Is Charity Immoral?

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Ego
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by Ego »

jennypenny wrote:But if I have more than I need, and someone has less than they need, what's the big deal if I choose to share?
The closer I get to those who are in need according to people like me....
1) the more I realize that the need is usually not as great as it seems from afar
2) the more I realize that there can also be considerable harm done by giving.
3) the more I realize that good people, myself included, are skilled at ignoring #2 because we want to believe there is something we can do.

Sympathy, compassion and empathy are all similar but they are not the same. To be truly helpful the helper must have empathy. In other words, they must be able to imagine themselves in the shoes of the needy person. They must have a basic understanding of how that person got to where they are and have an inkling of what will happen if they were to drop $100 bill in their cup.

This is why we can walk past the same homeless guy every single day without helping. We understand that the $100 bill will do more harm than good. We can actually project ourselves into his mind, into his shoes. But that act of self-projection is painful. So we look for problems that are further away, problems where we experience sympathy and compassion but spare ourselves the pain of empathy. When we find that comfortably far-away problem we imagine that Singer's project of throwing cash at the problem is somehow different than dropping the bill in the homeless guy's cup.

Jenny, I know that your help is done face to face and a great deal of walking in the other person's shoes is done. I have come to have great respect for that.

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jennypenny
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by jennypenny »

I know a common criticism of charity work is that it alleviates the symptoms to the point that society is no longer forced to address the cause of the problem. But even in the best of times, there will always be people with more and people with less, whether it's money, agency, health, or luck. No matter how you measure it or adjust the 'system' to try and compensate for it, inequality will always exist. Maybe charity isn't the reason the problems aren't fixed--maybe charity is the fix?

Part of the issue in this discussion is lumping all charity together. Some issues are different than others, and some assistance is better than others. For every example someone can give of a charity doing more harm than good, someone else can give an example of a charity doing amazing work. We can all find examples to justify our positions. I prefer face-to-face charity work like preparing meals because I want to see whether what I'm doing is making a difference. It could be argued, however, that helping even the 'neediest' person in my neck of the woods is just one first-worlder helping another, and does nothing to address the needs of the millions of people around the world who live without reliable access to food, water, sanitation, education, medical care, and a safe environment. They wouldn't be wrong.

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fiby41
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by fiby41 »

jennypenny wrote:No matter how you measure it or adjust the 'system' to try and compensate for it, inequality will always exist.
Aristotle wrote: The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

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jennypenny
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by jennypenny »

Aristotle wrote:The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
Says the guy who was more equal than most during his time. ;)

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Ego
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by Ego »

jennypenny wrote:It could be argued, however, that helping even the 'neediest' person in my neck of the woods is just one first-worlder helping another, and does nothing to address the needs of the millions of people around the world who live without reliable access to food, water, sanitation, education, medical care, and a safe environment. They wouldn't be wrong.
Yeah, it seems I revisit this topic every time I go to a place where people from far away come with the desire to do something for the needy, as if there are not good people who would or could do that locally. The needy person in your neck of the woods is the only person you can effectively help without causing greater harm. The further removed you are from the need the more amplified the distortions in both directions.

I've had the opportunity to meet a handful of foreigners who are running programs in remote places that people in their home countries considered "amazing work" and have come to the conclusion that the only reason they can stomach the damage they've done for so long is because they are f#©£ing nuts. Or they are in love with a local. Or they are addicted to the local drug of choice. Seriously. That's why most programs are relatively short term. Because anyone who isn't certifiable, in love or addicted, realizes the harm and moves on. If they've got an advanced degrees in aid work they get themselves promoted out of fieldwork.

