There was modest farmland in Iraq managed by a trust for about 400 years that paid for the wedding dresses for all women in the nearby town. The colonial administrators found this ineffective and dismantled the trust fund and privatized the land.

There is something to be said about how we sometimes fail to account for the effectiveness of ineffective altruism.

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SpicyLemonZest 2 hours ago | parent [-]

When people talk about ineffective altruism, they're generally talking about organizations like the American Heart Association, which spends over half of annual donations on payroll (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/135...). I don't think many people in the effective altruist movement would complain about a targeted trust that successfully and reliably achieves some niche goal.

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UncleMeat an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Imagine you have a charitable organization that receives funds and then pays its staff of doctors to provide free treatment to the poor. All of their donations would be spent on payroll and overhead. But this would not demonstrate that the organization is wasteful.

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SpicyLemonZest an hour ago | parent [-]

While that's true, the AHA does not perform medical treatments or have an in-house research lab.

If someone's really passionate about putting up healthy living posters and shifting the cost of CPR education from healthcare providers, more power to them! But my guess is that most AHA donors don't know or ask what exactly their donations are accomplishing.

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jefftk 40 minutes ago | parent [-]

A lot of what the AHA does runs via payroll: advocacy, training, writing guidelines, etc. The implication of "payroll" is that the money is all going to administration, but their programs involve a lot of staff time.

(I have a generally EA view of the world and I don't think the AHA is an especially valuable donation opportunity.)

	▲	SpicyLemonZest 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's fair. I personally was a bit put out when I discovered this, I had assumed most of the donations were going to research, but advocacy and training have some value and I could believe that other people fully expect that's what the AHA does.

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mohamedkoubaa an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

When effective altruists talk about ineffective altruism, they talk about AHA. When I talk about ineffective altruism, I talk about things like a targeted trust.

It's the EA people who generalize from AHA to make grand ethical claims that lead to absurdity.