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Comment by kylestanfield | Hacker News Reader

This is a motte and bailey fallacy. I don’t think many people take issue with feeding the hungry. However the longtermist sect and their idea that enriching yourself as much as people so you can do more good later leads to the actual controversial actions especially when taken to its logical extremes. And the AI fanaticism got mixed in there somehow.

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> their idea that enriching yourself as much as people so you can do more good later

This is a very uncommon idea within EA. There are some people who support it ("patient philanthropy") but almost everyone within EA either thinks you should be working / donating to help people/animals (most "neartermists") or you should be working / donating to help reduce extinction risk (most "longtermists").

What about this common stereotype: EA advocates that one should take the most lucrative job possible, regardless of any moral harm it may cause, as long as it enables you to do good which (perhaps barely) outweighs the moral harm your job caused in the first place? How fair or unfair is that stereotype?

This sounds close to a thing I've heard EAs argue for, though your version is missing important parts. A big one is that if the good the job allows you to do only barely outweighs the moral harm you caused by taking taking the job, then probably there was some other job where you'd have caused much greater net moral benefit.

I think the closest there is to a mainstream EA view on this is https://80000hours.org/articles/harmful-career/ , which argues that "it's a mistake to pursue a career in which the direct effects of the work are seriously harmful, even if the overall benefits of that work seem greater than the harms".

Thanks for the link to that article. That's a much better source than secondhand hostile undocumented claims.

Are there examples of these "controversial actions". Are they actions that wouldn't have happened without the ideology of EA. How prominent is it within the movement.

I'm opened to having my mind changed, but i'm going to need more than that.

> Effective Altruism-Linked Group Used Millions Donated By FTX To Buy A Czech Castle

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2023/02/28/effecti...

(They are now selling said castle.)

I'm not sure i see how that is really linked to effective alturism as a philosophy. Sounds like person famous for grifting did some grifting, but that happens all the time in normal philanthropy too.

I don't think EA is immune from grifters or people with bad intentions. It is after all a movement made up of humans. I think the question to be answered is does the philosophy encourage it in a way that other philosophies around philanthropy don't.

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