Sam Bankman-Fried and the effective altruism delusion
newstatesman.com
newstatesman.com
What are the odds of a 50 year old having the same moral framework that they did when planning their future at 20? I rank it as rather low by default, not factoring in the corrupting influence of mega-wealth, or the road taken to achieving it.
Dogma is a key part of religion’s power. It gives certainty in the face of these difficult questions.
For me it feels like authoritarianism vs. democracy - in theory an authoritarian provides quick certain decisions where a democracy might be slow and messy and unequivocal, but in practice an authoritarian government is just a democracy that makes voting very difficult. If you make decisions enough people disagree with you'll be removed, just like in a democracy. Similarly, religious dogma has to be regularly updated to avoid losing followers, and the enormous variety of religions and denominations and sects and interpretations means that in practice religion is just another form of personal philosophy that is more cumbersome to change when you lose your certainty.
One does also have the benefit of looking at a religious group and potentially seeing the tradeoffs/upside though. ‘Does this seem to be working out for them overall?’
If one was being rational about the whole thing, anyway.
It is the very concept of supernatural beings that's risible. That's not a strawman. Inevitably the arguments fall into:
1. My book says so. (Yeah, well, I have a different book that says your book isn't just wrong, but evil.)
2. The god of the gaps. (The ever shrinking god.)
3. So many people believe! (So what? Millions of people think the Earth is flat. That doesn't make them right.)
4. You don't know, so it's just as likely! (lol. Let's unicorn hunting. You don't know they're not real. So they must be!)
Belief is so central to these religions in particular that there are multiple treatises arguing over the fate of good people that who do not share their belief, and whether mere ignorance (as opposed to conscious rejection) is enough for them to be “saved” from eternal damnation. To deny this, is either displaying ignorance or is rather disingenuous attempt to shift the discussion to abstract platitudes. Furthermore, the omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence of their preeminent supernatural being are fundamental properties of it.
Using big words, and acting serious, doesn’t hide the fact that the very topic is unserious. It’s like holding a conference on the economy of the United Federation of Planets. Sure, it may be a fun intellectual exercise, but no matter how much you dress it up, the core concept is fiction. And treating it as serious is not only unproductive, it’s profoundly insulting.
But sure. The Emperor’s new clothes sure are fantastic, and anyone saying they don’t exist are just haters.
Alternatively, God created the world as an arena, with creatures as agents. God manifests in the world through His creatures, in our quest to maximize truth, goodness, beauty. One step further, the purpose of the Son is to provide a humanly comprehensible blueprint on how to act as to maximize truth, goodness, beauty. Finally, the Holy Spirit is that which guides us in following the path the Son laid out for us.
For a scientifically trained mind, this can also be pictured as the quest to identify and asymptotically aim at maximizing the objective function that encodes truth, goodness, beauty. The stakes - a life well lived.
As far as a deistic god , you clearly don’t believe in that, as any reference to divinely given scriptures runs counter that concept. You can’t claim its hands off while simultaneously engaging in miracles and vaguely interpret led prophecies.
It’s a weak, and lousy concept, propagated by cultural baggage.
The being in the clouds is a red herring. The real reason for not debating those facts was that they were conventional respected wisdom. People didn't have to, and often only superficially if at all, believe to the actuality of it - but they wouldn't contest the associated moral code, the same way they wouldn't contest the customs of their land.
That's part of culture, not necessarily religion. Those answers come from just watching how people go about life and learning from them. Metaphysical beliefs are not needed for day to day life and are just vestigial at this point
It is worth noting that that same doctrine holds that "doing evil" means doing an act which is evil in itself or willing the bad outcome (e.g., because the harm caused is part of the mechanism by which the good is achieved) of an act which is not itself inherently evil. Knowing a bad outcome is likely (or even certain) to occur but accepting that as a side effect (rather than a mechanism) of doing good without willing the bad outcome is permitted, for proportionate reasons. (Principle of Double Effect)
Are any of the leading players in the movement scientists of any kind? I have worked with many people who while being obviously very smart, including engineers of many kinds and software developers, who don't have any idea about errors and compounding of errors.
When I studied physics in the mid-70s a compulsory feature of every experimental report was the expected error in the result which had to be justified with reference to the expected errors in all of the measurement equipment and any other sources of error.
When I got into industry this discipline seemed to be pretty much absent.
In my 40 year career in electronic and electrical engineering I don't think I ever saw an engineer include any information on the expected error of a set of measurements even though most were familiar with the concepts of statistical curve fitting and so on. They were not much better than social scientists and would plot the results of an experiment in Excel, click the button to get a polynomial fit and accept the coefficients as gospel totally disregarding the R value. And most of them didn't care that the polynomial form wasn't even applicable to the data.
