Sam Bankman-Fried is a feature, not a bug

&gt; Effective altruism is a philosophical and social movement that advocates &quot;using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis<p>I&#x27;m not sure how anyone could argue that what SBF was doing fits it any way with that. He&#x27;s just been found guilty of fraud on multiple counts, so clearly the whole &quot;Effective altruism&quot; was just a image he was trying to present, while acting completely against it in private.

&gt; 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”.<p>From Scott Alexander’s post on why, as an EA, he donated a kidney. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.astralcodexten.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;my-left-kidney" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.astralcodexten.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;my-left-kidney</a>

As someone who creates data and analysis which get used in setting policy I do find a lot of EA spreadsheet analysis of measured &quot;good&quot; to be very niave to the nature of measurement and classification.<p>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.

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 &quot;philosophy EA&quot; are also involved in &quot;application EA&quot;. So this is an easy mistake to make.<p>There <i>are</i> people in rooms discussing whether &quot;the ends justify the means&quot; (though I don&#x27;t think anyone is seriously arguing in favor of SBF-type means). BUT THESE ARE PHILOSOPHICAL DISCUSSIONS.<p>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 <i>approve</i> of SBF&#x27;s behavior do not understand EA at all.<p>---<p>I study EA and so I am loosely connected to the movement, but I don&#x27;t consider myself an effective altruist.

This article misrepresents what EA is about, and unfairly links SBF&#x27;s criminal behavior to that philosophy.<p>SBF is a numerically oriented crook.<p>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&#x27;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.

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 &quot;I am death, destroyer of worlds&quot;, but more accurately - &quot;I am time, and I will destroy these people with or without your involvement&quot;.<p>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 &quot;proxy wars&quot; of the Cold War era, so you can make a convincing historical &quot;what if&quot; either way.<p>Effective altruism is not a very useful philosophy if you don&#x27;t actually know what is best for humanity. Oppenheimer&#x27;s philosophy (the Gita philosophy) was to simply do his job without being attached to the outcome.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org&#x2F;chapter&#x2F;11&#x2F;verse&#x2F;32" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org&#x2F;chapter&#x2F;11&#x2F;verse&#x2F;32</a>

This essay is a mess. I won&#x27;t flag it, but I doubt with such poor definitions it&#x27;ll make much of a useful conversation on HN.<p>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&#x27;s just too much to clean up (for folks taking any kind of issue at all with the thesis or conclusion.)<p>It was well-structured and cogent, though. Kudos to the author for that. That puts them well above other essays of this type.

What fucking moral boundaries am I overstepping if I donate via EA to get some mosquito nets put up in Africa??

One of the problems with effective altruism (and consequentialism more generally) is that it&#x27;s quite hard to look at SBF and say definitively that his actions had net negative consequences.<p>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&#x27;s for this reason that we have to rely on intuitive moral feelings or there&#x27;s no way to confidently say that anything is good or bad.<p>That said, I view EA as a call to think more carefully and analytically about our actions and how they affect the world. There&#x27;s certainly nothing wrong with that as long as it&#x27;s not taken to bizarre extremes.

This is mentioned in passing in TFA but the fundamental problem of EA, and all charity in general, is that it ignores and often even perpetuates the societal structures that create most of the problems that charity tries to patch up.<p>Of course if it would try to address the structural problems, it wouldn&#x27;t be charity but politics. And politics are bad because it could change the structure.

The biggest logical flaw of effective altruism is valuing potential future lives the same as the lives of existing people. Taking that logic to the extreme it would be okay to kill a person for two additional people being born.

It&#x27;s way easier to point at SBF as a fraudster within the larger group of crypto fraudsters than a fraudster within the larger group of effective altruist fraudsters.

In the beginning, SBF probably believed in EA. It helped him recruit the executives of AR and FTX.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 &quot;everything is fine&quot; when the withdrawal rush began.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The WSJ had a chart of &quot;where did the money go&quot; showing that only a miniscule slice of the $16B was donated to philanthropic organizations. It was less than $100M.<p>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.

I think this article assigns a lot of blame to Effective Altruism that really belongs in classic narcissism and power tripping.<p>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.<p>That’s not to say that EA doesn’t deserve its own criticism, but SBF was only pretending to be one on TV.

