What the Hell Happened to Effective Altruism

&quot;...EA brand will now be associated with irrational feminized college students rather than interesting quantitative thinkers.&quot;<p>That is quite a quote, the kind that makes it hard to take anything in this essay seriously. If this guy has been to an EA event in the last year I&#x27;m sure he&#x27;d notice it&#x27;s still like 90% men and the demographic is pretty much the same as in previous years.<p>Somehow he&#x27;s been around EA for a long time but think AI safety is a problem to work on. He compares AI regulation to over regulation around medicine. Maybe because there&#x27;s basically no regulation around AI and a huge amount in medicine and the stakes between the two are completely different. In fact they are completely different issues so why should it be the case that EA should have the same viewpoint on both.<p>Don&#x27;t bother wasting your time reading this like I did

Weird article: if the point of EA-the-philosophy is to diligently measure and pursue utility-maximizing donations, then none of the &quot;social&quot; stuff should matter to its adherents. They can call themselves whatever they&#x27;d like, and nobody would find that basic premise particularly objectionable.<p>In other words, this doesn&#x27;t really seem to be about EA. It&#x27;s about who owns the EA &quot;brand,&quot; a thought that&#x27;s incoherent with the putative mission of EA.

&gt; EA used to be great.<p>It was always a cult-like delusion.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33618156">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33618156</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34646361">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34646361</a>

<p><pre><code> But the evidence was there. Personal attacks against Nick Bostrum, Robin Hanson, among other leadings figures, not for their positions on the most important issues, or even for being wrong, but for not conforming to the socially desirable position on the current thing, </code></pre> Nick Bostrum very clearly states that he believed blacks to be inantely intellectually inferior to the rest of humanity. I didn&#x27;t realize that this was decidely correct, or even unimportant. Doesn&#x27;t the belief of a racial hierarchy affect one&#x27;s ability to decide on most optimal forms and recipients of altruism?<p>This blogpost just reads as a &quot;go woke go broke&quot; victory lap that has very little new to say about the current state of EA. At the very least I do genuinely appreciate that Chau directly linked to the detractors he discusses (even if the twitter link leads to a deleted post)

One of the benefits of being cynical and jaded is that I see exactly where these kind of movements are going as soon as they get started. The new-atheism movement from a decade ago is one example, rationalist movement was another. The newest one is e&#x2F;acc. While the movements themselves often die and fade away, their impact often does not.<p>Something strange happens when an idea becomes a movement and then it becomes an identity. Pretty soon the identity alters the movement which then subverts the idea. Next thing you know you see someone who claims the identity in a TED talk speaking ideas you would never personally support.<p>For that reason I don&#x27;t just judge ideas on their own merits. I try to consider the movement that will arise around it. Then I try to consider the assumed identity of those caught up in the movement. Then I consider how a large number of individuals sharing an identity will reflect back onto the movement.

All movements that want to preserve their identity need a (at least benevolent) dictator and the ability to self-police. EA had neither. Therefore, it inevitably morphed into a movement that none of the original supporters could recognize.<p>It is not the first to give into such naivete and it won&#x27;t be the last.

If this article represents the quality of thinking behind EA, then it’s no wonder it fell apart. “safetyism, a malicious pathology“, “Irrational feminized college students”??

Transmuted into Effective Accelerationism (e&#x2F;acc). Cringe.

...what? Are you really claiming that EA is bad for... advocating for public policy around AI xrisk, rather than just writing off the government entirely? That EA is at fault for the leading AI companies having profit motivations, and that somehow they are less interested in safety than without it? That EA should reject people who come to us because, by knowing us for being in the news, they aren&#x27;t what, ethically pure enough?<p>&gt; It is inevitable that the EA brand will now be associated with irrational feminized college students rather than interesting quantitative thinkers willing to bite socially undesirable bullets.<p>In all my interactions with EAs I... what? What??<p>You are right that at least one trad EA thinks this reads like a strawman. I&#x27;m sorry you&#x27;ve had whatever experience led you to this. Maybe visit Cambridge sometime.

&gt; It went from wanting to repeal the FDA to wanting to make a new one for AI.<p>They wanted to repeal the FDA?

Something just as effective happens automatically: really driven non-altruists achieve success and realise it doesn&#x27;t bring happiness. Then proceed to donate their wealth. Buffet nor Gates started out as altruists but are both planning it as an end.

It’s been exposed for what it always was.

Writing about altruism behind pop-up.

&gt; EA was founded on rejecting a great falsehood: a lie <i>that almost everyone believed</i>, that is not just false but the opposite of truth. This was the lie that donating based on your feelings was the best way to help people.<p>What utter nonsense.<p>EA is as myopic when looking at normies, as it is when performing introspection.

It was always batshit and bat shit.