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>The popularity of EA always seemed pretty obvious to me: here's a philosophy that says it doesn't matter what kind of person you are or how you make your fortu

>The popularity of EA always seemed pretty obvious to me: here's a philosophy that says it doesn't matter what kind of person you are or how you make your fortune, as long as you put some amount of money toward problems. Exploiting people to make money is fine, as long as some portion of that money is going toward "a good cause." I dont think this is a very accurate interpretation of the idea - even with how flawed the movement is. EA is about donating your money effectively. IE ensuring the donation gets used well. At it's face, that's kind of obvious. But when you take it to an extreme you blur the line between "donation" and something else. It has selected for very self-righteous people. But the idea itself is not really about excusing you being a bad person, and the donation target is definitely NOT unimportant.

some_guy_nobel 1y ago
You claim OP's interpretation is inaccurate, while it tracks perfectly with many of EA's most notorious supporters. Given that contrast, I'd ask what evidence do you have for why OP's interpretation is incorrect, and what evidence do you have that your interpretation is correct?
- jandrese 1y ago
  It's like libertarianism. There is a massive gulf between the written goals and the actual actions of the proponents. It might be more accurately thought of as a vehicle for plausible deniability than an actual ethos.
  - glenstein 1y ago
    The problem is that creates a kind of epistemic closure around yourself where you can't encounter such a thing as a sincere expression of it. I actually think your charge against Libertarians is basically accurate. And I think it deserves a (limited) amount of time and attention directed at its core contentions for what they are worth. After all, Robert Nozick considered himself a libertarian and contributed some important thinking on things like justice and retribution and equality and any number of subjects, and the world wouldn't be bettered by dismissing him with twitter style ridicule. I do agree that things like EA and Libertarianism have to answer for the in-the-wild proponents they tend to attract but not to the point of epistemic closure in response to its subject matter.
    - Eisenstein 1y ago
      When a term becomes loaded enough then people will stop using it when they don't want to be associated with the loaded aspects of the term. If they don't then they already know what the consequences are, because they will be dealing with them all the time. The first and most impactful consequence isn't 'people who are not X will think I am X' it is actually 'people who are X will think I am one of them'.
      - glenstein 1y ago
        I think social dynamics are real and must be answered for but I don't think any self-correction or lacktherof has anything to do with subject matter which can be understood independently. I will never take a proponent of The Bell Curve seriously who tries to say they're "just following the data", because I do hold them and the book responsible for their social and cultural entanglements and they would have to be blind to ignore it. But the book is wrong for reasons intrinsic to its analysis and it would be catastrophic to treat that point as moot.
        Eisenstein 1y ago
        I am saying that those who actually believe something won't stick around and associate themselves with the original movement if that movement has taken on traits that they don't agree with.
        glenstein 1y ago
        You risk catastrophe if you let social dynamics stand in for truth.
        Eisenstein 1y ago
        You risk catastrophe if you ignore social indicators as a valid heuristic.
        1y ago
- RobinL 1y ago
  > many of EA's most notorious supporters. The fact they're notorious makes them a biased sample. My guess is for the majority of people interested in EA - the typical supporter who is not super wealthy or well known - the two central ideas are: - For people living in wealthy countries, giving some % of your income makes little difference to your life, but can potentially make a big difference to someone else's - We should carefully decide which charities to give to, because some are far more effective than others. That's pretty much it - essentially the message in Peter Singer's book: https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/ https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/. I would describe myself as an EA, but all that means to me is really the two points above. It certainly isn't anything like an indulgence that morally offsets poor behaviour elsewhere
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
    I would say the problem with EA is the "E". Saying you're doing 'effective' altruism is another way of saying that everyone else's altruism is wasteful and ineffective. Which of course isn't the case. The "E" might as well stand for "Elitist" in that's the vibe it gives off. All truly altruistic acts would aim to be effective, otherwise it wouldn't be altruism - it would just be waste. Not to say there is no waste in some altruism acts, but I'm not convinced its actually any worse than EA. Given the fraud associated with some purported EA advocates, I'd say EA might even be worse. The EA movement reeks of the optimize-everything mindset of people convinced they are smarter than everyone else who just say just gives money to a charity A when they could have been 13% more effective if they sent the money directly to this particular school in country B with the condition they only spend it on X. The origins of EA may not be that, but that's what it has evolved into.
    - estearum 1y ago
