EA continues to look like moral cover for good old-fashioned profit maximization. The "Effective" part is immediate and drives short-term incentives like maxim

EA continues to look like moral cover for good old-fashioned profit maximization. The "Effective" part is immediate and drives short-term incentives like maximizing profit. The "Altruism" part is hypothetical and delegated to a future date where the resources acquired "effectively" are deployed for the benefit of humanity. In the gap between the two are fallible human beings, not necessarily more virtuous than average, that task themselves with making decisions about what's important. I do not agree that we should try to maximize our profit and then only help people at a nebulous distant point in time. We all make priorities about things important to us. Some of that shows in what we chose to donate to. A lot of charities we donate to are not fundamentally urgent because they do not work on saving lives. A lot of EA is simply prioritizing what saves the most lives, right here, and right now. The focus on hypothetical dangers like GAI is telling here. If you can invent an apocalyptic boogeyman that you're "addressing" by funding thinktanks and sitting on company boards you don't actually have to spend anything on addressing immediate issues. They can be sincerely strongly held belief. The fact that OpenAI is actually...not doing anything remotely about it makes me discount OpenAI as a serious organization, regardless of the nebulous and hypothetical nature of GAI. For the record, I don't think we are able to even remotely approach the problem if we can't take of issues of alignments of human actors. Once we figure that out, maybe we'll have a concrete path for aligning GAI should that or when it becomes a technological possibility.