Sam Bankman-Fried and the effective altruism delusion

This “expected value” way of thinking about income and philanthropy was inherently flawed - it didn’t take into account the risk of preference shifting. If you do good now to do good later, and later you change your mind, you’ve still done good. If you smear shit now to do good later, and later you change your mind, you’re just left with a lot of smeared shit.<p>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.

The original idea of EA was to convince students to take &quot;immoral&quot; but good paying jobs on Wallstreet in order to donate the earned money to charities (Mainly charities owned by other effective altruists).<p>EA is thus an excuse &#x2F; incitation to commit immoral and in SBF&#x27;s and his co-conspirators case illegal things.

For anyone interested in charity or doing good, and this is your first time hearing about EA, i recommend you check out some of the major resources at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.givingwhatwecan.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.givingwhatwecan.org&#x2F;</a> or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;80000hours.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;80000hours.org&#x2F;</a>. You have an opportunity in your life to alleviate massive suffering and change lives, you shouldn&#x27;t let negative publicity sway you from doing good things.<p>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.

I think the QALY criticism grazes the real fundamental problem with EA. You can&#x27;t really quantify &quot;good&quot; good enough to create a meaningful measure. Being alive is better than being dead (in almost all cases). Being sighted is better than being blind. But is losing an arm objectively worse than losing a leg? Who has it worse, a gay man in a seriously homophobic country or a woman in a severely misogynistic country? Sure, donating money to an animal you find cute may not be the best use of money, objectively. But maybe it&#x27;s better to be openly subjective, lest we end up codifying our own subjective beliefs.

There is a need to decouple &quot;Effective Altruism (TM)&quot; the culty organization, from the underlying ideas of effective altruism.<p>Personally, I&#x27;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.<p>At the same time, imo there&#x27;s no need to go 100% utilitarian and overoptimize, overthink, or blindly trust someone else&#x27;s QlYs calculations... Perfection is the enemy of good enough.<p>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&#x27;m happy with it. Never even read a tweet from William or the fancy organization.<p>Some examples lines of thought<p>* kids with cancer feels very bad&#x2F;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)...<p>* perhaps consider non-charitable donations to political organizations, given the impact of government policies.<p>* 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.

Despite SBF, I still am a proponent of effective altruism overall. You just have to be obsessed performing your own due diligence because there isn&#x27;t aren&#x27;t any market forces that compel you to do so. For example, I think GiveWell is good example of this.<p>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.

Can anyone please explain to me what the train of thought was from effective altruism (of which I choose to know very little) to a &quot;bunker&#x2F;shelter&quot; in Nauru? []<p>[] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;observer.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;07&#x2F;who-was-invited-sam-bankman-fried-doomsday-bunker&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;observer.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;07&#x2F;who-was-invited-sam-bankman-fri...</a>

Instead of bringing &#x27;altruism&#x27; into socioeconomic decision-making, we should instead eliminate the concept of &#x27;externalities&#x27; from the process.<p>If investors and corporations were forced to subtract the very real costs of &#x27;externalities&#x27; 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.<p>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.

&gt; <i>Ord had pledged to give away all his earnings above £20,000. MacAskill followed suit.</i><p>I don&#x27;t even know what that means. A pledge is like a terrible version of a futures contract: a nonenforceable one.<p>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?

SBF is and I think always has ben a con artist, masquerading as a clumsy nerd genius and using the EA trend was a coup de maître, but this is beside the point.<p>Really effective altruism should not focus on money or medicine, but on power.<p>Power imbalance is and always has been the main culprit behind all other kind of inequalities.<p>But there is an issue, contrary to money&#x2F;wealth, power is zero sum, and is much less fungible.<p>Charity does not work with power, quite the opposite in practice.

Sure, EA has good goals, and even has a good philosophy. Lots of cheap mosquito nets preventing more malaria and dengue fever than more expensive options has become a modern day parable for good reason.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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, &quot;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.&quot;<p>It’s just cover for personal greed.<p>But soon. Soon. Just be patient.

So SBF is a con-man who realized that it&#x27;s easy to scam the EA community. All you need to do is learn their language and &quot;pledge&quot; to give away a lot of money. Then the donations will start pouring in.<p>I guess it&#x27;s not that different from any other in-group. If you&#x27;re seen as a trusted member, others will give you the benefit of the doubt as far as they can.

I always find that those who follow this effective altruism thing are very big on abstract thought.<p>It is accepted that philantropy is not 100% altruistic, leave it alone the tax deductions and tax shelter schemes but as a practice it&#x27;s done to virtue signal or to feel like we are doing something meaningful or that we are changing people&#x27;s lives.<p>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.<p>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.

The delusion is simply in not realizing logical reasoning follows a log normal.

I never heard of effective altruism before the whole SBF trial.<p>Can someone fill me in &#x2F; point me to somewhere with some historical context?

&gt; [Effective Altruism] is self-righteous in the most literal sense. Effective altruism as distinct from what? Well, all of the rest of us, presumably—the ineffective and un-altruistic, we who either do not care about other human beings or are practicing our compassion incorrectly.<p>&gt; 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.<p>Those are the opening paragraphs from a much better article on the same subject: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.currentaffairs.org&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;defective-altruism" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.currentaffairs.org&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;defective-altruism</a><p>Where this article meekly claims that &quot;utilitarian calculations can be co-opted to justify extremely weird and potentially harmful positions&quot; Nathan J Robinson correctly skewers the very fundamentals of utilitarianism:<p>&gt; 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.”)<p>As Robinson observes, the EA movement’s intellectual core is so poisoned by bad philosophy as to be unsalvageable.

What is &quot;Effective Altruism&quot; but a sexy re-branding of the principles and behaviours that religions and other cultural vessels have attempted to imbue in people for thousands of years now?<p>If your goal is truly to do good, it&#x27;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.