The author would&#x27;ve had a point if SBF actually donated all the stolen money to effective charities. But he didn&#x27;t, he just appropriated it.<p>So his actions are in no way consistent with EA, and shouldn&#x27;t be considered indicative of it.

&gt; Michael Lewis, along with a cadre of others, have astonishingly aligned themselves with the EA bamboozlers, steadfastly standing by their erstwhile idol<p>I read his book and some interviews and this is hyperbole. And poor use of “erstwhile”.

Stated without argument: &quot;EA, in its cold calculus, can justify the unjustifiable in pursuit of an ill-defined &quot;greater good.&quot; I&#x27;d love to hear an actual argument for that. What sort of cold calculus can justify the unjustifiable? Isn&#x27;t that a contradiction in terms?<p>I&#x27;d love to hear an actual argument for it. I don&#x27;t want to think that Joan Westenberg (whoever that is) is a purveyor of twisted words.<p>(There are more examples in the article, I picked one because I like examples.)

God this “X is a feature not a bug” has become so cringe

<i>&gt; But in neither camp are we seeing the degree of self-reflection that the immolation of their champion should call for.</i><p>If you watch a herd of gazelles get one of their own munched by a lion, they get the hell out of there.<p>It seems as if these ones are saying &quot;Well, she&#x27;s got her fill with poor old Sam, over there, so we&#x27;re all right to keep eating this sweet grass.&quot;

At what point was the “feature not bug” argument defended? I missed that on first read and can’t be bothered to spin through again. I’m all for the condemnation of fad ideology on the basis of strong arguments, and SBF fucked up, and EA seems dubious,<p>But this article seems like it’s not achieving anything

&quot;I work with companies that are $1,000,000+ in revenue.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;joanwestenberg.com&#x2F;about" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;joanwestenberg.com&#x2F;about</a><p>Why not not $1,000,000+ in profit.

Joan has become something of a buttcoiner (if you understand the reference) in recent years after not achieving the success she was looking for with NFT projects.

This is actually good for bitcoin^Weffective altruism.

The true feature was the political donations making their way back into the accounts of politicians.

Most philosophies fail in the execution, typically because the execution is handled by humans.

&gt; promising to solve the world&#x27;s woes through a calculator.<p>SBF || !SBF that was the problem

I will never cease to wonder at how so many people can blame so much on people trying to take a rigorous approach to world improvement, up to and including &quot;a narcissistic con-man claimed to do trying to do X, and I can imagine a scenario where someone could justify doing the shitty things he did to justify X, so therefore everyone trying to do X must also suck and be complicit in fraud and assorted sins&quot;.

If the altruistic narrative had any truth, SBF et al would have been outraged at any one of ten acts, behaviors, thefts, practices, and their underlying attitudes portrayed in his unmasking. He even set his parents up to steal, and they complained when the checks were late, and that was a tiny, but diagnostic part of the scam. More like Madoff II than anything else.

Effective Altruism is nth degree utilitarianism which even a college freshman can tell you has very unsatisfying answers to all kinds of fairly trivial ethical puzzles.<p>Not even remotely surprising that a sociopathic fraudster subscribed to these ideas. It&#x27;s the same kind of ethical framework that early 20th century eugenicists were quite fond of.

In other news, real communism has never been tried

A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and and refitted, even though this should put him at great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.<p>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.<p>W.K. Clifford<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;human.libretexts.org&#x2F;Bookshelves&#x2F;Philosophy&#x2F;Philosophy_of_Western_Religions_(Levin_et_al.)&#x2F;01%3A_THE_BASICS_OF_RELIGIONS_AND_THE_NATURE_OF_BELIEF&#x2F;1.05%3A_The_Ethics_of_Belief_(W.K._Clifford)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;human.libretexts.org&#x2F;Bookshelves&#x2F;Philosophy&#x2F;Philosop...</a>

When reading teardowns of Effective Altruism, I always find them light on substance and preferable alternatives.<p>I see two typical failure modes. Half of the time, they fall into a<p>&gt; cannot separate the man from the idea<p>trap of “someone with a corrupted moral compass once believed this, ergo the idea itself is bad”, which doesn’t follow.<p>The other half does engage with the idea, but seemingly only ever half of it. They tend make the first step successfully,<p>&gt; People can use a veneer of charity and rationality to ignore ethical issues<p>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<p>I think the core is that a lot of people have a problem with admitting someone they dislike had a pretty sensible idea.