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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://w

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.
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    One question is : how exactly did SBF come to his... "interesting" interpretation of the expected value of money ? And the vocabulary and the whole framework that he has been using to think about these issues come with their own values and consequences, AFAIK widely shared inside EA ?
  - jprete 3y ago
    I think there's a strand of EA that goes hardcore utilitarian, because utilitarianism is the only thing that is both logical and universally fair. And that specific strand of EA is IMO very very vulnerable to ends-justify-means kind of thinking. SBF doesn't even have to be a fake EAer to have done what he did. He just has to be a hard-utilitarian EAer who thinks there's a way to rob the world and repurpose the money to the most likely path to infinite utility.
    - metalcrow 3y ago
      Agreed, utilitarianism definitely causes people to suffer from "i am smarter than everyone else"-itis (and i say that as a hardcore utilitarian). The good news from this is that hopefully this make other utilitarians enter the odds of failure, and that they are less likely to succeeded then they think, into their calculus. The only difference between a utilitarian that creates a positive impact (Bill Gates for example, even though i don't think he's utilitarian) and SBF is that SBF was overconfident and suffered from delusions of grandeur.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        Possibly Bill Gates' focus on solving a massive problem, without utilitarian whataboutism, is what makes him genuinely effective.
        metalcrow 3y ago
        The utilitarianism "whataboutism" is what allows most people to see and be motivated to solve (real) massive problems. Most people don't care about solving world hunger, it's only if you really understand the depth and suffering of that problem do you know how badly it has to be solved. You either get lucky enough to have your emotions line up with it, or you figure it out via utility. Plus, emotions can lead you into solving fake massive problems just as easily as real. Mormons are certainly highly motivated into solving the problems of a lack of God in our society.
- waveBidder 3y ago
  if you choose to characterize every social movement by it's worst scandal, you're not going to have much of value left.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    For what it's worth, I think two totally separate things: 1. It doesn't really matter how I choose to characterize this, what matters is that this social movement only entered mainstream consciousness because of the scandal. And that will be fatal to its ability to ever gain a mainstream foothold. If it had already broken through into mainstream consciousness, and then there was a scandal, then maybe things would be different. But as it is, for 99% of people, this will now just be some scammy thing that a famous criminal was into. 2. But for me personally, prior to any of this scandal, I had lost patience with EA. I was a big fan of the version of it that was like "people should mostly donate to charities that are not wasteful and efficiently use their funds on things with measurable positive impacts to peoples' lives". But then it has seemed like for the last few years, they got bored with that and started advocating that people instead throw all their money into - in my view, even more wasteful - initiatives speculatively aimed at improving the lives of humanity (or our successors) thousands of years from now.
    - waveBidder 3y ago
      1 is totally fair. I do worry about that, especially as far as backlash on givewell happens because of this. In many respects I think longtermism is a thing that really doesn't/shouldn't scale to have everyone's attention, because so often throwing more money or non-niche skills at it is frankly worse than useless because it attracts grifters. AI safety isn't really something most people outside of the research frontier should really give much attention, let alone money.
      - sanderjd 3y ago
        Yep, agreed. But the sexier thing will inevitably suck up the attention of people who see themselves as the brilliant movers and shakers of the world.
- tasty_freeze 3y ago
