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Sam Bankman-Fried and the effective altruism delusion

98 points by ironyman 3y ago

bitcurious 3y ago
This “expected value” way of thinking about income and philanthropy was inherently flawed - it didn’t take into account the risk of preference shifting. If you do good now to do good later, and later you change your mind, you’ve still done good. If you smear shit now to do good later, and later you change your mind, you’re just left with a lot of smeared shit. What are the odds of a 50 year old having the same moral framework that they did when planning their future at 20? I rank it as rather low by default, not factoring in the corrupting influence of mega-wealth, or the road taken to achieving it.
- tech_ken 3y ago
  I think that the problem is even deeper, the idea of an actual concrete "universal expected moral utility" seems so shaky to me. I appreciate utilitarianism, and think it provides important and useful guidance, but the EA approach takes it way too literally. If you're trying to decide whether to fund research of vaccine A or vaccine B, sure the outcome variable is clearly well defined, but if you're talking about the sum total human happiness 100+ years down the line....I mean the error bars on that are so wide any honest error propagation is going to render your conclusions useless. It's the same grift as prosperity gospel stuff: provide tissue thin justification for its rich participants to feel good about the horrible things they do to get rich.
  - kwhitefoot 3y ago
    > .I mean the error bars on that are so wide any honest error propagation is going to render your conclusions useless. Are any of the leading players in the movement scientists of any kind? I have worked with many people who while being obviously very smart, including engineers of many kinds and software developers, who don't have any idea about errors and compounding of errors. When I studied physics in the mid-70s a compulsory feature of every experimental report was the expected error in the result which had to be justified with reference to the expected errors in all of the measurement equipment and any other sources of error. When I got into industry this discipline seemed to be pretty much absent. In my 40 year career in electronic and electrical engineering I don't think I ever saw an engineer include any information on the expected error of a set of measurements even though most were familiar with the concepts of statistical curve fitting and so on. They were not much better than social scientists and would plot the results of an experiment in Excel, click the button to get a polynomial fit and accept the coefficients as gospel totally disregarding the R value. And most of them didn't care that the polynomial form wasn't even applicable to the data.
    - tech_ken 3y ago
      Don't even get me started on error bar usage in industry. I've seen Big 3 consultants charge several 0s for a regression analysis that I would give a C+ in a first year grad stats course. I can't imagine how any of EA's guiding lights could have used stats in a practical application and still want to hold it as the foundation of their entire moral outlook.
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    Like the assumption that maximizing something is "good", even QALYs...
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  Was there never any serious discussion about preferences shifting as they age? I had always assumed there was, and the issues were addressed, for there to be so much confidence in that 'plan'.
- user3939382 3y ago
  The Catholic church has an explicit teaching on this, which is, "you may not do evil so that good may come from it." Suggesting, as many already know/suspect, that ends vs means is a pretty classic philosophical question.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    This is one of the values of religion. Whether you believe in an omniscient man in the clouds or not, the practical day-to-day rules to live by gives people answers to these sorts of philosophical questions. This saves them the trouble, anxiety, and self-doubt that come from trying to work out the "best" answer for themselves.
    - fatherzine 3y ago
      FWIW, 'omniscient man in the clouds' is a strawman built by its enemies.
      - BobaFloutist 3y ago
        ...it is?
      - syedkarim 3y ago
        Are you saying that Christianity and Islam don’t require the belief in a supernatural being?
        coldtea 3y ago
        In practice they never did. Their utility (for good or bad) came from being widespread moral frameworks, shared by an entire society, that you were taught to respect from birth, plus that fact that they weren't up for debate, except through very slow processes.
        soco 3y ago
        Just for the sake of debating I wanted to add that the entire basis for not debating those facts is because they belonged to a dangerous being in the clouds. Not saying that they should have been debated more, nor less, just that pretty much all societies based their moral codes on very scary supernatural being(s). Maybe because only fear makes humans collaborate in good times - thus basically turning the "good times" into a permanent "dangerous times"...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > What are the odds of a 50 year old having the same moral framework that they did when planning their future at 20? I'm older than 50 now, and I have certainly changed from when I was 20. I'm much more inclined (and able) to engage in philanthropic activities now than then.
- civilized 3y ago
  I'm sure this will be analyzed a lot from many legitimate different perspectives, but IMO the root fallacy here is the fetish for quantification. Sam said he would take a bet with a 50-50 chance of ending the world or making it "twice as good". The meaning of ending the world is obvious, but does it mean to make the world twice as good?
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    The message I got from his answer to that question was that he didn't see an ethical problem with the idea the he has the right to put everyone else at extreme risk.
  - bbatha 3y ago
    Its also just bad understanding of probability. Making bets to end the world isn't a one time deal, its an obvious repeated game. You don't just need to win one 50-50 bet, humanity needs to win all of them which approaches 0 probability.
    - ble 3y ago
      The focus on "rational" value maximization on individual bets is doubly blind: - First, you and I might have different utility functions which are based on valuing outcomes differently; if utility functions are different, there may not be a single "most rational" choice - Second, a single bet is a single bet, but investing in a company or following a specific policy is more like staking a gambler to make a sequence of bets.
janmo 3y ago
The original idea of EA was to convince students to take "immoral" but good paying jobs on Wallstreet in order to donate the earned money to charities (Mainly charities owned by other effective altruists). EA is thus an excuse / incitation to commit immoral and in SBF's and his co-conspirators case illegal things.
- codq 3y ago
  Yes, it's a way of excusing lifestyles of luxury via immoral causes. The modern equivalent of paying indulgences to the Catholic Church; the wealthly have always sought ways of justifying the grotesqueries of their lifestyles. Indeed for many, it's the primary labor of their lives.
  - user3939382 3y ago
    > equivalent of paying indulgences Only approximately. Indulgences were used as a penance which was only possible on the precondition of true contrition. There is no such contrition in the philosophy of EA.
    - MadnessASAP 3y ago
