Talk:Effective altruism/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: J Milburn (talk · contribs) 19:00, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

I commend you for taking on such an important and complex topic. Happy to offer a review, but it won't all be today. Josh Milburn (talk) 19:00, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

• I don't think the lead does the job it should. It doesn't really summarise the article, and I'm not convinced that people reading it will really be clear on what effective altruism is. I'm also not sold on the list of names (also, in British English, it'd be wrong to refer to MacAskill or Ord as "professors"). And you mentioned evidence-based practices, which are not mentioned elsewhere in the article (leaving aside navboxes and categories.) I recommend the lead is rewritten with an aim to 1) Give a concise impression of what effective altruism is; and 2) Summarise the contents of the article.
• "In this way it is similar to consequentialism, which some leaders of the movement explicitly endorse" This is not what the source says.
• "Singer personally gives a third of his income to charity." This probably isn't relevant to a section that is supposed to be about the philosophical underpinnings of the movement.
• "Although there is a growing emphasis on effectiveness and evidence among nonprofits" Vague
• "Effective altruists choose the highest priority causes based on whether activities in each cause area could efficiently advance broad goals, such as increasing human or animal welfare, and then focus their attention on interventions in high priority areas." Reference?
• "For example, they select health interventions on the basis of their impact as measured by lives saved per dollar, quality-adjusted life years (QALY) saved per dollar, or disability-adjusted life years (DALY) averted per dollar. This measure of disease burden is expressed as the number of years lost due to ill-health, disability or early death." Reference?
• "as they are often considered to be at the highest level of strong evidence in healthcare research.[31]" That source does not mention effective altruism
• "Effective altruist organizations make philanthropic recommendations for charities on the basis of the impact from marginal funding rather than merely evaluating the average value of all donations to the charity." Tough. This could be better spelt out.
• "For example, a medical charity might not be able to hire enough doctors or nurses to distribute the medical supplies it is capable of purchasing, or it might already be serving all of the potential patients in its market. There are many other organizations which do have room for more funding, so giving to one of those instead would produce real-world improvements." Reference?
• Lots of weasel words. "Some argue", etc.
• The "Donation" section feels a little pro-EA. Do you need to list all those donation amounts?
• "This is because there are often hidden harms in following unethical careers, and because they think it is important to take moral uncertainty into account." Vague. What's meant by taking moral uncertainty into account? (Also, is this not MacAskill too? It's his organisation, and moral uncertainty was the topic of his doctoral thesis.)
• "Global poverty alleviation has been a focus of some of the earliest and most prominent organizations associated with effective altruism." Reference?
• Does Singer use the term "effective animal welfare altruists"? It's a really clumsy construction.
• "if farm animals such as chickens are assigned even a modicum of consciousness" This needs to be explained.
• In the developing world section, you list some effective charities; perhaps that would be good in the animal welfare section?
• Sentience Institute and WAS are both worth mentioning, but at the moment they feel a little "dropped in".
• What does "aligning advanced artificial intelligence" mean?
• Much of the history section feels like it's repeating what has already been said.
• "David Brooks has questioned whether children in distant countries should be treated as having equal moral value to nearby children. He claims that morality should be "internally ennobling"." I can't access the article - could you quote the relevant section (on this page, not the article) so I can compare it to what's claimed in the article?
• Criticism sections can introduce POV problems; here, "claims" and "perceived" make this feel pretty pro-EA.
• McMahan is worth reading. I was surprised to see no references to the Greaves/Pummer book. There's a lot of literature out there, of course; I worry the philosophy in this article doesn't go too far beyond Singer until the criticism section, which is a little underdeveloped.

I've not looked closely into the sources yet, though I'm already a little nervous about sourcing and neutrality. Sorry to be the voice of doom. Please double-check my edits. Josh Milburn (talk) 19:50, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

A quick response to your last point above: I think the lack of reference to the Greaves/Pummer book may be due to the fact that it was published in 2019, and there was not as much editing activity on this article during 2018–2019 (89 non-minor edits) compared to 2015–2017 (437 non-minor edits). The Greaves/Pummer book should be addressed. The lack of references to the effective altruism forum in issue 73 (2016) of The Philosophers' Magazine (which includes the McMahan article you mentioned) is harder to explain.

