I just want to register support for this.

I think that "being willing to question orthodoxies on cost-effectiveness, using a lot of real-world data and careful thinking" is a lot of the best part of EA, and it's clear that much of this post is in that style. It sounds like you're wrestling with a bunch of important (and, as pointed out elsewhere, highly-debated) parts of the discussion on this topic. 

Overall I found this post quite refreshing. I think it's really neat that you are from Uganda and seem to understand many of the relevant facts there well. As you might have noticed, a lot of the EA community has historically been very Western-centric, and this has clearly led to important gaps in relevant discussions.

As for your specific questions, I think that other comments here have done a good job going through them point-by-point. Also, because these are fairly-discussed questions, I'd flag that LLMs probably have a decent understanding of them now. So I'd expect that Claude / ChatGPT / etc to do a decent job to quickly get you up-to-speed to the current state of discussion on these topics.

(While I like to think of myself as a decent writer, at this point, I often believe that LLMs can explain things better than I can.)
 

Welcome to the forum. You are not missing anything: in fact you have hit upon some of the most important and controversial questions about the EA movement, and there is wide disagreement on many of them, both within EA and with EA's various critics. I can try and give both internal and external sources asking or rebutting similar questions. 

In regards to the issue of unintended consequences from global aid, and the global vs local issue. this was an issue raised by Leif Wenar in a hostile critique of EA here. You can read some responses and rebuttals to this piece here and here. 

With regards to the merits of Longtermism, this will be a theme of the debate week this coming week, so you should be able to get a feel for the debate within EA there. Plenty of EA's are not longtermist for exactly the reasons you described. Longtermism the focus of a lot of external critique of EA as well, with some seeing it as a dangerous ideology, although that author has themselves been exposed for dishonest behaviour. 

AI safety is a highly speculative subject, and their are a wide variety of views on how powerful AI can be, how soon "AGI" could arrive, how dangerous it is likely to be, and what the best strategy is for dealing with it. To get a feel for the viewpoints, you could try searching for "P doom", which is a rough estimate for the chance of destruction. I might as well plug my own argument for why I don't think it's that likely. For external critics, pivot to AI is a newsletter that compiles articles with the perspective that AI is overhyped and that AI safety isn't real. 

The case for "earning to give" is given in detail here. The argument you raise of working for unethical companies is one of the most common objections to the practice, particularly in the wake of the SBF scandal, however in general EA discourages ETG with jobs that are directly harmful. 

Take malaria prevention. It’s a top EA cause because it’s highly cost effective $5,000 can save a life through bed nets (GiveWell, 2023). But what happens when government corruption or instability disrupts these programs? The Global Fund scandal in Uganda saw $1.6 million in malaria aid mismanaged (Global Fund Audit Report, 2016). If money isn’t reaching the people it’s meant to help, is it really the best use of resources?

I think there are basically two ways of looking at this question.

One is the typical EA/'consequentialist' approach. Here you accept that some amount of the money will be wasted (fraud/corruption/incompetence), build this explicitly into your cost-effectiveness model, and then see what the bottom line is. If I recall correctly, GiveWell explicitly assumes something like 50% of insecticide-treated bednets are not used properly; their cost-effectiveness estimate would be double if they didn't make this adjustment. $1.6m of mismanagement seems relatively small compared to the total size of anti-malaria programs, so presumably doesn't move the needle much on the overall QALY/$ figure. This sort of approach is also common in areas like for-profit businesses (e.g. half of all advertising spending is wasted, we just don't know which half...) and welfare states (e.g. tolerated disability benefit fraud in the UK). To literally answer your question, that $1.6m is presumably not the best use of resources, but we're willing to tolerate that loss because the rest of the money is used for very good purposes so overall malaria aid is (plausibly) the best use of resources.

The alternative is a more deontological approach, where basically any fraud or malfeasance is grounds for a radical response. This is especially common in cases where adversarial selection is a big risk, where any tolerated bad actors will rapidly grow to take a large fraction of the total, or where people have particularly strong moral views about the misconduct. Examples include zero-tolerance schemes for harassment in the workplace, DOGE hunting down woke in USAID/NSF, or the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. In cases like this people are willing to cull the entire flock just to stop a single infected bird—sometimes a drastic measure can be warranted to eliminate a hidden threat.