I had always assumed there was, and the issues were addressed, for there to be so much confidence in that 'plan'.
I'm older than 50 now, and I have certainly changed from when I was 20. I'm much more inclined (and able) to engage in philanthropic activities now than then.
EA is thus an excuse / incitation to commit immoral and in SBF's and his co-conspirators case illegal things.
No, this isn't the original idea. It's one that came up when people started trying to combine utilitarianism and arithmetic with the actual original idea: to ask the question "How can I do the most good in the world?"
Note that I said "utilitarianism and arithmetic". It is one thing to say "saving 2M people from disease is better than saving 200 people from death". It is something quite different to say "it is X times better".
Also, I'd probably say "simple EA", since I have no idea what "true EA" would even mean.
The modern equivalent of paying indulgences to the Catholic Church; the wealthly have always sought ways of justifying the grotesqueries of their lifestyles. Indeed for many, it's the primary labor of their lives.
Only approximately. Indulgences were used as a penance which was only possible on the precondition of true contrition. There is no such contrition in the philosophy of EA.
EA: How wonderful! It shall be our moral centerpiece.
EA is all about doing the most good you can, and thinking about how to do it, instead of just guessing or following fleeting emotional moments.
What I mean is: you can't simply ignore that outcome when evaluating the principles, because people followed those principles to this (in my opinion) bad outcome.
Now the complaint that EA influenced SBF to do the bad things that he did, that's a much more valid complaint about the principles. But i think that's just a coincidental association, rather then a causal one. Nowhere does EA suggest doing short term bad things in exchange for long term good things. It suggests "earning to give", but that's not at all why SBF is considered a bad person. He stole money and committed fraud, plain and simple. EA has advocated against that in the past, and continues to.
The most you can say about EA imo is that it's concern about alleviating large scale suffering allowed SBF to internally justify doing bad things in exchange for doing a lot of future good. And sure, if your message is corruptible easily that's a problem with your message. But there is literally always going to be people mis-interpreting your message, or worse yet people intentionally using your message as cover while knowing full well they are disobeying it. That happens with social justice movements, leftist movement, rightist movements, literally any message ever has had this problem. It's a problem that should have lessons learned from it, but if it invalidated the movement i don't think there is a single valid movement left on earth.
Unfortunately, this is a bubble perspective. I (and I assume you) have known people who have been interested in or involved with or have been talking about effective altruism for many years. This is probably true of most people here on HN and in our broader techie bubbles.
But for every person like us who first heard of effective altruism years ago, there are now a couple orders of magnitude more people who have only heard of it within the past year, entirely because of SBF's rise and fall.
It's a shame! But that's just how it works when some niche thing becomes mainstream via some famous person. Sometimes that publicity is good for that niche thing, but it is fundamentally a risky proposition, because famous people are fallible and their reputations are inevitably tied into the things associated with them.
Emotions are what enable us to decide what is the most utility. It's accounting, not finance.
And the vocabulary and the whole framework that he has been using to think about these issues come with their own values and consequences, AFAIK widely shared inside EA ?
You have a wildly distorted view of effective altruism. Peter Singer's book, The Life You Can Save, is nearly 15 years old. It was updated (more current statistics) about four years ago. The leading thought experiment presented in the book (the child drowning in a pond) was written by Singer over 50 years go.
The label "effective altruism" might be new (2011) but the ideas behind it have been around for a long time. There are terrible people who give money to many causes -- do you think all those causes are disreputable because of them?
In that quote I said that effective altruism is now "almost entirely associated with a scammer", I did not say "I almost entirely associate effective altruism with a scammer".
I read Singer's book around the time it was written! I have long been, and remain, a strong supporter of GiveWell's approach to effective charitable giving.
But you have to understand: The vast vast majority of people have never heard of these things, but have now heard of "effective altruism", because that phrase appeared in an article about the salacious acts of a criminal scam artist.
Yes, that's very frustrating! But what I'm saying is that people who consider themselves part of this movement could use to reflect on how it ended up in this position.
I'm just saying: It's not irrelevant to consider what people who profess to be living by the principles of a movement have actually done in reality. It's fine to say "well, by my understanding of the principles, those people were not actually doing it right". (That's certainly how I feel about a bunch of stuff that has been done in the name of Christianity!) But that doesn't make their behavior irrelevant.
The actual aggregate outcome of ideas / principles / movements matters, in addition to their intentions.
For what it's worth, I think the major religions actually hold up fairly well to this level of scrutiny, despite all of them having major obvious failures in the particular, and that that's a big contributor to their longevity. For instance (just because it happens to be Christianity that I know the most about), it is notable that when Martin Luther put up his demands for Church reform, he was rejecting very specific behavior that had become ingrained in practice, rather than the foundational principles of the religion. Despite being essentially a radical reformer, he thought the principles were nonetheless good.