In response to the request above for excerpts from the David Brooks column "The Way to Produce a Person" (2013):

From the article, Trigg seems like an earnest, morally serious man, who, if he lives out his plan, could indeed help save many lives. But if you are thinking of following his example, I would really urge caution. [...] Second, I would be wary of inverting the natural order of affections. If you see the world on a strictly intellectual level, then a child in Pakistan or Zambia is just as valuable as your own child. But not many people actually think this way. Not many people value abstract life perceived as a statistic as much as the actual child being fed, hugged, nurtured and played with. [...] If you choose a profession that doesn't arouse your everyday passion for the sake of serving instead some abstract faraway good, you might end up as a person who values the far over the near. You might become one of those people who loves humanity in general but not the particular humans immediately around. [...] That's why when most people pick a vocation, they don't only want one that will be externally useful. They want one that they will enjoy, and that will make them a better person. They want to find that place, as the novelist Frederick Buechner put it, "where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." If you are smart, hard-working, careful and lucky you might even be able to find a job that is both productive and internally ennobling. Taking a job just to make money, on the other hand, is probably going to be corrosive, even if you use the money for charity rather than sports cars. [...] I'd think you would be more likely to cultivate a deep soul if you put yourself in the middle of the things that engaged you most seriously. If your profoundest interest is dying children in Africa or Bangladesh, it's probably best to go to Africa or Bangladesh, not to Wall Street.

— Brooks, David (June 3, 2013). "The Way to Produce a Person". The New York Times. Retrieved July 7, 2015.

Those excerpts contain all of the mentions of the world "child" in that column. Notice that it may not be exactly true that in his column "David Brooks has questioned whether children in distant countries should be treated as having equal moral value to nearby children", as the Wikipedia article claims. What Brooks wrote was that "not many people actually think" that "a child in Pakistan or Zambia is just as valuable as [their] own child". (People's "own child" is not the same as all "nearby children", unless all nearby children happen to be their "own".) Then in the next sentence Brooks changes the subject to "abstract life perceived as a statistic" versus an "actual child", which is not exactly the same issue as whether people think that a distant child is as valuable as their own child, since a distant child need not be abstract—indeed, one's own child could be physically far away. Then at the end Brooks changes the subject again and says that if one's "profoundest interest" is children in a distant country, then one should go to that distant country. In conclusion, I don't think that Brooks said anything coherent in his column about the comparative moral value of children, so I have removed the sentences about his column in Effective altruism § Claims that comparisons within and across cause areas are illegitimate. In contrast, the sentences about his column in Effective altruism § Career selection are a fairly accurate summary of the message of the column.

Thanks for working on this GA review. Biogeographist (talk) 22:11, 27 January 2020 (UTC) and 22:55, 27 January 2020 (UTC) and 23:22, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

Yes, thanks, I think you were right to remove the Brooks reference. I'm not going to say that there's nothing there worth adding (no opinion right now) but I do think that claim was a misrepresentation, or at least misleading. Let me know when you've worked through what I've posted above, but I'll look through sources and images soon regardless. Josh Milburn (talk) 19:49, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

I am still working on this, currently doing a literature review. Biogeographist (talk) 02:00, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

@Biogeographist: Let me know when you're ready for me to take another look. Josh Milburn (talk) 18:54, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the nudge. I stalled when my literature review revealed how inadequately this article covers some of the debates about EA. Above you said that the criticism section "is a little underdeveloped", which I've come to think is an understatement. I'm going to try to start working on this again this week. Biogeographist (talk) 12:53, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

@Biogeographist: I'm wondering how you want to proceed, here. There's a lot of literature out there, but you do not need to engage with all of it in order to have a GA-ready article. I am pleased to see that there have been some recent additions, but the article is far from being actively edited. Should we close up the review and leave more time for research/development? Or do you think that the article will be GA-ready very soon? Josh Milburn (talk) 15:01, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

@J Milburn: Thanks very much for your review. I'm afraid it is best to close the review as failed. I intend to keep working on the article, addressing your points above and adding other important material that I have found. I fixed all of the first five points above, except for another paragraph summarizing the article in the lead, and two or three of the later points. For now, though, I have to admit defeat. It doesn't help that I didn't start as an expert on the subject—but if I were an expert I would have seen the article's problems and likely wouldn't have been so audacious as to nominate it for GA status, so my ignorance was beneficial to get the ball rolling. Biogeographist (talk) 00:31, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Please don't be hard on yourself; it's a decent article, and a really tough topic. You've done good work, here, and I'm sure with a little more it'll be GA-ready. I'll close the review properly soon, but do get in touch with me if there's anything I can do to help develop the article. Josh Milburn (talk) 08:08, 30 March 2020 (UTC)