Sam Bankman-Fried, Effective Altruism, and the Question of Complicity

The spins on most media coverage of this story are insane. Somehow they seem to suggest that it’s okay to lie (repeatedly saying he lived a frugal lifestyle) and steal (claims he didn’t know what was going on) as long as you give the money away to “good causes”.

I put good causes in quotes because it is debatable that that is where it went.

It wouldn’t surprise me if “Effective Altruism” is itself a concept that was invented by billionaires to hide behind and somehow make up for all the bad things they have done.

It should tell you everything you need to know that Julian Assange published government secrets and is being prosecuted by the espionage act and is locked up in a maximum security prison, and Sam Bankman-Fried stole billions of dollars from regular people and is still invited to speak at events while the media covers for him.

It’s like They’re bending over backwards to do anything but call him a fraud / criminal.

Unrelated to the replacement of traditional ethics with a more hermetic system like EA…

Somewhere around the release of Clueless, people started interjecting “like” into spoken sentences. The quotes in this article show very educated people doing so. I remember one of the first explanations of this as a phenomenon; among many different multiverses or perceptions of reality, separating a sentence with “like” separated one part where you and I agree on a cause from another part where we’re trying to communicate about an effect.