Is it a bad thing?
In the case of SBF, if he essentially stole from a bunch of retail investors, and then went about doing altruism (this is not yet verified, of course) did he ultimately create a net positive? That only works if the investors in FTX did not lose out, which they did.
Anything that goes into the 'ends justifies the means' territory ends up badly. Sometimes immediately, sometimes over time, but always.
“Ya. Hehe. I [SBF] had to be. It’s what reputations are made of, to some extent. I feel bad for those guys who get fucked by it, by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”
https://www.gawker.com/money/sam-bankman-fried-is-so-stupid-...
He did donate and fund many people through his FTX Foundation and donations via Giving What We Can. I know this because 1) people were funded with real money, even if some people who have not received money yet are of course screwed and 2) I did some voluntary data analysis work for some EA orgs and saw figures, SBF donated.
In the case of EA, we now have exactly one instance where someone engaged in this ends-justify-the-means behavior in a morally problematic way, and this is for some reason supposed to show that EA is irredeemably flawed. This seems a bit absurd.
EA doesn't support this. It's absolutely not okay to do immoral things to make money and even things like Earning to Give via legit quant roles is and was pretty hotly debated.
It's all very well to pay lip service to 'common sense morality' but it doesn't seem to fit into the actual theology of EA, and this is what fanatics are most likely to follow.
Because most people who are willing to donate x% of their salary to charity tends to be decent people? Apart from that, there's tons of fundermental EA posts and writings that talk about how EA cannot be an 'ends justify the means' philosophy to donating. Sadly this SBF shit has really corrupted the core message which is to be skeptical of charities and view them like investments, picking the best one for QALY per $, and valuing all lives equally. I don't even like the futurist side of EA because I personally can't put the value of a hypothetical person above someone who's sick today and focus on global health & animal welfare. Honestly the core point of EA is imo very hard to discredit aside from longtermism.
This is at odds with its core adoption of utilitarianism, which is the movement's fundamental justification. Utilitarianism is sort of textbook "sounds nice on paper, works crappy in practice" outcome.
It's covered briefly here https://www.effectivealtruism.org/faqs-criticism-objections
I don't really know how to defend EA as not Utilitarian beyond that, except saying take a look at some EA-based books or blog posts that aren't from the last month and decide for yourself!
Many have, including the press, hence why the press says its utilitarianism reskinned! :)
EA is reskinned utilitarianism, which folks have repeated pointed out.
Well then I respectfully argue you're misinformed, or simply reading a small subset that is utilitarian. I don't know a single utilitarian in the EA circles I'm in. Central EA-orgs define themselves as not utilitarian. There's many sources arguing you give what you can afford while a utilitarian approach would be to give beyond that if you can save more lives. SBF would be championed as a hero, not a villain, for his ponzi scheme. No money would be going to animal welfare or modern healthcare worries because longtermism would have won the argument. There'd be more than one case of someone using EA to cause harm like robbing a bank. There'd be popular EA speakers calling themselves utilitarian in public. There'd be a single post arguing the ends justify the means from a central EA organisation.
Etc...
EA is very simply the idea that one should check the efficiency of charities and try get the best bang for their dollar. That is it.
Maybe it'd help to understand your idea of what EA and Utilitarianism actually are? Because there's a disconnect somewhere between us. And utilitarianism is a huge subject so perhaps your thinking of a particular kind that is different to my (and many EA's) understanding of the topic.
I'm confident I'm not misinformed, and I have no need to inefficiently waste your and, much worse, my and other HN readers' time arguing with a clear acolyte on the topic. So, to circle back to the portion you dodged from my prior comment:
>> Please do me a favor and at least acknowledge that many people you interact with regarding EA have thought about it and aren't babes in the wool.
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> I don't know a single utilitarian in the EA circles I'm in ... There'd be popular EA speakers calling themselves utilitarian in public.
With due respect, your personal take on the EA movement is less informative than* that of* the core EA thinkers, which I've reviewed. Why would they not want to claim association to utilitarianism? Utilitarianism has a lot of nasty known failure modes and edge cases. Repackaging it is more sellable than fixing an older idea.
EDIT: Missing word
A misunderstanding of utilitarianism. If telling people to give everything makes them give nothing, then it is a bad approach. The utilitarian aims to maximize the amount given, which may entail telling them to give less. You treat utilitarianism as if we are philosophers considering it in theory, not practitioners who have accepted its logic.
>SBF would be championed as a hero, not a villain, for his ponzi scheme.
A terrible approach for similar reasons. Telling people you intend to scam them is a good way to get them to not give you money.
>No money would be going to animal welfare or modern healthcare worries because longtermism would have won the argument.
Treated similarly: EA is like a funnel. They draw you in by saying "you give to charity anyways, shouldn't you do so 'effectively'?" Then, instead of telling you which local homeless shelters are best, they tell you "effective" means curing diseases in africa. Once you accept that, then they have another style of charity to sell you. They carefully avoid pushing you too far, to avoid having you throw out the whole project.
> EA is very simply the idea that one should check the efficiency of charities and try get the best bang for their dollar.
"Effectiveness" is not defined, and any concrete definition is carefully buried. In practice, it usually means "maximizing human welfare" or something to that effect (ie utilitarianism), but they will carefully avoiding forcing that definition on anyone. "Oh, you want to donate to a local foodbank," they might say, "better make sure its an effective food bank" - this for reasons explained above. But every EA organization knows exactly what it means by effective, which is always some variant of utilitarianism. Importantly, they never refer to it as such, because utilitarianism is a ideology, and thus open to criticism. Instead, they always describe it in terms of platitudes that seems sufficiently obvious as to be impossible to question. In this way, they prevent anyone from falling off the ramp.
I’m curious if you would accept the claim that a regular churchgoer is unlikely to act immorally, because I can’t see any difference in principle, down to the “donating a portion of your salary” part.
So you can conclude that you should just do whatever makes you feel good and all ethics are nonsense as you seem to prefer, but I'm not sure that you've really refuted the basic premise that you should try to maximize the amount of good you can accomplish.
Even if you find a "pure" utilitarian (which is rare), it's considered "naive utilitarianism" to ignore the long-term and broad effects of creating harm, and it's also considered intellectually arrogant to think you know enough about the impacts of your decisions and moral philosophy that you can justify causing definite short-term harm for potential long-term gain against the moral frameworks of just about everyone else.
On the whole, I can't personally think of any one person involved in EA, or widely-read EA literature, that promote or support that type of thinking.
I say this as someone who took the Earning to Give path from 80,000 hours and happily donate to healthcare charities suggested by Givewell via Giving What We Can. My wife took the other path and is a postdoc at Stanford working on medical research with an EA focus (both in her field and on replication crisis in medicine). I'm pretty in this space so to speak, albeit only in a small way.
It's basically a license to be a charming scoundrel. Everything good you do can be balanced by some vice of yours, and that's how we get powerful people abusing their employees and other relations.
The MO is not new, you might have heard of the Sacklers donating to art. Should it buy them any sympathy for what they've done? Doubt it.
If you want to do good things, do good things. As soon as you do a good thing and get publicity for it, I'm going to think you're buying publicity. I think there's an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm about this.
If you want to turn money into publicity, then giving locally to high profile causes is optimal. EA discourages both in favor of more global, more impactful causes.