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A lot of defense of EA on this thread follows the same chain of thought: "what's wrong with doing the most good? What's wrong with Peter Singer's philosophy of

A lot of defense of EA on this thread follows the same chain of thought: "what's wrong with doing the most good? What's wrong with Peter Singer's philosophy of doing so? Have you read The Life You Can Save?" It's like trying to defend against criticisms of religious fundamentalism by saying "What about the teachings of Love and Kindness by Jesus? Have you ever read the Bible?" The literal words of the Bible doesn't matter as much when people who claim to follow it in the earnest are also doing the most harm. You need to have a conversation internally first to figure out what your ideology is, otherwise it just looks like avoiding responsibility to the "outsiders".

gonehome 4y ago
It's a little different - I don't personally identify as part of the EA movement because of the associated baggage, but the ideas around trying to do the most good, extending empathy beyond kin/culture to other people suffering that you cannot see, and reasoning about the effectiveness of charity make sense to me. Without getting into a flame war not fit for HN, the same cannot be said for the supernatural foundations and epistemic claims of religions - the foundational ideas of EA are not the problem in this case. I think Sam Harris breaks it down decently here: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/303-the-fall-of-sam-bankman-fried https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/303... though that's a little out of date with how fast news on the topic is moving. It's also another reminder why it's good to keep your identity small [0] and deal with the ideas directly. Said another way: "Go three-quarters of the way from deontology to utilitarianism and then stop. You are now in the right place. Stay there at least until you have become a god."[1] [0]: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html [1]: https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1497157447219232768?s=20&t=7fULq3NXML7gb2O4OMpGjA https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1497157447219232768?s...
eddsh1994 4y ago
There is a lot of conversation internally. You can see these debates here [0]. The guy credited with who got SBF into EA wrote a post [1] which was also debated heavily in the comments. A good introduction, or at least my introduction, was by the same guy's debate [2] which I recommend if people are interested in EA outside of the current media storm. [0] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/ https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/ [1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WdeiPrwgqW2wHAxgT/a-personal-statement-on-ftx https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WdeiPrwgqW2wHAxgT/... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qslo4-DpzPs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qslo4-DpzPs
Aunche 4y ago
The difference is that EA is nothing like religious fundamentalism. No one is pressuring you to work in HFT or donate to AI risk if you don't want to.
- ben_w 4y ago
  You say that, but I literally just listend to a podcast of someone talking about their efforts to convince people to work on AI risk.
  - Aunche 4y ago
    So they're a bad person because they are trying to convince people to allocate their resources in a way that you think is sub-optimal? By that logic, most of the people on HN are bad people because they work at ad-tech companies.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      ? I didn’t say “bad”. But they are trying to convince people to work in AI risk who otherwise wouldn’t have chosen to. Pressure? Perhaps not. But then again, pressure can be an irregular verb: “I encourage, you persuade, he pressures” ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation
boxed 4y ago
This is why you need to do what the Catholic Church does: - Own your name - Excommunicate those who claim to be of your movement that you don't like Otherwise you will lose control over the term you invented and it goes to hell. Witness Buddhism (Pure Land is basically anti-buddhism), Christianity (where to even begin with all the splitting?), Islam (two big sects trying to murder eachother), communism (pol pot, mao, stalin). Protect your brand or see your name be dragged through the mud.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Pure Land simply preserves the tradition of what Buddhism was like prior to the Western-influenced revitalization of it in the 19th century. It's the closest analog to the Catholic church with its long history, whereas what most people think of as Buddhism is relatively recent.
  - boxed 4y ago
    Pure Land rejects lots of stuff in the tripitaka. It's clearly BS. Replacing all of Buddhas teaching with "some god will save you if you say these magic words" is very similar to how the Catholic Church rejected the teachings of Jesus with indulgences. "Never mind what Jesus said, pay us some money and you'll go to heaven even if you're a mass murderer". Pure land is basically the same type of crazy.
- tptacek 4y ago
  Just for what it's worth: it's a lot easier to get excommunicated from EA than from the Catholic Church, where it is more or less impossible to accomplish that. I think this comes up a lot because Catholics "own" the term "excommunication", but if you've got the sense that it's an ordinary thing that happens in the church, well, no. Sinéad O'Connor had to beg for it, and still didn't get it. (Has anyone in the world ever been as thoroughly vindicated as Sinéad, though?)
  - boxed 4y ago
    The threat and the ownership of the trademark is the point though.
jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