      A lot of altruism is quite literally wasteful and ineffective, in which case it's pretty hard to call it altruism. > they could have been 13% more effective If you think the difference between ineffective and effective altruism is a 13% spread, I fear you have not looked deeply enough into either standard altruistic endeavors nor EA enough to have an informed opinion. The gaps are actually astonishingly large and trivial to capitalize on (i.e. difference between clicking one Donate Here button versus a different Donate Here button). The sheer scale of the spread is the impetus behind the entire train of thought.
- btilly 1y ago
  The OP's interpretation is an inaccurate summary of the philosophy. But it is an excellent summary of the trap that people who try to follow EA can easily fall into. Any attempt to rationally evaluate charity work, can instead wind up rationalizing what they want to do. Settling for the convenient and self-aggrandizing "analysis", rather than a rigorous one. An even worse trap is to prioritize a future utopia. Utopian ideals are dangerous. They push people towards "the ends justify the means". If the ends are infinitely good, there is no bound on how bad the "justified means" can be. But history shows that imagined utopias seldom materialize. By contrast the damage from the attempted means is all too real. That's why all of the worst tragedies of the 20th century started with someone who was trying to create a utopia. EA circles have shown an alarming receptiveness to shysters who are trying to paint a picture of utopia. For example look at how influential someone like Samuel Bankman-Fried was able to be, before his fraud imploded.
- cortesoft 1y ago
  Well, in order to be a notorious supporter of EA, you have to have enough money for your charity to be noticed, which means you are very rich. If you are very rich, it means you have to have made money from a capitalistic venture, and those are inherently exploitive. So basically everyone who has a lot of money to donate has questionable morals already. The question is, are the large donators to EA groups more or less 'morally suspect' than large donors to other charity types? In other words, everyone with a lot of money is morally questionable, and EA donors are just a subset of that.
  - nl 1y ago
    > you have to have made money from a capitalistic venture, and those are inherently exploitive. You say this like it's fact beyond dispute, but I for one strongly disagree. Not a fan of EA at all though!
    - tovej 1y ago
      For very much money, as in, let's say, more than 1000x the median person in the wealth distribution, I'd say it's obviously true. You cannot make 1000x the average persons wealth by acting morally. Except possibly winning the lottery. A person is not capable of creating that wealth. A group of people have created that wealth, and the 1000x individual has hoarded it to themselves instead of sharing it with the people who contributed. If you are a billionaire, you own at least 5000x the median (200000k in the US). If you're a big tech CEO, you own somewhere around 50-100,000x the median. These are the biggest proponents of EA. The bottom 50% only own about 2% of the wealth anymore, the top 10% own two thirds of the wealth, the top 1% owns a whole third and it's only getting worse. Who is responsible for the wealth inequality? The people at the right edge of the Lorenz curve. They could fix it, but don't, in fact they benefit more from their workers being poorer and more desperate for a job. I hope that explains the exploitation.
      - zozbot234 1y ago
        > You cannot make 1000x the average persons wealth by acting morally. Except possibly winning the lottery. The risk profile of early startup founders looks a lot like "winning the lottery", except that the initial investment (in terms of time, effort and lost opportunities elsewhere as well as pure monetary ones) is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of a lottery ticket. There's only a handful of successful unicorns vs. a whole lot of failed startups. Other contributors generally have a choice of sharing into the risk vs. playing it safe, and they usually pick the safe option because they know what the odds are. Nothing has been taken away from them.
- socalgal2 1y ago
  this feels like “the most notorious atheists/jews/blacks/whites/christian/muslims are bad therefore all atheists/jews/blacks/whites/christian/muslims are bad
- stickfigure 1y ago
  > tracks perfectly with many of EA's most notorious supporters Just wait until you find out about vegetarianism's most notorious supporter.
klustregrif 1y ago
> EA is about donating your money effectively For most it seems EA is an argument that despite no charitable donations being made at all, and despite gaining wealth through questionable means it’s still all ethical because it’s theoretically “just more effective” if the person continues to claim that they would in the far future put some money towards these hypothetical “very effective” charitable causes, that just never seems to have materialized yet, and all of cause shouldn’t be perused “until you’ve built your fortune”.
- Aunche 1y ago
  If you're going to assign a discount rate for cash, you also need to assign a similar "discount rate" for future lives saved. Just like investments compound, giving malaria medicine and vitamins to kids who needs him should produce at least as much positive compounding returns.
  - faidit 1y ago
    That future promise doesn't do much good if the planet is dead by the time these guys get around to donating, thanks to the ecological catastrophe caused by their supposedly well-intentioned greed. Also, EA proponents tend to ignore society's opportunity cost here - that money could have been taxed and put to good uses by the public in the meantime. Whatever the inefficiencies of the public sector, at least we can do something to fix it now instead of trusting the promises of billionaires that they will start giving back one day.
ghurtado 1y ago