      I don't know much about EA other then it sounds like a way for the rich to justify their existence. Indulgences however they may have started, became grossly twisted and simplified until it was giving money to the church in exchange for absolving sins.
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  Karl Marx: There is this thing in modernity called “alienation”... EA: How wonderful! It shall be our moral centerpiece.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  > The original idea of EA was to convince students to take "immoral" but good paying jobs on Wallstreet No, this isn't the original idea. It's one that came up when people started trying to combine utilitarianism and arithmetic with the actual original idea: to ask the question "How can I do the most good in the world?"
Waterluvian 3y ago
What is "Effective Altruism" but a sexy re-branding of the principles and behaviours that religions and other cultural vessels have attempted to imbue in people for thousands of years now? If your goal is truly to do good, it's really not that hard. If your goal is to feel good, that usually requires these kinds of wrappers, and with them will come the charlatans that sense opportunity in exploiting your insecurities.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  This is not fair to the core idea of EA. There are LOTS of ways to do good in the world, and sure, religion and various other cultural vessels encourage us to pursue them. The original idea behind EA was to provide a way to choose between different ways of doing good. The fact that you wanted to and were going to "do good" was assumed.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Religion really does not focus on maximizing good at all. They are overwhelmingly kantian, focusing more on rules that keep your community strong whereas EA has a much larger focus on causes outside your community.
gizmo 3y ago
> [Effective Altruism] is self-righteous in the most literal sense. Effective altruism as distinct from what? Well, all of the rest of us, presumably—the ineffective and un-altruistic, we who either do not care about other human beings or are practicing our compassion incorrectly. > We all tend to presume our own moral positions are the right ones, but the person who brands themselves an Effective Altruist goes so far as to adopt “being better than other people” as an identity. Those are the opening paragraphs from a much better article on the same subject: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/09/defective-altruism https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/09/defective-altruism Where this article meekly claims that "utilitarian calculations can be co-opted to justify extremely weird and potentially harmful positions" Nathan J Robinson correctly skewers the very fundamentals of utilitarianism: > Patching up utilitarianism with a bunch of moral nonnegotiables is what everyone ends up having to do unless they want to sound like a maniac, as Peter Singer does with his appalling utilitarian takes on disability. (“It’s not true that I think that disabled infants ought to be killed. I think the parents ought to have that option.”) As Robinson observes, the EA movement’s intellectual core is so poisoned by bad philosophy as to be unsalvageable.
- bambax 3y ago
  > Effective altruism as distinct from what? Well, all of the rest of us, presumably—the ineffective and un-altruistic That's exactly right. All those ineffective doctors risking their lives being parachuted in the jungle or working in war zones, they're losers! And the bankers in their private jets, those are the altruists! EA is a thought experiment in putting morals upside-down. It's ridiculous; what's fascinating is that it almost worked. We have to thank SBF for having shown the world what EA actually is. A sinister joke.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    SBF also has very publicly very strange set of ideals. He believed that almost any amount of risk is good as long as he can convince himself that it’s somehow “morally net positive”
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    I mean, when the concept of "effective altruism" first came onto my radar, when GiveWell came onto the scene, it was very clear what it meant to be distinct from: charities that use barely any of the funds they raise on their core charitable work. Those charities were "altruistic", but also ineffective, so the idea was, let's keep the altruism, but improve the effectiveness. This was then and still is a very good idea! But then it's like that good but humble mission wasn't enough for a lot of the people interested in this, and they (in my view) sort of disappeared into a black hole of inscrutable philosophizing.
kr0bat 3y ago
I think the QALY criticism grazes the real fundamental problem with EA. You can't really quantify "good" good enough to create a meaningful measure. Being alive is better than being dead (in almost all cases). Being sighted is better than being blind. But is losing an arm objectively worse than losing a leg? Who has it worse, a gay man in a seriously homophobic country or a woman in a severely misogynistic country? Sure, donating money to an animal you find cute may not be the best use of money, objectively. But maybe it's better to be openly subjective, lest we end up codifying our own subjective beliefs.
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  I think there is no shortage of objective ways to do good. If we skip over those, seeking the more subjective ways, it is probably in service to one's self, not to the goal of doing good.
  - cma 3y ago
    They bought two effective altruist castles because they said the ambiance would help their thinkers and spruce up their conferences.
    - metalcrow 3y ago
      Citation needed. From what i know, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-left-kidney https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-left-kidney says "conference venues kept ripping them off, having a nice venue of their own would be cheaper in the long run, and after looking at many options, the “castle” was the cheapest". Zero mention of ambiance and improving thinking.
      - kawhah 3y ago
        your attitude to citations seems strange. Scott Anderson simply says, as part of a rant against anti-EA people, that the EA people said that they bought a castle for the right reasons, and that he chooses to believe them.
      - 3y ago
JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
I always find that those who follow this effective altruism thing are very big on abstract thought. It is accepted that philantropy is not 100% altruistic, leave it alone the tax deductions and tax shelter schemes but as a practice it's done to virtue signal or to feel like we are doing something meaningful or that we are changing people's lives. Effective altruists find pleasure in the numbers turning around on a big scale and being celebrated as a philantropist, perhaps the Nobel Peace Prize? All stuff that would stimulate an abstract mind. The opposite of an abstract mind is a mind that is in deep connection with the body and the 5 senses such mind knows that there is no way you can hug and see the change upon the faces many millions of people, whereas if you do good now you can hug the person you are helping right now and you can also see the change upon their faces instantly and you can appreciate it as opposed to seeing them as a number 30 years down the road.
- krisoft 3y ago
