4 ms·

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.

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.