It is ironic that we believe we are the people to fix those whose entire culture revolves around community ubuntu.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(philosophy)

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Ego
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by Ego »

Here are a few interesting critiques of Singer's Effective Altruism

http://bostonreview.net/forum/logic-eff ... e-altruism

However counterintuitive it may seem, children are not dying for the lack of a few thousand dollars to keep them alive. If it were so simple, the world would already be a much better place. Development is neither a financial nor a technical problem but a political problem, and the aid industry often makes the politics worse. The dedicated people who risked their lives to help in the recent Ebola epidemic discovered what had been long known: lack of money is not killing people. The true villains are the chronically disorganized and underfunded health care systems about which governments care little, along with well-founded distrust of those governments and foreigners, even when their advice is correct.

http://bostonreview.net/world/emily-clo ... ruism-ngos

In the worst case, the presence of NGOs induces exit from the state sector. When relatively efficient, well-functioning NGOs enter a health or education market, for example, citizens in that market who are paying attention are likely to switch from government services to NGO services. The result is a disengagement of the most mobilized, discerning poor citizens from the state. These are the citizens most likely to have played a previous role in monitoring the quality of state services and advocating for improvements. Once they exit, the pressure on the government to maintain and improve services eases, and the quality of government provision is likely to fall.

The second argument is similar to one of the criticisms of school vouchers. The most engaged get pulled out of the public system, leaving behind the poorest and those least motivated to make the system work well.

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Ego
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by Ego »

It seems the new cause célèbre among international aid workers is to return home and soul search aloud in print. This is good. A decade ago they would have remained silent for fear of harming their resume. In the past year I've been tempted to post about a dozen stories written by these returnees. This one is better than the others for its thoroughness. He misses the boat on the conclusion, but that's understandable because it is still impossible for anyone in the field to admit that doing nothing is an option. God forbid anyone suggest it as the ideal option.

https://newrepublic.com/article/120178/ ... lan-fix-it

My favorite example of unintended consequences comes, weirdly enough, from the United States. In a speech to a criminology conference, Nancy G. Guerra, the director of the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Delaware, described a project where she held workshops with inner-city Latina teenagers, trying to prevent them from joining gangs. The program worked in that none of the girls committed any violence within six months of the workshops. But by the end of that time, they were all, each and every one, pregnant.

“That behavior was serving a need for them,” she says in her speech. “It made them feel powerful, it made them feel important, it gave them a sense of identity. ... When that ended, [they] needed another kind of meaning in their lives.”

The fancy academic term for this is “complex adaptive systems.” We all understand that every ecosystem, each forest floor or coral reef, is the result of millions of interactions between its constituent parts, a balance of all the aggregated adaptations of plants and animals to their climate and each other. Adding a non-native species, or removing one that has always been there, changes these relationships in ways that are too intertwined and complicated to predict.

According to Ben Ramalingam’s Aid on the Edge of Chaos, international development is just such an invasive species. Why Dertu doesn’t have a vaccination clinic, why Kenyan schoolkids can’t read, it’s a combination of culture, politics, history, laws, infrastructure, individuals—all of a society’s component parts, their harmony and their discord, working as one organism. Introducing something foreign into that system—millions in donor cash, dozens of trained personnel and equipment, U.N. Land Rovers—causes it to adapt in ways you can’t predict.

BRUTE
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by BRUTE »

Ego wrote:because it is still impossible for anyone in the field to admit that doing nothing is an option.
all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Dragline
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by Dragline »

It all comes back to that fractal math and complexity theory, eh? :D

It is correct that any intervention into a complex adapative system is likely to have unintended consequences, both positive and negative, that cannot be predicted from the outset. And the outcomes can be vastly different due to differing initial conditions, even in neighboring communities. This is not just true of developing countries but of every complex society. (We have the same general issue with "education reform" in the US.) But I think the lesson is more of moderating expectations than collapsing into analysis paralysis. And trying to be a bit more targeted like how those "play pumps" are doled out now.

The fact of the matter is that most people's lots in life in the world have improved dramatically over the past 30 or 40 years. So the question is why? And are those improvements replicable? It probably doesn't have too much to do with NGOs and magic/fad fixes. I would guess its largely related to the reduction in war in most of the world, the emancipation and education of women (leading to lower fertility rates) and the loosening of some economic freedoms in places like China. Places like Vietnam are prime examples of positive feedback loops resulting in greater prosperity. But every place has its own story and what works in one place may have an entirely different outcome in another.

