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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30437 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? 😈

As the resident apologist of EA, even I find it somewhat hilarious how much spotlight Macaskill has been getting throughout this entire fiasco. He has consistently from the beginning said that he doesn’t think he is smart or qualified enough to lead the movement or have as much impact as he does. It seems like he was right.

That being said, I wonder if this could be a sort of “no press is bad press” moment for Effective Altruism. As someone who has been involved for years, the amount of buzz I see around EA both online and in my personal life has been incredible. Between the media push for Macaskill‘s book and now this juicy scandal, I wouldn’t be surprised if the amount of people who know what EA is has doubled in just the last six months.

Time will tell if this is a good thing for EA or not, but speaking from my personal experience the main issue in talking to people about it was apathy. At least now the space will be a bit more entertaining and potentially show normies that there can be drama and fun to be had even in doing good. Maybe we’ll even pull in some rdrama folks who knows.

At least now the space will be a bit more entertaining and potentially show normies that there can be drama and fun to be had even in doing good.

No, this is exactly why we’re in this mess in the first place. Mosquito nets and clean water are boring. High-leverage crypto trading is fun and exciting. Living in a penthouse with your buddies is cool and sexy. Drama appeals to the deepest impulses of the primate brain. A world without drama would be very boring indeed. But drama, living in penthouses, and high-leverage crypto trading are not altruism. In case you think that no smart or rational person would ever make such a category error, consider the following primary source:

five years ago it felt like a really serious conflict in my mind that what was maximally good often seemed weird, or sketchy, or tacky, or unpleasant, or just plain aesthetically distasteful

these days it feels like the good is shockingly aligned with the fun, the beautiful, the awesome, the exciting, the sexy and shiny and cool

… I … don’t know what to think or how to feel about that tbh

-Caroline Ellison, October 5, 2021.

Pull up a Bitcoin price chart and find early October 2021. She was making bank in a bull market and confused getting rich for doing good. She is a smart girl, and noticed that something seemed off. As we now know, she did not correctly resolve the problem. This should tell you something about the darkness and corruption inherent in the human soul. Altruism is not natural and must be either rigorously guarded or lost.

Yeah I agree that EA has been leaning a lot more towards mental masturbation and things that are fun to think about like AI safety. That being said you have to bend a bit to the drama if you want to have massive societal impact and change the way everyday people view doing good.

I’m optimistic that even if EA gets watered down in its quest for more adoption, it will at least inject some good ideas/mental frameworks into the mainstream branch of philanthropy.

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