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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

This is maybe tangential of me to say, but since this post is coming from an EA forum: I think the cozy relationship between EA and FTX has done immense damage to the public image and standing of the EA movement.

I've never been an EA person (much less a utilitarian) but I can appreciate the meat and potatoes of applied ethics, especially when those ethics are applied consistently. The infusion of cryptocurrency funny money into that world has completely perverted both aspects: much of EA now seems focused on speculative concerns (AGI) rather than real ones (world hunger or civic integrity), and all sorts of perverse rationales are offered for wealth extraction in service of future utils rather than just doing morally good things.

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> The infusion of cryptocurrency funny money into that world has completely perverted both aspects: much of EA now seems focused on speculative concerns (AGI) rather than real ones (world hunger or civic integrity)

My impression is the (excessive) AGI focus predated FTX (which was founded in 2019), rather than being caused by cryptocurrency money. For example, OpenAI was founded in 2015.

Yeah. To be clear, I'm not claiming that the AGI focus comes from FTX, or any particular monetary source. The claim is that "easy" money (or, more accurately, the prospect of easy money) from those sources has made those aspects of EA more prominent, drowning out other "schools."

I'm a bit behind on the times, but I'm failing to see how the philosophy of effective altruism and cryptocurrency are related. Do you know how the two got intertwined?

SBF participates or participated in the EA movement.

My (outsider's) understanding is that the "longtermist" sub-school of EA has grown over the years, and has developed increasingly convoluted and speculative rationales for behavior that would otherwise be considered unethical.

The example I'm most familiar with is calculating utils in terms of the expected total human population of the galaxy, were we to achieve interstellar travel: it's not inconceivable that orders of magnitude more humans would be alive in the distant future than are alive now, which makes their combined future interest more important than the interests of any (or even all) living human beings. Consequently, we should divert money away from the welfare of people living today and towards efforts that maximize the likelihood of a galaxy filled with colonized planets.

If that sounds ridiculous, it's because it is.

This is called “the end justifies the means” and EA did not invent it, unfortunately.

That phrase refers to doing immoral acts and justifying it by the supposedly positive impact of that act in the long run. It does not refer to acting in the long term future's interest instead of the short term future's.

Honestly, I think this is even more perverse than the "normal" hedonic trap of the ends justifying the means: this particular branch of EA expects us to make world-altering decisions based on what mostly comes off as speculative science fiction.

I would understand it more if it was purely hedonic: at least I could then argue about whether the ends actually do justify the means! But instead it's this sort of unfalsifiable, "but what if" reasoning that's actively diverting money away from worthwhile causes.

Galactic utility is ridiculous. But so is the other extreme, to act only on short-term utility. The asymmetry is that most humans don't need any encouragement to think short-term, but they do need some impetus to think long-term. But it takes wisdom to balance the two concerns. And yes it is a huge downside to any strategy that delays gratification that it can be "hacked" for evil, which is a problem more general than EA or "longetermism".

Assuming utilitarian ethics for a moment, I agree!

Maybe someone more familiar with the EA movement can answer this: why has rule utilitarianism disappeared from EA rationales for behavior? That seems to me a very natural check on these otherwise extreme (long and short-term) leaps of reasoning.

I don't know about "EA rationales", but rule utilitarianism is unpopular among philosophers largely because it's believed to collapse into act utilitarianism. The phil101 caricature is that rule utilitarianism says "no stealing, because 'no stealing' is a rule that increases utility" and act utilitarianism says "steal if you think it maximizes utility" - but on the one hand "no stealing, except for bread to feed your starving child" is an even better rule, and so on; and on the other hand not incorporating uncertainty into your decision procedure isn't being a good act utilitarian, it's just being an idiot. And so in practice they endorse the same decision procedures in pursuit of the same end.

>>If that sounds ridiculous, it's because it is.

Based on how you described it, I don't see what's ridiculous about it.

It is utter hubris to put the lives of fictional future people, mere characters in a story you've invented, over the lives of real people alive today.

It can justify virtually any action. The future is unknowable, so we can spin a new yarn every time we want to justify a new ethical compromise.

In principle, a greater number of future lives matter more than a lesser number of present lives. The principle itself seems sound to me.

The problem is you can't actually be certain those future lives will come to exist. One assuming they will, and being so confident in their assumption that they deprioritize the lives of the currently living based on it, is hubris, but only because it over-estimates one's powers of prognostication.

