Sam Bankman-Fried is a feature, not a bug
joanwestenberg.com
joanwestenberg.com
I'm not sure how anyone could argue that what SBF was doing fits it any way with that. He's just been found guilty of fraud on multiple counts, so clearly the whole "Effective altruism" was just a image he was trying to present, while acting completely against it in private.
That's pretty easy, actually. He seems to see himself as some kind of Robin Hood-esque figure, taking money from the rich and distributing it to the poor (or, more specifically, distributing the money of the rich to the places where its most effective).
The argument is about whether EA naturally leads to this "the ends superseed the means"-type of actions, which is what the article argues.
He's still (for the largest part) taking investment money from the top 1% or at least top 10% of the world and is (in his opinion) putting it to work saving actual lives. I don't think it's that hard to see how he could justify his actions to himself.
> and when things are settled, it's almost assuredly the whales that will get paid out first.
This is pure speculation on my part, but I'm pretty sure that "how is the remaining money re-distributed once my company implodes" didn't make it into his calculations. Also, where the remaining funds go is pretty irrelevant to the calculation anyway, as it's not going to be funneled towards EA causes.
And I doubt the idea that they were all liars that never believed in what they preached would withstand scrutiny.
Suppose, your ethics are unworkable or irrational and you are unwilling to question them. If you think about it, by necessity, you must become more amoral as time goes by. At the very least the luxury of a palace probably helps silence one's moral instincts.
See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gest_of_Robyn_Hode#Summary
But, of course, what he didn't do was get the consent of his depositors to have their deposits rerouted and gambled with in the way that he did. Even if he had been right, if he had been able to ride the wave and cryptocurrency became everything he thought it could be - his actions were legally found to be fraudulent.
In terms of a broader pattern with regards to consent and power dynamics, there's another inescapable data point of the EA movement's problems with internally handling sexual harassment allegations - I won't link to the time.com article on the EA movement, as it horrifyingly orientalizes and conflates polyamory with harassment, but assuming that the article's quotes from primary sources are accurate, it suggests a culture of protection for those who would abuse their power.
I think that the EA community needs to grapple with the notion that just because one believes a certain pathway to be optimal, it does not absolve them of the need to gather explicit consent, given freely, with information discrepancies and power dynamics taken into account, from those who would be impacted. Optimization under constraints can still be optimization, and people's freedom to choose the extent to which they participate is the most important constraint of all.
I mean, Caroline Ellison herself is the one who said her relationship goals (which was to a large degree coterminous with company structure) was "best characterized as something like 'imperial Chinese harem'" no? It's not Time "orientalizing", it's one particular fucked up polycule. Which also happened to be one of the highest visibility ones in "the movement" (whether you take that as EA, crypto, Rationalism, Bay Area rich kid libertinism, whatever).
Polyamory takes on a distinctly awful flavor when imported into EA (and before that Rationalist, which I would assume is where it reached EA from) communities. I would assume abuse and codependence before healthy relationships in these cases, because frankly I see 99% of this movement is at best emotionally immature.
I also think this is really a non-issue, millennials and later mostly don't care at all and the people who don't like them aren't going to be convinced by anything ever, let alone some more carefully-crafted magazine article.
Well, and to himself. At one point, didn't he own three private jets?
There is zero evidence that this was his intent.
There is a lot of evidence that he intended to maximize trading profits and use those profits to help people.
The fact that he failed does not mean that he intended to steal from the rich.
The federal jury seems to have disagreed, finding him guilty on all charges, all of which require intent. As do his co-conspirators who testified to their fraud.
This is such a bizarre take; this was one of the most lopsided financial prosecutions of all time and you're out here saying it had no foundation in fact at all?
The commenter was very clearly disputing SBF's _intent_ to steal. _You_ may doubt his good intentions for that theft (quite reasonably), but that's not the point that we are debating.
Juxtaposed with zero evidence of intent to steal.
I'm sorry, but I believe you have misread the thread completely.
the second problem is that we tend to redefine what things are based on the actions of those that promote them. it's the same thing that happens with religions. a lot of people now and in the past did things in the name of those religions that were a discredit to them.
the difficulty is to keep these things apart.
the consequence for me is that i can not associate myself with things like EA or blockchain development, because in the eye of the public now these do more harm than good. and for the same reason many not only leave their particular religion but disassociate themselves from the concept of religion itself.
at best i can see that high earners claim effective altruism for themselves, and are discrediting it with their actions, just like i said.
if you talk to people promoting effective altruism on the ground (which i had the opportunity to do recently) then you get a different picture.
