Hacker News Reader

Comment by abnry | Hacker News Reader

If effective altruism is the best philosophy then anything that supports effective altruism must also be good. And anything that supports that, etc.

So make sure to buy comfy plush pillows and foot massagers for the effective altruists so they can do their effective altruism more effectively!

View on HN

We call ourselves the good guy squad. Everything we do is eventually good even if you don't see how it's good now. Any time we do something you think is bad like buying a $15 million mansion that who the heck knows what we're using it for now, it's due to someone making an honest mistake. You wouldn't criticize the good guy squad, because then you'd be part of the bad guy squad!

And if you can make money to fund EA by starting a billion-dollar crypto Ponzi scheme, well, the ends justify the means.

"Ends justify the means, even when the means include significant harm" has never been within mainstream EA. For example, Will MacAskill's post on the FTX collapse includes lots of examples from his book where he said not to do this: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WdeiPrwgqW2wHAxgT/...

There's certainly a lot of silly stuff going on in EA, but as far as I know, FTXs methods have been universally condemned within EA.

I don't think so.

At least not while the money was rolling in.

If FTX had been doing what they were widely believed to be doing, providing a place where people could trade cryptocurrencies and taking a cut on the trades, I wouldn't have any problem with that: there wouldn't have been harmful means that needed justifying. Which is why all the condemnation is coming out after we learned that they were actually doing something much much worse.

I see it a little bit like a dodgy party donor, which is very much appreciated by the party profiting from the filthy lucre being sent in their general direction.

Then suddenly scandal engulfs the donor and the honchos in the profiting party are shocked! SHOCKED! I tell you.

I think that's a quite good analogy to what happened here. While the money was rolling nobody asked questions from where it's actually coming from. Only when that whole house of cards, built within other houses of cards collapsed did the "condemnation" start.

Nobody is really interested in details how the sausage is made as long the money is rolling. Thus, any condemnation or distancing from Mr. Bankman-Fried and his business rings very, very hollow to me.

FTX had a pretty solid reputation and plenty of legitimate investors like the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund. Plenty of positive reputation signals.

It's not like it was some obviously shady businessman making political donations or something.

EA is shady in a lot of ways but this seems like an unrealistic guilt by association.

> nobody asked questions from where it's actually coming from

What do you mean? The public story around FTX, and what they said when you asked them, was that the money was coming from charging fees on trading, which was plausible given the level of trading and the size of their fees. That the condemnation didn't start until it turned out that SBF and FTX were actually doing other things and lying to everyone is not surprising?

Like a lot of other organizations and leaders, EA has egg on its face from SBF/FTX, no doubt. You can see it roiling the community. But while I'm in no way an expert on their funding, I think it's an open question whether SBF funding is part of a pattern of "filthy lucre" as you put it, or one--or maybe one of a few--instance of an unknown criminal funding source doing some reputation washing. My sense is it's the latter.

I'd also go further to say that it's pretty hard to track down the sources of all your funding. Even government organizations (the FEC, the IRS, the FBI) have a super hard time doing this. Nonprofits generally just go by reputation, as they have essentially zero investigative power.

Running a crypto exchange is a grey hat. It is a place for crims, money launderers, gamblers and of course there is the environmental impact of crypto to consider.

After he blew up and stopped paying for everything.

The time to condemn was when he was running a Ponzi scheme and handing out millions.

I first thought this a joke and then I remembered FTX

It's very effective, especially if you maintain the altruistic intent.

I mean, we're joking, but we're joking on a story where they managed to justify an $18MM estate to hold events at.

"I only read one Book because its Good Book don't you know, and I know it's Good because a really Good Book would." (c) somehow reminded me about that song :)

A lot of human ideas can become ridiculous when taken to a logical extreme (typically when all other competing factors at play are ignored).

Taking things to a logical extreme is what self-described rationalists do, almost religiously.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com