  > I always find that those who follow this effective altruism thing are very big on abstract thought. That is probably true. > The opposite of an abstract mind is a mind that is in deep connection with the body and the 5 senses such mind knows that there is no way you can hug and see the change upon the faces many millions of people Ok? And turns out what feels right to do and what is right to do is not always the same thing. Imagine you are living in a medieval city ravaged by waterborne diseases. You can spend your time running around nursing the sick, cooking them soup, hoping that they recover. Or you can use the same energy to design a water treatment plant / sewer / aquaduct and prevent the spread of the disease in the first place. One feels good, you are helping humans in their hour of need. Some die, but spend their last days in a bit more comfort due to your ministrations. Some recover. Hopefully more than would have recovered without your nursing. The other is literal shit pumping. It does not feel good at all. And yet, we know that sanitary infrastructure is the key to the health of a city. You can cure max like a few hundred per week by nursing. But with a water treatment plant you can prevent illness in millions and millions. Will you able to hug them and see change upon the face of them? No, probably they won't even know who you are, or that you helped them not being sick.
  - 3y ago
jonathankoren 3y ago
Sure, EA has good goals, and even has a good philosophy. Lots of cheap mosquito nets preventing more malaria and dengue fever than more expensive options has become a modern day parable for good reason. But, SBF and his ilk fall into the old habit of almost everyone when they get power and money. “Not now, but soon.” For someone big into altruism, I’m unaware of any philanthropy he did. Oh, he invested in companies to make himself richer, but that’s not the same. It’s the same with all the billionaires and their “giving pledges”. “Not now, but soon.” And then of course they set of a foundation that pays their kids seven figures a year forever while occasionally throwing a ball for boneitis or naming something after themselves. Best of all is when the altruism reveals them to be just engaging in their own hobbies. Like Marvel’s Sauron said, “But I don’t want to cure cancer! I want to turn people into dinosaurs!” Or as Jeff Bezos put it, "The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it." It’s just cover for personal greed. But soon. Soon. Just be patient.
- rqtwteye 3y ago
  Well said. And of course they still want to stay super rich.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  Depending on your definition of philanthropy, SBF actually did a substantial amount of it. The problem he was doing it with other people's money.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- henryaj 3y ago
  > It’s the same with all the billionaires and their “giving pledges”. “Not now, but soon.” Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have both given away more than $50bn each. Not pledged - actually donated.
  - 3y ago
bambax 3y ago
> Ord had pledged to give away all his earnings above £20,000. MacAskill followed suit. I don't even know what that means. A pledge is like a terrible version of a futures contract: a nonenforceable one. The pledger gets the benefits of PR immediately, with a vague promise to do something in the future; why do we even pay attention to this?
- henryaj 3y ago
  Because they have, in fact, given away much of their income. Thousands of people have taken the Giving What We Can Pledge. I suppose they could all be lying but it seems unlikely. (Happy to send you my donation receipts if you like.) Also, the Founder's Pledge (in which entrepreneurs commit a portion of their future proceeds from an exit) is legally-binding.
  - bambax 3y ago
    Why would anyone advertise the good they're doing? I become extremely suspicious in the presence of such individuals.
    - styxfrix 3y ago
      [dead]
    - HDThoreaun 3y ago
      To put pressure on others to also do good.
losteric 3y ago
There is a need to decouple "Effective Altruism (TM)" the culty organization, from the underlying ideas of effective altruism. Personally, I'd describe the core as donate regularly, and donate with your brain not your heart - consider the ROI, and reflect on how personal income is otherwise being spent to decide a recurring donation amount. At the same time, imo there's no need to go 100% utilitarian and overoptimize, overthink, or blindly trust someone else's QlYs calculations... Perfection is the enemy of good enough. I read one of the EA books, did my own research over a few days to pick my causes, and now just do a yearly review after every tax season. I'm happy with it. Never even read a tweet from William or the fancy organization. Some examples lines of thought * kids with cancer feels very bad/sad, but still maybe rethink donating to the organization with $7B in the bank and $2B in yearly income that just saves the ~8,000 easiest cases (St Jude)... * perhaps consider non-charitable donations to political organizations, given the impact of government policies. * When donating to research, consider the time discount and uncertainty. The research might save more in the future if it pans out, but it might not and you might be dead before any gains. Some people can be saved today.
- deleted 3y ago
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- tech_ken 3y ago
  > And perhaps consider non-charitable donations to political organizations, given the impact of government policies. This part gets wayyyyy underplayed in EA [0]. So many charities and nonprofits exist to resolve problems that are the result of policy decisions, and ceding that ground by focusing entirely on which to donate too is a losing battle from the start. For example, people being unable to afford life-saving medical care shouldn't be something that religious-affiliate groups even need to exist to resolve, it's a problem with how we've structured our economy overall. [0] edit: or not, see comment below!
  - civilitty 3y ago
    People also significantly overestimate the amount of money required to make an impact. If it’s not a contentious issue like abortion, a little money to send some advocates (not expensive lobbyists but nonprofit volunteers) to DC or state capitols several times to regularly press the flesh with representatives goes a long way. People have just gotten too cynical thanks to the culture wars and partisanship.
RedCondor 3y ago
[dead]
stephc_int13 3y ago
SBF is and I think always has ben a con artist, masquerading as a clumsy nerd genius and using the EA trend was a coup de maître, but this is beside the point. Really effective altruism should not focus on money or medicine, but on power. Power imbalance is and always has been the main culprit behind all other kind of inequalities. But there is an issue, contrary to money/wealth, power is zero sum, and is much less fungible. Charity does not work with power, quite the opposite in practice.
lainga 3y ago
Can anyone please explain to me what the train of thought was from effective altruism (of which I choose to know very little) to a "bunker/shelter" in Nauru? [] [] https://observer.com/2023/07/who-was-invited-sam-bankman-fried-doomsday-bunker/ https://observer.com/2023/07/who-was-invited-sam-bankman-fri...
- roywiggins 3y ago
  I had something long typed out, but it's basically their attempt to do "Foundation."[0] It's important for EA to survive the apocalypse, so that in any possible future, EA will be around to shepherd humanity to its apotheosis. In this view, even an apocalypse is only a speedbump as long as EA survives it. They're looking toward a million years in the future where we've colonized the galaxy as trillions of machine intelligences or whatever. It's fine for 99% of humanity to be wiped out tomorrow as long as an order of Hari Seldon-mathematician-kings can keep humanity steered toward that future. When you're humanity's best hope for transcending Earth and achieving techno-godhood, the best money you can spend is on yourself. See? Altruism. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series
