GAAP compliance has no bearing on accuracy. Accounting intangibles are suggestions at best, the market discovers the true value of assets. Where's the market on bad EA ideas?

The linked article was explicitly stating a philosophical argument in favor of effective altruism as a good philosophy to live by. I see this equivalent to eugenics - the ends justify the means, afterall.

If we are going to live in a society where some people pretend they can calculate the benefit of all their actions, then I am free to say how absolutely fucked that entire process is, and point out the real world damage that is has explicitly caused.

If someone was openly a National Socialist, we wouldn't have any problem pointing out the problems the Nazis caused. But with EAs who recently lit tens of billions of dollars on fire to buy penthouses on Caribbean islands and castles in rural England, we have to give them a pass? Excuse me if I'm not open to listening to their thoughtful commentary.

As one example, a friend of mine lost over $20 million to SBF / FTX, which funded said castle. However he did not sell his claim and is optimistic he will get most of it back. Money seems like a number on a page until you see how it affects real people!

As another example, I had an EA VC investor nuke one of my seed investments in order to have a different one of his portcos acquire the IP for scrap because he had a far higher stake in the other portco, which was in the same vertical. Ruined a lot of employees' ISOs as well as my equity. But hey he's an EA - can't blame him! His expected value was simply higher.

Yes! This was the realization that started moving me away from many flavors of consequentialist utilitarianism.

There is to me no ontological distinction between means and ends, or the cause and the effect as an action. There is a vast literature prioritizing the latter at the expense of the former, an illusion brought upon us by the arrow of time our consciousness happens to be travelling in the same direction as. But if we're going to prioritize along that axis we might as well claim actions to the left of us are privileged relative to actions to the right of us.

I admit this is splitting philosophical hairs. "Doing X at time T means at time T + 1 many many sentient beings will benefit" is not really a hard-consequentialist argument - we don't prioritize X because it is at time T. But now consider: "if future sentient beings no longer care about Y, then doing X now will benefit nobody; deciding on not-X, however, saves resources we can then use towards whatever we do care about." Now totalize that, and add in a modesty claim: As the people at the start of history, we (maybe) have no control over what moral concerns future beings will have at all, and if we do then we can (maybe) can choose to craft a future where no moral concerns are detected by any sentient beings in the future at all.

Is that good? I have no idea, but it's a lot more fun to try to puzzle through.

Also, there's the Achilles' heel of utilitarianism in general to deal with: "Even the very wise cannot see all ends."

A cynic might say "Even the very wise cannot see any ends."

My brother has a kidney ailment, so the expected value of me donating to a stranger is less than the expected value of me donating to my brother. This is because my brother has the potential for children. If he has children, they may become doctors. If they become doctors, they will potentially save a huge number of people. Of course the risk of them not becoming doctors is high. So I should investigate who around me is a doctor that needs my kidney. But then I need to assess if their doctoring is based upon sound methodology, and the correlation of their GPA vs. their schooljg mathcex the ideal numberr of utils to balances dfcsslmksn;kzknfvknzlgn;lz;lnzglzll

Your point being?