could always do both.
OOP better take that post down (and our OP probably should, too) before they get arrested for inducing potentially fatal aneurysms in the conservatives who happen to see this.
Socialism? But that's the opposite of capitalism, which is the cause of all our problems and why billionaires have usurped rule of law and democracy!
If there weren't poors wallowing around in the street, who are they supposed to toss spare change so they can feel Grateful™?
PB&J, fresh veggies and water? I rather dig the trash.
Socialism has absolutely nothing to do with this. Socialism is worker democracy and this guy is unlikely to be a worker. What you want is government social services, thats got nothing to do with socialism.
Yes because this isn't socialism. Giving things away to the needy isn't a political system. It's just being a good person doing the right thing.
Keep going, you are almost there...
In what way? mechoman444 is completely correct. See my comment here.
Almost to where? Some kind it epiphany about how socialism is fantastic?
How about you stop being a pompus glib ass hat and actually retort in some meaningful way to my comment!
No they ain't.
Anybody saying that type of dumb shit is doing the opposite of scientific and rational thought.
They are fanatics, they will presume anything that goes against their indoctrination is demonic and come up with any and all excuses to vilify it.
Also see: religion
You realize that people still work for pay in a socialist society correct? Difference being is that the means of production is owned by the state rather than the individual.
Socialism isn't giving charity to people it's ensuring equality amongst the general population.
How is it that so many people don't know what the basics of socialism is and yet they defended it with their dying breath like it's the salvation of our society.
There hasn't been a single socialist country that has been successful in the history of human kind.
I just saw this comment, haha. I am sure you must be wondering why noone engages into any "discussions" with you 😂 It is a mystery.
Your comment to me was nonsensical eluding to some kind of epiphany that I just can't get to because of my own ignorance I guess.
It's funny that you say that nobody will engage in discussion with me when you yourself can't even make a statement that makes sense to discuss in the first place.
Playing devil's advocate: Being required to pay the government to fund social programs is no good if said government is corrupt.
I’m sorry, this is nice, but a bit problematic?
They could just point them in a helpful direction where they can get a selection of food, rn, for free. Does this not exist in America? It’s an attempt at “socialism” but it’s very pb&j fisted
I can't tell if this is hilarious satire or the dumbest take imaginable
Yeah it was a tongue in cheek piss take sorry
no I loved it. The mystery makes it exciting
"Yes, gtfo of our dumpster. When we are here we will give you free food, including protein and fresh produce, without hassling you about whether you deserve it or are 'needy enough'."
...but that's not good enough for you because instead of fixing an immediate need like someone's currently growling stomach, this establishment should tell them to go somewhere else?
There is a difference between forced socialism where the government uses their monopoly on violence to compel participation in distribution of resources under duress and personally giving of what you do not need to those who have less.
The store management willingly being charitable in their own community is fantastic and should be encouraged. It is the right way. The community should respond by giving them more business.
The government raising taxes to fund organizations that accomplish nothing of value at a high price while their management grows wealthy should be abolished.
An example is LA spending over $24B over 5 years to address homelessness without meaningful results. That average of $42,000 per person per year should easily handle the problem, even in LA metro. If they spent $75k per person per year, that should result in more than 5x the 45k homeless people LA has being set up in better circumstances. They tout 4.5k people getting off the streets last year as a win.
Compare that to Abode Services that helps 4.4k people every year with an operating budget of $29m.
Letting the government get involved only leads to waste and fraud as entities bid for contracts that they will commit fraud with the funds and nothing of value is done. It creates bloated administrative bodies that are only self-accountable and only have to report some progress to keep being awarded more and more money.
Exactly, there’s a difference between socialism and empathy. A small business should not feel like they have to be charitable toward non customers just to show human decency, to make up for the gaps in our society and to have basic respect for another human. We should feel ashamed that there is such a need. Our society can and should ensure everyone gets basic needs met
Ah yes socialism bad because some governments don't work well. And the noedic countries don't exist I guess
Localized charity like that just increases inequality in the bigger picture. Individuals and individual businesses tend to help the issues they see around them, but they are blind to stuff they don't know about, and no individual can keep tabs on everything. So people they don't see (like people who live farther away) are less likely to get help.
Of course, this is a feature to some people, for whom it's really important to only help people they deem worthy. This unsurprisingly often means only helping their in-group, like their church congregation or their local community. But the people in most need of assistance and the ones the most capable of providing it rarely live in the same area.
It would be far more efficient if a larger-spanning entity (like a larger non-profit charity or government) provided assistance to everyone in a larger area, ensuring everyone has a baseline standard of living. In my experience the Nordic model, where money or subsidized housing is provided by the government to everyone needing it, works quite well. This does not in fact trash the economy, because most people are willing to work to achieve a higher than baseline standard of living.
Yes, comrade commissar, this comment right here.
This reasoning is founded on the idea that there is at any given time a reasonably just distribution of wealth and the capability of the market to fill most any niche that society needs. Neither is even close to true the best way to get more wealth isn't to do anything in particular it is to already possess it and those who hold the overwhelming majority of wealth act to continually tilt the game board to ensure more of it fills their pockets and absent laws limiting their power and redistributing their wealth inevitably until their entire society collapses.
We and others have been flogging the idea of the market as the solution to all ills for about 3 centuries and their isn't a nation on earth that is anything remotely like purely capitalistic because there is no fucking reason to believe such a thing could ever work. Every functional nation has a central government which subsists on either a massive pile of material wealth it has appropriated for itself like Saudi Arabia or taxes its citizens to perform many functions that the market is ill suited to provide. If Libertarianism worked why has nobody done it in centuries?
You point out the money spent by LA to address homelessness and treat waste as a natural law when it is a function of a defective system not a specific failing which it so obviously is. We burn a bunch of money pretending to solve homelessness because we are shits. Finland solves it by housing nearly everyone because they are not. Hell social security, medicaid, and medicare proves the government CAN if it sets it's mind to it help people successfully.
Cup of water 😩😂
Business owners out here thinking that a Pepsi might be too decadent for a dumpster diver.
Seems more like they are trying to provide nutritionally valuable food.
I don't know about you, but any sweetened drink like that just dehydrates me more. Regular drinking water or mineral water, that's it. Nothing else for thirst.
I like some flavor personally. A bit of squeezed lemon or lime is just the right fit.
Though just go an infuser bottle from a friend and fresh cucumber from the garden, so thats this weeks drink of choice!
Edit: Okay slight correction, some of the cucumbers, mint, and lavender will be made into syrups for some homemade cocktails and sodas for some summer night drinks.
Honestly, water is better
Yeah you are really helping someone with a pepsi...🙄
So how’s your diabetes going?