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I have a different perspective here, where a) I think it's conceptually possible, b) the interesting question is whether people who say they are are really only doing the pure altruism. I first encountered the term pure altruism in two papers by James Andreoni, from 1989 and 1990. In them, Andreoni lays out a model of altruistic giving, where agents contribute to a public good both because they value it in itself, but also because they get a private benefit, a "warm glow". He has some nice academic results, like a quick mechanism for indexing one's own altruism (if one was taxed one dollar less, or a thousand, how much more would one donate?), and other observations (taxation may not produce warm glow, and as a result increasing taxation by some amount doesn't reduce donations by that amount; when parents get a warm glow from giving to their children, children are incentivized to be more "spoilt" in a technical sense).
Are people who are saying they are doing pure forms of altruism actually doing so? Often not so. There are aspects of the EA community that just don't make sense by considering its participants as pure white cherubs of innocence and selflessness, although each particular case will be uncertain and ambiguous, and although pointing the discrepancy is tricky.
One of the biggest bets Open Philanthropy—a large philanthropic foundation I'm acquainted with—is making is in its own people. 161 people, earning say 150K to 250K salaries, with overhead of 20% to 40% (?) is 30M to 52M/year—probably higher than any one of their grants in 2024 and 2025. This does not include the cost of their office, another cool 16.5M. This leads them to have a class interest: they are invested in that form of doing philanthropy—rather than anonymous part-time rotating grantmakers whose funds under management grow or shring depending on their evaluated success (like the Survival and Flourishing Fund).
Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed outlines how this happened with the apparatchik in Russia. The apparatchik are in charge of the wellbeing of the Soviet Union and ended up reallocating ressources to themselves. Some of my experience is that the grantmakers just want to be sucked up to, their ideas confirmed, their egos upheld, their strategies validated, their personalities admired. But at the same time they are selected for not rocking the boat in a deep way. More mundanely, people get grants from projects that don't work out, and don't pivot, because they think that would involve losing their jobs. EA seems like a failed Schelling point to me, because it advertises itself as doing pure altruism, but the actors end up fighting for their own self-interest, sometimes in quite obvious ways.
Is pure altruism selected out? If you do something for someone such that you don't get something out of it, can you continue doing that into the future? What is the mechanism? I think this is a key question that leads to rederiving some form of non-naïve form of altruism. Or alternatively, it leads to exploiting the pure altruism until its ressources are exhausted. One of the first guys to think about this ended up killing himself.
On the other side, pure altruism can be understood essentially as a mating display because it's a costly signal of strength, and it. The underlying purpose of ideology X isn't ideology X, it's displaying that you can still be a well-adjusted person even with its iron around your neck. Some version of this is fine by me, but the problem becomes when people really believe their ideologies and do cripple themselves for real, as happened with Germany's industrial economy as a result of their terrible energy policy. This matters to me, I made a heavily real, non-fake investment in learning German. I passed the C1 exam but probably at some point did have a C2 level in German. Now I just do business with Americans instead. I also do find it aesthetically distasteful when people do something which is nominally about, e.g., helping the homeless in a way that makes the problem worse, partly because nobody taught me how to do the Straussian reading.
At the same time, how do you coordinate around public goods? One cool answer is dominant assurance contracts but in practice this hasn't been implemented much, perhaps because the people who could have jobs as grantmakers they would rather preserve, but also because part of the problem of setting up a new project is just distribution, and you have a chicken an egg problem here (you could do a dominant assurance funding model if only you had already built the distribution funnel for your thing, but that's a big part of the job).
Anyways one answer here is to try to get people in man vs. nature games because man v. man conflicts are just fucked up.
I think that pure altruism is only impossible under the one definition that also renders "selfless behaviour" trivially impossible. You choose your own actions, so you naturally choose the ones you like the best, even if what you like the best is something like "to mistreat myself for the sake of others".
But let's talk psychology: Our mental states exist in a high-dimensional space, and one of the dimensions seems to be poverty-abundance. This is easy to miss if you haven't experienced the extremes of both. Do you know insecure people who are like black holes for compliments, affection and reassurance? That's the minus pole. But the plus pole also exists - a state where it becomes uncomfortable not to give. You'll usually have to be on drugs or to spend years doing spiritual practices in order to reach this state, but it's very real and basically a pure altruistic mindset.
And I have a reason to think that this behaviour will not disappear: It benefits the invidual, even when they do not do it for the sake of benefits. Positive states of being are psychologically healthy for the same reason that negative states of being are associated with dying earlier. And while altruism seems dangerous in that it's reverse eugenics, you can only be altruistic by improving yourself to be more than self-sufficient, so it's a kind of inverse parasitism.
