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> Earning to give. This is exactly the kind of "baby with the bathwater" thing that bothers me - when I hear "earning to give" I don't think of SBF, or LessWro

> Earning to give. This is exactly the kind of "baby with the bathwater" thing that bothers me - when I hear "earning to give" I don't think of SBF, or LessWrong, or even Slate Star Codex - I think of Peter Singer, or Will McAskill. The "philosophical" angle is where I first encountered the concept, not the dumb "rationalist" stuff about how preventing AI apocalypse now counts as charity to all the projected lives across the recovered future of humanity. And I get it, it's not necessarily fair or accurate to separate those two origins when they've become so intertwined, but I share your concern about a genuinely good, righteous core idea getting tossed out because one public figure who espoused it turned out to be a crook. (Or because an army of weird nerds on LessWrong does a bunch of mystical fantasy "utilitarian math" on their weird little forum).

davidgerard 3y ago
There's a lot to Singer's basic idea, I concur. There's not to MacAskill's - he's loudly and explicitly into 10^54 hypothetical emulated future humans over anyone alive and needing help now. And fundamentally, you can't get away from the EAs being the guys who spent the charity money on not one, but two castles. Every atrocity in history was justified as being for the greater good.
jowea 3y ago
> This is exactly the kind of "baby with the bathwater" thing that bothers me - when I hear "earning to give" I don't think of SBF, or LessWrong, or even Slate Star Codex - I think of Peter Singer, or Will McAskill. The "philosophical" angle is where I first encountered the concept, not the dumb "rationalist" stuff about how preventing AI apocalypse now counts as charity to all the projected lives across the recovered future of humanity. I feel a lot of us here in this thread heard about this stuff before, but I get the impression EA became famous because of Bankman-Fried, so yeah. As for specifically earning to give, yeah it also has defensible roots. But the idea of doing anything that pays a lot of money, even if it's something whose contribution to society is not very good or even negative, can easily go wrong in my opinion. And let's get real here, how many people will actually give the money after they get rich or get a high income and not change their attitude or fall into the hedonistic treadmill? Even for the people who are genuine about earning to give and not just using it as cover for proudly pursing their own material wealth and buying some Caribbean real estate?

davidgerard 3y ago

There's a lot to Singer's basic idea, I concur. There's not to MacAskill's - he's loudly and explicitly into 10^54 hypothetical emulated future humans over anyone alive and needing help now. And fundamentally, you can't get away from the EAs being the guys who spent the charity money on not one, but two castles. Every atrocity in history was justified as being for the greater good.

jowea 3y ago

> This is exactly the kind of "baby with the bathwater" thing that bothers me - when I hear "earning to give" I don't think of SBF, or LessWrong, or even Slate Star Codex - I think of Peter Singer, or Will McAskill. The "philosophical" angle is where I first encountered the concept, not the dumb "rationalist" stuff about how preventing AI apocalypse now counts as charity to all the projected lives across the recovered future of humanity. I feel a lot of us here in this thread heard about this stuff before, but I get the impression EA became famous because of Bankman-Fried, so yeah. As for specifically earning to give, yeah it also has defensible roots. But the idea of doing anything that pays a lot of money, even if it's something whose contribution to society is not very good or even negative, can easily go wrong in my opinion. And let's get real here, how many people will actually give the money after they get rich or get a high income and not change their attitude or fall into the hedonistic treadmill? Even for the people who are genuine about earning to give and not just using it as cover for proudly pursing their own material wealth and buying some Caribbean real estate?