BRUTE
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by BRUTE »

Dragline wrote:Places like Vietnam are prime examples of positive feedback loops resulting in greater prosperity.
Vietnam is hilarious because they'll have a BoA, a KFC restaurant and a reinforced concrete and glass building, but there'll be hammer and sickle banners hanging from them. brute thinks words like communist/capitalist have completely lost their meaning.

in Dragline's esteemed opinion, if one were to realize that a system is complex and complicated and non-linear and fractal and all that, how would one go about inducing non-random change in that system? is there a methodology? if the consequences are unforeseeable, maybe a sort of metaphorical "wading in slowly", seeing if the resulting waves lead to what was hoped?

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Ego
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by Ego »

BRUTE wrote: if the consequences are unforeseeable, maybe a sort of metaphorical "wading in slowly", seeing if the resulting waves lead to what was hoped?
The eternal dilemma. Who is the person watching the consequences? Wading in slowly means a long-term commitment. Anyone with a conscience gets out when they realize the unintended consequences are almost never good. The slow-wade restarts with each new bright and shiny recruit. Those who stay longer have a vested interest in this life or, more often, the next, and factor that heavenly payoff into their calculation of the resulting waves.

BRUTE
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by BRUTE »

so shit's just random?

Dragline
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by Dragline »

BRUTE wrote:
Dragline wrote:
in Dragline's esteemed opinion, if one were to realize that a system is complex and complicated and non-linear and fractal and all that, how would one go about inducing non-random change in that system? is there a methodology? if the consequences are unforeseeable, maybe a sort of metaphorical "wading in slowly", seeing if the resulting waves lead to what was hoped?
Yes, like most of life it requires empirical observation. Basically do something and see what happens and then make an adjustment, and don't do something too drastic right away. It's no different than starting a new exercise program.

The example of the books from the article is a good one as something that could be easily corrected if somebody would have been paying attention. Providing books written in a language that people can't read is like supplying somebody with rowing equipment and not teaching them how to use it.

I like to say life is more like tending a garden (a dynamic system) than constructing a sculpture, building or some other static object. You have to pull weeds, get feedback and make adjustments as you go. But it you try to do too much all at once, you'll probably have bad results.

I'm reading an interesting book right now "The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck . . ." by Maubossin that, while focussed on business, sports and investing, gives ten guidelines for approaching human-based complex systems that are generally applicable:

1. Understand where you are on the luck/skill continuum
2. Assess sample size, significance and swans
3. Always consider a null hypothesis
4. Think carefully about feedback and rewards
5. Make use of counter-factuals
6. Develop aids to guide and improve your skill
7. Have a plan for strategic interactions
8. Make reversion to the mean work for you (or at least account for it)
9. Develop useful statistics
10. Know your limitations

But most NGOs are not designed like this. They quickly become more about marketing, which they need to do to sustain themselves and attract a steady stream of donors. So they focus on short-term appearances/fixes and not long-term results. Their incentives are all wrong and the results are haphazard. (Note that article was a bit slanted sometimes -- things like de-worming might not improve the GDP of the community very much, but I'm sure they improved the lives of people who would otherwise have them.)

The organizations that are most likely to succeed are those that are not caught in endless funding cycles and can work on long-term planning and assess results as they go. These would be things like the Gates Foundation, which adopt many of the kinds of controls in that list above and are highly focussed on "making lots of small bets" and getting feedback on them. See http://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work

Tyler9000
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by Tyler9000 »

jennypenny wrote:This conversation always depresses me. I can see not liking huge charities that are mostly about having a special color ribbon and a "walk." I don't like commercialized charity either. But if I have more than I need, and someone has less than they need, what's the big deal if I choose to share?
I also find it sad when people dismiss all charity because of the poor examples that many of the big organizations set.

There's a really big difference between the core concept of personal "charity" and "charities" in the organizational sense. The well-deserved cynicism for the latter is usually due to a notable lack of the former. Too often, charities are about changing your neighbor socially or politically or virtue signalling to your neighbor from a safe distance rather than simply giving a meaningful helping hand to the person next door. IMHO, if we all took to heart the true meaning of "charity" and acted accordingly on a personal level rather than deferring it to others to do it for us, the world would be a much better place.