Maybe effective altruism will also have staying power, because maybe its principles will also stand the test of time, and its scandals fade. But I think people who care about it shouldn't just rest on their laurels and assume that will happen! I think people should be aware that if most people are "doing it wrong" then they aren't actually doing it wrong, it just is what it is.
No, that's a non sequitur. People aren't machines following rules. It's hard to stick to principles. Saying "if love thy neighbour worked, people would do it right, and it would work" is just not right. It would work if we did it, but we don't do it.
Maybe I'm not being explicit enough: It is not effective to just have principles, and then when it turns out that nobody is following them, keep saying "well if people would just follow the principles, it would work!". What is effective is to develop practices that reinforce the principles.
So Christianity didn't just write down "love thy neighbor" as a principle, it developed a practice - going to church - to continuously reinforce that principle, and in practice that has worked out very imperfectly but also much better than most things (like the Atkins diet!). And indeed, I think a big part of the problem with contemporary political Christianity in the US / Christian nationalism, is that it doesn't emphasize this kind of praxis, but rather mere identity and sloganeering. And that doesn't work!
Longtermism is one strand of the movement - still many millions of dollars get donated to global health and animal welfare.
1. It doesn't really matter how I choose to characterize this, what matters is that this social movement only entered mainstream consciousness because of the scandal. And that will be fatal to its ability to ever gain a mainstream foothold. If it had already broken through into mainstream consciousness, and then there was a scandal, then maybe things would be different. But as it is, for 99% of people, this will now just be some scammy thing that a famous criminal was into.
2. But for me personally, prior to any of this scandal, I had lost patience with EA. I was a big fan of the version of it that was like "people should mostly donate to charities that are not wasteful and efficiently use their funds on things with measurable positive impacts to peoples' lives". But then it has seemed like for the last few years, they got bored with that and started advocating that people instead throw all their money into - in my view, even more wasteful - initiatives speculatively aimed at improving the lives of humanity (or our successors) thousands of years from now.
In many respects I think longtermism is a thing that really doesn't/shouldn't scale to have everyone's attention, because so often throwing more money or non-niche skills at it is frankly worse than useless because it attracts grifters. AI safety isn't really something most people outside of the research frontier should really give much attention, let alone money.
But the sexier thing will inevitably suck up the attention of people who see themselves as the brilliant movers and shakers of the world.
The original concept is, but I deeply question the movement itself. Fortunately, you don't have to join the EA movement in order to be thoughtful about how to help your fellow man.
For instance, lots of wealthy techie types who bought into EA donated heavily (and I think still do) to charities targeting things like risks to far-future humans and life extension. To me, those are also "pseudo-charities". There is no way to evaluate their effectiveness. They could be 100% effective or 0% effective, we won't know for generations or millenia...
And - just like all the "pseudo-charities" researched by GiveWell - every dollar that has gone to these organizations with unknowable effectiveness could have instead gone to known-effective charities.
However, I'm still going to do my charity through GiveWell. GiveWell makes many people with dubious pet causes very angry and these people have taken the adjacent scandal as an opportunity to attack the very idea of vetting charity. If someone wants to propose an alternative vetting strategy, I'm all ears, but I don't see the sins of SBF & co as a reason to stop vetting. I just don't. I am of the opinion that we need vetting now more than ever, and whatever we want to call that going forward I plan to support it.
To their credit, they never recommended these "longtermism" initiatives as effective places to direct charitable funds. So I think their credibility as an organization comes out of this intact, despite some of the people originally associated with them coming out looking much worse.
But I dunno, maybe they and/or people like us who support them should be doing more to explicitly distance them from the rest of the EA movement.
Who's arguing against vetting?
Note that GiveWell only gets 10% of your donation if you explicitly request that they do. https://www.givewell.org/donate/more-information#How_is_Give...
Yeah, there are even ones that buy manor houses [0].
[0] Effectivealtruism.org purchased a £15M estate for its headquarters in 2021. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33903850
You're anchoring on 'castle'. If it was a boring office building, no-one would care.
> You said:
> "Obviously this kind of thing is why everyone hates effective altruists. People got so mad at some British EAs who used donor money to “buy a castle”. I read the Brits’ arguments: they’d been running lots of conferences with policy-makers, researchers, etc; those conferences have gone really well and produced some of the systemic change everyone keeps wanting. But conference venues kept ripping them off, having a nice venue of their own would be cheaper in the long run, and after looking at many options, the “castle” was the cheapest. Their math checked out, and I believe them when they say this was the most effective use for that money. "
> I'm curious to see the math for Wytham Abbey. All I ever saw was Owen Cotton Barrett's response when this was brought up over on the forum. The actual cost benefit analysis for paying £15 million wasn't made clear. As one comment pointed out, the reasoning given for purchasing the castle "could have been made virtually verbatim had the cost been £1.5m or £150m."