I don't see anything in your comment that directly disagrees with the one that you've replied to. Maybe you misinterpreted it? To me, It was simply saying that the flaw in the EA model is that a person can be 90% a dangerous sociopath and as long as the 10% goes to charity (effectively) they are considered morally righteous. It's the 21st century version of Papal indulgences.
- HDThoreaun 1y ago
  The thing is that dangerous sociopaths will be dangerous sociopaths either way. What’s the downside in convincing them to donate 10% of their income to effective causes?
glenstein 1y ago
I actually think I agree with this, but nevertheless people can refer to EA and mean by it the totality of sociological dynamics surrounding it, including its population of proponents and their histories. I actually think EA is conceptually perfectly fine within its scope of analysis (once you start listing examples, e.g. mosquito nets to prevent malaria, I think they're hard to dispute), and the desire to throw out the conceptual baby with the bathwater of its adherents is an unfortunate demonstration of anti-intellectualism. I think it's like how some predatory pickup artists do the work of being proto-feminists (or perhaps more to the point, how actual feminists can nevertheless be people who engage in the very kinds of harms studied by the subject matter). I wouldn't want to make feminism answer for such creatures as definitionally built into the core concept.
WhyOhWhyQ 1y ago
The op and your reply are basically guaranteed text on the page whenever EA comes up (not that your reply is unwarranted, or the op's message is either, but it is interesting that these are guaranteed comments).
pjc50 1y ago
> EA is about A friend of mine used to "gotcha" any use of the expression "X is about Y", which was annoying but trained a useful intellectual habit. That may have been what EA's original stated intent was, but then you have to look at what people actually say and do under the name of EA.
- Joeboy 1y ago
  As per conversation elsewhere, I think you've fallen for some popular but untrue / unfair narratives about EA. But I want to take another tack. I never see anybody make the following argument. Probably that's because other people wisely understand how repulsive people find it, but I want to try anyway, possibly because I have undiagnosed autism. EA-style donations have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. I know there are people who will quibble about the numbers, but I don't think you can sensibly dispute that EA has saved a lot of lives. This never seems to appear in people's moral calculus, like at all. Most of those are people who are poor, distant, powerless and effectively invisible to you but nevertheless, do they not count for something? I know I'm doing utilitarianism and people hate it, but I just don't get how these lives don't count for something. Can you sell me on the idea that we should let more poor people die of preventable diseases in exchange for a more morally unimpeachable policy to donations?
  - nemomarx 1y ago
    I don't think the complaint is really the donations or the impact, rather it's that the community has issues? Whether you agree that someone can put money into saving lives to make up for other moral faults or issues or so on is the core issue. And even from a utilitarian view we'd have to say that more of these donations happened than would have without the movement or with a different movement, which is difficult to measure. Consider the usaid thing - Elon musk may have wiped out most of the EA community gains by causing that defending, and was probably supported by the community in some sense. How to weigh in all these factors?
    - Joeboy 1y ago
      > Whether you agree that someone can put money into saving lives to make up for other moral faults or issues or so on is the core issue For me the core issue is why people are so happy to advocate for the deaths of the poor because of things like "the community has issues". Of course the withdrawal of EA donations is going to cause poor people to die. I mean yes, some funding will go elsewhere, but a lot of it's just going to go away. Sorry to vent but people are so endlessly disappointing. > Elon musk may have wiped out most of the EA community gains by causing that defending For sure! > and was probably supported by the community in some sense You sound fairly under-confident about that, presumably because you're guessing. It's wildly untrue.
JohnMakin 1y ago
It is a little bit though, using these lines of thinking it becomes extraordinarily easy to excuse, justify, or even paint as a good thing highly unethical or immoral actions. For instance - If I find some sort of fraud that will harm X number of users, but make me Y dollars - if Y > (harm caused), not doing (fraud making me Y dollars) could be interpreted as being "inefficient" with your resources or causing more harm. It's very easy to use the philosophy in this manner, and of course many see it as a huge perk. The types of people drawn to it are all much the same.
cyanydeez 1y ago
Its a illogical theory, even if practiced in good faith. Just because the market pays for one activity does not mean ots externalitirs are equally solvedby the matkets valuation. From basic physics, its akin to saying you can drop a vase and return it to predropped state with equal effort. Entropy alone prevents EA.
jjj123 11mo ago
The main idea is not an excuse to be a bad person, but it does justify making an ungodly amount of money, and making even more money after you’ve already made an ungodly amount of money. And for not letting that money get taken by taxes (god forbid, how ineffective!). So I’d argue on OPs side, I don’t care what EA stated intent is, it works pretty well as a smokescreen for the types who want to get really fucking rich by any means necessary. Even better if the donation target is a North Star they never actually reach.