  - suzzer99 3y ago
    I imagine Pol Pot had similar justifications for his agrarian utopia.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      It's 100% the sort of thinking that can easily justify atrocities today in the service of achieving nirvana tomorrow. Very nearly everyone, even truly evil people, think of themselves as good. "You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet" can help to maintain the illusion.
Aunche 3y ago
Despite SBF, I still am a proponent of effective altruism overall. You just have to be obsessed performing your own due diligence because there isn't aren't any market forces that compel you to do so. For example, I think GiveWell is good example of this. On the other hand, the analysis that spending money on AI risk has functionally infinite value is obviously absurd. Imagine pitching to investors that your AGI startup will have a functionally infinite market cap when humans become an intergalactic species.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  Frankly, any moral or philosophical stance that is predicated on "imagining pitching to investors" makes me sick to my stomach.
  - Aunche 3y ago
    In this context, the "pitching" would be done by government officials and charities, and the "investors" would be regular voters and donors.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      Have we just invented charitable giving and democracies?
      - Aunche 3y ago
        The problem is that people are giving and voting based on their feelings rather than trying to understand the impacts of these things. IMO, the reason why corporations win over the people is that they actually bother to do this due diligence. I'm sure that Pfizer made sure that their lobbyists were doing a good job ensuring that the CARE act would favorable to them. On the other hand, housing first advocates have been cheering for wasteful projects like $1.7 million public toilets until tabloids started pointing out how ridiculous it was.
        3y ago
dartos 3y ago
I never heard of effective altruism before the whole SBF trial. Can someone fill me in / point me to somewhere with some historical context?
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  TFA is as good a place to start as any.
- timerol 3y ago
  Wikipedia is unsurprisingly pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism I feel that this summary is useful as a history of the movement. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XTBGAWAXR25atu39P/third-wave-effective-altruism https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XTBGAWAXR25atu39P/... I stopped identifying with the movement around the start of the second wave. I went from "EA is cool and great and you should read about it and donate to help save lives" to "EA has had some cool ideas but is now mostly focused with weird probability math that siphons money away from it's mission of saving lives", but I digress.
- waveBidder 3y ago
  https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/ https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/ https://80000hours.org/ https://80000hours.org/ https://www.givewell.org/ https://www.givewell.org/
- callalex 3y ago
  This podcast by Robert Evans (of Behind the Bastards fame) covers the history and thinking of the movement pretty well. https://omny.fm/shows/it-could-happen-here/the-effective-altruism-scam https://omny.fm/shows/it-could-happen-here/the-effective-alt...
photochemsyn 3y ago
Instead of bringing 'altruism' into socioeconomic decision-making, we should instead eliminate the concept of 'externalities' from the process. If investors and corporations were forced to subtract the very real costs of 'externalities' from their bottom lines, this alone would lead to changes in behavior. E.g. fossil fuel externalities included widespread air and water pollution as well as the steady planetary warming trend. Ensuring those costs were born by both fossil fuel producers and users would encourage a transition to renewable energy. Yes, there are externalities involved in PV panel and wind turbine and battery manufacturing, but these costs are much, much lower than those associated with fossil fuel production and use. Effective altruism was never much more than a fig leaf for an economic system that has tended to privatize the profits while socializing much of the costs via the fiction of externalities.
metalcrow 3y ago
For anyone interested in charity or doing good, and this is your first time hearing about EA, i recommend you check out some of the major resources at https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/ https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/ or https://80000hours.org/ https://80000hours.org/. You have an opportunity in your life to alleviate massive suffering and change lives, you shouldn't let negative publicity sway you from doing good things. EA is all about doing the most good you can, and thinking about how to do it, instead of just guessing or following fleeting emotional moments.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Yes, but you have to recognize that it matters that this movement traced this path to being almost entirely associated with a scammer and an obsession with artificial intelligence, blowing right past its (IMO) more grounded and useful focus on improving conditions for presently-existing life. What I mean is: you can't simply ignore that outcome when evaluating the principles, because people followed those principles to this (in my opinion) bad outcome.
  - metalcrow 3y ago
    I wouldn't say that the movement was entirely associated with him at all! He donated to a lot of EA organizations, sure, but Bernie Madoff donated to a lot of Jewish charities yet that doesn't cause Judaism to be associated with scam artists. Now the complaint that EA influenced SBF to do the bad things that he did, that's a much more valid complaint about the principles. But i think that's just a coincidental association, rather then a causal one. Nowhere does EA suggest doing short term bad things in exchange for long term good things. It suggests "earning to give", but that's not at all why SBF is considered a bad person. He stole money and committed fraud, plain and simple. EA has advocated against that in the past, and continues to. The most you can say about EA imo is that it's concern about alleviating large scale suffering allowed SBF to internally justify doing bad things in exchange for doing a lot of future good. And sure, if your message is corruptible easily that's a problem with your message. But there is literally always going to be people mis-interpreting your message, or worse yet people intentionally using your message as cover while knowing full well they are disobeying it. That happens with social justice movements, leftist movement, rightist movements, literally any message ever has had this problem. It's a problem that should have lessons learned from it, but if it invalidated the movement i don't think there is a single valid movement left on earth.
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
The delusion is simply in not realizing logical reasoning follows a log normal.
wilburTheDog 3y ago
So SBF is a con-man who realized that it's easy to scam the EA community. All you need to do is learn their language and "pledge" to give away a lot of money. Then the donations will start pouring in. I guess it's not that different from any other in-group. If you're seen as a trusted member, others will give you the benefit of the doubt as far as they can.