On a negative note: I think it's literally impossible to protect society against exploitation without ruining every pleasant part of it. What follows from this is scary: Rules are bad. They're literally symptoms of problems rather than solutions to them. You cannot fix every loophole - you can only get rid of the type of person who would exploit a loophole.
Actually, I just realized a series of things - The way we're trying to reduce suffering is destroying all human experience. The way we're trying to minimize crime will result in the minimization of human freeedom. The way we're trying to model everything is destroying all mystery and wonder. Our attempts of reducing mistakes to zero is reducing meaningful actions taken to zero. You cannot solve all problems without killing all innovation. You cannot destroy competition without destroying growth. Many things are rotting because we refuse to let them die. I believe these are in the category of 'Complementarity Principles'.
Closing loopholes affects bad actors on the margin. Yes, someone who's sufficiently determined can find loopholes in almost anything. Buit it can be easier or harder to find loopholes, and it can be easier or harder to get those loopholes past that subset of judges who are actually fair.
The second amendment has probably done quite a bit for the right to bear arms even though state and Federal government constantly finds loopholes ro work around it.
Closing loopholes affects everyone, not just bad actors. You degrade the whole system in order to harm a subset. Every rule and regulation does, at least when these rules and regulations only place new restrictions. I'm not sure about the effect of restrictions which limit other peoples ability to place restrictions, it's harder to solve the general case of that question.
Rules tend to limit things to the lowest common denominator, this doesn't just protect those below, it also harms those above. We're also part of a dynamic system, and these tend to balance themselves. If you find a way to make X half as dangerous, then people tend to be half as careful when they do X, and then you're back where you started. This "you're back where you started" seems to explain why introducing new rules for centuries haven't gotten us anywhere. We made laws in the 1500s to combat theft, and even today we're making new laws to combat theft. I think it's safe to conclude that laws do not work, and that further laws also won't work.
I recommend an entire new way of looking at these issues. Some rules are better than others, but I think we should look at these issues in a different perspective, one which is so different that our current perspective doesn't make any sense. I like this quote by Taleb:
"I am, at the Fed level, libertarian;
at the state level, Republican;
at the local level, Democrat;
and at the family and friends level, a socialist"
If the optimal level of trust in other people is inversely proportional to the size of the system, then the optimal system is different at every scale. And one way in which you can lessen restrictions is through decentralization (running many small systems in parallel). This is merely my own answer to the question, but it seems correct. After all, the amount of rules a system has (and perhaps needs) seems to depend on its size. Family members don't usually make rules for one another. This also explains why Reddit got worse as it grew larger, until themotte had to move to its own website. And this website is largely independent from larger systems (decentralized). If this website grew in size and popularity by a factor of 10 or 100, it would either need more rules and regulations, or be shut down.
Of course, this mathematical property is not set in stone - 4chan had few rules for its size at every scale. This is either because 4chan users are more tolerant of the tradeoffs of freedom, or because the social power of moral arguments was smaller on 4chan (less moralizers = less people suggesting that you ruin everything for everyone to prevent some kind of abuse going on).
These websites are merely examples, I'm trying to solve (or model, since no solution seems to exist) the most general case of imposing restrictions on behaviour order to prevent exploitation of a system. My conclusions so far are "there are only trade-offs" and "what systems are possible depends just as much on the people inside said systems as it does on the design of said systems"
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mmmh!! top points, thanks
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Isn't it the case that as a society we want people to be altruistic, so we teach them to feel good/get a positive reinforcement from what they perceive as good acts? The ethical question of 'purity' is interesting if you're a philosopher but doesn't seem practically useful. Even martyrs hold to their faith because they have a belief in a higher/eternal good that outweighs the temporal loss. Indeed, anyone who trades good for bad is making an error - I don't think anyone does so deliberately.
I mean, we want people to be prosocial, provide public goods, play cooperative games, coordinate around positive outcomes. But you don't want this to be suicidal. Not sure if that's just a restatement. of what you are saying.
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Yeah, the altruism question is interesting, and I've seen what I might describe as "weaponized altruism," where an individual commits an act of self-sacrifice with the hope and intent of convincing someone else to commit to an act of even greater self-sacrifice.
Or perhaps the classical example where someone engages in an altruistic act that leaves them worse off, but they perceive that doing so will let them acquire increased social status in that particular situation, and they'll be able to trade on that social status for greater gains in the long term.
I define 'real' altruism in terms of incurring some material loss that is in excess, ideally far in excess, of the expected gains of taking the action, and that someone else is the expected beneficiary of the action.
On the extreme end this would mean dying or incurring some devastating injury in order to ensure someone else lives.