some_guy_nobel 1y ago

You claim OP's interpretation is inaccurate, while it tracks perfectly with many of EA's most notorious supporters. Given that contrast, I'd ask what evidence do you have for why OP's interpretation is incorrect, and what evidence do you have that your interpretation is correct?

jandrese 1y ago
It's like libertarianism. There is a massive gulf between the written goals and the actual actions of the proponents. It might be more accurately thought of as a vehicle for plausible deniability than an actual ethos.
- glenstein 1y ago
  The problem is that creates a kind of epistemic closure around yourself where you can't encounter such a thing as a sincere expression of it. I actually think your charge against Libertarians is basically accurate. And I think it deserves a (limited) amount of time and attention directed at its core contentions for what they are worth. After all, Robert Nozick considered himself a libertarian and contributed some important thinking on things like justice and retribution and equality and any number of subjects, and the world wouldn't be bettered by dismissing him with twitter style ridicule. I do agree that things like EA and Libertarianism have to answer for the in-the-wild proponents they tend to attract but not to the point of epistemic closure in response to its subject matter.
  - Eisenstein 1y ago
    When a term becomes loaded enough then people will stop using it when they don't want to be associated with the loaded aspects of the term. If they don't then they already know what the consequences are, because they will be dealing with them all the time. The first and most impactful consequence isn't 'people who are not X will think I am X' it is actually 'people who are X will think I am one of them'.
    - glenstein 1y ago
      I think social dynamics are real and must be answered for but I don't think any self-correction or lacktherof has anything to do with subject matter which can be understood independently. I will never take a proponent of The Bell Curve seriously who tries to say they're "just following the data", because I do hold them and the book responsible for their social and cultural entanglements and they would have to be blind to ignore it. But the book is wrong for reasons intrinsic to its analysis and it would be catastrophic to treat that point as moot.
      - Eisenstein 1y ago
        I am saying that those who actually believe something won't stick around and associate themselves with the original movement if that movement has taken on traits that they don't agree with.
        glenstein 1y ago
        You risk catastrophe if you let social dynamics stand in for truth.
        Eisenstein 1y ago
        You risk catastrophe if you ignore social indicators as a valid heuristic.
        1y ago
RobinL 1y ago
> many of EA's most notorious supporters. The fact they're notorious makes them a biased sample. My guess is for the majority of people interested in EA - the typical supporter who is not super wealthy or well known - the two central ideas are: - For people living in wealthy countries, giving some % of your income makes little difference to your life, but can potentially make a big difference to someone else's - We should carefully decide which charities to give to, because some are far more effective than others. That's pretty much it - essentially the message in Peter Singer's book: https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/ https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/. I would describe myself as an EA, but all that means to me is really the two points above. It certainly isn't anything like an indulgence that morally offsets poor behaviour elsewhere
- Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
  I would say the problem with EA is the "E". Saying you're doing 'effective' altruism is another way of saying that everyone else's altruism is wasteful and ineffective. Which of course isn't the case. The "E" might as well stand for "Elitist" in that's the vibe it gives off. All truly altruistic acts would aim to be effective, otherwise it wouldn't be altruism - it would just be waste. Not to say there is no waste in some altruism acts, but I'm not convinced its actually any worse than EA. Given the fraud associated with some purported EA advocates, I'd say EA might even be worse. The EA movement reeks of the optimize-everything mindset of people convinced they are smarter than everyone else who just say just gives money to a charity A when they could have been 13% more effective if they sent the money directly to this particular school in country B with the condition they only spend it on X. The origins of EA may not be that, but that's what it has evolved into.