He was pretty open even before the collapse about how he decided to get as rich as possible, as fast as possible, at all costs, as long as (in his own moral calculus) the net benefits were positive.
EAs are arguably a 'cult' obsessed with AI risk, which they mostly believe will end the world in the next few years. So to them, that pretty much justifies anything that could help mitigate that risk. He would see it as immoral not to become a criminal in order to fund AI risk research.
Personally, I think these AI risk concerns are legitimate, but I don't agree with these methods.
They don't. Everyone in EA (AFAICT) has been pretty clear about this. Lying and undermining trust and institutions does tremendous lasting harm.
I am also tired of "people are very concerned about X and think that it's important, so they're basically a cult".
Literally anyone from the outside would easily be convinced they were pretty much your standard apocalyptic sex cult, just from accurately describing it.
I don't really care if people on EA forums don't all agree with SBF, but his type of thinking is standard if you use utilitarianism to make decisions in the real world, and it leads to some pretty horrific stuff. Consequentialism / utilitarianism are widely accepted in EA, and if you take that to the extreme, it can justify things like this.
But the fact that a few extremists would take an idea way beyond any measure of reason is a human effect, not an EA effect.
I can't think of any good ideas that haven't been distorted by a few. That's no reason to abandon them.
My personal opinion is that EA is mostly worthless navel gazing, but that doesn't mean that we should dismiss it over the SBFs.
https://time.com/6262810/sam-bankman-fried-effective-altruis...
Edit for reply:
> around October/November 2022
i.e. after the run and it's clear he's going to be arrested... Usual EA bullshit.
> Nice moving goal posts :)
This isn't the gotcha you think it is. The relevant time is the ~4y period from 2018 to 2022 while he was running an obvious fraud and totally insane, not the few weeks between the run, collapse, and formal arrest. If you think he only looked bad from late 2022, that's just more proof you EAs are dumb as rocks.
> Institutionally, EA was defending SBF up until he was arrested,
Nope, here's why & evidence
> i.e. after the run and it's clear he's going to be arrested... Usual EA bullshit.
Nice moving goal posts :)
The existence of extremists implies the existence of moderates. What are they? When their moral code says "Fraud, in this particular circumstances, is good", are they the ones that can't shake off the vice of honesty?
Or are they the ones who use motivated reasoning to bring their moral philosophy to conformance with their instinctual moral feelings?
I am not familiar with all of the intimate details, I did not think that the scam was targeted at "rich people" but rather advertised generally and preyed upon get-rich-quick crypto attitudes. Am I mistaken?
Edit: for context this was a large aggregator for “effective charities” with other billionaires and if you sorted by max he was on top for the years I did data analysis
Are you sure? My gut says that he mostly damaged not-rich people. I don't know too much about the specific case, but I know enough about the general crypto space to have an opinion, although not sure how to provide data to support it. You don't provide data either, though.
If you own a car and/or a home - are you rich? Is it acceptable to steal your $1K investment and spend it on pseudo-EA causes? An argument so ethically bankrupt, I can't believe people even type it on a public forum.
My point is that I suspect that SBF stole mostly from non-rich people, which is also NOT ok.
Clearly this is a false assumption. He was not stealing from rich people (as if stealing from reach people is a justifiable EA practice), and was not spending the majority of the stolen money on worthy causes (worthy by EA standards). He was buying property for himself and his circle, signing deals with stadiums, covering Alameda Research losses, etc. Even for a deluded man like SBF, don't think it's possible to interpret that as an improvement of the world's conditions.
I mean I get the idea of trying to optimize the value of charitable donations. But donating something is infinitely better than chatting all day and donating nothing.
Even on a small scale, the number of times I've seen non-EA people do something nice is way, way more than the number of times I've seen an EA person come out of their "circle" and do something nice.
There's substantial discussion:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7uJcBNZhinomKtH9p/...
I do agree that utilitarianism provides too much room for mental gymnastics which bad actors can use to feign benevolence.
It has a side benefit of discouraging accelerated inheritance schemes.
all sorts of interesting slicing and dicing of charitable activities are tracked, and it's really curious.
https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/almanac/statistics-on...
I don’t know if it was started in earnest or if there was some ulterior motive.
I don't think that's right. In his head, it wasn't fraud. He was moving money around to backstop losses, sure, and OK, technically it wasn't his. But it was all going to be OK in the end and no one would know. No one was going to lose any money, so no fraud. QED.
