Aaron Gertler 🔸 comments on Effective Altruism and Free Riding

[Aaron Gertler 🔸]

This post was awarded an EA Forum Prize; see the prize announcement for more details.

My notes on what I liked about the post, from the announcement:

This post describes issues that could apply to nearly every kind of EA work, with clear negative consequences for everyone involved. I especially liked the problem statement in this passage:

The key intuition is that in an uncooperative setting each altruist will donate to causes based on their own value system without considering how much other altruists value those causes. This leads to underinvestment in causes which many different value systems place positive weight on (causes with positive externalities for other value systems) and overinvestment in causes which many value systems view negatively (causes with negative externalities).

The post supports this point with a well-structured argument. Elements I especially liked:

• The use of tables to demonstrate a simple example of the problem

• References to criticism of EA from people outside the movement (showing that “free-riding” isn’t just a potential issue, but may be influencing how people perceive EA right now)

• References to relevant work already happening within the movement (so that readers have a sense for existing work they could support, rather than feeling like they’d have to start from scratch in order to address the problem)

• The author starting their “What should we do about this?” section by noting that they weren’t sure whether “defecting in prisoner’s dilemmas” was actually a bad thing for the EA community to do. It’s really good to distinguish between “behavior that might look bad” and “behavior that is actually so harmful that we should stop it.”