I've said this in most threads on this topic but will keep repeating it: EA functionally matches the exact same patterns I grew up around among evangelical extremists. It's an all purpose justification of moral righteousness, performed with false humility.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  EA is about applying well-established social science to the problem of getting the most bang for the buck in charity. There's nothing else to it, and it's not "extremist" unless you hold that charity itself is extremist.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    That's sort of begging the argument proposed upthread. This is the standard line about EA, but it has clearly led some people --- people important to the movement, to "institutional" EA --- to some weird, dark places. And those dark ideas are in a sense dicta to parts of the wider EA community.
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      "EA" didn't do this. The EA-pursuing community in particular places may well be deeply flawed in all sorts of ways, but this has no bearing on the validity of EA principles more broadly.
      - tptacek 4y ago
        Then, if it helps you, just mentally substitute "EA-pursuing community" for "EA" in these discussions.
        onos 4y ago
        I would accept the theme if you used “many of those claiming to follow EA”. But you don’t, you say “EA”. It’s on you to make your statements accurate.
HideousKojima 4y ago
Especially strange since Peter Singer supports infanticide: "You have been quoted as saying: "Killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all." Is that quote accurate?" "I did write that, in the 1979 edition of Practical Ethics. Today the term “defective infant” is considered offensive, and I no longer use it, but it was standard usage then. The quote is misleading if read without an understanding of what I mean by the term “person” (which is discussed in Practical Ethics). I use the term "person" to refer to a being who is capable of anticipating the future, of having wants and desires for the future. As I have said in answer to the previous question, I think that it is generally a greater wrong to kill such a being than it is to kill a being that has no sense of existing over time. Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living. That doesn’t mean that it is not almost always a terrible thing to do. It is, but that is because most infants are loved and cherished by their parents, and to kill an infant is usually to do a great wrong to her or his parents." "Sometimes, perhaps because the baby has a serious disability, parents think it better that their newborn infant should die. Many doctors will accept their wishes, to the extent of not giving the baby life-supporting medical treatment. That will often ensure that the baby dies. My view is different from this, but only to the extent that if a decision is taken, by the parents and doctors, that it is better that a baby should die, I believe it should be possible to carry out that decision, not only by withholding or withdrawing life-support — which can lead to the baby dying slowly from dehydration or from an infection — but also by taking active steps to end the baby’s life swiftly and humanely."
- the-printer 4y ago
  It’s always interesting to watch people wantonly spin up new definitions of things as quick as you could deploy a Docker container to justify their queer and inhumane philosophies.
rcoveson 4y ago
I've read the Bible. It is mostly not about "teachings of Love and Kindness". It's mostly about faith in and obedience to God. The fundamentals of Christianity are bad. The fundamentals of EA are good. You can't assess a philosphy by its worst adherents. However, you could attempt to quantify the net good/bad done by its adherents and make an argument about the effect the philosophy has on human personality. But then you'd be doing science and statistics in pursuit of understanding how to make humanity the best it can be, and you'd find yourself in trouble: You don't want to be associated with EA, but they keep emailing you to hear about your findings. :) Earning to Give is to EA like Copyleft is to Free Software. It's on the more radical side of the philosphy, and it definitely leads to some internal contradictions. It is, at times, contentious within the movement. There are a lot of people who care more about harm minimization who may oppose Copyleft and Earning to Give, and there are people who are more focused on net-good-maximization who may argue in favor of both. There's no getting around those arguments because there's no getting around complexity when it comes to broad new philosophies.
- ElevenLathe 4y ago
  Not to sidestep the discussion because of your metaphor, but I just don't understand it. What Free Software is there that doesn't rely on copyleft? Just public domain stuff? If so, you're talking about such a fringe part of the Free Software movement that it basically doesn't exist except by accident (when people forget to license their software) and is even more extreme than RMS, who is usually considered the absolute far "left" of Free Software as a movement. Is that really the analogy you're trying to draw with Earning to Give?
  - leereeves 4y ago
    Copyleft is the requirement that derivative works carry the same license ("share-alike"). There's a lot of Free Software that doesn't have that requirement.
    - ElevenLathe 4y ago
      Can you name one? A sibling comment says the MIT license is one, but that requires derivative works to include the license, so it seems also to be copyleft under this definition. What is the point of releasing software with a license that says you can strip the license off of it and do whatever you want? This is effectively the same as releasing it to the public domain.