  - estearum 1y ago
    A lot of altruism is quite literally wasteful and ineffective, in which case it's pretty hard to call it altruism. > they could have been 13% more effective If you think the difference between ineffective and effective altruism is a 13% spread, I fear you have not looked deeply enough into either standard altruistic endeavors nor EA enough to have an informed opinion. The gaps are actually astonishingly large and trivial to capitalize on (i.e. difference between clicking one Donate Here button versus a different Donate Here button). The sheer scale of the spread is the impetus behind the entire train of thought.
btilly 1y ago
The OP's interpretation is an inaccurate summary of the philosophy. But it is an excellent summary of the trap that people who try to follow EA can easily fall into. Any attempt to rationally evaluate charity work, can instead wind up rationalizing what they want to do. Settling for the convenient and self-aggrandizing "analysis", rather than a rigorous one. An even worse trap is to prioritize a future utopia. Utopian ideals are dangerous. They push people towards "the ends justify the means". If the ends are infinitely good, there is no bound on how bad the "justified means" can be. But history shows that imagined utopias seldom materialize. By contrast the damage from the attempted means is all too real. That's why all of the worst tragedies of the 20th century started with someone who was trying to create a utopia. EA circles have shown an alarming receptiveness to shysters who are trying to paint a picture of utopia. For example look at how influential someone like Samuel Bankman-Fried was able to be, before his fraud imploded.
cortesoft 1y ago
Well, in order to be a notorious supporter of EA, you have to have enough money for your charity to be noticed, which means you are very rich. If you are very rich, it means you have to have made money from a capitalistic venture, and those are inherently exploitive. So basically everyone who has a lot of money to donate has questionable morals already. The question is, are the large donators to EA groups more or less 'morally suspect' than large donors to other charity types? In other words, everyone with a lot of money is morally questionable, and EA donors are just a subset of that.
- nl 1y ago
  > you have to have made money from a capitalistic venture, and those are inherently exploitive. You say this like it's fact beyond dispute, but I for one strongly disagree. Not a fan of EA at all though!
  - tovej 1y ago
    For very much money, as in, let's say, more than 1000x the median person in the wealth distribution, I'd say it's obviously true. You cannot make 1000x the average persons wealth by acting morally. Except possibly winning the lottery. A person is not capable of creating that wealth. A group of people have created that wealth, and the 1000x individual has hoarded it to themselves instead of sharing it with the people who contributed. If you are a billionaire, you own at least 5000x the median (200000k in the US). If you're a big tech CEO, you own somewhere around 50-100,000x the median. These are the biggest proponents of EA. The bottom 50% only own about 2% of the wealth anymore, the top 10% own two thirds of the wealth, the top 1% owns a whole third and it's only getting worse. Who is responsible for the wealth inequality? The people at the right edge of the Lorenz curve. They could fix it, but don't, in fact they benefit more from their workers being poorer and more desperate for a job. I hope that explains the exploitation.
    - zozbot234 1y ago
      > You cannot make 1000x the average persons wealth by acting morally. Except possibly winning the lottery. The risk profile of early startup founders looks a lot like "winning the lottery", except that the initial investment (in terms of time, effort and lost opportunities elsewhere as well as pure monetary ones) is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of a lottery ticket. There's only a handful of successful unicorns vs. a whole lot of failed startups. Other contributors generally have a choice of sharing into the risk vs. playing it safe, and they usually pick the safe option because they know what the odds are. Nothing has been taken away from them.
socalgal2 1y ago
this feels like “the most notorious atheists/jews/blacks/whites/christian/muslims are bad therefore all atheists/jews/blacks/whites/christian/muslims are bad
stickfigure 1y ago
> tracks perfectly with many of EA's most notorious supporters Just wait until you find out about vegetarianism's most notorious supporter.

