> Effective altruism is a philosophical and social movement that advocates "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis
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.
Yes, he admitted multiple times that it was all just an act for public perception. Can't get much more clear than this:
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 us
> I'm not sure how anyone could argue that what SBF was doing fits it any way with that.
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.
I'm not even sure if he saw himself as redistributing money vs. creating value from scratch, from the productivity increases that cryptocurrency would usher in when it became mainstream - and if he was the one to not "re-distribute," but simply distribute, some portion of those newfound gains, why, he would be the best possible steward because of his EA ideals!
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.
How is he defining "rich" - because AFAIK his algorithm didn't just take money from the whales to give to Alameda - and when things are settled, it's almost assuredly the whales that will get paid out first. So he's almost assuredly taking from the middle-class-at-best to give to his own personal pet projects.
the problem seems twofold. on the one hand there is a seemingly objective definition of what Effective Altruism is supposed to be. that definition is one that i would like to subscribe to as well. on the other hand it appears that the idea of EA was popularized by someone whose actions didn't actually fit the definition which discredits the whole movement. that's the first problem.
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.
It's actually very common for companies doing terrible things like fraud, environmental damage, bait and switches, patent abuse etc. to lean hard on promoting social work they're doing.
This is so common that short sellers like Kyle Bass actually look for it as an additional red flag when hunting down fraudulent companies.
SBF cannot even manage "ineffective" altruism. He puts other people through hell without a hint of empathy. How would anyone expect he could do "effective" altruism. In his own words, he "fucked up". But he is not sorry, he offers no apology, he's "not guilty". He is a compulsive liar.
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.
Somehow our society puts the non-alturistic people into positions which have most impact. I guess the ineffective alturist knows its almost impossible to get to such position without wronging others. And its the ruthless fool with savior complex that puts himself above others “to save them”.
What would be the difference between SBF being an effective altruist and doing fraud to hoard wealth until his dying day when he would turn it all into a public good, and saying he was and doing everything up until the last step?
The fraud is still illegal. He would still have gone to jail.
His brother was heading some “Guarding against pandemics” non-profit that he was involved with. I believe there was one California proposition they were heavily funding related to it.
I don’t know if it was started in earnest or if there was some ulterior motive.
> 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.
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.
I think the key thing is that everything he's ever said and done (including the stuff that harmed only Sam Bankman Fried as well as the stuff that benefited him and the stuff that was illegal and lost his customers money) screams gambling addict.
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?...
I think anything SBF did to benefit others was a byproduct or side effect of what he was actually doing, enriching/empowering himself, like you say. Or, at best, a hedge in the form of insurance against bad PR.
Does that change the point? Even if not in earnest, he was able to deflect suspicion wearing a cloak of EA. That, in and of itself, is a problem. Nothing is above reproach, no matter how pious or nerdy.
Is it just me or do a whole lot of EA people just love to keep talking but never do anything actually altruistic?
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.
This is how EA works. It wouldn’t be maximally effective to donate the money now, would it? Compounding interest says you should hoard it until your dying day and only then invest in a charitable cause.
The argument is akin to saying bank robbery is a feature not a big when the thief donates his or her takes to charities of soup kitchens or what have you.
His actions made perfect sense from his utilitarian Effective Altruist worldview. He was stealing from rich people, and giving the money to what he saw as "worthy causes."
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.
> His actions made perfect sense from his utilitarian Effective Altruist worldview. He was stealing from rich people, and giving the money to what he saw as "worthy causes."
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 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?
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.
> 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,
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.
This leads into a whole "theory vs practice" argument that shows up whenever people start talking about communism. If anybody doing Effective Altruism in the real world fails, we are told that they were not doing EA correctly, and it's simply unfortunate that nobody's done it correctly yet. Thus the movement itself can never be discredited by mere experimental evidence.
Most EA adherents focus on process not outcomes. So from an EA position, the fraud outcome doesn’t matter. Imagine if SBF gambles paid off they might say, and that potential outcome must be probablistically weighed against the negative outcome. Since crypto in most EA is viewed as a sin industry, the negative impact is minor relative to the positive impact of SBF political and charity donations, so even a slim chance of success should be taken.
However 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.
Theft or fraud would definitely be preferable to the loss of the planet. Utilitarianism aside, sometimes doing the wrong thing actually is the better thing to do. Anyone who helped slaves escape via the Underground Railroad or smuggled Jews out of Nazi Germany would not be considered evil for their actions, and those could easily be construed as theft (in a gross way) or fraud.
> On November 11, FTX fell apart and was revealed as a giant scam. Suddenly everyone hated effective altruists. Publications that had been feting us a few months before pivoted to saying they knew we were evil all along. I practiced rehearsing the words “I have never donated to charity, and if I did, I certainly wouldn’t care whether it was effective or not”.
