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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30438 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? 😈

I keep not seeing my perspective brought up in these threads so I guess I'll say what I can't believe isn't obvious. Why should I care at all about any of the people or things connected to this dude who I had not heard of until the collapse? If they had a knowing hand in the scam then sure, but what's next? Are we going to hear about his favorite ice cream shop and their complicity in selling such a monster ice cream? We don't even have two cases of EA adjacent scammers with which to draw a pattern, the only conceivable way I see this being bad for EA is that they're now down a lot of money that they expected.

The condemnation of EA over this is kinda funny. If SBF showed up to any other charity, or person or organization, including everyone criticizing him, and offered billions of dollars over a decade, I don't think they'd say "uh, what if this large heavily invested business secretly committing fraud though? I demand an invasive audit of your books to make sure, and I won't take the money otherwise." And that goes double for just 'advising SBF'.

Ah ah ah, EA built their entire case around being "not like those other charities, we investigate first and have all these tools to assess what is the bestest bang for the buck".

So they are on the hook for "so why didn't you check out how this guy was promising tons of money out of thin air then, clever-clogs?"

Susie Maye who runs the Save Our Fluffy Friends campaign out of her own house and is active mainly in the fifty mile radius around the town, accepting a hunk of cash from an anonymous donor who says "I love puppies and kitties and bunny rabbits, here's a thousand to help your good work, keep it up!" isn't held to the same standard as "I am an Oxford philosopher who is so important to the world I can't take time out to have kids because that would distract from my Important World-Saving Work, oh here's $30 million for Good Causes I am involved with and you want me to be on the team of your Big Donation Fund that is funded by you making money via magic beans? Don't mind if I do!"

Is it not intuitive that people looking to give money are more concerned with the output than the input? I don't quite understand why it should matter all that much to the people who aren't going to die of Malaria because of the movement whether the funding came from a perfect loving cute grandmother who loves all people equally or a scum bag serial murder rapist. Can someone actually articulate the harm of taking the money of bad people to do good things?

The only thing that really concerns me about the effective altruism angle is how poorly a lot of that money got spent.

That is intuitive, I agree. The thing that makes me hesitate to sign on to it, though, is that EA as a movement is actually involved not just in taking people's money but in encouraging people to make that money in the first place. So, if someone was going to be a bad person anyway, then, yes, you might as well take their money. But if you are (perhaps inadvertently) encouraging people to become bad in order to make lots of money that they then give to you, then it gets a bit more complicated. Especially if your movement then goes around loudly praising these (actually bad) people.

I'll admit that's a failure mode but it's not exactly a unique one. "Be fruitful and multiply" can advocate for some quite nasty practices if taken as loosely. Earning more to give more is a possible way to summarize as classic of tales as robin hood with the same moral ambiguity. Whether the ends justify the means is something that cuts through the heart of every member of every movement and I don't think it's fair to declare which side has won from the actions of one member.

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