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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30397 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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The Bankman-Fried/FTX Saga just gets better and better. A "why oh why" article in the Wall Street Journal has plums to be plucked out, such as these.

(And if Will MacAskill wants to repair his reputation, he better make some moves sharpish because the media are painting him as Sam's guru who encouraged and indeed enabled him).

Mr. Bankman-Fried has said his law-professor parents instilled in him an interest in utilitarianism, the philosophy of trying to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. He said he started putting those ideals into practice while majoring in physics at MIT. Concerned with the suffering of animals on factory farms, he said, he stopped eating meat.

Will MacAskill, then a philosophy graduate student, pitched Mr. Bankman-Fried on the idea of effective altruism, a way of applying some utilitarian ideas to charitable giving.

...Mr. Bankman-Fried had considered different career paths, he said in the “80,000 Hours” interview, but Mr. MacAskill suggested he could do the most good by making a lot of money and giving it away, a popular idea in the community.

Yeah, does anyone think that someone who doesn't know the first thing about EA or any of the people here, when reading this, is going to come away with a good view of all concerned? Personally I'm very amused that veganism has been dragged into this: "guy who swindled billions is against meat eating" 🤣 So let's count 'em up: that's utilitarianism, Effective Altruism, cryptocurrency, and veganism all tainted by association!

As for MacAskill, it sounds like he was in contact with Bankman-Fried up until quite recently:

The FTX Foundation’s favored causes included pandemic prevention and protecting humanity from the potential downsides of artificial intelligence. At a July meeting of the foundation, Mr. Bankman-Fried became deeply engaged in a discussion on how lightbulbs equipped with a particular frequency of ultraviolet light could eradicate airborne pathogens, Mr. MacAskill told the Journal this summer.

He has distanced himself now, but unfortunately that may be too little, too late:

[Future Fund’s] two largest public grants, of $15 million and $13.9 million, were awarded to effective altruism groups where Mr. MacAskill held roles. Mr. MacAskill, now a professor at Oxford University, wasn’t paid for his involvement in those organizations “other than expenses,” a spokeswoman for one of them said.

...Mr. MacAskill distanced himself from FTX as it was crumbling. In a string of tweets, he accused Mr. Bankman-Fried of personal betrayal and abandoning the principles of effective altruism. He was also one of the Future Fund staffers who quit.

But wait, that isn't the best bit:

Mr. MacAskill at times advised Mr. Bankman-Fried on more than just philanthropic matters. When Elon Musk started his campaign to buy Twitter, Mr. MacAskill sent the Tesla chief executive a text message, according to documents made public in the litigation over his purchase of the social-media firm. “My collaborator Sam Bankman-Fried has for a while been potentially interested in purchasing it and then making it better for the world,” he wrote.

Oh yes. Just imagine it. Instead of Musk buying Twitter, it could have been Bankman-Fried. If people are getting het-up about Twitter potentially collapsing, what would they think if Twitter was caught up in the undertow of the FTX collapse? 😈

This is getting bad. I have my issues with effective altruism, but I wonder how far the media intends to spread the contagion. I believe that Sam himself is only allowed to blather in an attempt to make his case because they want to get some more juicy material to discredit other spheres and people with. Crypto – obviously, that's in the starter pack. EAs, MacAskill, meh, we'll do without. Veganism, most people who don't eat meat globally act this way for economic reasons. But the very idea of non-kin altruism, perhaps? Or of planning long-term? Worst of all, caution about AI and AI-empowered state-level actors, except the spook-aligned «what if China makes it first or uses our opensource, we gotta give our all to NSA closed model»?

Potentially, this isn't even throwing the baby with the bathwater, this is throwing a powered toaster into the baby's bath because the baby has shat itself. The media is far too powerful to be allowed to play with these matters so frivolously or maliciously.

When the SPAC fad happened, the question was which company taken public via a SPAC would be the first to see its share price implode via fraud. (A: Nikola.) SPACs have valid advantages over IPOs in terms of speed and cost, but they also have lower oversight. The latter was guaranteed to eventually attract someone like Trevor Milton.

I think about EA in the same way. In particular, encouraging massive wealth accumulation in the hands of a small few and prioritizing solutions for problems that might (AI) or won’t (the need to leave the solar system before the sun goes nova) threaten people in their lifetime was bound to attract a SBF eventually.

Edit: And, it’s dubious how sincere SBF was, so to qualify, attract as in entice some fraudster to espouse it.

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