gonehome 4y ago

It's a little different - I don't personally identify as part of the EA movement because of the associated baggage, but the ideas around trying to do the most good, extending empathy beyond kin/culture to other people suffering that you cannot see, and reasoning about the effectiveness of charity make sense to me. Without getting into a flame war not fit for HN, the same cannot be said for the supernatural foundations and epistemic claims of religions - the foundational ideas of EA are not the problem in this case. I think Sam Harris breaks it down decently here: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/303-the-fall-of-sam-bankman-fried https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/303... though that's a little out of date with how fast news on the topic is moving. It's also another reminder why it's good to keep your identity small [0] and deal with the ideas directly. Said another way: "Go three-quarters of the way from deontology to utilitarianism and then stop. You are now in the right place. Stay there at least until you have become a god."[1] [0]: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html [1]: https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1497157447219232768?s=20&t=7fULq3NXML7gb2O4OMpGjA https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1497157447219232768?s...

eddsh1994 4y ago

There is a lot of conversation internally. You can see these debates here [0]. The guy credited with who got SBF into EA wrote a post [1] which was also debated heavily in the comments. A good introduction, or at least my introduction, was by the same guy's debate [2] which I recommend if people are interested in EA outside of the current media storm. [0] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/ https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/ [1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WdeiPrwgqW2wHAxgT/a-personal-statement-on-ftx https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WdeiPrwgqW2wHAxgT/... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qslo4-DpzPs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qslo4-DpzPs

Aunche 4y ago

The difference is that EA is nothing like religious fundamentalism. No one is pressuring you to work in HFT or donate to AI risk if you don't want to.

ben_w 4y ago
You say that, but I literally just listend to a podcast of someone talking about their efforts to convince people to work on AI risk.
- Aunche 4y ago
  So they're a bad person because they are trying to convince people to allocate their resources in a way that you think is sub-optimal? By that logic, most of the people on HN are bad people because they work at ad-tech companies.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    ? I didn’t say “bad”. But they are trying to convince people to work in AI risk who otherwise wouldn’t have chosen to. Pressure? Perhaps not. But then again, pressure can be an irregular verb: “I encourage, you persuade, he pressures” ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation

boxed 4y ago

This is why you need to do what the Catholic Church does: - Own your name - Excommunicate those who claim to be of your movement that you don't like Otherwise you will lose control over the term you invented and it goes to hell. Witness Buddhism (Pure Land is basically anti-buddhism), Christianity (where to even begin with all the splitting?), Islam (two big sects trying to murder eachother), communism (pol pot, mao, stalin). Protect your brand or see your name be dragged through the mud.

zozbot234 4y ago
Pure Land simply preserves the tradition of what Buddhism was like prior to the Western-influenced revitalization of it in the 19th century. It's the closest analog to the Catholic church with its long history, whereas what most people think of as Buddhism is relatively recent.
- boxed 4y ago
  Pure Land rejects lots of stuff in the tripitaka. It's clearly BS. Replacing all of Buddhas teaching with "some god will save you if you say these magic words" is very similar to how the Catholic Church rejected the teachings of Jesus with indulgences. "Never mind what Jesus said, pay us some money and you'll go to heaven even if you're a mass murderer". Pure land is basically the same type of crazy.
tptacek 4y ago
Just for what it's worth: it's a lot easier to get excommunicated from EA than from the Catholic Church, where it is more or less impossible to accomplish that. I think this comes up a lot because Catholics "own" the term "excommunication", but if you've got the sense that it's an ordinary thing that happens in the church, well, no. Sinéad O'Connor had to beg for it, and still didn't get it. (Has anyone in the world ever been as thoroughly vindicated as Sinéad, though?)
- boxed 4y ago
  The threat and the ownership of the trademark is the point though.

jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago

I've said this in most threads on this topic but will keep repeating it: EA functionally matches the exact same patterns I grew up around among evangelical extremists. It's an all purpose justification of moral righteousness, performed with false humility.