98 points by ironyman 3y ago

This “expected value” way of thinking about income and philanthropy was inherently flawed - it didn’t take into account the risk of preference shifting. If you do good now to do good later, and later you change your mind, you’ve still done good. If you smear shit now to do good later, and later you change your mind, you’re just left with a lot of smeared shit. What are the odds of a 50 year old having the same moral framework that they did when planning their future at 20? I rank it as rather low by default, not factoring in the corrupting influence of mega-wealth, or the road taken to achieving it.

tech_ken 3y ago
I think that the problem is even deeper, the idea of an actual concrete "universal expected moral utility" seems so shaky to me. I appreciate utilitarianism, and think it provides important and useful guidance, but the EA approach takes it way too literally. If you're trying to decide whether to fund research of vaccine A or vaccine B, sure the outcome variable is clearly well defined, but if you're talking about the sum total human happiness 100+ years down the line....I mean the error bars on that are so wide any honest error propagation is going to render your conclusions useless. It's the same grift as prosperity gospel stuff: provide tissue thin justification for its rich participants to feel good about the horrible things they do to get rich.
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  > .I mean the error bars on that are so wide any honest error propagation is going to render your conclusions useless. Are any of the leading players in the movement scientists of any kind? I have worked with many people who while being obviously very smart, including engineers of many kinds and software developers, who don't have any idea about errors and compounding of errors. When I studied physics in the mid-70s a compulsory feature of every experimental report was the expected error in the result which had to be justified with reference to the expected errors in all of the measurement equipment and any other sources of error. When I got into industry this discipline seemed to be pretty much absent. In my 40 year career in electronic and electrical engineering I don't think I ever saw an engineer include any information on the expected error of a set of measurements even though most were familiar with the concepts of statistical curve fitting and so on. They were not much better than social scientists and would plot the results of an experiment in Excel, click the button to get a polynomial fit and accept the coefficients as gospel totally disregarding the R value. And most of them didn't care that the polynomial form wasn't even applicable to the data.
  - tech_ken 3y ago
    Don't even get me started on error bar usage in industry. I've seen Big 3 consultants charge several 0s for a regression analysis that I would give a C+ in a first year grad stats course. I can't imagine how any of EA's guiding lights could have used stats in a practical application and still want to hold it as the foundation of their entire moral outlook.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Like the assumption that maximizing something is "good", even QALYs...
MichaelZuo 3y ago
Was there never any serious discussion about preferences shifting as they age? I had always assumed there was, and the issues were addressed, for there to be so much confidence in that 'plan'.
user3939382 3y ago
The Catholic church has an explicit teaching on this, which is, "you may not do evil so that good may come from it." Suggesting, as many already know/suspect, that ends vs means is a pretty classic philosophical question.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  This is one of the values of religion. Whether you believe in an omniscient man in the clouds or not, the practical day-to-day rules to live by gives people answers to these sorts of philosophical questions. This saves them the trouble, anxiety, and self-doubt that come from trying to work out the "best" answer for themselves.
  - fatherzine 3y ago
    FWIW, 'omniscient man in the clouds' is a strawman built by its enemies.
    - BobaFloutist 3y ago
      ...it is?
    - syedkarim 3y ago
      Are you saying that Christianity and Islam don’t require the belief in a supernatural being?
      - coldtea 3y ago
        In practice they never did. Their utility (for good or bad) came from being widespread moral frameworks, shared by an entire society, that you were taught to respect from birth, plus that fact that they weren't up for debate, except through very slow processes.
        soco 3y ago
        Just for the sake of debating I wanted to add that the entire basis for not debating those facts is because they belonged to a dangerous being in the clouds. Not saying that they should have been debated more, nor less, just that pretty much all societies based their moral codes on very scary supernatural being(s). Maybe because only fear makes humans collaborate in good times - thus basically turning the "good times" into a permanent "dangerous times"...
deleted 3y ago
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JohnFen 3y ago
> What are the odds of a 50 year old having the same moral framework that they did when planning their future at 20? I'm older than 50 now, and I have certainly changed from when I was 20. I'm much more inclined (and able) to engage in philanthropic activities now than then.
civilized 3y ago
I'm sure this will be analyzed a lot from many legitimate different perspectives, but IMO the root fallacy here is the fetish for quantification. Sam said he would take a bet with a 50-50 chance of ending the world or making it "twice as good". The meaning of ending the world is obvious, but does it mean to make the world twice as good?
- JohnFen 3y ago
  The message I got from his answer to that question was that he didn't see an ethical problem with the idea the he has the right to put everyone else at extreme risk.
- bbatha 3y ago
  Its also just bad understanding of probability. Making bets to end the world isn't a one time deal, its an obvious repeated game. You don't just need to win one 50-50 bet, humanity needs to win all of them which approaches 0 probability.
  - ble 3y ago
    The focus on "rational" value maximization on individual bets is doubly blind: - First, you and I might have different utility functions which are based on valuing outcomes differently; if utility functions are different, there may not be a single "most rational" choice - Second, a single bet is a single bet, but investing in a company or following a specific policy is more like staking a gambler to make a sequence of bets.

janmo 3y ago

The original idea of EA was to convince students to take "immoral" but good paying jobs on Wallstreet in order to donate the earned money to charities (Mainly charities owned by other effective altruists). EA is thus an excuse / incitation to commit immoral and in SBF's and his co-conspirators case illegal things.

codq 3y ago
Yes, it's a way of excusing lifestyles of luxury via immoral causes. The modern equivalent of paying indulgences to the Catholic Church; the wealthly have always sought ways of justifying the grotesqueries of their lifestyles. Indeed for many, it's the primary labor of their lives.
- user3939382 3y ago
  > equivalent of paying indulgences Only approximately. Indulgences were used as a penance which was only possible on the precondition of true contrition. There is no such contrition in the philosophy of EA.
  - MadnessASAP 3y ago
    I don't know much about EA other then it sounds like a way for the rich to justify their existence. Indulgences however they may have started, became grossly twisted and simplified until it was giving money to the church in exchange for absolving sins.
avgcorrection 3y ago
Karl Marx: There is this thing in modernity called “alienation”... EA: How wonderful! It shall be our moral centerpiece.
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
> The original idea of EA was to convince students to take "immoral" but good paying jobs on Wallstreet No, this isn't the original idea. It's one that came up when people started trying to combine utilitarianism and arithmetic with the actual original idea: to ask the question "How can I do the most good in the world?"