In the real world, criminals don't think they're criminals. Everyone's got a good reason for doing what they do.
1) SBF is an crook
2) SBF is an idiot
Its debatable whether the EA stuff was rationalisation of those impulses or reputation laundering, but he was quite explicit about the fact that his idea of "saving humanity" involved making massive financial bets whilst dismissing the idea of hedging against the downsides even in fawning interviews published by VCs that had invested in him. In that respect, his public image was entirely in keeping with the sort of person that wouldn't be bothered by a few regulations about customer funds, because what if he could double them by ignoring the regulation?...
This is so common that short sellers like Kyle Bass actually look for it as an additional red flag when hunting down fraudulent companies.
It’s a ridiculous high school level argument.
KP: you were really good at talking about ethics, for someone who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers
SBF: ya
SBF: hehe
SBF: I had to be
SBF: it's what reputations are made of, to some extent
SBF: I feel bad for those who get f***** by it
SBF: by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths [sic] and so everyone likes usHowever EA logic is wrong because utilitarianism is wrong. It doesn’t matter whether stealing and fraud create good outcomes or not. Theft and fraud are evil in themselves irrespective of outcomes. To put it in an extreme sense, even if it would save the planet you should still not steal nor defraud others. The fact that some actions are in essence evil is enshrined in the legal system, is commonly accepted, and philosophically sound.
Extreme moral relativism like you’re mentioning here is just as wrong as utilitarianism.
It’s not preferable to steal than to lose the planet. Some things really are worse than death, and committing an evil action is wrong no matter what the justification the evildoer makes.
For many other ethical systems, good and evil aren’t weighed against each other. Instead evil deeds may be forbidden flat out. Good deeds are optional but commendable. Since evil is forbidden and good is optional, you cannot justify good with evil - you cannot justify the unjustifiable.
Why is deontology a better system than utilitarianism? There’s a lot of reasons, but here’s two.
First deontology solves a lot of thought puzzles much more cleanly than utilitarianism does, and avoids the weirdness such as that torturing one person is ok if it makes everyone else happy (see the short fiction story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” for a empathetic example). Deontology has a strong philosophical basis outside of theology, especially beginning with Kant.
Second it prevents those in power from justifying evil deeds because of the good outcome. Take politics, where politicians will justify evil actions to their followers by arguing it’s necessary to prevent the other side from winning. If people accept a better theory of ethics, those types of arguments won’t take and politics will be forced to a higher standard.
The fraud is still illegal. He would still have gone to jail.
EA strikes me as the same sort of ambiguous slime as "breast cancer awareness."
You read the words and think hey, that sounds right. Benefit others as efficiently as possible. Guy's a Robin Hood type, stealing from the rich to benefit others. Good for you, buddy. Godspeed.
Except you look at what he's actually doing and see he's not stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. He's stealing from the foolish and giving to "others," who turn out to be his friends and associates. $500m to Anthropic? $5b for Twitter? This shit isn't charity.
It's kleptocracy masquerading as charity. I can't see his charitable causes as anything more than an ephemeral funds-parking scheme storing funds in a chain of IOUs.
It will be interesting how he fares in prison. Martin Shkrelli wants to be his friend. Perhaps they can be pen pals. Maybe he'll get special treatment or early release.
Even if SBF was following the EA playbook to the letter, it did not work. The attempt was ineffective. He failed.
Michael Lewis shared some SBF story where the scenario (the bet) presented to SBF was a chance to make the world better or, if it failed, the entire world would be destroyed. SBF allegedly would take that bet. All or nothing. Where have we seen this type of thinking before.
From Scott Alexander’s post on why, as an EA, he donated a kidney. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-left-kidney
I thought he regularly preaches the presumption of good faith, even when discussing some of the most radical people in the world, interesting how that's not extended to the NY Times for the sin of... using a real name policy?
That being said, I think this peice is a bit of an overreaction and there seem to be many earnest actors in the EA community really thinking about how they can do good in the world. SBF is very unfortunate for EA, but to jump from him example to saying all EA practitioners care exclusively about the ends over the means is a bit of a leap, imo.
If any of these people actually walked the talk, we'd see a lot more one-way tickets to Africa for them to finally be able to employ their beautiful minds on real problems.
I guess I’m just suspicious of any community or movement that labels itself as “effective,” because it is hard to believe that they were the first ones to think of the idea of not being ineffective, haha.
