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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?
Do you have absolutely no empathy for someone in west Africa dying of malaria? If it cost you a mere penny to save their life, would you do it? EA is trying to save lives in the most cost effective way possible, and last I checked the most effective way to save lives was buying bed nets to prevent malaria.
If there was already an abundance of bed nets and it'd cost millions to save a single more life even in the most efficient way possible, where as they could open a local art museum that served thousands for just $10k, they'd probably start donating to local art. But right now art is already pretty well funded, and people dying of malaria are relatively underfunded. Although EA has certainly done a lot to change that and I think they have more money than they know how to spend. You could probably post an essay to their website about why donating to local art is the most moral thing to do if you can write out a clear argument for it.
In all honesty, no. I can't say I do without severely watering down the meaning of the word empathy. If I felt a non zero unit of empathy for every dying child in this world I'd be emotionally crippled by the weight of the world's suffering.
EA stopped being about malaria nets a long time ago when they started putting funding into political campaign donations into "their" candidates into the Democratic Party primaries in Oregon (he lost anyways lmao). Scott Alexander and Big Yud shilling for this loser is a big jumping the shark moment for EA. Shoveling money into the black hole that is politics is the exact opposite of effective or altruism.
I don't think it's that hard to feel different amounts of non-zero empathy for different people proportional to how close they are to you. To save the life of your child? Spend up to 50% of your wealth. A parent? 10%. A close friend? 0.1%. A foreigner? 0.01%. Made up numbers that would be different for everyone of course, but I think that's the general premise most people actively live life by. I can't imagine if there was a charity that could legitimately save an African life for a penny, maybe because there's some immediate crisis that needs every cent it can get immediately and the big actors can't respond fast enough, and you knew all this for certain, you wouldn't donate. And drawing the line somewhere between a penny and $10k to save a life is reasonable. But people are just drawing their lines at different points, and there's nothing wrong with that.
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