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"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?
I think this critique has legs, and I've made variants of it back in August of this year, but rolling it around the FTX collapse is a little awkward a fit.
Bankman-Fried spent nearly as much on a sportsball endorsement than he did for all of FTX Future Fund expenditures combined; clearly he wasn't thinking about EA first and foremost, nor was he really pretending for the non-FTX expenditures. Finding out that he was also spending money on things to keep his business running is sordid, in the buying-and-selling politicians sense, but it would be absolutely business as normal except for the part where FTX went broke in a giant fireball of hilariously bad fraud.
The FTX Future Fund failed from a rationalist perspective of noticing that their sole and primary funder had a significant chance of disappearing in a flash even without the fraud, but they weren't advertised as a rationality group first and foremost; if anything, their rationalist expenditures were kinda debatable as projects to "improve humanity’s long-term prospects". Their EA grants are a grab bag of not-especially-great spending, but at least as a quick glance it's more EA nepotism than Clinton influence-peddling.
Yes, to some extent they're practicing the world's oldest profession, and selling themselves for access. If they didn't realize that a decade ago, this should be a good wakeup call for literally everything else in both charity and in effective business. But for anyone who was willing to be associated with crypto at the benefit of saving hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of lives, that's a pretty easy bullet to bite. I've done worse!
Eigenrobot mentions (and glosses over, and flags since it 'spun off' in a way that I don't think is a strong quibble) the criminal justice reform snafu (previous discussion here), and I think that is a more damning criticism of OpenPhilanthropy and to a lesser extent the people contemporaneously evaluating it. Same for the Clinton fund, which Eigenrobot spends more time on, but misses the delightful quote of :
Which should absolutely have raised a whole bunch of red flags, especially given how vague the goals are (it's a plan to find areas to target?!). If something exactly meets your current bars by conservative estimates, this is a really convenient accident. I'd separately add land use reform and (more controversially) immigration policy, and I don't think they're the only other failure of EA principles at OpenPhilanthropy so much as the ones that are on their fucking header list.
And there's definitely a point where you've lost those principles; the Parable of Murder-Gandhi looms large, and it's definitely eaten some specifically EA people who went from selling their reputation to selling their souls.
But it's not clear how related these are to this specific failure, or how well Eigenrobot's proposals would have solved the problem here. Bankman-Fried could readily have waved a generic "I donated X amount to charities" sheet to burnish his reputation, and honestly given the low reputation of EA even before this in general circles I wouldn't be surprised if he often did. The revolving door and press-release-as-charity stuff ran through different organizations that would not have been tempted to follow his principles, and it's not clear that they would have needed his proposed approaches to have effective quid-pro-quos. More broadly, it's a little naive of a look at how things like CHAI, criminal justice reform, or land use reform grew into focus areas at OpenPhilanthropy. And despite all the problems and near-fraud, GiveWell focuses remain so far above the average charities that it's probably still worth looking at them, even with the reservations.
The underlying core of EA remains: it's a set of mathematic principles, not a set of people. To the extent I would have once trusted CEA, GiveWell, or OpenPhilanthropy's assessments of a given charity at one point, I don't anymore, but even when I trusted them it was worth checking. Anything else is noise.
The relation is the following. SBF specifically is the top "sociopath" in Eigenrobot's telling. He has become one of the most visible public faces of EA, and has personally donated a substantial fraction of money to EA-umbrella causes. Moreover, there are many such sociopaths in the community; Kelsey Piper is another very visible one.
The critique here is that folks like SBF are funding causes like the Clinton Foundation and "TRUMPLOSE" and this is guiding EA-the-movement.
FTX could likely have collapsed even if SBF was a techno-libertarian. But I'm starting a discussion about EA-the-movement, not FTX.
EA is both a movement/principle and also a community. I'm personally very aligned with the principle. But I'm wondering if the movement still aligns with that principle, both in terms of current activities (which they mostly do, but proportionally less than before) as well as future activities guided by the current zeitgeist.
Ambushing her friend is the most recent.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy
Prior to that was (as per her beliefs) letting people die by not warning them about COVID cause she didn't want her Vox buddies to think she wasn't cool. (This was back when journalists were calling techbros racist for worrying about the China virus.)
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