i cannot believe how comically apropos and ironic and terrible the entire thing was
ok, get this
first off they came in on a sat night and reserved like half of our fucking tables, like a 30-top so we had to rearrange the entire place for their meetup. they show up huddled outside the restaurant like boy scouts waiting to be lead by their troop leader, but like, 34 year old men (who look EXACTLY like you would expect these fucking dorks to look like; seriously, not even gonna describe them, just picture an effective altruist and yes, thats exactly what they ALL looked like, it was surreal)
ok anyway then they are directed by their troop leader to be seated and that there's a one drink minimum tonight (the leaders have t shirts that say effective altruism on them.....uggghhh), they all proceed to order one drink
literally the rest of the night they do not order a single god damn fucking thing. one of them ordered like 2 sides of fries for the entire group and 2 pizzas for the entire group of 30 people. these pizzas feed 2 people a piece... like, maybe
they proceeded to complain that we arent filling their waters enough. as i refilled their waters, i had to listen to the most insufferable fucking dialogue i have ever heard in my entire adult life. oh my god i was trying so hard not to burst out laughing and/or murder them every time i walked by, like "i was thinking the other day, is it ethical to even exist??? bro, i dont know, sopheclese says" blah blah fucking blah and prenatalism vs promortalism and holy fucking mother of god dude we get it you listen to the sam harris podcast shut up shut up shut the fuck up before i take that pizza tray and beat your ass to death with it oh my god
they then tried to split the check 30 ways, I AM NOT MAKING THIS SHIT UP. YOU CANT, I DARE YOU
we were so staffed up (it was a fucking SATURDAY NIGHT) and we made zero fucking money collectively because these fucking pretentious adult children do not understand the most basic fucking etique, norms or standards that pertain to regular fucking civil society, we must have collectively lost $500 in tips for the entire staff because of the people we physically could not seat because of them.
they stayed until an hour after closing and we had to physically start removing their tables to get them to leave. i will never forget this night
the tip was a pittance obviously, even broke college students tip better, anyway, had to share!
Such a weird concept. Do they think everybody besides themselves tries to help people without ever giving a thought to how?
What do they think charities do all day? Do they think they just sorta dig wells in random spots and never think about the science of it?
The purpose of effective altruism is to provide a justification to not be altruistic. To them their decision to not tip, to work for an evil tech company, and to support reactionary politics can all be excused as necessary to support the greater good.
For effective altruists, the most altruistic course of action possible is to amass as much money as possible, so that it can be donated to prevent an evil all-powerful ai (the devil), from causing the singularity (rapture), and imprisoning human consciousness for an eternity in virtual torture chambers (hell). Conversely by paying tithes to create a good ai (god), we can create a transhuman paradise on Earth (heaven), and bring the dead back to life to live forever.
They have reinvented Christianity to such an extent that they're even managing to steal the crown from the post-Church crowd as the worst people in a restaurant.
my parents are those people and it is mortifying to be out with them, I would rather cook a giant meal myself for them than do it
if I forget to bring cash to make up for their shitty tip, I have to sneak away and pull the server aside, give them my debit card, and ask them to please order me a small dessert etc so I could tip them, while apologizing profusely for my parents' attitude
they weren't like that 15-20 years ago, idk what happened – both of them had difficult, public-facing, service-oriented jobs that they were good at, and they used to be really kind to other working people
I came in to ask what effective altruists are but this sounds about right.
"I don't give homeless people money or food because it just encourages that kind of behavior"-type people
Some of these people believe homeless people are actually middle class and pretending because it pays better than getting a job. I had one tell me he honestly believes they go home, wash up, and then go engage in upper middle class pastimes once they get enough money standing on the side of the road.
I'm not sure how you even argue with that.
The unfortunate truth is there are panhandlers that are not homeless. I have personally seen people picked up in Audis after holding a homeless sign near me.
It is usually women with children, but I don’t know their situation. They could be being trafficked or taken advantage of, but it does happen.
