This is what I have been thinking. This whole thing has soured in my mind: Jane Street, Effective Altruism. Crypto, VCs, Silicon Valley culture in general I already assumed are scummy.
The practical version of Effective Altruism for most people is essentially "if you're well off, you should donate a chunk of your income to buying anti-malaria bed nets/deworming medicine/direct cash transfers for the global poor". I don't see how that could "sour" in your mind, seems like a fairly unreservedly good thing.
I want to point out that there are real people [1] being helped by Effective Altruism right now. Telling them "sorry, can't help you any more, some rich asshole in the US just committed a scam, and he claimed he wanted to help you too" just seems incredibly petty and cruel to me.
[1] - This is also a group that traditionally doesn't receive much attention either.
All the mainstream political suggestions for taxation/wealth distribution focus on correcting wealth inequalities within a rich nation. Very few (if any) suggest redistributing from wealthy western nations to the global poor.
Obviously AMF has been around before EA, the big difference is the additional amount of money it’s been able to deploy. I personally know many people (including me!) who started donating significantly because of EA.
Isn't it against EA ethos? Helping some people right now, right here? I read some posts about this movement, and from them it seemed like EAs are more interested in the far off stuff - developing benevolent AI, transumanism, space travel, gene vaults, terraforming, Mars colonisation etc. (there is nothing wrong with these activities). Because helping people right now is "just" altruism, not effective altruism.
> I read some posts about this movement, and from them it seemed like EAs are more interested in the far off stuff
You can’t really use that as a metric to judge the movement, since there’s only so much one can write about “donate money to AMF”, but you can write pages and pages about the far off stuff.
Jane Street - NYC
EA - Berkeley
Crypto - the Bahamas or something?
VCs - Palo Alto
```Palo Alto (/ˌpæloʊ ˈæltoʊ/; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area``` - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Alto,_California