If we agree the principle can't be applied - why would we consider it sound? That's like saying the principle behind 1 + 1 = 3 is sound, with the small caveat that you get the wrong answers. If something looks good on paper and turns sour when we try to use it, that's the indication that we've miscalculated.

Another perspective to consider; the best way to help people in the future is to help people today. Solving the challenges of our time is an investment that will compound into the distant future. Speculating on what life could be like in a hundred or a thousand years, and tailoring your efforts to that imagined future, is much like creating a product without a customer in mind. If you end up with something useful, it's almost certainly on accident and not because your speculation was accurate.

A principle can be sound while not being applicable. Principles and applications are two separate things and there's no reason to conflate them.

>>That's like saying the principle behind 1 + 1 = 3

That's not sound in principle..

>>Another perspective to consider; the best way to help people in the future is to help people today.

That is an entirely valid, and I would argue probably correct, perspective yet it doesn't invalidate the principle that a greater number of future lives matter more than a fewer number of current lives. It may be that the best course of action for both future lives and current lives is to pursue the best interest of the currently living.

Guarantee you that the same people espousing this use Net Present Value to evaluate their investments.

> Consequently, we should divert money away from the welfare of people living today and towards efforts that maximize the likelihood of a galaxy filled with colonized planets. If that sounds ridiculous, it's because it is.

It sounds ridiculous to you because you framed it in an uncharitable way. Another way of saying "maximize the likelihood of a galaxy filled with colonized planets", so far as contemporary people are concerned, is "minimize the likelihood of civilizational collapse". Even a marginal reduction in the risk of nuclear war, for instance, would be a very good thing.

How does giving your money to crypto businesses improve the future?

When did I say it did?

parent was sarcastic

> Even a marginal reduction in the risk of nuclear war, for instance, would be a very good thing.

Nobody disagrees with this. But since you brought it up, I think it's worth asking: what precisely has the EA movement done to reduce, even marginally, the risk of a nuclear war?

> what precisely has the EA movement done to reduce, even marginally, the risk of a nuclear war?

Nothing that I'm aware of. In general I think that most of the current "longtermist" organizations are useless - but that doesn't mean they're incorrect.

Here’s how I think about it: they aren't necessarily incorrect, but they are behaving in a misleading manner by labeling speculative ethical behavior as “EA” when it’s neither effective nor particularly altruistic (in the sense that Singer uses).

I don’t belong to the EA movement, so maybe it just isn’t my place to say what should or shouldn’t be EA. But this kind of bootstrapping of classroom ethical dilemmas into actually diverting donated money away from human welfare efforts astounds me.

> misleading manner by labeling speculative ethical behavior as “EA” when it’s neither effective

I agree that they're ineffective, but I don't see any evidence that the MIRI types are lying - they're trying to help, they think they're helping ... and they're mostly wrong. It happens.

> But this kind of bootstrapping of classroom ethical dilemmas into actually diverting donated money away from human welfare efforts astounds me.

Are you sure that's what's actually going on? Donations and especially effort are not fungible. The techy libertarian futurist types in the MIRI orbit, for instance, are so far as I can tell simply not as bothered by poverty as Singer et al. A world in which they're not worried about AI risk is not a world in which they give just as much to other causes; it's a world in which they give less.

I believe the general consensus is that nuclear war is a great risk and important to prevent but the effectiveness of philanthropic efforts is low. Fighting malaria is still a more effective form of altruism.

https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/cause-areas/long-term-future...

https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/nuclear-security/

https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/carl-robichaud-fa...

I know you're not defending this take, but I'm having trouble seeing how scam coins benefit future people.

My understanding is that the EA argument for cryptocurrency boils down obtaining the means to do the most good: they want to do the most good, and that requires financial resources. This allows them to justify just about any financial activity, so long as they can convince themselves that the long term utility of their behavior outweighs its downsides. Which gets us cryptocurrencies and oil company investments.

The philosophies aren’t related beyond the fact that EA seems to view making as much money as possible a virtue if you use the money effectively, and the crypto space has happened to be the place where people are making the most money the fastest.

"Using the money effectively" is the operative point: as more and more of the money in the EA sphere comes from cryptocurrencies (and other civically corrosive sources), the EA movement's notion of "effective use" seems to loosen.