I remember! He was happy about it -- until he found out that the NYT was going to doxx him and publish his name, which would've likely had highly negative effects for himself and his psychiatric patients. The NYT didn't care, of course -- and they attempted to cover him a lot more negatively, as a result of the backlash they received.
As someone who creates data and analysis which get used in setting policy I do find a lot of EA spreadsheet analysis of measured "good" to be very niave to the nature of measurement and classification.
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.
It's just a bunch of privileged armchair humanitarians who never left the confines of their fancy circles, let alone been confronted to the things they're trying to fix. They think they can fix issues better than NGOs which have had boots on the grounds for decades, just because they know python and excel, as if people actually working on humanitarian causes were benevolent r**ards. Of course, it allows for great intellectual masturbation and self-congratulation, as if fixing complex social/ecological issues was just about "cracking a problem" and presenting a neat 12-page PPT presentation, before moving to the next problem.
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.
For someone outside the space (like me), what’s the big innovation of Effective Altruism? I assume when the rubber hits the road, most people doing big donations have people to look at the effectiveness of that donation.
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.
Most people doing big donations aren't particularly interested in effectiveness. The Susan G. Komen foundation, still the largest breast cancer charity in the US, had a big controversy about this around the time that Effective Altruism started to get big. According to their annual reports (https://www.komen.org/wp-content/uploads/fy19-20-annual-repo...), if you go to their site and donate $100 towards their promise of "ending breast cancer":
* $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.
EA seeks to measure and compare altruistic endeavors, however imperfectly. For example, measuring the good created by donating to your kids school, to the 9/11 fund, or to bed nets in Africa. An EA would likely say that the good for society created by donating to your kids' school is less than the good provided by donating the same amount of money to bed nets. They might quantify that in lives saved, such as a $1000 donation to bed nets saving about 1/5th of a life in Africa. But maybe the $1000 donation to the school improves the lives of 100 students by 1% each, or something like that.
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.
It seems to make sense to me. You evaluate whether your actions are doing the most good in the world according to your metrics. For example, should I work at a soup kitchen for a day or work in my day job in HFT for a day and donate it all to a soup kitchen.
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.
Some political/social communities simply kidnap words and terms and use them as if their solution is the only solution to a problem. You are absolutely right to be suspicious; the fact that they are oblivious enough to reality that they really believe themselves to be more effective than others (simply because they hide behind arbitrary numerical computations) is reason enough to suspect that their numbers aren’t really covering everything.
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.
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.
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.
It’s not just donations. It’s living your entire life according to “expected value”, or what the maximum “utility” units (utils) can be created through every action and relationship. It’s an extremely inhuman way of living that goes against ethical norms established since the dawn of civilization. Effective altruists are dangerous and you should not be friends with them, hire them, or associate with them at all if you possibly can. They put your wealth and life at risk.
This article makes a fundamental mistake that many who have written about EA make - by treating the philosophical and real-world application of EA as the same thing. EA is such a new philosophy and movement that the philosophy and application of EA are not sufficiently divorced from one another, and the people at the core of "philosophy EA" are also involved in "application EA". So this is an easy mistake to make.
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.
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I study EA and so I am loosely connected to the movement, but I don't consider myself an effective altruist.
This article misrepresents what EA is about, and unfairly links SBF's criminal behavior to that philosophy.
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.
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.
When Oppenheimer witnessed the first explosion of a nuclear weapon, he quelled his ethical reservations over the destructive power of his creation with a verse from the Bhagavad Gita [1] often mistranslated as the deity stating "I am death, destroyer of worlds", but more accurately - "I am time, and I will destroy these people with or without your involvement".
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.
That's incorrect. The translation quoted by Oppenheimer is actually more accurate than yours. The other two, more popular are:
"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]
To my ear, the two translations you listed sound very similar to primitivesuave’s “I am time…” translation and dissimilar to Oppenheimer’s “I am death…” translation. Can you explain why you disagree?
I understand the point you're making, but the statement that
> 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.
This essay is a mess. I won't flag it, but I doubt with such poor definitions it'll make much of a useful conversation on HN.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
Well, and to himself. At one point, didn't he own three private jets?
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.
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 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.
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The fraud is still illegal. He would still have gone to jail.
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.
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?...
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1) SBF is an crook
2) SBF is an idiot
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.
all sorts of interesting slicing and dicing of charitable activities are tracked, and it's really curious.
https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/almanac/statistics-on...
It’s a ridiculous high school level argument.
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".
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.
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 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?
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.
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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.
However 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.
From Scott Alexander’s post on why, as an EA, he donated a kidney. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-left-kidney
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.
* $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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
1. https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/chapter/11/verse/32
"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
[1] - https://asitis.com/11/32.html
> 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.