Wouldn’t this work better if it was on the dumpster?
Having it on the door makes it performative, doesn’t it
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.
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.
But if we have socialism, how will the rich give the poor people the breadcrumbs to stroke their ego and appear like a benevolent monarch? Think of their feelings!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Conservatives would actually call this a win for their side IMO.
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 really hard to argue with the research EA has done.
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 actually think this is the idea of socialism, not charity. Ozy Brennan again, on difference between leftism and EA:
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.
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™
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.
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!
PB&J, fresh veggies and water? I rather dig the trash.
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.
“But I want credit for my acts of kindness.”
-The Righteous Right
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.
How can I get into heaven if I don’t get the points myself? Collective good works are only half credit.
America was so horrified at the sight of bread lines that we stopped giving the bread
