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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?
Sorry, but what do you find utterly repulsively evil about it?
Edit: To clarify a bit, you never explained what your problem with EA actually is. You just stated that focus on “global moral enterprises” is utterly evil, but why? I can understand valuing your own country higher than one halfway around the world, and perhaps you can’t emotionally identify with the EA view, but calling it utterly evil seems bizarre and ridiculous
Utterly evilness is thinking that "Human Global Welfare" is something we should strive for, instead of giving to your people. In my morality system, community and ethnos is everything, and as we consider a Father who does not prefer his Son to other people an evil person, I cannot tolerate people who believe in global constructs of human welfare.
How much should a father favor his son? What if his son’s needs are met?
Choosing to feed the local homeless instead of buying the son a nicer car is altruism. Choosing to feed the non-local homeless, or to protect them from malaria, is still altruism. Even when you (rightly, IMO) value these distant people less, there exists a point where you can do more for them than you could do for your son.
The effective altruists claim that this tipping point occurs very close to home, and that commissioning art or donating to a university is a luxury: more style than substance. Some of them surely think that feeding the homeless is such an extravagance, too. Those people are probably wrong—SV is a different kind of luxury signaling environment breeding its own styles of excess. I don’t think that makes the basic claim evil.
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