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Comment by cowthulhu | Hacker News Reader

I always feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I see how vitriolic the discussion around EA gets. I’m sure you can find some crazies in who adhere to EA in wacky ways (as with any other group), but the brunt of the focus of EA has always clearly been to do the most good per dollar, or to be effective with your altruism. Maybe a secondary belief is that you should donate 10% of your income to charity. These seem like obviously good things, to the point that I don’t understand how people can be so against while maintaining a straight face.

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The idea itself is fine, but the people who are drawn to it are a weird bunch. It feels very culty too.

I’ll admit that’s a pretty fair criticism :)

Saying that detractors are upset with the idea of charity is reductive. I personally don't like it because it seems to attract self-aggrandizing navel gazers who don't have the nerve to have a lot of money without some justification as to why they need/deserve it, not because I disagree with the idea on paper. I imagine I'm not alone.

It's just people coping with guilt about not giving to charity honestly. That, and ad hominem attacks on the people involved. You see people giving kidneys away and there are still articles talking about how its selfish or misguided.

The movement kind of got co-opted by some strong personalities who somewhat went down their own rabbit hole of utilitarianism.

Also, SBF wasn't good optics.

Did it get co-opted, or are you only exposed to the extremely online segment of EA that talks about AI and future generations and Roko's Basilisk?

From what I can tell, EA is still alive and well I the real world, donating bed nets to combat malaria and other very real, worldly tasks.

Exactly. These people (the anti-EA’ers) are in too deep on the memes. It is absolutely hilarious seeing anti-EA’ers on this thread “pondering questions” about charity that are literally the exact questions posed by EA. EA produces extremely pragmatic answers and the anti-EAers get stuck at “hmm is it really so bad to give to people who live next door just because?”

Of course they cannot even write the answer they’re implicating because it’s laughable on its face, so they’re just here to “ponder” the questions, then accuse EA of navel gazing.

As you say, EA asks those same questions, gets to an answer that’s far less ridiculous than “my neighbors deserve more by virtue of being my neighbors,” then writes checks.

For me it’s the unspoken assumption that “step 0” (attain wealth in the first place) is left as an exercise to the reader. A given. It’s all so self aggrandizing and tone deaf.

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