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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Dragline said: I like to say life is more like tending a garden (a dynamic system) than constructing a sculpture, building or some other static object. You have to pull weeds, get feedback and make adjustments as you go. But it you try to do too much all at once, you'll probably have bad results.
I agree. Gardening is a good analogy for life as a whole, because it requires a balance of masculine energy (towards order) and feminine energy (towards chaos.) Taking even one more step back or up from gardening towards permaculture, you can learn to dispense with the quicker judgment inherent in use of terms such as "weed", "invasive species" or "pest." it's not that all things are equally valued, but rather that all things are equally worthy of consideration.

Why is there a good deal of chicory growing on the abandoned lots in my neighborhood? Why are there young cats hiding underneath my camper? Why are there a great many immigrants from Yemen and Bangladesh moving into the abandoned houses in my neighborhood? Why did I feel happy yesterday, when I was attempting to explain what the word "family" meant to a third-grader with very little English, so she could complete the assignment of drawing a picture, and she suddenly blurted out "Mommy, Dahddy, baybay...", and we slapped each other 5? Why do I feel like the underpaid hireling representative of a Confederacy of Dunces when I hand out free government-issue shrink-wrapped Nutri-muffin snacks to children whose mother's are at home cooking delicious, nutritious stews for their dinners?

The most important thing to notice about weeds is that they are pre-defined to prevail.

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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by jacob »

BRUTE wrote: in Dragline's esteemed opinion, if one were to realize that a system is complex and complicated and non-linear and fractal and all that, how would one go about inducing non-random change in that system? is there a methodology? if the consequences are unforeseeable, maybe a sort of metaphorical "wading in slowly", seeing if the resulting waves lead to what was hoped?
/Grammar nazi mode on/

These mathematical terms are not interchangeable and they actually mean something precise.

Complicated means that something consists of many connected parts. Complex means that the sum of all the parts is greater than the sum of the parts and that it's not possible to understand the whole merely by understanding the parts in isolation.

Chili con carne or con beans is an example of something that's complicated but not very complex. You could take the ingredients individually, put them in your mouth, and chew them around (thus connecting the parts) and it would taste more or less the same. The sum of the parts ~ the sum of the whole.

Bread is an example of something that's complex but not very complicated. You can't take a spoonful of flour and a spoonful of water, put them in your mouth, chew them, and have it taste like bread.

One could define the field of engineering in its most abstract way by saying that it is the field of reducing complexities to complications.

Fractal simply means that the same pattern repeats at all scales of the system. That's probably not the case with charity. The pattern that determines the organization of soup kitchens is not the same as the pattern that guides the operation of an individual soup kitchen. On the other hand, prices from the stock market often display fractal patterns. This is because e.g. small day traders and large month-by-month institutional traders display many of the same trading habits but at different levels of scale.

Non-linear simply means that the system has a non-proportional response to the input, e.g. if I double the input, the output won't be double.

Random can be defined in many ways, but one of the more useful ones is that there's no pattern. I think that's better than saying that random=unpredictable because unpredictable might just be a personal failure to see the pattern. For example, the stock market is not random. If you look at charts for more than a couple of months, it will be pretty clear that markets tend to rise slowly and crash fast (so an upside down chart would look weird). That's a pattern.

Chaotic (doesn't mean disordered like in the vernacular) but refers to systems that are highly sensitive to starting conditions. Chaotic systems can be completely deterministic and non-random. E.g. the three-body problem.

A complex adaptive system is a system of parts where the interaction of the parts creates a pattern that feeds back and interacts with the parts. It is the feedback of the pattern that makes the system complex (because the pattern arises from the sum of the parts) and adaptive (because the parts respond to the holistic pattern). If the same/similar patterns feed back at several levels, the system is complex, adaptive, as well as fractal. So the stock market as a whole is fractal complex adaptive system because the patterns are similar at all sizes of traders (from bedroom to pension funds) and because individual traders respond to the patterns they see on their trading stations.

