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This is what I have been thinking. This whole thing has soured in my mind: Jane Street, Effective Altruism. Crypto, VCs, Silicon Valley culture in general I alr
by typon 4y ago
This is what I have been thinking. This whole thing has soured in my mind: Jane Street, Effective Altruism. Crypto, VCs, Silicon Valley culture in general I already assumed are scummy.
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y agoYou got it. That is the correct line to follow. Sequoia in particular must be heavily investigated.
- neilparikh 4y ago> Effective Altruism The practical version of Effective Altruism for most people is essentially "if you're well off, you should donate a chunk of your income to buying anti-malaria bed nets/deworming medicine/direct cash transfers for the global poor". I don't see how that could "sour" in your mind, seems like a fairly unreservedly good thing. I want to point out that there are real people [1] being helped by Effective Altruism right now. Telling them "sorry, can't help you any more, some rich asshole in the US just committed a scam, and he claimed he wanted to help you too" just seems incredibly petty and cruel to me. [1] - This is also a group that traditionally doesn't receive much attention either.
- freejazz 4y agoThis is why so many people find EA annoying. People donated to malaria causes well before EA was a thing, but of course now, without EA, there's nothing.
- hestefisk 4y agoI find it very annoying. Why I’ rely on the benevolence of a few rich people when you can do the same much more effectively with proper taxation and wealth redistribution.
- neilparikh 4y ago> proper taxation and wealth redistribution All the mainstream political suggestions for taxation/wealth distribution focus on correcting wealth inequalities within a rich nation. Very few (if any) suggest redistributing from wealthy western nations to the global poor.
- freejazz 4y agoNeither does EA, they just suggest rich people donate sometimes...
- neilparikh 4y agoI don’t think upper-middle class programmers were donating much before EA. Obviously AMF has been around before EA, the big difference is the additional amount of money it’s been able to deploy. I personally know many people (including me!) who started donating significantly because of EA.
- Yizahi 4y ago"if you're well off, you should donate a chunk of your income to buying anti-malaria bed nets/deworming medicine/direct cash transfers for the global poor" (c) Isn't it against EA ethos? Helping some people right now, right here? I read some posts about this movement, and from them it seemed like EAs are more interested in the far off stuff - developing benevolent AI, transumanism, space travel, gene vaults, terraforming, Mars colonisation etc. (there is nothing wrong with these activities). Because helping people right now is "just" altruism, not effective altruism.
- neilparikh 4y agoThe longtermist EAs do suggest that, but by dollar donated, the more traditional global health stuff is still a large chunk of what EA do. > I read some posts about this movement, and from them it seemed like EAs are more interested in the far off stuff You can’t really use that as a metric to judge the movement, since there’s only so much one can write about “donate money to AMF”, but you can write pages and pages about the far off stuff.
- astrange 4y agoNone of those things are Silicon Valley. Can't blame Santa Clara County for none of this. Jane Street - NYC EA - Berkeley Crypto - the Bahamas or something? VCs - Palo Alto
- hnfong 4y agoPalo Alto is literally in Santa Clara Country.... ```Palo Alto (/ˌpæloʊ ˈæltoʊ/; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area``` - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Alto,_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Alto,_California