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Comment by wwarner | Hacker News Reader

I think the consequentialist underpinnings of EA are part of the story. Consequentialism revisits our ideas of right and wrong by looking at outcomes. Any reasonable person can look at a law and conclude that there might be a reason to break it under certain circumstances. Certainly, one might argue, financial regulations are arbitrary and that the only way to succeed in your larger goal is to break the rules. EA specializes in this type of reframing, especially when the imagined benefits hugely outweigh the immediate costs, and in this case it's easy to see how self-serving it can be.

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Agreed. There's also the question of the stopping point - or how do you balance earning vs giving. Some day SBF is still worth $900M. Is he giving that away? Probably not, because he thinks it's easier to make a ton of money with a half ton of money. So he'll hoard his money in the hopes of making more money, but from the perspective of the starving person, his behavior is the same as a greedy billionaire who keeps their money for their own personal use.

For all his talk of altruism, what has he actually done so far? Compared with, say, Mackenzie Scott, who is actually putting her money where her mouth is?

From what little I could find, perhaps he has written $160M worth of grants, and it is questionable if those will even be paid out, or who they went to, or over what time period. So that is 0.6% of his wealth at peak.

For reference, people who make less than $30-50k/yr(who generally have a negligible net worth and are sustained by their income) donate on average 5%[0] of their income to charity each year. An average Joe or Jane appears to be literally 10x more altruistic than SBF from what I can find.

[0]https://www.definefinancial.com/blog/charitable-giving-stati...

> think the consequentialist underpinnings of EA are part of the story

I've thought before that EA is charity for sociopaths. Nothing recently has shaken that view. There are plenty of EA quotes that support the 're-framing' point you make, stuff ling Singer saying "take advantage of strategies other people are biased against using".

Fortunately, with FTX collapsed there is a little less risk that someone will actually fund them to move forward with the idea of genociding all the wild animals on earth (on the basis of it being the most efficient way to reduce total suffering because wild animals are suffering). So, I guess that's a little silver lining on the FTX implosion.

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