klustregrif 1y ago

> EA is about donating your money effectively For most it seems EA is an argument that despite no charitable donations being made at all, and despite gaining wealth through questionable means it’s still all ethical because it’s theoretically “just more effective” if the person continues to claim that they would in the far future put some money towards these hypothetical “very effective” charitable causes, that just never seems to have materialized yet, and all of cause shouldn’t be perused “until you’ve built your fortune”.

Aunche 1y ago
If you're going to assign a discount rate for cash, you also need to assign a similar "discount rate" for future lives saved. Just like investments compound, giving malaria medicine and vitamins to kids who needs him should produce at least as much positive compounding returns.
- faidit 1y ago
  That future promise doesn't do much good if the planet is dead by the time these guys get around to donating, thanks to the ecological catastrophe caused by their supposedly well-intentioned greed. Also, EA proponents tend to ignore society's opportunity cost here - that money could have been taxed and put to good uses by the public in the meantime. Whatever the inefficiencies of the public sector, at least we can do something to fix it now instead of trusting the promises of billionaires that they will start giving back one day.

ghurtado 1y ago

I don't see anything in your comment that directly disagrees with the one that you've replied to. Maybe you misinterpreted it? To me, It was simply saying that the flaw in the EA model is that a person can be 90% a dangerous sociopath and as long as the 10% goes to charity (effectively) they are considered morally righteous. It's the 21st century version of Papal indulgences.

HDThoreaun 1y ago
The thing is that dangerous sociopaths will be dangerous sociopaths either way. What’s the downside in convincing them to donate 10% of their income to effective causes?

glenstein 1y ago

I actually think I agree with this, but nevertheless people can refer to EA and mean by it the totality of sociological dynamics surrounding it, including its population of proponents and their histories. I actually think EA is conceptually perfectly fine within its scope of analysis (once you start listing examples, e.g. mosquito nets to prevent malaria, I think they're hard to dispute), and the desire to throw out the conceptual baby with the bathwater of its adherents is an unfortunate demonstration of anti-intellectualism. I think it's like how some predatory pickup artists do the work of being proto-feminists (or perhaps more to the point, how actual feminists can nevertheless be people who engage in the very kinds of harms studied by the subject matter). I wouldn't want to make feminism answer for such creatures as definitionally built into the core concept.

