A friend of mine is part of a Mensa (top 2% IQ people) local chapter. He did that mainly for fun and no pedantic reasons.
He always tells me story of the problems they have organizing basic activities and governance for the chapter... Even when all participants have a very high IQ.
Beyond the validity of IQ, people do crazy things when trusted people, or in power positions give recommendations. Also by FOMO.
The second story is from a friend who is a second generation finance professional, knows about the complexity of investments in general and in crypto, had crypto companies, and more but was scammed in a basic way investing in a crypto fund.
The third story is about a group of business people who created successful businesses, have a WhatsApp group for recommending crypto investments: one guy recommended a DeFi project, I immediately recommended to escape from that investment because it didn't have a security audit (my field and basic due diligence) and... well the project was easily hacked.
(2) EA creates an excuse to act outrageously evil "for the good of the longterm"
2. Contrary to what you think, there's nothing about effective altruism that requires/wants you to donate to effective altruism organizations. Yes, there are effective altruism funds that effectively collect money and donate them to the most impactful causes, but there are also sites like givewell that tells you which charities are doing the most impactful work. I don't see how the latter is ponzi-like in any way. Even the former isn't really ponzi-like unless there's high administrative overhead (ie. most of the money isn't getting disbursed to charities and is instead spent on admin expenses).
3. This whole comment feels like an attack on a strawman on effective altruism and/or earning to give. The EA people I know of definitely do not give me the impression that they're willing to commit crimes so they can divert more money to EA/charities. I'll admit that I'm not deep into EA, so it's possible that I didn't witness their secret meetings where they they do discuss this. What you're doing feels like attacking utilitarians (eg. Peter Singer or John Stuart Mill) by saying that the logical conclusion to their ideology "creates an excuse to act outrageously evil "for the good of the longterm""
It isn't obvious, and I'm skeptical both by cases like this and by the lack of domain expertise of a white-collar worker to be able to judge the veracity of charitable activities.
I mean, maybe if we had flush teams of water quality experts in every state with the time and expertise to judge whether water supplies are safe. But as it is, a team from Virginia Tech had to high tail it to Flint during their water crisis based on the reports they heard about lead levels there.
If there are too few domain experts or even too weak a web of trust to connect them to white collar donors, what you describe doesn't sound like an effective strategy. (Not to mention whatever it is that causes you to think that the approach is obviously superior to drilling down in some domain.)
I don't get what you're arguing here. The white collar worker lacks the expertise to "judge the veracity of charitable activities" therefore we should...
* fly over to africa so hey can dig a well and find out first hand whether it's actually doing good? Leaving aside the massive amounts of resources needed for this endeavor, there's no evidence that the same unqualified white collar worker would be qualified to judge what's happening on the ground
* not practice effective altruism, and donate to whichever feels the cutest and/or is in vogue?
* when we're 18, choose a random field and hope 18 year old self is qualified to figure out which field would do the most good?
>I mean, maybe if we had flush teams of water quality experts in every state with the time and expertise to judge whether water supplies are safe. But as it is, a team from Virginia Tech had to high tail it to Flint during their water crisis based on the reports they heard about lead levels there.
I'm baffled as to why you think sending a team from virginia tech was the best course of action here. Google maps says that such a trip would take over 8 hours. Assuming the "team" had at least 2 people, then that's at least 32 man-hours for such an excursion. At median college graduate wages that translates to $880 in travel time alone. They couldn't have crowdsourced water collection and had it delivered via courier (maybe $20/package) to their campus?
That's why the first thing EA did is evaluate which charities are most effective. In a few seconds you can find things like https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/donate/organizations
Bill Gates has been trying to do this ever since the year 2000. Transfering quality of life from Seattle or Pasadena to a slum in Lagos or Nairobi is the hardest thing you could possibly do.
Humans are selfish so the moment the decision is made to allocate an X amount of money Piranhas start to attack the loot, both at home and abroad.
The dynamics of negotiations, pricing power, elasticity of supply and demand don't go out of the window just because a sum of money is destined to Africa or has "philantropy" stamped across.
At the end of the day you need people who do it for their own satisfaction, not for the money
Charities in general aren't exactly known for conducting thorough due diligence on their donors. Sure, it might make sense to make sure the person you're getting money from isn't some sort of ruthless dictator or embroiled in some scandal, but "runs crypto trading firm" is a pretty plausible story.
At least one of the people involved (MacAskill) is a big name in EA circles.
People in general don't do thorough due diligence on who they work with. As long as there isn't anything obviously bad about a person, it seems fairly reasonable to cooperate with someone who shares your goal and is willing to contribute resources. From what I can tell, SBF/FTX's public image was reasonably clean prior to the blow up. The wikipedia article[1] only lists some minor controversies (eg. FDIC cease and desist). This definitely isn't something like bitfinex/tether where there's a long controversy spanning years[2].
Why should I trust my (or other people's) ability to act to maximize long term good when I (or other people) aren't smart enough to avoid landmines like FTX?
2. My previous comment asserts that SBF/FTX was reasonably clean prior to the collapse. If someone seemed reasonably clean, but then it turned out that he was a Bad Person or whatever, should everyone associated with that person be chastised for not being "smart enough to avoid landmines"?
2. Even if we accept your conclusion, what does that mean in practice? Wikipedia describes effective altruism as:
>a philosophical and social movement that advocates "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis".
Should we not use evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible? Should we revert back to donating based on whatever makes us feel fuzzy? It's easy to dunk on something because it supposedly failed, but what's your proposed alternative?
...yes? Or at the very least, qualify the brand. I've seen founders use XYZ-backed to great effect with investors, customers and even public officials. Making it clearer that Sequoia investing in a company isn't Sequoia saying it's done deep diligence is good for everyone.
But if I were positioned in one of the funds that invested heavily into a company that even a surface-level check would have revealed to have the controls, governance, and risk management of a lemonade stand, I would be withdrawing all my money, post-haste. You literally had one job to do.
Many of them fully endorsed or implicitly endorsed SBF.
That SBF was revealed as a fraudster should update your belief on the quality of these people, but not outright scratch them out.
For example, I have severely downgraded my opinion of Sequoia.
There is a bright side on this. If you didn't get funding you don't need to feel guilty.
How so? The fact that people make decisions based on only what they actually know is in no way a lapse of judgement. I mean what else are they supposed to do?