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Does the Sam Bankman-Fried transformation into Bankrupt Fraud tell us something about the failures of effective altruism?
I saw Bankman mentioned on themotte a number of times over the past two years. I’m pretty sure he was mentioned over on SSC, too. After Scott, he was the person who immediately came to mind when I thought of figures associated with EA. Many normies and finance types will only think of Bankman when EA is brought up. (I refuse to use the “SBF” acronym because it was consciously chosen as imitation of HSBC and other institutions, and despite his name the man is not a bank.)
I think the EA’s failure to have any effective impact on Bankman’s moral calculus is its complete absence of emotional salience. Traditional moral systems usually try to maximize moral salience. (Stoicism was short-lived and immersed in a Hellenistic culture that emphasized honor through salient stories, and while “mindfulness” is emotional neutral, traditional Buddhism emphasizes benevolence through stories.)
Consider Christianity. Its stories are designed for emotional salience, using novelty/paradox/shock in key moments to illustrate the moral point. Mankind’s Hero was born in a manger to a lowly family, faced persecution from the very people who claimed moral superiority, took on followers who were poor and irrelevant, and died the death of a painful criminal for the purpose of saving all of humanity. The paradoxes and surprises are meant to enhance the emotional experience, and thus the effect, of the moral point. Within the Gospel narrative, we have parables, also emphasizing salience. You have the wealthy and high status patrician who looks down on his lower class sinful neighbor, and the latter is announced as just and not the former. We have metaphors involving specks in the eye, wheat cultivation, farm animals, and storing grain, all of which would be immediately understood by the target audience. The parable form itself can be construed as the most expedient way of expressing a moral point to the largest possible audience.
While Effective Altruism may be logically sound, in the sense that the optimal actions are clearly delineated and argued, it may also not be very effective in obtaining an end result. There is an ocean of difference between a logical assessment of morality and the effectively-felt transformation of an individual into a moral actor who follows the moral commandments. To walk over this ocean of difference or to part its waters requires a moral system (if not a religion, close to it) that is focused on making morality felt. Otherwise, as in the case of Bankman-Fried, our passions and our greeds prevent us from following through on what we ought. This conflict over Ought and Will is, of course, explored throughout the New Testament, with the inability to perfectly follow moral commandments (the law) being solved in the Person of Christ, who makes morality possible to follow through his being born (a human) and through his friendship (fellowship), which effects the salience necessary to turn the follower moral.
Wrong in both ways, imo? EAs are very emotionally moved by the dying african children, generally. Hard to argue for with a source, i guess. Closest I can try - EAs like Alexander Berger (open phil co-CEO), for instance, donated a kidney to someone he'd never met to help save their life. That doesn't feel like an action you take with 'absence of emotional salience'. Another one would be the strong moral sense EAs have about how important their work is, to the point that burning out of EA because it was totalizing / took over your life is a somewhat-common issue. (although I would not argue that's a criticism of EA itself.)
But - every large movement that's ever had strong 'emotional salience' combined with strong moral teachings has had many, many prominent figures who have broken those teachings or done other bad things. Christianity, progressivism, conservatism, etc. Christians, progressives, conservatives, people of any other group - commit crimes, scam all the time. Sam doesn't say much about utilitarianism/EA other than 'some of its followers often do very bad things', which is true for any set of morals. One can say utilitarianism/EA isn't necessarily better at preventing misconduct than other belief systems, but one can't say it's worse, absent ... any evidence of that - and it never claimed to be better, just that donating money to starving children was worthwhile. And if you compare the outcomes to other crypto exchanges that've collapsed (there are many) - hundreds of millions to 'effective projects' + crypto scams versus ... hundreds of millions to luxury goods plus crypto scam?
"I think the EA’s failure to have any effective impact on Bankman’s moral calculus is its complete absence of emotional salience" is compared to " Its stories are designed for emotional salience, using novelty/paradox/shock in key moments to illustrate the moral point", yet
How can you seriously claim this "lacks emotional salience"? drowning child you are personally causing to die? really?
christianity, again, doesn't actually stop this from happening. christians constantly "sin". plus, utilitarianism/EA contests your deontological claim about what "we ought" to do, and effectively, the local wholesome 'feed the homeless' drive really does just save fewer lives than malaria nets, so how on earth is the former more christian?
I think half of the 'EA isn't morally salient' claim comes from things like - donating lots of money made from facebook stocks to global health charities. In one sense, it's incredibly technical and complicated, and isn't a group emoting session around an altar - more like a spreadsheet of estimated disability-adjusted life years saved. But even given the deep philosophical problems the spreadsheet has, the money is still going to global health causes, and the EAs seem to care emotionally about the recipients.
I am not personally causing the kid to die. Did I push them into the pond? Did I arrange it so that their parents never taught them to swim?
How old is the kid? After all, this is the same Singer who said that though he personally wouldn't approve, nonetheless it could be argued that children are not persons until after the age of two, so parents could have the right to infanticide as with the right to abortion.
If the kid is one year and eleven months old, and I'm its parent, I can leave it to drown by Singer's own moral calculus.
Well, you are causing it in the sense that your actions could cause the child to live and they aren't. And the EA argument is that this is the part of "causing the child to die" that matters, and that even without the "cause" the fact that the child is dying is the problem, and not anything about whether you, like, intended it.
