Death in a Shallow Pond

What Hacker News says

1. oceanplexianSep 2026
   Daniel Kahneman is a big EA (Effective Altruism) advocate, aka the cult that all the tech elites such as Sam Altman, Elon Musk are a part of.

   The book is selling you on a belief system (i.e. System1/System2). Then it uses some cherry picked data to set up a straw man to rationalize his idea of how the mind works. Death in a Shallow Pond is a good rebuttal to this even if it doesn't address the book directly.

   thread
2. libraryofbabelNov 2025
   I expect the book itself (Death in a Shallow Pond: A Philosopher, a Drowning Child, and Strangers in Need, by David Edmonds) is good, as the author has written a lot of other solid books making philosophy accessible. The title of the article though, is rather clickbaity: it’s hardly “recovering” the origins of EA to say that it owes a huge debt to Peter Singer, who is only the most famous utilitarian philosopher of the late 20th century!

   (Peter Singer’s books are also good: his Hegel: A Very Short Introduction made me feel kinda like I understood what Hegel was getting at. I probably don’t of course, but it was nice to feel that way!)

   Show morethread
3. skybrianNov 2025
   The book is titled "Death in a Shallow Pond" and seems to be all about Peter Singer. (I don't see a table of contents online.)

   The way I first heard of Effective Altruism, I think before it was called that, took a rather different approach. It was from a talk given by the founders of GiveWell at Google. (This is going off of memory so this is approximate.)

   Their background was people working for a hedge fund who were interested in charity. They had formed a committee to decide where best to donate their money.

   The way they explained it was that there are lots of rigorous approaches to finding and evaluating for-profit investments. At least in hindsight, you can say which investments earned the most. But there's very little for charities, so they wanted to figure out a rigorous way to evaluate charities so they could pick the best ones to donate to. And unlike what most charitable foundations do, they wanted to publish their recommendations and reasoning.

   There are philosophical issues involved, but they are inherent in the problem. You have some money and you want to donate it, but don't know which charity to give it to. What do you mean by the best charity? What's a good metric for that?

   "Lives saved" is a pretty crude metric, but it's better than nothing. "Quality-adjusted life years" is another common one.

   Unfortunately, when you make a spreadsheet to try to determine these things, there are a lot of uncertain inputs, so doing numeric calculations only provides rough estimates. GiveWell readily admits that, but they still do a lot of research along these lines to determine which charities are the best.

   There's been a lot of philosophical nonsense associated with Effective Altruism since then, but I think the basic approach still makes sense. Deciding where to donate money is a decision many people have! It doesn't require much in the way of philosophical commitments to decide that it's helpful to do what you can to optimize it. Why wouldn't you want to do a better job of it?

   GiveWell's approach has evolved quite a bit since then, but it's still about optimizing charitable donations. Here's recent blog post that goes into their decision-making:

   https://blog.givewell.org/2025/07/17/apples-oranges-and-outc...

   Show morethread