Waterluvian 3y ago

What is "Effective Altruism" but a sexy re-branding of the principles and behaviours that religions and other cultural vessels have attempted to imbue in people for thousands of years now? If your goal is truly to do good, it's really not that hard. If your goal is to feel good, that usually requires these kinds of wrappers, and with them will come the charlatans that sense opportunity in exploiting your insecurities.

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
This is not fair to the core idea of EA. There are LOTS of ways to do good in the world, and sure, religion and various other cultural vessels encourage us to pursue them. The original idea behind EA was to provide a way to choose between different ways of doing good. The fact that you wanted to and were going to "do good" was assumed.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
Religion really does not focus on maximizing good at all. They are overwhelmingly kantian, focusing more on rules that keep your community strong whereas EA has a much larger focus on causes outside your community.

gizmo 3y ago

> [Effective Altruism] is self-righteous in the most literal sense. Effective altruism as distinct from what? Well, all of the rest of us, presumably—the ineffective and un-altruistic, we who either do not care about other human beings or are practicing our compassion incorrectly. > We all tend to presume our own moral positions are the right ones, but the person who brands themselves an Effective Altruist goes so far as to adopt “being better than other people” as an identity. Those are the opening paragraphs from a much better article on the same subject: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/09/defective-altruism https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/09/defective-altruism Where this article meekly claims that "utilitarian calculations can be co-opted to justify extremely weird and potentially harmful positions" Nathan J Robinson correctly skewers the very fundamentals of utilitarianism: > Patching up utilitarianism with a bunch of moral nonnegotiables is what everyone ends up having to do unless they want to sound like a maniac, as Peter Singer does with his appalling utilitarian takes on disability. (“It’s not true that I think that disabled infants ought to be killed. I think the parents ought to have that option.”) As Robinson observes, the EA movement’s intellectual core is so poisoned by bad philosophy as to be unsalvageable.

bambax 3y ago
> Effective altruism as distinct from what? Well, all of the rest of us, presumably—the ineffective and un-altruistic That's exactly right. All those ineffective doctors risking their lives being parachuted in the jungle or working in war zones, they're losers! And the bankers in their private jets, those are the altruists! EA is a thought experiment in putting morals upside-down. It's ridiculous; what's fascinating is that it almost worked. We have to thank SBF for having shown the world what EA actually is. A sinister joke.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  SBF also has very publicly very strange set of ideals. He believed that almost any amount of risk is good as long as he can convince himself that it’s somehow “morally net positive”
- sanderjd 3y ago
  I mean, when the concept of "effective altruism" first came onto my radar, when GiveWell came onto the scene, it was very clear what it meant to be distinct from: charities that use barely any of the funds they raise on their core charitable work. Those charities were "altruistic", but also ineffective, so the idea was, let's keep the altruism, but improve the effectiveness. This was then and still is a very good idea! But then it's like that good but humble mission wasn't enough for a lot of the people interested in this, and they (in my view) sort of disappeared into a black hole of inscrutable philosophizing.

kr0bat 3y ago

I think the QALY criticism grazes the real fundamental problem with EA. You can't really quantify "good" good enough to create a meaningful measure. Being alive is better than being dead (in almost all cases). Being sighted is better than being blind. But is losing an arm objectively worse than losing a leg? Who has it worse, a gay man in a seriously homophobic country or a woman in a severely misogynistic country? Sure, donating money to an animal you find cute may not be the best use of money, objectively. But maybe it's better to be openly subjective, lest we end up codifying our own subjective beliefs.

Waterluvian 3y ago
I think there is no shortage of objective ways to do good. If we skip over those, seeking the more subjective ways, it is probably in service to one's self, not to the goal of doing good.
- cma 3y ago
  They bought two effective altruist castles because they said the ambiance would help their thinkers and spruce up their conferences.
  - metalcrow 3y ago
    Citation needed. From what i know, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-left-kidney https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-left-kidney says "conference venues kept ripping them off, having a nice venue of their own would be cheaper in the long run, and after looking at many options, the “castle” was the cheapest". Zero mention of ambiance and improving thinking.
    - kawhah 3y ago
      your attitude to citations seems strange. Scott Anderson simply says, as part of a rant against anti-EA people, that the EA people said that they bought a castle for the right reasons, and that he chooses to believe them.
    - 3y ago

JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago

I always find that those who follow this effective altruism thing are very big on abstract thought. It is accepted that philantropy is not 100% altruistic, leave it alone the tax deductions and tax shelter schemes but as a practice it's done to virtue signal or to feel like we are doing something meaningful or that we are changing people's lives. Effective altruists find pleasure in the numbers turning around on a big scale and being celebrated as a philantropist, perhaps the Nobel Peace Prize? All stuff that would stimulate an abstract mind. The opposite of an abstract mind is a mind that is in deep connection with the body and the 5 senses such mind knows that there is no way you can hug and see the change upon the faces many millions of people, whereas if you do good now you can hug the person you are helping right now and you can also see the change upon their faces instantly and you can appreciate it as opposed to seeing them as a number 30 years down the road.