"Republicans care deeply about unborn life, but abandon the child after it's born". Is this an argument for abortion? Just because singer makes another bad argument, doesn't directly affect the first argument.
That argument works for abortion, too. Try it and see how far it gets you in the pro-choice camp. If a woman is perfectly entitled to choose to terminate the life she conceived by her own actions (we're leaving rape etc. out of this), then I have no obligations towards a stranger that is nothing to me and who I might not even know is drowning had I chosen to walk down a different path.
The argument of the Drowning Child depends heavily on "if you say yes, you sound like you think you have a moral obligation to save lives even if it costs you money". But what if I say no? That cuts off the argument, which is then reduced to "But you're supposed to say yes!"
And why am I supposed to? Because of the lingering attitudes carried over from the Christianity which influenced Western civilisation, and that's an entirely different set of moral assumptions and foundational principles to what Singer et al. are trying to evoke and invoke. It's perfectly feasible for me to say "I prefer to take care of my clothes, which cost me money I had to work to earn; I don't see any obligation to some stranger's brat who may just as well die and reduce the surplus population".
Ah ah ah, you are the one who introduced it as having emotional salience: drowning child you are personally causing to die? But if it doesn't matter whether or not I am personally causing this child to die, then what is the problem with standing by and letting it happen? The emotional salience you mean is "the effect of seeing a child dying", not "child you are personally causing to die". But what if I'm cold-hearted and emotionless and don't feel affected by "oh no, a child is dying!" What if I am on my way to work at an abortion clinic as an abortion provider, and I see twenty pregnancies a week that could grow into a kid like this, but I'm asked to terminate them? Are the EA crowd going to claim I should care about "causing the child to die" in this instance? Why should I care about a full-term plus pregnancy that is being terminated by good old Mother Nature right now?
Okay, let's say I admit I should jump in and save the kid. What about all the drowning children I don't see drowning, those who are drowning fifty or two hundred or a thousand miles away? Am I obligated to wander around all day on the look-out for drowning children I could save, were I to happen upon them at the right moment? I don't think anyone would argue "If you save the child you saw on your way to work, you are now obliged to spend all day going around all the rivers, ponds, swimming pools and bodies of water in the neighbourhood to save any potential drowning children". What then is the difference about "if you save this child, then you are obliged to save children far away by giving us money to do Good Stuff".
I do think you should save drowning children, and I even think you should give to charity. But this argument has nothing to do with reason or logical thinking or any thing of that nature, it relies solely on the emotional heft of reaction to the scenario of "a young of our species is in danger of death" and the instinct programmed into us to protect the young of the species. It's pure feeling, and it's phooey. It's emotional blackmail dressed up as "this is a logically constructed argument to rationally convince you".
Most of this is factually true but idk how it matters?
because there aren't that many drowning children. On the other hand, there are many children with malaria.
Just saying 'feeling' doesn't mean anything. Pain is a 'feeling', yet it is also 'objectively' worthwhile to avoid cutting yourself with a knife, and "pain" is more of an understanding of that than a thing on its own. If you say 'that knife is there avoid getting cut', that's appealing to pain, but ... not 'appealing to pain' in the sense that if you e.g. didn't feel pain it'd still be worth avoiding, because 'pain' is just a way of understanding that!
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That’s very nice for Alex to donate a kidney and only get a NYT Op Ed in return, especially when his livelihood is literally the occupation of working for charities and guiding health policy. In Alex’s case, the right choice was also the one that benefitted him the most financially and socially. Now, I do think that society should be organized such that the right action is the one that benefits us tangibly. And Alex did do a good thing. But most of our moral dilemmas occur in the valleys and shadows where the moral light doesn’t shine. To use a passage from the Gospel,
The “salience” of religion is intended to be so strong that you do works for your God, who is so close as to be a Father. The problem with doing works with an eye on social reinforcement is that when the reinforcement is omitted, the behavior may not occur. This social reward is the “left” hand, in near east tradition the one used for dirty activities, with the right hand kept for pure activities.
If EA were a compendium of moral dilemmas, questions, stories, and imagined experiences, it would not lack emotional salience. And yet it is not such a compendium. One example made does not make the movement based on emotional salience. Perhaps if the drowning child were made into a statue and you attended a service every week to sing songs about the loss of the transcendent drowning child submerged in the waters of chaos, then that would surely count as salient. But, EA is about logical analysis, not pulled heartstrings.
The kidney donation was a (not that well argued) example of plausible emotional salience. In terms of 'moral dilemmas', holden/alex/dustin had many ways to get financial and social benefit that didn't involve sending billions of dollars to poor people in other countries (which is financially negative, on the whole). Which, really, does matter a bit more than if you toss a coin into a tithe box 'in the shadows', in the christian/universalist sense. Also, moskovitz could've easily started the Dustin Moskovitz Breast Cancer and Reparations Foundation instead, but didn't, it's not obvious or argued that the 'effectiveness' focus of effective altruism was socially motivated in a way that christianity wasn't. They actually seem rather similar in their attention to the plight of the poor and suffering?
I'm not sure what this means tbh. For the first - EA has a massive group of people that really do work for the benefit of the poor, unfortunate, etc, which fits nicely in christianity. They aren't doing it primarily for social reward, and i'm curious why you claim that. (of course, it's possible to genuinely, not for social reward, still do something mistaken / bad / disgusting / etc)
It's (according to scott alexander) the thing that started the movement, not just 'one example'
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