> You might have seen more information than me though.
> Owen Cotton-Barretts comment -> https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xof7iFB3uh8Kc53bG/...
I think taking this statement ("we were getting ripped off") without any data goes exactly against the while idea of effective altruism.
A decent subthread on this on the EA Forum: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xof7iFB3uh8Kc53bG/...
The money came from a grant from OpenPhil for the purpose. EVF didn't publish a cost-benefit analysis my knowledge, but a back-of-the-envelope calculation [https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xof7iFB3uh8Kc53bG/...] suggests it would plausibly cost £1~2M a year to hire similar venues. That said, whether it's worth it to purchase a dedicated venue depends a lot on how much use the venue actually gets.
Ultimately, "we were getting ripped off" is a financial judgement made by CEA. I don't think it really has a great deal to do with the wider effective altruist movement tbh.
MacAskill writes that QALYs can be used to decide which charitable causes to prioritise: faced with a choice between spending $10,000 to save a 20-year-old from blindness or the same amount on antiretroviral therapy for a 30-year-old with Aids – a treatment that will improve their life and extend it by ten years – MacAskill argues it would be better to perform the sight-saving surgery, as the 20-year-old can expect to live another 50 years. He acknowledges that QALYs are an “imperfect”, “contested” measure but sees them as mostly good enough. I've been to about 70 conferences in my academic career, and I'm noticed that the aesthetics, antiquity, and uniqueness of the venue can have a significant effect on the seriousness with which people take ideas and conversations, and the creativity of their thinking. And, of course, it's much easier to attract great talent and busy thinkers to attractive venues. Moreover, I suspect that meeting in a building constructed in 1480 might help promote long-termism and multi-century thinking.[1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xof7iFB3uh8Kc53bG/...
Although it doesn't seem to mention the issue with being unable to find other conference centers, so that reason may still be valid or might be a mistake on Scott's part.
Why do they need a "nice venue"? Why wouldn't any airport hotel's conference room be sufficient? They wanted something nice, more than utilitarian. They wanted luxury, and how does an "effective altruist" defend that? Because luxury makes them "more effective" of course.
If someone is spending lavishly on pitching to me[1], I start to really question the deal. At best, they're showing me that they don't mind wasting money on things that don't matter. If you want to impress me, wine and dine me by taking me to McDonald's.
[1] I have been picked up in expensive sports cars, I have been taken out to eye-wateringly expensive restaurants, etc. This is the sort of thing that raises big red flags to me.
Two separate castles:
https://twitter.com/paulmainwood/status/1600433194691502081
https://www.chateau-hostacov.cz/en/contact
They really ran with the exact opposite of Peter Singer's sacrifice your fancy boots to save a child parable.
And Effective Altruist Sam Bankman-Fried, who drove a Prius for optics, lived in what has been cited as potentially the most expensive private residence in the Bahamas. He was grilled on it a bit before the collapse and explained that worrying about what he did with 1% of his money wasn't justifiable use of time in the big picture--still dubious given the Singer origins of the movement)--but a bigger problem was close to 100% of the money was fictional: illiquid self-issued token valuation, and double spending/self-loaning of customer funds.
Just like other charities that spend nearly more of the money on fundraising and growth that were the main target of criticism of the movement, they did pretty much the same, while pitching it as a more effective alternative to Oxfam, etc.
Personally, I'd describe the core as donate regularly, and donate with your brain not your heart - consider the ROI, and reflect on how personal income is otherwise being spent to decide a recurring donation amount.
At the same time, imo there's no need to go 100% utilitarian and overoptimize, overthink, or blindly trust someone else's QlYs calculations... Perfection is the enemy of good enough.
I read one of the EA books, did my own research over a few days to pick my causes, and now just do a yearly review after every tax season. I'm happy with it. Never even read a tweet from William or the fancy organization.
Some examples lines of thought
* kids with cancer feels very bad/sad, but still maybe rethink donating to the organization with $7B in the bank and $2B in yearly income that just saves the ~8,000 easiest cases (St Jude)...
* perhaps consider non-charitable donations to political organizations, given the impact of government policies.
* When donating to research, consider the time discount and uncertainty. The research might save more in the future if it pans out, but it might not and you might be dead before any gains. Some people can be saved today.
This part gets wayyyyy underplayed in EA [0]. So many charities and nonprofits exist to resolve problems that are the result of policy decisions, and ceding that ground by focusing entirely on which to donate too is a losing battle from the start. For example, people being unable to afford life-saving medical care shouldn't be something that religious-affiliate groups even need to exist to resolve, it's a problem with how we've structured our economy overall.
[0] edit: or not, see comment below!
