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Comment by brindlejim | Hacker News Reader

Kind of.

Sam was not doing what EAism says you should do.

But he was embedded in the EA movement, close to many of its other members, and abetted by people like Will.

So if you look at EA descriptively, Sam was very much doing EA.

He was lying about his business. But he wasn't lying about giving the money away. That was very real, and a big part of what "doing effective altruism" is.

Sam/Caroline were also doing crypto.

The two movements -- EA and crypto -- clearly want to excommunicate them. But both those movements were happy to work with them when they appeared to be successful, non-fraudulent billionaires.

Nobody knows you when you're down and out.

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>But both those movements were happy to work with them when they appeared to be successful, non-fraudulent billionaires.

Yes? I don't understand the point of this statement.

"When Alice appeared to donating to her local charity, we liked her, but when it turned out she was lying to us, we didn't like her anymore.

We like charity/EA/crypto, and think those are all good things. So when people are doing them, that is good. If they use that goodwill to exploit other people, we don't like that.

That is a functioning system.

> But both those movements were happy to work with them when they appeared to be successful, non-fraudulent billionaires.

Are you claiming failure to do "due diligence" ? Because otherwise, that seems fairly normal.

I am claiming two things:

1) EA as a movement and as a principle has been at best equivocal on whether or not it's OK to deliberately harm a few people in order to benefit many people. There's a very strong argument that SBF was pursuing utilitarian goals as espoused by EA. Riches amplify our flaws. He committed EA on a grand scale, and it turns out that SBF's version of take-no-prisoners utilitarianism is a) illegal, b) harmful to millions of people, and b.1) that includes his own movement.

2) SBF and Caroline did crypto. They didn't do crypto and secretly scam people and therefore they are not really doing crypto. Scamming is at the heart of crypto. If you want scamming not to be at the heart of crypto, then accept that you will need a centralized authority with a mandate for violence to impose rules of behavior, much as we have with the rest of finance.

Someone lying about doing EA is not doing EA. They’re doing fraud.

There’s the EA movement proper, which I don’t know much about. And then there’s EA the principle, which just says that you should probably prioritize giving that is effective rather than giving that makes you feel good (since human ethical intuition isn’t tuned very well here). Not much to disagree on there. It’s unfortunate that SBF’s fall has diverted attention from this.

(Paraphrasing Sam Harris’s most recent podcast here, https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes)

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