In the malaria example, if the cost is merely that $1.6m is set on fire, the first approach seems pretty appropriate. The second approach seems more applicable if you thought the $1.6m was having actively negative effects (e.g. supporting organised crime) or was liable to grow dramatically if not checked.

Thanks for the thoughtful and organized feedbacks; I have to say I share very similar views after the intro to EA course - it seems to me back then that EA has a lot of subgroups/views. Appreciate the write up which probably spoke up for many more people!

Hi, there! I completely understand your concerns. I have had to grapple with many of them over the years. Don't feel discouraged, many of these issues are still subject to debate within the wider EA community. 

I am a Zimbabwean who lives and works in Nigeria and South Africa at present. I would like to provide my insights on whether proximity matters. Like all effective altruists, I fundamentally desire to flip the notion that charity begins at home on its head in line with Singerian approaches to ethics and philanthropy. I seek to go where I can help the most. 

At this stage however, I believe in focusing on primarily addressing African problems due to my own local expertise and the sheer scale of the developmental challenges in the African context. Some of my critical priorities include reducing poverty, improving healthcare outcomes and enhancing access to quality education. 

You're not missing anything!

Cause Prioritization. Does It Ignore Political and Social Reality?

People should be factoring in the risk of waste, fraud, or mismanagement, as well as the risk of adverse leadership changes, into their cost-effectiveness estimates. That being said, these kinds of risks exist for most potential altruistic projects one could envision. If the magnitude of the risk (and the consequences of the fraud etc.) are similar between the projects one is considering, then it's unlikely that consideration of this risk will affect one's conclusion.

EA says encourages donations where impact is highest, which often means low income countries. But what happens when you live in one of those countries? Should I still prioritize problems elsewhere?

I think this is undertheorized in part because EA developed in, and remains focused on, high-income countries. It also developed in a very individualistic culture.

EA implicitly tells at least some members of the global top 1% that its OK to stay rich as long as they give a meaningful amount of their income away. If it's OK for me to keep ~90% of my income for myself and my family, then it's hard for me to see how it wouldn't be OK for a lower-income community to keep virtually all of its resources for itself. So given that, I'd be pretty uncomfortable with there being a "EA party line" that moderately low-income communities should send any meaningful amount of their money away to even lower-income communities. 

Maybe one could see people in lower-income areas giving money to even lower-income areas as behaving in a supererogatory fashion?

I would generally read EA materials through a lens of the main target audience being relatively well-off people in developed countries. That audience generally isn't going to have local knowledge of (often) smaller-scale, highly effective things to do in a lower-income country. Moreover, it's often not cost-effective to evaluate smaller projects thoroughly enough to recommend them over the tried-and-true projects that can absorb millions in funding. You, however, might have that kind of knowledge!

Amartya Sen (Development as Freedom) says that well-being isn’t just about cost-effectiveness, it’s about giving people the capability to sustain improvements in their lives. That makes me wonder: Are EA cause priorities too detached from local realities? Shouldn’t people closest to a problem have more say in solving it?

I think that's a fair question. However, in current EA global health & development work, the primary intended beneficiaries of classic GiveWell-style work are children under age 5 who are at risk of dying from malaria or other illnesses. Someone else has to speak for them as a class, and I don't think toddlers can have well-being in the broader sense you describe. Moreover, the classic EA GH&D program is pretty narrow -- such as a few dollars for a bednet -- so EA efforts generally cause only a very small fraction of all resources spent on the child beneficiary's welfare to have low local control. 

All that makes me somewhat less concerned about potential paternalism than I would be if EAs were commonly telling adult beneficiaries that they knew better about the beneficiary's own interest than said beneficiaries, or if EAs controlled a significant fraction of all charitable spending and/or all spending in developing countries.

I was just arguing a few days ago on here that your very perspective is needed in EA: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6FLvBaEwiiqf9JGEJ/history-of-diversity-efforts-and-trends-in-ea?commentId=Egczucx2c3uX4qEMo

Something I do like about EA is that while the main ideas that many hold do have value, as you say... there also are some people who find their own way in EA on whatever topic most interests them even if their ideas are NOT held closely by many. (For example, while I am really concerned about AI, 95% of my interest in EA is global poverty, and teaching others some EA basics alongside non-EA ideas... and I mostly just link up with people who have those specific interests.)

That said, EA would be way better off as a whole if more diversity was present, from the high-income country world and especially from the low-middle income country world.

Cheers and thanks for writing this !!!!