zozbot234 4y ago
EA is about applying well-established social science to the problem of getting the most bang for the buck in charity. There's nothing else to it, and it's not "extremist" unless you hold that charity itself is extremist.
- tptacek 4y ago
  That's sort of begging the argument proposed upthread. This is the standard line about EA, but it has clearly led some people --- people important to the movement, to "institutional" EA --- to some weird, dark places. And those dark ideas are in a sense dicta to parts of the wider EA community.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    "EA" didn't do this. The EA-pursuing community in particular places may well be deeply flawed in all sorts of ways, but this has no bearing on the validity of EA principles more broadly.
    - tptacek 4y ago
      Then, if it helps you, just mentally substitute "EA-pursuing community" for "EA" in these discussions.
      - onos 4y ago
        I would accept the theme if you used “many of those claiming to follow EA”. But you don’t, you say “EA”. It’s on you to make your statements accurate.

HideousKojima 4y ago

Especially strange since Peter Singer supports infanticide: "You have been quoted as saying: "Killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all." Is that quote accurate?" "I did write that, in the 1979 edition of Practical Ethics. Today the term “defective infant” is considered offensive, and I no longer use it, but it was standard usage then. The quote is misleading if read without an understanding of what I mean by the term “person” (which is discussed in Practical Ethics). I use the term "person" to refer to a being who is capable of anticipating the future, of having wants and desires for the future. As I have said in answer to the previous question, I think that it is generally a greater wrong to kill such a being than it is to kill a being that has no sense of existing over time. Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living. That doesn’t mean that it is not almost always a terrible thing to do. It is, but that is because most infants are loved and cherished by their parents, and to kill an infant is usually to do a great wrong to her or his parents." "Sometimes, perhaps because the baby has a serious disability, parents think it better that their newborn infant should die. Many doctors will accept their wishes, to the extent of not giving the baby life-supporting medical treatment. That will often ensure that the baby dies. My view is different from this, but only to the extent that if a decision is taken, by the parents and doctors, that it is better that a baby should die, I believe it should be possible to carry out that decision, not only by withholding or withdrawing life-support — which can lead to the baby dying slowly from dehydration or from an infection — but also by taking active steps to end the baby’s life swiftly and humanely."

the-printer 4y ago
It’s always interesting to watch people wantonly spin up new definitions of things as quick as you could deploy a Docker container to justify their queer and inhumane philosophies.

rcoveson 4y ago

I've read the Bible. It is mostly not about "teachings of Love and Kindness". It's mostly about faith in and obedience to God. The fundamentals of Christianity are bad. The fundamentals of EA are good. You can't assess a philosphy by its worst adherents. However, you could attempt to quantify the net good/bad done by its adherents and make an argument about the effect the philosophy has on human personality. But then you'd be doing science and statistics in pursuit of understanding how to make humanity the best it can be, and you'd find yourself in trouble: You don't want to be associated with EA, but they keep emailing you to hear about your findings. :) Earning to Give is to EA like Copyleft is to Free Software. It's on the more radical side of the philosphy, and it definitely leads to some internal contradictions. It is, at times, contentious within the movement. There are a lot of people who care more about harm minimization who may oppose Copyleft and Earning to Give, and there are people who are more focused on net-good-maximization who may argue in favor of both. There's no getting around those arguments because there's no getting around complexity when it comes to broad new philosophies.

ElevenLathe 4y ago
Not to sidestep the discussion because of your metaphor, but I just don't understand it. What Free Software is there that doesn't rely on copyleft? Just public domain stuff? If so, you're talking about such a fringe part of the Free Software movement that it basically doesn't exist except by accident (when people forget to license their software) and is even more extreme than RMS, who is usually considered the absolute far "left" of Free Software as a movement. Is that really the analogy you're trying to draw with Earning to Give?
- leereeves 4y ago
  Copyleft is the requirement that derivative works carry the same license ("share-alike"). There's a lot of Free Software that doesn't have that requirement.
  - ElevenLathe 4y ago
    Can you name one? A sibling comment says the MIT license is one, but that requires derivative works to include the license, so it seems also to be copyleft under this definition. What is the point of releasing software with a license that says you can strip the license off of it and do whatever you want? This is effectively the same as releasing it to the public domain.