People have just gotten too cynical thanks to the culture wars and partisanship.
Conversely, if you strip away all the FTX crypto hate and eat the rich sentiment, I actually find SBF quite charming and persuasive. I loved the interview he did with Matt lavine, and thought he was a clear and effective communicator.
He probably could have gone far in politics if he didn't go into finance and if he wasnt ugly.
I genuinely find that fascinating, because from the first I ever saw or heard him (before the FTX stuff erupted), my reaction was the exact opposite. My most charitable reaction was that he was a scammer.
Do you have any priors that would lead you to that reaction, or were you neutral and open to what he was saying? I know a lot of people are hostile to crypto, so that I should see them reacting inherently negatively to anyone in the crypto space.
As near as I can tell, I had no prejudgement about him, other than my assumption was that he was a subject matter expert. My reaction to him was entirely about how he acted and spoke during the interview. It had nothing to do with the subject matter being discussed. His manner strongly resembles a personality type that I've encountered numerous times over the decades, and in most cases those people were extremely sketchy.
I think it's that he speaks and acts in a way that appears disingenuous and calculated to manipulate.
I didnt think he was being deceptive at all.
He would not have come off that way if he hadn't severed the connection between what he was saying and the truth.
Any dinner theater actor can give a good speech, it's giving a good speech without ignoring the messiness of reality that's difficult.
If he had been a clear and effective communicator while describing using customer funds to buy houses and pay debts then he might have become president.
conmen often are very effective communicators. It comes with the package.
Higgins, Clay: $300
Should wealthy individuals that have often accumulated wealth at the detriment of others be the power that decides which causes are worthy of support, based on their personal preferences?
It seems it could be better to develop a system where resources might be distributed in a more equitable or communal manner from the outset, reducing the need for later redistribution through individualized philanthropy and ideologies like effective altruism.
Private entities don't "control redistribution" - they spend money. "Redistribution" implies a parental "you all get the same pocket money" approach, instead of "I'll spend money on things I value, and receive it based on what others value".
There is no "collective way" - even with a government, it's relatively few people (voted in, not having proven their effectiveness by selling something lots of people value) making the decisions.
Charities, where people choose to help others, are a great option. There's no need to reduce the need for them. They also aren't "redistributing".
Having said all that, the government takes almost half your cash before you get it, and taxes you when you spend it as well, and taxes imports you buy as well, and taxes the fuel needed to move goods around, and the businesses you buy from in multiple ways, and if you're paid a salary your business also pays taxes on you as you're an employee. This is a pretty "we'll take your stuff" system already. The answer may not be to give them more stuff.
Democratic systems do provide a communal approach to resource allocation, which tends to be more accountable than private philanthropy. It's worth pondering whether funneling donations to government budgets, which are subject to public scrutiny and democratic processes, might actually achieve greater societal benefit.
However, the crux of my argument is to create conditions where neither heavy taxation nor philanthropy are as necessary. Consider environments with competitive markets, strong worker protections, and cultural stances against excessive wealth accumulation. These tend to foster a robust middle class, minimizing the need for later redistribution.
Is the answer to let people like Musk and Gates get so much stuff that they can pretty much do whatever they want? No one elected them. If you are incredibly successful does that mean you get to make more money than you would ever need and use it to do whatever you want? At what point are collective needs more important than the freedom of the individual to keep making more money?
These are all questions that are waved away by nature of 'they earned it'. But so what? They are particularly good at one specific thing (making money, or being lucky, or both) -- does that mean they deserve the power that one gets with having effectively infinite capital in a capitalist society?
I honestly don't know, but I heavily lean towards 'no'.
Now, you can buy powerful people such as politicians, because the democratic process is not very good at being able to detect people who shouldn't have power. But that is not the same as power.
Private enterprise, however, is generally pretty good at giving people the right amount of responsibility and reward for value created.
The big, big problem occurs when you mix power and money. That's why tens of millions died in the last century. Mao and Stalin destroyed their own countries for the greater good, put and kept in power by people who thought that for government officials they could turn off their critical faculties; their instincts somehow trained to believe that government was like a good parent who will handle the family finances well and love its children. Sadly for them, government is populated by flawed people, just like everything else. To limit the blast radius of this, successful societies generally say: government has power; it shouldn't have control over the allocation of money. Venezuela has been experiencing the horror of the state taking over its main industry, its population starving.
In this case it's definitely true that perfect (or a utopian vision sold by a skilled orator) is the enemy of good.
Yes, they do. In the US, anyway, money is power and the more of it you have, the more power you have. That rich people don't always get their way isn't evidence contrary to that. Not all powerful people are pulling in the same direction.
> Private enterprise, however, is generally pretty good at giving people the right amount of responsibility
I am very unconvinced of this, but it may depend on what you mean by "the right amount of responsibility".
