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Reading about the FTX dèbacle and what the founder and his friends thought (especially about their EA space) made me understand how much utterly alien is to me the entire EA movement.
Watching the videos, the blogposts, all the infos that are getting out, made me reflect on "how" they think money should be used by rich people in order to maximise happiness and saving people and in particular the entire world.
Maybe it is because of my particular illiberal upbringing (Euro-mediterranean Catholic family), but I cannot fathom how this ideology is, for my eyes, "Utterly Evil".
How can you, a rich person, focusing yourself on improving astract things as the entire world, financing no-profits and calculating metaphysical moral earning based on how much money you are investing in EA?
Why not helping your community, focusing on art, infrastructure and knowledge, instead of giving money to global moral enterprises? It utterly repulse me on a philosophical and moral level, and this is probably the reason I never bought in EA.
If this is the alternative to the woke/progressive view, I have no idea of how the Western World can remotely fix its problems. Am I the only one who feels like this?
There's a line from Scott's What We Owe the Future review that really stood out to me:
Catching that for the first time really had me hoping he would explore that a little bit more, but in context it seemed to be little more than a quip. So it falls to me to try to explore it.
I don't think it's an accident that utilitarian altruists start out with hypothetical scenarios about bodily harm to children. I think, in effect, it's an attempt to manipulate the audience: to condition them into a rare mode, one meant for extreme emergencies, and then lock them in that mode for the rest of their lives. To catch people in their very most self-sacrificial state and make them keep that up forever.
It seems to me rather like if someone heard about a mother, with a burst of strength, lifting a burning car off her toddler, and thinking "wow! Super-strength is within human capacity! All we have to do is get into the mindset of a mother whose children are in immediate mortal danger and stay like that all the time and who knows what wonders we'll all be capable of afterward! We could carry pianos one-handed; build houses alone in but a day! All that stands in our way is that, for whatever reason, we're not in the right mindset! Well, we'd better fix that!"
Do you think that would work? I don't. First of all, there'd be no chance of actually getting people far enough to try it. Second of all, even if people did try it, what would result is not a glorious utopia full of Herculeans, but instead a bunch of miserable or dead people with rapidly-ruined bodies. The world would not be stronger, richer, happier, more vivacious for it, but weaker, poorer, more miserable, and more dead.
Moving back from the matter of super-strength to altruistic economic productivity removes the vividly gory details of exploded muscles and limbs torn apart, but I do wonder if it wouldn't be similarly ruinous to try to change the equilibrium in which humans operate to the greatest extremum achieved, especially without a very thorough understanding of why we're not already always up there in the first place.
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