“Effective Altruism”

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bjn
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“Effective Altruism”

Post by bjn » Sun Dec 11, 2022 7:57 pm

On the back of the FTX collapse I’ve seen quite a bit of talk about Effective Altruism. SBF being a major backer of it the movement founded by Oxford academic William MacAskill.

From what I can see it is tech-bro grift masking as doing good, probably with a huge amount of self delusion on top of it all. The article below is typical of the commentary I’ve seen.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-grift-brothers/

SBF is obviously a nob, and MacAskill sounds like rather unpleasant.

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Woodchopper
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Re: “Effective Altruism”

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Dec 12, 2022 8:03 am

There’s good and bad aspects.

The good is that they pushed the use of data and rigorous analysis in assessing what kinds of aid work. There are now far more RCTs and other forms of robust analysis. For example, one conclusion which had some data behind it is that giving very poor people cash is an effective and efficient way to help them. In terms of development aid this is somewhat revolutionary as the traditional approach was to build infrastructure and provide services (often very inefficiently and unable to show that the spending improves people’s lives).

The bad side is that part of the movement got taken over by a philosophy that goes something like this:

a) Short-termism is bad. It’s wrong to prioritise people living in the present over people who will live in the future.

b) Far more people will live in the future than will live now.

c) We should concentrate now upon doing things which will have most benefit to future generations.

You’re probably still with me, but then we get into …

d) If we predict the world in a thousand years time the biggest problems could be alien invasion or rogue self-aware robots. Let’s focus upon mitigating those problems rather than trivial present issue like climate change or malaria.

There has been a tendency for (ex)billionaires to be profligate and encourage cults of personality. But I take that as billionaires behaving like billionaires.

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Woodchopper
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Re: “Effective Altruism”

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Dec 12, 2022 8:19 am

Article on the intellectual history and personalities here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022 ... e-altruism

IvanV
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Re: “Effective Altruism”

Post by IvanV » Mon Dec 12, 2022 9:28 am

The Economist (17 Nov) has a graph showing Effective Altruism's money broken down into 4 categories - Global development, long term existential risks, animal welfare and movement building. The balance is described in the quote from the article below. He has also been giving money to the Democrats.
Economist wrote:...Mr Bankman-Fried claimed to be a long-termist, and spent a lot of money advancing the cause. In 2015 nearly all effective-altruist spending went to global development. This year nearly 40% went to minimising existential risk (see chart). Mr Bankman-Fried’s “ftx Future Fund,” which was launched in February, disbursed $130m in its first four months, mostly to long-termist causes. So fast was the spending, some altruists believed the movement was no longer “funding-constrained”—it had so much money, the only problem was finding talented people who could make good use of it.
...As Mr [Dustin] Moskovitz [EA's second richest supporter] wrote: “Either EA encouraged Sam’s unethical behaviour, or provided a convenient rationalisation for such actions.” ...
In messages with Vox, an online publication, published on November 15th, Mr Bankman-Fried claimed his ethical positions were “dumb sh.t”; a move to gain a better reputation and impose his version of “good” on the world. To do this, he sought to win “by this dumb game we woke Westerners play”. The question now is exactly what he meant by “good” and which ethical positions he was disavowing.
The decline of Mr Bankman-Fried taps into existing criticisms of the movement, namely that it is too centralised and insular—and that this stifles dissent. ...
The hope is this may be the fiasco to get effective altruism to finally change, says one adherent: “If EA is willing to suffer public criticism over this, I think that is a totally viable pathway to reform.”
...

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