He also lost all his money, so he isn't a billionaire. I would love if you could list some actual billionaires who ever went to prison in the USA.
Perhaps the most effective altruism of all is that which makes Effective Altruism (TM) redundant.
> more equitable or communal manner
Who, exactly, are we empowering to make that decision?
No, that would be another instance of a similar pattern of "pool all the money and put it in the hand of a select few that gets to decide if, where and how to redistribute it".
I'm talking of a system that wouldn't first accumulate maximum wealth, and then have a select few decide where to distribute it.
I'm not sure what system can best achieve this, but it does feel like it be better to have a system that's designed to make it so money is distributed more evenly from the outset, and where distribution decisions are done more communally.
Exactly. Paraphrasing Economist Mike Munger when interviewing EA advocates: "I'm very interested in the scientific rigor of EA, but I'm still going to buy my children birthday presents"
People you love need your love. If you don't give it to them -- and sometimes the means of expressing affection is material, like gifts -- then they suffer. And if they suffer out of principle and that principle is universally applied, then you've created a whole lot of tragic, self-perpetuating suffering. That does the world no good and it's arguably worse than passively allowing for the death of someone or many someones that you'll never meet. The reason being is that if you perpetuate suffering in your children or your loved ones, they have a good chance of become either monsters or crippled. Either way, they will be poor custodians of the future.
The part that fails is the utilitarian philosophy itself. Most people dont actually believe utility or happiness to fungible in practice. Similarly, most people find the natural conclusions that arise from utilitarianism to be repugnant.
On the other hand, the analysis that spending money on AI risk has functionally infinite value is obviously absurd. Imagine pitching to investors that your AGI startup will have a functionally infinite market cap when humans become an intergalactic species.
Like anything large-scale that doesn't have measurable outcomes, this is highly fakeable.
This is why it's critical to have trusted institutions doing what institutions like the FDA and CDC, and incredibly bad for they themselves or for others to undermine their credibility.
But if they only published their recommendations, without all the research and transparency, then they would not have the credibility as a trustworthy specialist to delegate one's research to. Both things are important.
[] https://observer.com/2023/07/who-was-invited-sam-bankman-fri...
In this view, even an apocalypse is only a speedbump as long as EA survives it. They're looking toward a million years in the future where we've colonized the galaxy as trillions of machine intelligences or whatever. It's fine for 99% of humanity to be wiped out tomorrow as long as an order of Hari Seldon-mathematician-kings can keep humanity steered toward that future.
When you're humanity's best hope for transcending Earth and achieving techno-godhood, the best money you can spend is on yourself. See? Altruism.
If investors and corporations were forced to subtract the very real costs of 'externalities' from their bottom lines, this alone would lead to changes in behavior. E.g. fossil fuel externalities included widespread air and water pollution as well as the steady planetary warming trend. Ensuring those costs were born by both fossil fuel producers and users would encourage a transition to renewable energy. Yes, there are externalities involved in PV panel and wind turbine and battery manufacturing, but these costs are much, much lower than those associated with fossil fuel production and use.
Effective altruism was never much more than a fig leaf for an economic system that has tended to privatize the profits while socializing much of the costs via the fiction of externalities.
I don't even know what that means. A pledge is like a terrible version of a futures contract: a nonenforceable one.
The pledger gets the benefits of PR immediately, with a vague promise to do something in the future; why do we even pay attention to this?
Thousands of people have taken the Giving What We Can Pledge. I suppose they could all be lying but it seems unlikely. (Happy to send you my donation receipts if you like.)
Also, the Founder's Pledge (in which entrepreneurs commit a portion of their future proceeds from an exit) is legally-binding.
Really effective altruism should not focus on money or medicine, but on power.
Power imbalance is and always has been the main culprit behind all other kind of inequalities.
But there is an issue, contrary to money/wealth, power is zero sum, and is much less fungible.
Charity does not work with power, quite the opposite in practice.
But, SBF and his ilk fall into the old habit of almost everyone when they get power and money. “Not now, but soon.” For someone big into altruism, I’m unaware of any philanthropy he did. Oh, he invested in companies to make himself richer, but that’s not the same.
It’s the same with all the billionaires and their “giving pledges”. “Not now, but soon.” And then of course they set of a foundation that pays their kids seven figures a year forever while occasionally throwing a ball for boneitis or naming something after themselves.
Best of all is when the altruism reveals them to be just engaging in their own hobbies. Like Marvel’s Sauron said, “But I don’t want to cure cancer! I want to turn people into dinosaurs!” Or as Jeff Bezos put it, "The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it."
It’s just cover for personal greed.
But soon. Soon. Just be patient.
The problem he was doing it with other people's money.
Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have both given away more than $50bn each. Not pledged - actually donated.