At the end of the day, people don't follow some sort of pure moral philosophy like some sort of platonic ideals.
It really forces us to have hard conversations about how we use our collective effort to help each other, based on more than just feelings in the moment. Feelings are an important part of the end goal, but feelings about some particular intervention are not a good way to evaluate it. We're also forced to be clear about what good we think an intervention will provide, and to whom.
The idea that you really believe that as an EA you are having “harder” conversations and you are more “forced” to be clear about what you do than other non-effective altruists is just baffling to me.
With the latter I could support quite a few people at the soup kitchen for that day.
You can take that to whatever extent you desire. Should I donate to guineaworm eradication or local libraries? And so on and so forth.
And the general EA community rates lives highly. So max lives saved usually trumps everything else.
What do people donate money to charity for? It's certainly not all to the poorest or desperate people amongst us. It get donated to a church, or to an art museum. Beyond a certain point, they don't really need the money.
Meanwhile, halfway around the world people lives in abject poverty or they're dying to famine or war.
I certainly don't act like an effective altruist. My money goes to things I cared about, like open source projects, but not necessarily to people who need the money to live another day or help people who could help other people live another day.
Let's put it this way. Is it wrong to not save people's lives, especially when it is of no inconvenience to you? I am not talking about donating so much money that I am a beggar on the street, but donating a substantial enough money but still retain a 'middle class' lifestyle.
Then the next question is whatever you doing effective or counterproductive? I think it should be no surprise that a large amount of people don't give such thought to the questions. Imagine the vast scientific illiteracy that pervades our world, like anti-vaxxers asking for money to help spread their messages.
I used to think so. Later events then taught me that proactively helping people doesn't necessarily keep their knife away from your throat. You see people's true colors when you try to disengage.
I only save the lives of animals these days. People are scum. Animals never did me wrong.
* $5 goes towards breast cancer research. (IIUC, cancer researchers are somewhat skeptical of the idea that cancer could be "ended" as such, but that's a minor quibble.)
* $8 goes towards treatment and screening. Not exactly what was promised, but still saving lives, so close enough.
* $14 goes towards administering the Susan G. Komen foundation.
* $22 goes towards raising funds for the Susan G. Komen foundation.
* $51 goes towards "education". They say this includes patient support services, not just telling people about the Susan G. Komen foundation, but don't offer a further breakdown.
And my understanding is that, in non-EA philanthropic circles, this breakdown isn't considered particularly egregious. At least they're doing something! An ineffective charity would be something like One Laptop per Child, which raised money and press attention from a fake crank-powered laptop and accomplished nothing of note before technological innovation outpaced them.
To my neighbor, SJK's efforts yielded as much as OLPC's vaporware. As a career nurse, she's well-educated about the breast cancer she has, that she will soon die from because she can't afford to treat it.
SJK amounts to little more than a goddamn fortune-teller. Not one cent of that $8 has bought her a single extra minute of life.
It is a bit like the way feminists think of themselves as the only line of fight for women’s rights, or right-wing extremists and populists keep labelling themselves as “freedom fighters”. All of a sudden if you’re opposed to them you become a woman-hater, or a freedom-hating socialist (because they can’t understand that there are other alternative ways to defend the same ideas). These are just political groups with one specific ideology who are marketing themselves as the solution. Thankfully nowadays with the fall of SBF people are dismissing EA as the fad that it is, but there was a time when opposing EA would elicit reactions such as “oh so you’re against effectiveness/transparency?” or “so you are in favor of corruption?” Sigh.
There are people in rooms discussing whether "the ends justify the means" (though I don't think anyone is seriously arguing in favor of SBF-type means). BUT THESE ARE PHILOSOPHICAL DISCUSSIONS.
If you asked 1,000 effective altruists if they think what SBF did was acceptable (or gave a hypothetical ends justify the means at 10% of the severity of SBF), I would wager that 0 would say it was acceptable. SBF used EA as a shield to hide his fraudulent behavior, and EA (both the philosophy and application sides) have taken a hard look at what EA argues for, and to think that EA (even philosophy EA) would approve of SBF's behavior do not understand EA at all.
---
I study EA and so I am loosely connected to the movement, but I don't consider myself an effective altruist.
SBF is a numerically oriented crook.
