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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I'm really surprised. Of all the people who could make anti-intellectual statements, I really thought SBF was one of the last.

I get that many books these days are long winded (looking at you Nassim Taleb) ways to make a point, but someone absolutely needs to document all the thinking somewhere. Whether you read the whole book in detail is also optional.

But to generalize this much about all books is astonishing.

Plus he's a math/physics grad, aren't those books super dense with new lemmas on every page?

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Being an effective altruist doesn't make someone an intellectual. They teach the boy-in-pond thought experiment the first week of any college elective ethics class. They hand out The Life You Could Save to all harvard undergrads in the first week. Locking yourself into a myopic utilitarianism that avoids all structural critiques seems roughly the opposite of an open intellectual perspective.

I think that the very very base level of EA (consider the relative good/efficiency of various charitable giving options; per-dollar things like mosquito nets save lots of lives) is not unreasonable, but the steps beyond are outrageous. You've got people saying that the only ethical giving is to AI organizations so that we either don't create the AI apocalypse or somehow convert all of our minds to digital form and this future benefit will outweigh every possible thing you could achieve today.

When people say "what use is the humanities" I just gawk at this new generation of tech billionaires who seemingly have developed very strongly held opinions about the social organization of people without looking at all at the prior work in this area.

Most EA’s are just donating to givewell(global health and poverty). The long termists are a small portion of the movement and ai safety even smaller.

I have followed EA for ten years and there is absolutely no doubt that its most prominent voices - Will MacAskill, Nick Bostrom, Rob Wiblin, Eliezer Yudkowsky, not to mention Sam Bankman-Fried - ascribe enormous significance to AI. I myself have yet to see a compelling argument as to how AGI is possible, let alone dangerous.

If you look at 80,000 hours' list of 'most pressing problems', AI safety is first:

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

Open Phil has donated $250m to AI safety according to its website:

https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/potential-risks-advan...

In terms of volume of people, definitely. In terms of big thought leaders in the community and famous voices in the tech gazillionaire circles? They've definitely moved on to this weird new thing. And its clear that they are just making it up as they go along rather than engaging with any actual intellectual heritage here.

I wasn't really thinking about EA, more that the type of person who is brought up by college professors and gets through some quite tight eye-of-the-needle admissions processes tends to be the kind of person who venerates knowledge in its most venerable form.

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