Gates: 110 billion USD (2023)
Buffett: 112.9 billion USD (2023)
Bulgaria GDP: 84.06 billion (2023)
Not
Nearly
Enough
Billionaires should not be exist
I guess it's not that different from any other in-group. If you're seen as a trusted member, others will give you the benefit of the doubt as far as they can.
It is accepted that philantropy is not 100% altruistic, leave it alone the tax deductions and tax shelter schemes but as a practice it's done to virtue signal or to feel like we are doing something meaningful or that we are changing people's lives.
Effective altruists find pleasure in the numbers turning around on a big scale and being celebrated as a philantropist, perhaps the Nobel Peace Prize? All stuff that would stimulate an abstract mind.
The opposite of an abstract mind is a mind that is in deep connection with the body and the 5 senses such mind knows that there is no way you can hug and see the change upon the faces many millions of people, whereas if you do good now you can hug the person you are helping right now and you can also see the change upon their faces instantly and you can appreciate it as opposed to seeing them as a number 30 years down the road.
That is probably true.
> The opposite of an abstract mind is a mind that is in deep connection with the body and the 5 senses such mind knows that there is no way you can hug and see the change upon the faces many millions of people
Ok? And turns out what feels right to do and what is right to do is not always the same thing. Imagine you are living in a medieval city ravaged by waterborne diseases. You can spend your time running around nursing the sick, cooking them soup, hoping that they recover. Or you can use the same energy to design a water treatment plant / sewer / aquaduct and prevent the spread of the disease in the first place.
One feels good, you are helping humans in their hour of need. Some die, but spend their last days in a bit more comfort due to your ministrations. Some recover. Hopefully more than would have recovered without your nursing.
The other is literal shit pumping. It does not feel good at all. And yet, we know that sanitary infrastructure is the key to the health of a city. You can cure max like a few hundred per week by nursing. But with a water treatment plant you can prevent illness in millions and millions.
Will you able to hug them and see change upon the face of them? No, probably they won't even know who you are, or that you helped them not being sick.
I believe you need both the first responders and those who plan for the wider state of the emergency.
What I mean is that the so called effective altruists are a minority who cannot extract satisfaction from the work of first responders but want to have the same glory and recognition as they do, but given that it's not something spontaneous from those who are being helped (as they show gratitude to the first responders not the head of Foundation) they have to go to great lenghts to create these publicity and propaganda fueled philosophical currents, effective altruism being one of them.
It's not something new it's been around for a long time before effective altruism emerged, and specifically in the form of prizes such as
Key of the city for philantropic work
Philantropist of the year
Biggest philantropic donation of the year
Nobel Peace Prize
etc
etc
They are just regular people with analytical minds. They would like good things to happen and they also recognise that resources are finite thus they ask how it is best to spend the finite resources to achieve the best bang for the buck.
That is basically the only comonality among them. Whatever machiavellian machinations you subscribe to them doesn’t seem to match my preceived reality.
But if you read my comment what I said is not just limited to effective altruism which is the new kid on the block , I have a similar feelings for all the other stuff that I mentioned including the Nobel Peace Prize.
It's like sports, nobody cheers for the owner of the franchise or gets excited about meeting them or the General Manager, it's all about the players. That's the reason why certain owners and General Managers do lots of media and outreach to propagate their cult and get some love from the fanbase.
Where I think you go wrong is that you tar and feather everyone associated with effective altruism with that image. Do you want to say that rich people washing their consciousness with effective altruism is dubious? I agree with you on that. But what your words are saying is that everyone associated with effective altruism is dubious, and that is simply not true.
Can someone fill me in / point me to somewhere with some historical context?
I feel that this summary is useful as a history of the movement. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XTBGAWAXR25atu39P/... I stopped identifying with the movement around the start of the second wave. I went from "EA is cool and great and you should read about it and donate to help save lives" to "EA has had some cool ideas but is now mostly focused with weird probability math that siphons money away from it's mission of saving lives", but I digress.
https://omny.fm/shows/it-could-happen-here/the-effective-alt...
> We all tend to presume our own moral positions are the right ones, but the person who brands themselves an Effective Altruist goes so far as to adopt “being better than other people” as an identity.
Those are the opening paragraphs from a much better article on the same subject: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/09/defective-altruism
Where this article meekly claims that "utilitarian calculations can be co-opted to justify extremely weird and potentially harmful positions" Nathan J Robinson correctly skewers the very fundamentals of utilitarianism:
> Patching up utilitarianism with a bunch of moral nonnegotiables is what everyone ends up having to do unless they want to sound like a maniac, as Peter Singer does with his appalling utilitarian takes on disability. (“It’s not true that I think that disabled infants ought to be killed. I think the parents ought to have that option.”)