One interesting feature of complex adaptive systems is that you can often cut out a part of it and study that and gain insight in how the larger system actually works. E.g. you can learn things about how a country functions by studying how a city functions.

/Grammar nazi mode off/

So down to it ...

Complex adaptive systems often display stages of equilibriums along with a slow trend towards a final equilibrium. In ecology, the intermediate levels are called seres and the final stage is called the climax. Evolution has generated a system that's more or less self-managing. Finance and other modern (post paleo) human inventions have not. This is probably because these systems are too complicated for human brains.

And here's the important point ..

The way to change or deal with a complex adaptive system is through micromanagement. That's pretty much the only methodology. You literally need to be aware of every single part of the system and its connections at all times. This allows you to make small changes to steer (think cybernetics) it along to where you want it to go. This way the system will not be unpredictable. A garden is a fine example of that (see above). You need to pull weeds, water, add fertilizer, etc. in order to maintain the garden away from the ecology's natural state. If you do all that, controlling your entire system (e.g. you're in a grow house so you know the boundaries, e.g. pests, temp, ...), your garden will be mostly predictable despite being complex and adaptive. (It's important to note that just because a system is complex and adaptive, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's random and/or chaotic.)

The more complicated the system, the greater the effort required. This is why you see ever more management the larger a system grows. At some point, the cost of management becomes too high and the artificial system collapse. One might wonder why humans alone seem to have overly large brains and also why human brains aren't even larger? The human brain alone consumes about 20% of a human's daily energy usage. It might be about the maximum of what the body can support without starving.

Another way to deal with a complex adaptive system is to "engineer". That's essentially the attempt to limit degrees of freedom to those you're interested in to achieve your goal. That's also hard and if you don't get it right, the system might blow up in your face, literally, see e.g. Chernobyl.

A smarter, but rather limited way, is simply to use what's already there and proven to work. In other words, you accept the natural equilibrium levels (seres) and try to design for the ones you like. Permaculture is a good example of this.

The general problem with complex adaptive systems is that they're a lot easier to create than they are to understand. The frequency of system failures is a good indicator that we're running into limits.

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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by FBeyer »

jacob wrote:...
Non-linear simply means that the system has a non-proportional response to the input, e.g. if I double the input, the output won't be double...
First part of that sentence is correct, the latter is not.
Linearity refers to the ability to write the response as an expansion of possibly transformed inputs.

Polynomial responses, say, of any degree are linear as long as the response can be written as
Y = C+ ax + bx^2...
but
Y = C+ a^x + b^x...
is not.

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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by jacob »

@FBeyer - Ha! I see what you did there but I suspect you might have added to the confusion of anyone who hasn't done LinAlg101 rather than clarified :-P I'm talking about the matrix (C, a, b, ...) not the vector space (1,x,x^2, ...). If I double the matrix, I double the Ys. What you did there was essentially to transform a non-linear response into a linear system of equations, i.e. you linearized something non-linear (your x^2). Same thing can be done with nonlinear differential equations, etc.

For all intents and purposes, i.e., when talking about systems, when something is linear it means that the input-output response is linear or proportional sans transformation.

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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by BRUTE »

so essentially linear means "some is good, more is better"?

Dragline
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by Dragline »

Pretty much. "More" is predictably similar to "some".

In non-linear complex systems with emergent properties or levels of complexity, "More is Different". This was the title of a now-famous article by solid-state physicist P.W. Anderson in 1972 that presaged the development of complexity theory.

Here's the article: http://robotics.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs68 ... ferent.pdf

And the accompanying nonsensical ravings of my lunatic mind (thank you Gene Wilder): http://www.prospectingmimeticfractals.c ... ierarchies

There is also a funny quote/observation at the end of the Anderson article:

"In closing, I offer two examples from economics of what I hope to have said. Marx said that the quantitative differences become qualitative ones, but a dialogue in Paris from the 1920s sums it up even more clearly:

FITZGERALD: The rich are different from us.

HEMINGWAY: Yes, they have more money."

I think this somehow also relates to that Wheaton scales discussion. ;-)

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