  "this movement traced this path to being almost entirely associated with a scammer" You have a wildly distorted view of effective altruism. Peter Singer's book, The Life You Can Save, is nearly 15 years old. It was updated (more current statistics) about four years ago. The leading thought experiment presented in the book (the child drowning in a pond) was written by Singer over 50 years go. The label "effective altruism" might be new (2011) but the ideas behind it have been around for a long time. There are terrible people who give money to many causes -- do you think all those causes are disreputable because of them?
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    It seems like a lot of people replying to me are somehow misunderstanding what I said. In that quote I said that effective altruism is now "almost entirely associated with a scammer", I did not say "I almost entirely associate effective altruism with a scammer". I read Singer's book around the time it was written! I have long been, and remain, a strong supporter of GiveWell's approach to effective charitable giving. But you have to understand: The vast vast majority of people have never heard of these things, but have now heard of "effective altruism", because that phrase appeared in an article about the salacious acts of a criminal scam artist. Yes, that's very frustrating! But what I'm saying is that people who consider themselves part of this movement could use to reflect on how it ended up in this position.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Also, there seems to be a lot of conflation between effective altruism (the principle) and Effective Altruism (the movement). The movement seems rotten to me and perhaps dangerous. The principle seems solid.
      - sanderjd 3y ago
        Yeah this seems right to me.
- henryaj 3y ago
  > blowing right past its (IMO) more grounded and useful focus on improving conditions for presently-existing life Longtermism is one strand of the movement - still many millions of dollars get donated to global health and animal welfare.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Yes, but to me it seems like that strand has sucked up most of the air in recent years, and (again, IMO) made the movement significantly less, well, effective.
- loeg 3y ago
  This is like associating Christian charity with the crusades or Spanish inquisition.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Christianity (and all religions) absolutely do have this same problem! Jesus' philosophy is (IMO) quite good, but it doesn't make sense to ignore the thousands of years of what has been done in the name of the religion when evaluating it. Both things matter. A nuanced view of a movement includes both evaluating its principles, and considering what people have done with those principles as the movement has met reality and evolved over time.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      Well, I think it's a step too far to evaluate principles based on what people do in your name. If I do something in your name, that shouldn't bring into question your principles. And if it does, that's people not thinking clearly.
      - sanderjd 3y ago
        I think this is just "no true scotsman", right? I'm just saying: It's not irrelevant to consider what people who profess to be living by the principles of a movement have actually done in reality. It's fine to say "well, by my understanding of the principles, those people were not actually doing it right". (That's certainly how I feel about a bunch of stuff that has been done in the name of Christianity!) But that doesn't make their behavior irrelevant.
        robertlagrant 3y ago
        Point I'm making is they may well not being living by those principles. I could say Atkins doesn't work because I do Atkins and its claims don't live up, but if I'm not actually doing that then that has zero reflection on the diet, and purely reflects on me.
goldenshale 3y ago
Yeah, at its core EA is about using data and logic to try to maximize the good that one can do through giving or taking action. Sure, some people have gone of the rails with AI doomerism and other far flung ideas, but its hard to really criticize either the intention or the strategy of trying to be as effective as possible when attempting to improve the situation for the planet and/or people in need.
JohnFen 3y ago
> 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. The original concept is, but I deeply question the movement itself. Fortunately, you don't have to join the EA movement in order to be thoughtful about how to help your fellow man.