krisoft 3y ago
> I always find that those who follow this effective altruism thing are very big on abstract thought. That is probably true. > The opposite of an abstract mind is a mind that is in deep connection with the body and the 5 senses such mind knows that there is no way you can hug and see the change upon the faces many millions of people Ok? And turns out what feels right to do and what is right to do is not always the same thing. Imagine you are living in a medieval city ravaged by waterborne diseases. You can spend your time running around nursing the sick, cooking them soup, hoping that they recover. Or you can use the same energy to design a water treatment plant / sewer / aquaduct and prevent the spread of the disease in the first place. One feels good, you are helping humans in their hour of need. Some die, but spend their last days in a bit more comfort due to your ministrations. Some recover. Hopefully more than would have recovered without your nursing. The other is literal shit pumping. It does not feel good at all. And yet, we know that sanitary infrastructure is the key to the health of a city. You can cure max like a few hundred per week by nursing. But with a water treatment plant you can prevent illness in millions and millions. Will you able to hug them and see change upon the face of them? No, probably they won't even know who you are, or that you helped them not being sick.
- 3y ago

jonathankoren 3y ago

Sure, EA has good goals, and even has a good philosophy. Lots of cheap mosquito nets preventing more malaria and dengue fever than more expensive options has become a modern day parable for good reason. But, SBF and his ilk fall into the old habit of almost everyone when they get power and money. “Not now, but soon.” For someone big into altruism, I’m unaware of any philanthropy he did. Oh, he invested in companies to make himself richer, but that’s not the same. It’s the same with all the billionaires and their “giving pledges”. “Not now, but soon.” And then of course they set of a foundation that pays their kids seven figures a year forever while occasionally throwing a ball for boneitis or naming something after themselves. Best of all is when the altruism reveals them to be just engaging in their own hobbies. Like Marvel’s Sauron said, “But I don’t want to cure cancer! I want to turn people into dinosaurs!” Or as Jeff Bezos put it, "The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it." It’s just cover for personal greed. But soon. Soon. Just be patient.

rqtwteye 3y ago
Well said. And of course they still want to stay super rich.
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
Depending on your definition of philanthropy, SBF actually did a substantial amount of it. The problem he was doing it with other people's money.
- deleted 3y ago
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henryaj 3y ago
> It’s the same with all the billionaires and their “giving pledges”. “Not now, but soon.” Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have both given away more than $50bn each. Not pledged - actually donated.
- 3y ago

bambax 3y ago

> Ord had pledged to give away all his earnings above £20,000. MacAskill followed suit. I don't even know what that means. A pledge is like a terrible version of a futures contract: a nonenforceable one. The pledger gets the benefits of PR immediately, with a vague promise to do something in the future; why do we even pay attention to this?

henryaj 3y ago
Because they have, in fact, given away much of their income. Thousands of people have taken the Giving What We Can Pledge. I suppose they could all be lying but it seems unlikely. (Happy to send you my donation receipts if you like.) Also, the Founder's Pledge (in which entrepreneurs commit a portion of their future proceeds from an exit) is legally-binding.
- bambax 3y ago
  Why would anyone advertise the good they're doing? I become extremely suspicious in the presence of such individuals.
  - styxfrix 3y ago
    [dead]
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    To put pressure on others to also do good.

losteric 3y ago

There is a need to decouple "Effective Altruism (TM)" the culty organization, from the underlying ideas of effective altruism. Personally, I'd describe the core as donate regularly, and donate with your brain not your heart - consider the ROI, and reflect on how personal income is otherwise being spent to decide a recurring donation amount. At the same time, imo there's no need to go 100% utilitarian and overoptimize, overthink, or blindly trust someone else's QlYs calculations... Perfection is the enemy of good enough. I read one of the EA books, did my own research over a few days to pick my causes, and now just do a yearly review after every tax season. I'm happy with it. Never even read a tweet from William or the fancy organization. Some examples lines of thought * kids with cancer feels very bad/sad, but still maybe rethink donating to the organization with $7B in the bank and $2B in yearly income that just saves the ~8,000 easiest cases (St Jude)... * perhaps consider non-charitable donations to political organizations, given the impact of government policies. * When donating to research, consider the time discount and uncertainty. The research might save more in the future if it pans out, but it might not and you might be dead before any gains. Some people can be saved today.

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tech_ken 3y ago
> And perhaps consider non-charitable donations to political organizations, given the impact of government policies. This part gets wayyyyy underplayed in EA [0]. So many charities and nonprofits exist to resolve problems that are the result of policy decisions, and ceding that ground by focusing entirely on which to donate too is a losing battle from the start. For example, people being unable to afford life-saving medical care shouldn't be something that religious-affiliate groups even need to exist to resolve, it's a problem with how we've structured our economy overall. [0] edit: or not, see comment below!
- civilitty 3y ago
  People also significantly overestimate the amount of money required to make an impact. If it’s not a contentious issue like abortion, a little money to send some advocates (not expensive lobbyists but nonprofit volunteers) to DC or state capitols several times to regularly press the flesh with representatives goes a long way. People have just gotten too cynical thanks to the culture wars and partisanship.

RedCondor 3y ago

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stephc_int13 3y ago

SBF is and I think always has ben a con artist, masquerading as a clumsy nerd genius and using the EA trend was a coup de maître, but this is beside the point. Really effective altruism should not focus on money or medicine, but on power. Power imbalance is and always has been the main culprit behind all other kind of inequalities. But there is an issue, contrary to money/wealth, power is zero sum, and is much less fungible. Charity does not work with power, quite the opposite in practice.

lainga 3y ago

Can anyone please explain to me what the train of thought was from effective altruism (of which I choose to know very little) to a "bunker/shelter" in Nauru? [] [] https://observer.com/2023/07/who-was-invited-sam-bankman-fried-doomsday-bunker/ https://observer.com/2023/07/who-was-invited-sam-bankman-fri...

roywiggins 3y ago
I had something long typed out, but it's basically their attempt to do "Foundation."[0] It's important for EA to survive the apocalypse, so that in any possible future, EA will be around to shepherd humanity to its apotheosis. In this view, even an apocalypse is only a speedbump as long as EA survives it. They're looking toward a million years in the future where we've colonized the galaxy as trillions of machine intelligences or whatever. It's fine for 99% of humanity to be wiped out tomorrow as long as an order of Hari Seldon-mathematician-kings can keep humanity steered toward that future. When you're humanity's best hope for transcending Earth and achieving techno-godhood, the best money you can spend is on yourself. See? Altruism. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series
- suzzer99 3y ago
  I imagine Pol Pot had similar justifications for his agrarian utopia.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    It's 100% the sort of thinking that can easily justify atrocities today in the service of achieving nirvana tomorrow. Very nearly everyone, even truly evil people, think of themselves as good. "You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet" can help to maintain the illusion.