As Robinson observes, the EA movement’s intellectual core is so poisoned by bad philosophy as to be unsalvageable.
I think the deep underlying desire is to make the world maximally comprehensible, but it all eventually becomes nightmarish entropy-maximizing humanity-destroying mechanistic systematization.
The unfortunate truth is that in the competition between systems, those that achieve higher speeds frequently win in the battle to spread the signal. The executive report that reduces the business to a set of metrics one page long, the tweet that gets shared millions of times, the quippy campaign promise.
I've been ruminating on this problem for a long time, and I don't have any answers that I'm satisfied with. The closest I've come to identifying what-to-do is that perhaps if we manage to somehow reduce the global liquidity of communication and reintroduce friction into how ideas spread, perhaps the harder ideas will become more competitive relative to the fast and easy. Put more simply, if everything is made a little more hard, it would benefit the stuff that's already hard. That said, I say it's the "best" idea I've come up with because I recognize that it's still really fraught with disastrous side effects, potentially impossible, and leagues away from actionable.
The more I see, the more I understand Hanson's "Great Filter" argument. It all feels pretty bleak.
That's exactly right. All those ineffective doctors risking their lives being parachuted in the jungle or working in war zones, they're losers! And the bankers in their private jets, those are the altruists!
EA is a thought experiment in putting morals upside-down. It's ridiculous; what's fascinating is that it almost worked.
We have to thank SBF for having shown the world what EA actually is. A sinister joke.
This was then and still is a very good idea! But then it's like that good but humble mission wasn't enough for a lot of the people interested in this, and they (in my view) sort of disappeared into a black hole of inscrutable philosophizing.
As its most prosaic, effective altruism as in 20M mosquito nets instead of 2000 organ tranplants.
As the article makes clear, a strictly utilitarian approach to assessing "effective" is at severe risk of going off the rails.
interpretation 1: (as in the quoted line) Oh, you think you're better than me, and you're criticizing my light bulb? Also you guys are super weird and I am disgusted by you, [other attempts at status-lowering]
interpretation 2: hmm, let me look at the data. If that bulb is better, I might use it! If not, maybe there's a way to fix it, or maybe I don't care. No big deal either way.
But like, who cares if some nerd philosopher writes an article? If they're wrong, the truth will come out. It's not hurting you. And if they're right, how about reading it and checking if you agree? And we already know social manipulators, psychopaths etc are attracted to intense new social movements. It doesn't mean the movement is bad.
This is not to say that all charity is perfectly interchangeable - for example, you can make very strong arguments that donating to a university with a $50 billion endowment is ineffective. Again there is nothing wrong with discussing these things, you just can't make a blanket statement that your particular philosophical framework is the best one.
Often you can. Even charities that are attempting to do the same thing (e.g. stop people dying of malaria) vary wildly in their 'effectiveness' - which is really just a fancy way of saying e.g. 'how many people we prevented dying of malaria per $ spent'.
> but not fine to say "mine is objectively more effective, just look at my quality-adjusted life years spreadsheet".
...because? QALYs are an attempt to make these comparisons possible; it's not clear what your objection here actually is.
Again I am not saying that there is no such thing as effectiveness, and I agree that charities doing the exact same thing can be reasonably compared.
I think EAs might just be trying to apply that same style reasoning to areas which aren't commonly viewed as clear yet. Ie say hey, you may not be familiar with it, but there is some information suggesting that between these two conventional charities, here is an analysis with assumptions laid out that suggests that contributuons may not actually be equivalent!
You can still take it or leave it.
I don't think they're saying they know everything perfectly. Just that they think it's important to push into the murky areas.
I think the issue with blanket statements is on the listener. If I have an idea and somewhat boldly say hey all, I think my idea is better than anything before - and here's why, the "get mad and attack" response, even when sincere and correct, masks so many nonsincere responses. That is, lots of people who claim to be serious analysts frequently use the "attack" response, or the "I'm so tired of this" response. Sometimes that is justified but it's also a crutch and tends to harden battle lines.
Personally I'd just figure out if I agree with them (and I don't) and why, and move on. I appreciate you not piling on to them, too.
I like the utilitarian idea and using evidence and reason, but as an engineer I apply it anyhow for many things, so giving it a specific name for the case of "altruism" seems ... strange. Never crossed my mind to write an article "everybody should be an engineer because then you would use more evidence and reason in your daily life".
If your goal is truly to do good, it's really not that hard. If your goal is to feel good, that usually requires these kinds of wrappers, and with them will come the charlatans that sense opportunity in exploiting your insecurities.
There are LOTS of ways to do good in the world, and sure, religion and various other cultural vessels encourage us to pursue them.
The original idea behind EA was to provide a way to choose between different ways of doing good. The fact that you wanted to and were going to "do good" was assumed.