WhyOhWhyQ 1y ago

The op and your reply are basically guaranteed text on the page whenever EA comes up (not that your reply is unwarranted, or the op's message is either, but it is interesting that these are guaranteed comments).

pjc50 1y ago

> EA is about A friend of mine used to "gotcha" any use of the expression "X is about Y", which was annoying but trained a useful intellectual habit. That may have been what EA's original stated intent was, but then you have to look at what people actually say and do under the name of EA.

Joeboy 1y ago
As per conversation elsewhere, I think you've fallen for some popular but untrue / unfair narratives about EA. But I want to take another tack. I never see anybody make the following argument. Probably that's because other people wisely understand how repulsive people find it, but I want to try anyway, possibly because I have undiagnosed autism. EA-style donations have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. I know there are people who will quibble about the numbers, but I don't think you can sensibly dispute that EA has saved a lot of lives. This never seems to appear in people's moral calculus, like at all. Most of those are people who are poor, distant, powerless and effectively invisible to you but nevertheless, do they not count for something? I know I'm doing utilitarianism and people hate it, but I just don't get how these lives don't count for something. Can you sell me on the idea that we should let more poor people die of preventable diseases in exchange for a more morally unimpeachable policy to donations?
- nemomarx 1y ago
  I don't think the complaint is really the donations or the impact, rather it's that the community has issues? Whether you agree that someone can put money into saving lives to make up for other moral faults or issues or so on is the core issue. And even from a utilitarian view we'd have to say that more of these donations happened than would have without the movement or with a different movement, which is difficult to measure. Consider the usaid thing - Elon musk may have wiped out most of the EA community gains by causing that defending, and was probably supported by the community in some sense. How to weigh in all these factors?
  - Joeboy 1y ago
    > Whether you agree that someone can put money into saving lives to make up for other moral faults or issues or so on is the core issue For me the core issue is why people are so happy to advocate for the deaths of the poor because of things like "the community has issues". Of course the withdrawal of EA donations is going to cause poor people to die. I mean yes, some funding will go elsewhere, but a lot of it's just going to go away. Sorry to vent but people are so endlessly disappointing. > Elon musk may have wiped out most of the EA community gains by causing that defending For sure! > and was probably supported by the community in some sense You sound fairly under-confident about that, presumably because you're guessing. It's wildly untrue.

JohnMakin 1y ago

It is a little bit though, using these lines of thinking it becomes extraordinarily easy to excuse, justify, or even paint as a good thing highly unethical or immoral actions. For instance - If I find some sort of fraud that will harm X number of users, but make me Y dollars - if Y > (harm caused), not doing (fraud making me Y dollars) could be interpreted as being "inefficient" with your resources or causing more harm. It's very easy to use the philosophy in this manner, and of course many see it as a huge perk. The types of people drawn to it are all much the same.

cyanydeez 1y ago

Its a illogical theory, even if practiced in good faith. Just because the market pays for one activity does not mean ots externalitirs are equally solvedby the matkets valuation. From basic physics, its akin to saying you can drop a vase and return it to predropped state with equal effort. Entropy alone prevents EA.

jjj123 11mo ago

The main idea is not an excuse to be a bad person, but it does justify making an ungodly amount of money, and making even more money after you’ve already made an ungodly amount of money. And for not letting that money get taken by taxes (god forbid, how ineffective!). So I’d argue on OPs side, I don’t care what EA stated intent is, it works pretty well as a smokescreen for the types who want to get really fucking rich by any means necessary. Even better if the donation target is a North Star they never actually reach.