EA is about attempting to measure and compare different philanthropic approaches in order to optimize where we spend our money, effort and time to benefit humanity. The author incorrectly implies that EA isn't concerned with ethics, or that EA will justify any means to achieve some perceived benefit - but this is the opposite of true. Ethical and moral behavior are required by EA, and in fact are an important part of the utility measured for some philanthropic activity. That is, ethics and morals are worthy goals (or aspects of worthy goals) for EA in and of themselves.
This is some grade A No True Scotsmaning.
Sam Bankman-Fried was about as high profile an EA as ever existed, with his personal wealth counted as the bulk of their finances, his FTX Future Fund employing both Nick Beckstead and his old friend William Macaskill, and his political action committee throwing money around Washington to promote crypto and longtermism.
Macaskill himself is probably the most famous EA of them all and was in lockstep with SBF for years, dismissing claims of unethical behavior, vouching for him and hooking him up with other rich people like Elon Musk cashing his checks for the charities he controlled, and of course enjoying the finer things in life that FTX could buy without either of these famously ascetic utilitarians could ever imagine doing for themselves.
Had the scientists of the Manhattan project (Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard, etc) subscribed to the EA philosophy, they would have been unlikely to work on nuclear weapons development, and millions more would have likely perished in a land invasion of Japan. However, millions of Southeast Asians and South Americans did perish in the subsequent "proxy wars" of the Cold War era, so you can make a convincing historical "what if" either way.
Effective altruism is not a very useful philosophy if you don't actually know what is best for humanity. Oppenheimer's philosophy (the Gita philosophy) was to simply do his job without being attached to the outcome.
"The Supreme Lord said: I am mighty Time, the source of destruction that comes forth to annihilate the worlds. Even without your participation, the warriors arrayed in the opposing army shall cease to exist." [0]
"Bhagavān Śrī Kṛṣṇa said: Time I am, the mighty destroyer of worlds, and I come to vanquish all living beings. Even without your participation, all the warriors on the opposite side of the battlefield will be killed" [1]
[0] - https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/chapter/11/verse/32
> they would have been unlikely to work on nuclear weapons development, and millions more would have likely perished in a land invasion of Japan
despite being constantly repeated, is not reflected by contemporary documents and later historical analysis of decision making among Pentagon and White House officials.
The threat of an impending land invasion was not a consideration at the time when it was decided to attack Japanese civilian centres with nuclear weapons. The primary factor in the decision for their use had far more to do with the risk of Stalin joining the fight on the eastern front and thus securing a claim for territory following the inevitable axis surrender, as well as a desire for US power projection from the demonstration of an atomic weapon in War. The primary delay in Japanese surrender was the question of the fate of Empreror Hirohito, who the US ended up protecting anyway.
I counted four topics in the first few paragraphs that the author defined in a poor, self-serving way. Any one of these topics and associated definitions would be interesting to talk about. Put them all together and it's just too much to clean up (for folks taking any kind of issue at all with the thesis or conclusion.)
It was well-structured and cogent, though. Kudos to the author for that. That puts them well above other essays of this type.
Maybe his donations saved lives. Maybe anthropic (which he famously funded) will save the world. Maybe by discrediting EA, SBF saved the world from EA fanatics. You could ennumerate hypotheticals like this forever, positive and negative. It's for this reason that we have to rely on intuitive moral feelings or there's no way to confidently say that anything is good or bad.
That said, I view EA as a call to think more carefully and analytically about our actions and how they affect the world. There's certainly nothing wrong with that as long as it's not taken to bizarre extremes.
Of course if it would try to address the structural problems, it wouldn't be charity but politics. And politics are bad because it could change the structure.
EA tries to look at the bigger picture of effectiveness, and many within EA do believe that political solutions are a good use of resources. For example, many of the new charities created by Charity Entrepreneurship spend their time lobbying governments. Relative to traditional philanthropy, I think EA has a real shot at the systemic changes necessary to make real change.
As FTX experienced the unprecedented growth to fantastical scale, SBF was at the center of it. I strongly suspect he felt deified by it, felt that the market was giving him unqualified approval for his every thought and method.
Somewhere in his ascendancy, I suspect that EA became merely a vocabulary of stock responses that he used to explain his decisions and to frame his public image.
The immorality began when he chose to ignore his fiduciary duty to his depositors, and instead used their funds as if they were VC money available to fund his ideas. The immorality continued when he gave false financial statements to the AR lenders. It culminated when he tweeted "everything is fine" when the withdrawal rush began.
Was he using EA theory to justify these unethical choices? Caroline Ellison thought he was but that was because she was in thrall to his personality.