OP is complaining about SBF coming into ea and using his crypto money to donate huge amounts to speculative and sometimes even harmful causes such as ai safety and that Oregon house seat instead of meat and potatos ea causes of global health/poverty and animal rights

As someone kind of on the outside of all these movements, I think this is mostly a "founder effects" thing.

A lot of the initial people in EA came from the world of rationality. Classic LessWrong had 3 main topics that were actively discussed - AI risk, Rationality, and EA. It also happened that cryptocurrency became known and somewhat popular among some LessWrong visitors.

We're probably talking like 1% of LessWrong visitors, mind you - but a few of those became crypto-millionaires.

So that's why a bunch of people, who were interested in both AI risk and EA, and now have millions, are infusing the EA movement with cash. Or at least, that's the story as I understand it.

Effective altruism and cryptocurrency are related because SBF's pledge to donate his wealth represented a significant portion of total wealth pledged to EA, and the FTX Future fund represented a large portion of the present funding available for longtermist causes.

> I think the cozy relationship between EA and FTX has done immense damage to the public image and standing of the EA movement.

And it couldn't happen to a nicer cult.

This is an incorrect understanding of history. Eliezer Yudkowsky more or less created the rationalist movement, out of which EA emerged, as a way of funding AI safety research. MIRI is older than EA.

My understanding is that EA mostly came from Peter Singer's ethics. The "rationalist" movement adopted a lot of the language and metaethical principles espoused by Singer, but Singer has not (to my knowledge) indicated particular interest in AI. The books I've read by him mostly focus on animal welfare and human welfare in developing nations (cf. "doing the most good").

Peter Singer happened to write primary source material, but your comment is like saying the EAs came from Jeremy Bentham. EA the organization began with LessWrong which, again, was all along a play to generate funding for AI safety research.

Edit: The original version of the comment implies LessWrong is the single precursor to EA, which is wrong. But it is a relevant and influential one.

The key distinction between Bentham and Singer is that Bentham is dead (unless you count the auto-icon!), and Singer is actively publishing books about EA.

I have no doubt whatsoever that EA the organization, LessWrong, and MIRI are all instrumental in EA the movement. But my understanding, including from actually reading just about everything Singer's ever written, is that the applied ethical groundwork for EA was laid at least a decade before LessWrong or MIRI arrived on the scene.

I was reacting to your original post which implied that speculative concerns have marred EA the movement by pointing out that EA the movement has had close ties to speculative concerns since the beginning. It's a large, complex group with many on-going projects. LessWrong's top charities are still meat and potatoes human development in the 3rd world.

If by "EA the organization" you mean the Center for Effective Altruism, it came out of the Oxford philosophy department.

No, Oxford is incidental to the story. The term was used to mean roughly those ideas at least half a decade before CEA was founded. Some history is here: https://jacyanthis.com/some-early-history-of-effective-altru...

EA was created by will macAskill at Oxford.

AGI nonsense was always at the forefront of the EA movement. You can thank Eliezer Yudkowsky for that.

EA and BankmaniFried receive your criticism for trying to do good. Is it really the case that other billionaires who earn their money say selling cigarettes, or helping old ladies gamble their life savings away, or selling vaping kits to children, and spend their ill-begotten gains on expensive champagne and private jets, are somehow better because they are morally consistent?

What about my comment made you think I’d be okay with any of those things?

I think you missed the point about consistency: I was trying to say that EA, minus the recent tangent, has my appreciation for its consistency. Consistency on its own isn’t a moral virtue, but it is a sign of earnestness. And I like it when people are earnest.

I presumed your comment about consistency was regarding the fact that on the one hand EA has at its core applied utilitarian ethics, but on the other hand the greatest source of EA funding is from an apparent charlatan.

Of course I don't think you find other dubious money making activities to be acceptable. I was pointing out that consistency is not a very useful moral yardstick. But since you don't seem to be claiming it as such with your clarification, my comment was unnecessary.

>much of EA now seems focused on speculative concerns (AGI) rather than real ones (world hunger or civic integrity)

this has been the case since perhaps the very start of EA. many prominent EA/utilitarian faces and perhaps all "long-termists" have been involved in highly speculative stuff like that. it's a meme at this point, as they say.

Agreed. This was not a good look for the movement https://twitter.com/kateconger/status/1590478599844339712.

IIRC lots of people had issues with EA even before they went all in on MTX.

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