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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?
(I think EAs would quibble about "metaphysical moral earning", but in a kinda an arbitrary way.)
Largely, because the marginal community example in the United States involves buying helmets for teenagers to concuss each other with, and the marginal dollar to sub-Saharan African involves fewer people dying painfully of starvation or malaria. Or, worse, the community example in the United States involved sending Americans to build shitty bridges in sub-Saharan Africa out of weird non-measurable benefit analysis.
There are frameworks where the Carnegie or Bell Labs model has bigger impact on the world (eg: Bell Labs), or where moral worth of a local charity is stronger than a distant one because of those community links, but they're pretty hard to argue in the general case from a philosophical position rather than from a axiomatic one.
((On the flip side, a lot of EAs have made it clear that they're not buying malaria nets with every last dollar, either: cfe EA crypto-nauts buying stadium names for concussion-ball, or more subtly, the failures of KelseyTUOC to adequately balance politically-acceptable outreach against EA popularization.))
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