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suy  1yr ago (astralcodexten.substack.com)   Edited 1yr ago   3865 thread views

Scott Alexander on Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX and Effective Altruism

astralcodexten.substack.com

I made this a top level post because I think people here might want to discuss it but you can remove it if it doesn't meet your standards.

Edit: removed my opinion of Scott from the body

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But the solution is to make sure it doesn't instead of creating society or any aspect (like finance) that doesn't need government at all.

I'll make the same response I do to more general "but we live in and should reform society" ones: I don't think the math works out for it. You can and should make the democratic arguments where you can win them.

But the truth is you can't win them all. You probably can't even win a majority. Not just in the FCFromSSC sense that multipolar tolerance failed, but the deeper issue where even if it had survived, you need to get to 50%+1. The smallest minority is the individual, and for any politician is willing to serve a market of one, there's a few dozen businesses willing to take commissions for a thousandth of the price.

You cannot win every fight, it doesn't mean that we shouldn't put efforts to support democracy and freedom of speech.

I cannot blame EA or rationalists for not taking greater stance against the government restrictions including vaccine mandates. That's everyone's personal decision to choose the hill to die on. But I am annoyed for them to actually support restriction of speech during the pandemic out of fear from disease. When I tried to speak out in the beginning that forced lockdowns are extremely damaging and will not prevent the spread of covid significantly, they called me names. At the end I was vindicated and the governments that forced lockdowns and vaccine mandates and fired unvaccinated people from their jobs were proven wrong, and that's not even acknowledged properly.

Possibly we got into this situation because dissenting voices were subtly and unjustly suppressed on all levels, including on social media. Alex Berenson was kicked out from Twitter for saying that vaccine does not prevent the spread of infection when this information was already publicly known. I don't agree with everything he says but clearly the overzealous fact-checkers had no understanding of nuance and scientific details.

In spite of all these setbacks, I believe that the only way forward is to foster debate, free speech and democratic norms. We need to learn from these mistakes. It is not too late to fix Canadian customs law and make them to respect minorities. Concentrating too much on technical solutions makes us to lose the focus on these important aspects.

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