Aunche 3y ago

Despite SBF, I still am a proponent of effective altruism overall. You just have to be obsessed performing your own due diligence because there isn't aren't any market forces that compel you to do so. For example, I think GiveWell is good example of this. On the other hand, the analysis that spending money on AI risk has functionally infinite value is obviously absurd. Imagine pitching to investors that your AGI startup will have a functionally infinite market cap when humans become an intergalactic species.

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
Frankly, any moral or philosophical stance that is predicated on "imagining pitching to investors" makes me sick to my stomach.
- Aunche 3y ago
  In this context, the "pitching" would be done by government officials and charities, and the "investors" would be regular voters and donors.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Have we just invented charitable giving and democracies?
    - Aunche 3y ago
      The problem is that people are giving and voting based on their feelings rather than trying to understand the impacts of these things. IMO, the reason why corporations win over the people is that they actually bother to do this due diligence. I'm sure that Pfizer made sure that their lobbyists were doing a good job ensuring that the CARE act would favorable to them. On the other hand, housing first advocates have been cheering for wasteful projects like $1.7 million public toilets until tabloids started pointing out how ridiculous it was.
      - 3y ago

dartos 3y ago

I never heard of effective altruism before the whole SBF trial. Can someone fill me in / point me to somewhere with some historical context?

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
TFA is as good a place to start as any.
timerol 3y ago
Wikipedia is unsurprisingly pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism I feel that this summary is useful as a history of the movement. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XTBGAWAXR25atu39P/third-wave-effective-altruism https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XTBGAWAXR25atu39P/... I stopped identifying with the movement around the start of the second wave. I went from "EA is cool and great and you should read about it and donate to help save lives" to "EA has had some cool ideas but is now mostly focused with weird probability math that siphons money away from it's mission of saving lives", but I digress.
waveBidder 3y ago
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/ https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/ https://80000hours.org/ https://80000hours.org/ https://www.givewell.org/ https://www.givewell.org/
callalex 3y ago
This podcast by Robert Evans (of Behind the Bastards fame) covers the history and thinking of the movement pretty well. https://omny.fm/shows/it-could-happen-here/the-effective-altruism-scam https://omny.fm/shows/it-could-happen-here/the-effective-alt...

photochemsyn 3y ago

Instead of bringing 'altruism' into socioeconomic decision-making, we should instead eliminate the concept of 'externalities' from the process. If investors and corporations were forced to subtract the very real costs of 'externalities' from their bottom lines, this alone would lead to changes in behavior. E.g. fossil fuel externalities included widespread air and water pollution as well as the steady planetary warming trend. Ensuring those costs were born by both fossil fuel producers and users would encourage a transition to renewable energy. Yes, there are externalities involved in PV panel and wind turbine and battery manufacturing, but these costs are much, much lower than those associated with fossil fuel production and use. Effective altruism was never much more than a fig leaf for an economic system that has tended to privatize the profits while socializing much of the costs via the fiction of externalities.

metalcrow 3y ago

For anyone interested in charity or doing good, and this is your first time hearing about EA, i recommend you check out some of the major resources at https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/ https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/ or https://80000hours.org/ https://80000hours.org/. You have an opportunity in your life to alleviate massive suffering and change lives, you shouldn't let negative publicity sway you from doing good things. EA is all about doing the most good you can, and thinking about how to do it, instead of just guessing or following fleeting emotional moments.

sanderjd 3y ago
Yes, but you have to recognize that it matters that this movement traced this path to being almost entirely associated with a scammer and an obsession with artificial intelligence, blowing right past its (IMO) more grounded and useful focus on improving conditions for presently-existing life. What I mean is: you can't simply ignore that outcome when evaluating the principles, because people followed those principles to this (in my opinion) bad outcome.
- metalcrow 3y ago
  I wouldn't say that the movement was entirely associated with him at all! He donated to a lot of EA organizations, sure, but Bernie Madoff donated to a lot of Jewish charities yet that doesn't cause Judaism to be associated with scam artists. Now the complaint that EA influenced SBF to do the bad things that he did, that's a much more valid complaint about the principles. But i think that's just a coincidental association, rather then a causal one. Nowhere does EA suggest doing short term bad things in exchange for long term good things. It suggests "earning to give", but that's not at all why SBF is considered a bad person. He stole money and committed fraud, plain and simple. EA has advocated against that in the past, and continues to. The most you can say about EA imo is that it's concern about alleviating large scale suffering allowed SBF to internally justify doing bad things in exchange for doing a lot of future good. And sure, if your message is corruptible easily that's a problem with your message. But there is literally always going to be people mis-interpreting your message, or worse yet people intentionally using your message as cover while knowing full well they are disobeying it. That happens with social justice movements, leftist movement, rightist movements, literally any message ever has had this problem. It's a problem that should have lessons learned from it, but if it invalidated the movement i don't think there is a single valid movement left on earth.

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

The delusion is simply in not realizing logical reasoning follows a log normal.

wilburTheDog 3y ago

So SBF is a con-man who realized that it's easy to scam the EA community. All you need to do is learn their language and "pledge" to give away a lot of money. Then the donations will start pouring in. I guess it's not that different from any other in-group. If you're seen as a trusted member, others will give you the benefit of the doubt as far as they can.