Unfortunate for the people out there that need help.
I've been dropped off at my local welfare office in my dad's Jag and then Tesla. Wealthy-ish parents who did not believe in trickle down but did invite me over for dinner time to time. Weird. No idea what people's circumstances are (also, being homeless with a car, if its an Audi or a 1993 Toyota Corolla, is a lot nicer than being homeless and having no car).
there was a guy who became locally infamous in my area for making a good living panhandling
he had a spot near the off-ramp everywhere that qualifies as a city, but because there are a lot of genuinely kind people here who had tried talking to him to get him plugged into public and private assistance and he was strangely honest with them, and because he was foolish enough to park his well-maintained new-ish vehicle very close by every spot, and because these are small cities with a lot of overlapping traffic and social circles, people eventually figured it out
(there was even a stink in the local newspaper, the archives of which are hard to search because it was eaten 10+ years ago by a big conglomerate that will only let me look at a handful of articles a month)
I remember it so clearly because we were so fucking broke at the time – Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, HEAP, etc, and still barely getting by – and I had given that dude money a few times. I still give money when I have it, but that incident makes me wonder sometimes how foolish I should feel about it – some people have his vibe, unfortunately.
then there's someone like the lady with kids I gave a $20 to a couple months ago; she almost cried and seemed genuinely super happy and grateful, so either she is an incredibly talented actor or she really needed that $20 more than I did 🤷 idk, maybe both, maybe she has realized that a big reaction to gifts makes others more inclined to give them, but also nobody wants to sit with their kids for hours next to a busy intersection with only an umbrella for shelter on a clear 90F day with 85% humidity
I think the origin of effective altruism was more "it's better to take a high-paying finance job and donate the excess money to charity than get a job at said charity" but I don't think many of them are actually donating half their incomes every year.
I mean yeah, kinda. The Three Cups of Tea guy built a bunch of schools that are being used for storage sheds because he didn't have any idea of what it would take to run a school in Afghanistan. Peace Corps is basically make-work projects for idealistic college grads with no real world experience. The Gates Foundation built high tech toilets for rural areas that were stripped for metals pretty much immediately. Tons of nonprofit money is wasted because anyone can raise money thinking the solutions are simple and then discover that the reality is a lot more difficult.
Effective Altruism had the kernel of a good idea in that it initially proposed that interventions be evidence-based and actually help the most people. But then they got bit by a radioactive Utilitarian or got lots of money from someone who knew that the real purpose of philanthropy is reputation laundering and suddenly it was all about kajillion simulated space consciousnesses and flimsy justifications for protecting the incomes of software engineers at Facebook.
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You are giving these deeply ignorant people too much credit. Development and Change has been published since 1970. Just because they're ignorant of the field, doesn't mean they pioneered it.
man, the money over value delivered is so fucking real across the entire non-profit world, at least in my experience.
to give, solicit, and receive massive grants for projects is the only thing the organizations care about, as it is the only metric the organizations reward with raises and promotions. if you dedicate yourself to actually delivering on the promises made, your career will go nowhere as the people who made the promises and told the story of how work was done will absolutely take credit for being The Brain behind your effort, creativity, and labor.
it's explicit in CVs and professional introductions, "so and so won a grant for 4 million dollars" etc. the organization takes their indirect / administrative cut, and then proceeds to give zero shits about what happens after so long as some reports are submitted which are completely churched up so as to be borderline fraudulent. but ultimately, it seems like funders don't even care most of the time.
when it comes to philanthropy, it doesn't even matter because rich people get the tax dodge for their charitable donations. but if regular ass people with common sense ever got into a position to audit public funding organizations to see "what the fuck actually happened" with many if not most of public funds, heads would roll. i swear, if you want to shit in the punchbowl of a non profit, next time some well remunerated asshole brags about a big grant they brought in, starting asking about the outcomes, detailed deliverables, and evaluations and to see the survey data they used to come to their conclusions.
Not all that different from any other capitalist enterprise in that regard, really.