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.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  One question is : how exactly did SBF come to his... "interesting" interpretation of the expected value of money ? And the vocabulary and the whole framework that he has been using to think about these issues come with their own values and consequences, AFAIK widely shared inside EA ?
- jprete 3y ago
  I think there's a strand of EA that goes hardcore utilitarian, because utilitarianism is the only thing that is both logical and universally fair. And that specific strand of EA is IMO very very vulnerable to ends-justify-means kind of thinking. SBF doesn't even have to be a fake EAer to have done what he did. He just has to be a hard-utilitarian EAer who thinks there's a way to rob the world and repurpose the money to the most likely path to infinite utility.
  - metalcrow 3y ago
    Agreed, utilitarianism definitely causes people to suffer from "i am smarter than everyone else"-itis (and i say that as a hardcore utilitarian). The good news from this is that hopefully this make other utilitarians enter the odds of failure, and that they are less likely to succeeded then they think, into their calculus. The only difference between a utilitarian that creates a positive impact (Bill Gates for example, even though i don't think he's utilitarian) and SBF is that SBF was overconfident and suffered from delusions of grandeur.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      Possibly Bill Gates' focus on solving a massive problem, without utilitarian whataboutism, is what makes him genuinely effective.
      - metalcrow 3y ago
        The utilitarianism "whataboutism" is what allows most people to see and be motivated to solve (real) massive problems. Most people don't care about solving world hunger, it's only if you really understand the depth and suffering of that problem do you know how badly it has to be solved. You either get lucky enough to have your emotions line up with it, or you figure it out via utility. Plus, emotions can lead you into solving fake massive problems just as easily as real. Mormons are certainly highly motivated into solving the problems of a lack of God in our society.
waveBidder 3y ago
if you choose to characterize every social movement by it's worst scandal, you're not going to have much of value left.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  For what it's worth, I think two totally separate things: 1. It doesn't really matter how I choose to characterize this, what matters is that this social movement only entered mainstream consciousness because of the scandal. And that will be fatal to its ability to ever gain a mainstream foothold. If it had already broken through into mainstream consciousness, and then there was a scandal, then maybe things would be different. But as it is, for 99% of people, this will now just be some scammy thing that a famous criminal was into. 2. But for me personally, prior to any of this scandal, I had lost patience with EA. I was a big fan of the version of it that was like "people should mostly donate to charities that are not wasteful and efficiently use their funds on things with measurable positive impacts to peoples' lives". But then it has seemed like for the last few years, they got bored with that and started advocating that people instead throw all their money into - in my view, even more wasteful - initiatives speculatively aimed at improving the lives of humanity (or our successors) thousands of years from now.
  - waveBidder 3y ago
    1 is totally fair. I do worry about that, especially as far as backlash on givewell happens because of this. In many respects I think longtermism is a thing that really doesn't/shouldn't scale to have everyone's attention, because so often throwing more money or non-niche skills at it is frankly worse than useless because it attracts grifters. AI safety isn't really something most people outside of the research frontier should really give much attention, let alone money.
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      Yep, agreed. But the sexier thing will inevitably suck up the attention of people who see themselves as the brilliant movers and shakers of the world.
tasty_freeze 3y ago
"this movement traced this path to being almost entirely associated with a scammer" You have a wildly distorted view of effective altruism. Peter Singer's book, The Life You Can Save, is nearly 15 years old. It was updated (more current statistics) about four years ago. The leading thought experiment presented in the book (the child drowning in a pond) was written by Singer over 50 years go. The label "effective altruism" might be new (2011) but the ideas behind it have been around for a long time. There are terrible people who give money to many causes -- do you think all those causes are disreputable because of them?
- sanderjd 3y ago
  It seems like a lot of people replying to me are somehow misunderstanding what I said. In that quote I said that effective altruism is now "almost entirely associated with a scammer", I did not say "I almost entirely associate effective altruism with a scammer". I read Singer's book around the time it was written! I have long been, and remain, a strong supporter of GiveWell's approach to effective charitable giving. But you have to understand: The vast vast majority of people have never heard of these things, but have now heard of "effective altruism", because that phrase appeared in an article about the salacious acts of a criminal scam artist. Yes, that's very frustrating! But what I'm saying is that people who consider themselves part of this movement could use to reflect on how it ended up in this position.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Also, there seems to be a lot of conflation between effective altruism (the principle) and Effective Altruism (the movement). The movement seems rotten to me and perhaps dangerous. The principle seems solid.
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      Yeah this seems right to me.
henryaj 3y ago
> blowing right past its (IMO) more grounded and useful focus on improving conditions for presently-existing life Longtermism is one strand of the movement - still many millions of dollars get donated to global health and animal welfare.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Yes, but to me it seems like that strand has sucked up most of the air in recent years, and (again, IMO) made the movement significantly less, well, effective.
loeg 3y ago
This is like associating Christian charity with the crusades or Spanish inquisition.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Christianity (and all religions) absolutely do have this same problem! Jesus' philosophy is (IMO) quite good, but it doesn't make sense to ignore the thousands of years of what has been done in the name of the religion when evaluating it. Both things matter. A nuanced view of a movement includes both evaluating its principles, and considering what people have done with those principles as the movement has met reality and evolved over time.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Well, I think it's a step too far to evaluate principles based on what people do in your name. If I do something in your name, that shouldn't bring into question your principles. And if it does, that's people not thinking clearly.
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      I think this is just "no true scotsman", right? I'm just saying: It's not irrelevant to consider what people who profess to be living by the principles of a movement have actually done in reality. It's fine to say "well, by my understanding of the principles, those people were not actually doing it right". (That's certainly how I feel about a bunch of stuff that has been done in the name of Christianity!) But that doesn't make their behavior irrelevant.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        Point I'm making is they may well not being living by those principles. I could say Atkins doesn't work because I do Atkins and its claims don't live up, but if I'm not actually doing that then that has zero reflection on the diet, and purely reflects on me.

goldenshale 3y ago

Yeah, at its core EA is about using data and logic to try to maximize the good that one can do through giving or taking action. Sure, some people have gone of the rails with AI doomerism and other far flung ideas, but its hard to really criticize either the intention or the strategy of trying to be as effective as possible when attempting to improve the situation for the planet and/or people in need.

JohnFen 3y ago

> 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. The original concept is, but I deeply question the movement itself. Fortunately, you don't have to join the EA movement in order to be thoughtful about how to help your fellow man.