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Notes -
"I liked it before it was cool."
This is a phrase typically associated to hipsters and the mainstream bands they still love, but I'm now starting to think the idea has some merit. I liked EA before it was cool.
It just makes sense to take an abstract principle ("black lives matter"), a set of causes, put them into a spreadsheet and sort by (black lives saved)/(dollars spent). Maybe that works for me because to borrow a phrase from Scott, I'm a regional manager of playing with tiny numbers in spreadsheets. Or jupyter notebooks, but whatever. I liked EA before it was cool.
But now? I'm not really sure I like the current EA movement much. Just today, a far left and a far right substack I read both converged on the idea that it has been captured by the mainstream.
https://eigenrobot.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-and-its-future
https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/sbf-ftx-ea-and-lt-my-reflections
I guess the example of the latter he's probably not hinting at is SBF's "effective" investment in "TRUMPLOSE".
https://external-preview.redd.it/ByiDrANZMyT2-CXazkm0rXXbXJ2bSgRTOnKDORrk9Gg.png?auto=webp&s=22c925a1be8509efa46fdef0a9a94c2822d32b0f
I can't see any plausible case this is "effective", but it's certainly the position of the rich.
For those in this community who are closer to the movements, what do you guys think is the current state of EA? It's clearly not just a bunch of weird nerds who discovered mosquito nets in uganda >> mental health for suburban teenagers anymore. But does that original core remain? Has it moved someplace new?
The same thing happened to them as happens to a lot of organisations based around wide-ranging general principles. They didn't start off on "we are committed to sending mosquito bed nets to Africa", that was just what popped up when they crunched the numbers as the best bang for the buck. They started off on broad, vague lines of "let's do good stuff".
This is part of my objection to the impression they gave off about "we're gonna do charity right, unlike all those other organisations". They had valid criticisms about bloat and mission drift and expenditure on officers and fancy shit, and they were correct, but they were mistaken in "this will never happen to us because we have spreadsheets!" (or whatever mathematico-philosophical/ethical principles they were using).
(Pause here for me to insert "And I always thought Peter Singer was a pain in the backside and the veneration for me put me right off". Okay, bias stated, carry on).
Well, it happened to them just like all the charities they were criticising. I suppose The Great Vegan Menu Massacre was an early sign. The "but if we calculate the biomass of all the insects on earth, that is immense amounts of suffering we must address!" line of reasoning was also odd (can you really find it in your heart to be concerned if a fly or beetle is in pain right this second?) and while it just looked like one of the odd, quirky things the odd. quirky people who were most enthused about EA would like as a cause, maybe it too was a sign. But now they have ventured into dipping their toe into politics (with 'we like Carrick Flynn as a candidate, he shares the same values' and not alone endorsing him but encouraging EA people and supporters to go donate etc. to his campaign).
And now they're "when we told you to forget your suffering neighbours in favour of the malaria-stricken children in Africa, now we're forgetting the malaria-stricken children in Africa because AI RISK!!!!" Guess those kids can just go die now, right? And before you jump in with "that's uncharitable", there were plenty arguing that donating to actual suffering going on right now in the world was stupid because if you saved your money and invested it, you could help so many more people in the future. That the future never comes, and in ten years' time the same argument about "if you invest your money rather than give it to the people in need right now, you can help so many more!" still applies, so you end up with a growing heap of money 'to help those in need' that somehow never gets given to those in need.
So yeah, they've fallen into the same patterns as all the other do-gooder organisations they criticised, so that is why I'm sticking with "I put money in the collection tin when it's rattled under my nose, and to my church fundraising for good causes".
I think my objection is a bit different from yours. I actually want the old EA back - the one that would make a spreadsheet, honestly attempt to evaluate criminal justice reform, and then say "sorry we don't like cause B1:B/C1:C -> sort put it at the bottom".
Assuming you think AI risk is real, why is this anything other than absolutely the right thing to do?
This is a very bad criticism of EAs who actually use spreadsheets. It's like saying "because some growth companies are getting 2x growth yearly, no company should ever do share buybacks." But the reasoning fails once you actually encode it in a spreadsheet - once the gains from consumption exceed the future projected gains from investment, you stop investing and spend.
Um, that is very much not what has happened with any EA org yet. I think you're describing college endowments.
Your disagreement with EA and mine are quite different. I don't object to EA because it's weird and non-mainstream, or because spreadsheets lead to different results than zeitgeist informed intuition. I think that's what is right about older EA. My lament is that the visible people claiming the title of EA seem to have mostly given that up.
I am not lamenting that I hate EA and always have because "ugh weirdos in fedoras". My lament is that I liked it before it became cool.
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