I would be immensely surprised if EA goals ever crossed his mind when he made these decisions. I suspect he was in empire building mode aiming to enter the pantheon of SV tech titans.
The WSJ had a chart of "where did the money go" showing that only a miniscule slice of the $16B was donated to philanthropic organizations. It was less than $100M.
You are correct that EA has been unmasked as a philosophy unburdened by ethics. However, my view is that SBF only used EA as a convenient label for his motives, when his goals were consolidating his power.
SBF wasn’t even an idealist’s version of an effective altruist, he basically lied and told everyone that he was one, probably in a vain attempt to explain where all the money went.
That’s not to say that EA doesn’t deserve its own criticism, but SBF was only pretending to be one on TV.
So his actions are in no way consistent with EA, and shouldn't be considered indicative of it.
I read his book and some interviews and this is hyperbole. And poor use of “erstwhile”.
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2023/10/24/book-review-going-in...
I'd love to hear an actual argument for it. I don't want to think that Joan Westenberg (whoever that is) is a purveyor of twisted words.
(There are more examples in the article, I picked one because I like examples.)
Utilitarianism is evil because it allows evil actions to be taken as long as that maximizes utility, thus justifying the unjustifiable. Utilitarianism is wrong because it is still evil to commit fraud even to save human lives. However utilitarianism is popular for people with power, because they can use it to justify their evil actions as for the greater good. Even if they are sincere, their actions are still evil; even if SBF succeeded instead of failing, and sincerely wanted to stop climate change, he would still and rightfully be a criminal.
That said there are several arguments from within utilitarianism that support deontology. For instance Bentham mugging indicates a utilitarian should pretend to support a deontology.
If you watch a herd of gazelles get one of their own munched by a lion, they get the hell out of there.
It seems as if these ones are saying "Well, she's got her fill with poor old Sam, over there, so we're all right to keep eating this sweet grass."
But this article seems like it’s not achieving anything
https://joanwestenberg.com/about
Why not not $1,000,000+ in profit.
SBF || !SBF that was the problem
Not even remotely surprising that a sociopathic fraudster subscribed to these ideas. It's the same kind of ethical framework that early 20th century eugenicists were quite fond of.
What shall we say of him? Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those men. It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in no wise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts. And although in the end he may have felt so sure about it that he could not think otherwise, yet inasmuch as he had knowingly and willingly worked himself into that frame of mind, he must be held responsible for it.
W.K. Clifford
https://human.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Philosophy/Philosop...
"Numerous industry experts had raised concerns about the safety of the vessel. OceanGate executives, including Rush, had not sought certification for Titan, arguing that excessive safety protocols and regulations hindered innovation."
"Rush replied that he was "tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation ... We have heard the baseless cries of 'you are going to kill someone' way too often. I take this as a serious personal insult"."
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_submersible_implosion
"In particular, he was critical of the Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993, a United States law which regulated the construction of ocean tourism vessels and prohibited dives below 150 feet, which Rush described as a law which "needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation"."
There's a phrase that should go down in infamy. "My desire to make money is more important than your life".
I see two typical failure modes. Half of the time, they fall into a
> cannot separate the man from the idea
trap of “someone with a corrupted moral compass once believed this, ergo the idea itself is bad”, which doesn’t follow.
The other half does engage with the idea, but seemingly only ever half of it. They tend make the first step successfully,
> People can use a veneer of charity and rationality to ignore ethical issues
Which is definitely true, but don’t seem to actually take on the ideas purported main thrust, that “if one intends to give charitably, one ought to bias their choices towards causes that give money as effectively as possible at meeting your goals”, which frankly seems pretty air-tight
I think the core is that a lot of people have a problem with admitting someone they dislike had a pretty sensible idea.
It's a guideline, but not an absolute rule. We can acknowledge its value as a general approach yet also recognize situations where a strictly utilitarian choice would be abhorrent.
Life is not so black-and-white.
However, if said person were to belong to an ingroup, then said person is categorized as an outlier by its members.
We can see lots of such examples in politics, such as people casting similar aspersions about how the recent action of a single person in an outgroup proves the larger aspirations of said group, about how "they're out to destroy society", and the like.
He had a very twisted interpretation of what is, arguably, a pretty sensible idea.
Or maybe not so sensible. EA may be an idea that could be a sensible one, but in practice may be too easy to get twisted and wind up in some really insane places, and therefore may not be so sensible in practice.