Even in less extreme cases, I don't now that its possible to live a whole life devoted to this ideal, because your ability keep incurring costs is bounded.
So I see it as only being represented in individual acts, and there are individuals who are capable of committing to such acts when the time comes, and those who will default to whatever is actually in their direct self interest.
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This is of course one of the oldest questions in meta-ethics, known to the Greeks as the Euthyphro dilemma:
"Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"
Substituting "the gods" for whatever is the source of the workings of the universe.
There's a large variety of answers to this, from divine command theory, to moral realism, to many others that reject or make meaningless the question, from Thomism to moral skepticism. Take your pick.
I tend to work under the faith based assumption that the world was not constructed by evil, and that there is thus unity between virtue and flourishing in the long run. On account of the terrible track record of gnosticisms.
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I think "pure altruism" is a strawmanning of EA in general and Open Philanthropy in particular. One of EA's main tenets is that the traditional hyperfocus on overhead costs of charities is unhelpful as a measure of actual efficacy. If you want smart, driven people to do good work in allocating resources, paying them something like market rate is advisable. Otherwise, you're selecting on something other than merely talent for the job.
Of course, it's always possible OpenPhil is actually bad at their stated mission for whatever reason, including design flaws. So having different models out there, like volunteer crowdsourcing, is a good thing.
Famously, the Soviets did not rely on charitable giving to fund their efforts. Donors can always stop donating.
Scott has addressed this kind of thing--how much altruism is mandated or what is sufficiently pure--multiple times. Numerous essay in EA Land focus on the emotional unsustainability of pure altruism.
Some level of partiality/self-interest is allowable on pragmatic grounds alone. Martyrdom should not be a standard requirement.
Yes, but the problem is that if you are giving them good salaries, you are selecting for the ability to tell good stories to donors in exchange for money. There's a reason why charities have tended to be suspicious of such structures: they have no in-built market correction so they're easy to turn into guilt-tripping sinecures. (GiveWell is fine but it's like a regulatory body and is straightforwardly capturable, so doesn't count.) That's why charities have traditionally relied on a combination of:
Since none of them need money. Of course, this still biases charities towards sounding good rather than doing good, but that's really really hard to avoid.
Amen.
See also: Welfare Democracy
Ultimately, donors have to do their due diligence on efficacy and voters on sustainability.
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Some things may be straw men of EA, but IMO it has made a lot of obvious errors as a movement, stretching its reputation to the point I don't think it maintains much credibility with people who are not already bought into charity qua charity. That most of EA freaked out about the PEPFAR cancelling is a great example. Its a 22 year old program that still requires massive outside subsidies, and there is no visible point on the horizon where that will not be true. You can call it many things, but "effective" is not one of them. Thats like calling a family where, after 22 years all the kids are still in the house, barely passing classes, and with no jobs and no prospects "effective parenting."
That's like saying that medical care is pointless, because even I save a child from dying of anaphylactic shock, they'll grow old and die anyway. Then they might have kids, who will, if they're not prone to atopy, still inevitably die.
I'm not an EA, and I don't particularly care about people with HIV in Africa, but I still find this a weak criticism at best. They believe that extending/saving lives is good, which I can't disagree with on a general principle. I'm certainly not on the shrimp welfare train, but I must concede that if you care about that inane cause, you might as well make sure your money is as effective as it can be.
That makes little sense. The child has great potential, if saved, to do things that are positive and good, like have children of their own, like start a business or work at a business. If you are talking about old age care, correct. The government should not be in that business, medicare, despite being highly popular is probably the worst program ever implemented by the US Government.
But keeping people alive with money is just bog standard charity. If you want a modifier like "effective" you should earn it.
Once again, I will state that I'm not an EA.
That being said:
The core tenet of Effective Altruism is a semi-universalist strain of utilitarianism. They genuinely believe that extending lifespan, particularly healthy lifespan, is good in of itself. In a vacuum, all else being equal, I have no reason to disagree. The real world, unfortunately, has atmosphere.
They tie themselves in knots evaluating the relative impact of charity. They (correctly) claim that donating to that breast cancer charity that hands out pink ribbons is a waste of money compared to distributing malaria nets or antiretrovirals. At least in terms of naive QALYs or DALYs.
An African with HIV, in their eyes, is interchangeable with any other human. I have a far more cynical outlook, but I cannot argue values, I care far more about actual potential. To a first approximation, their approach works. I get off the train because I both, don't really care, and because I think consequentialism demands more thought cycles that consider second order effects.
So an essential part of EA is extreme blank slatism to such extremes they even apply it to adults.
Blank slatism for adults isn't extreme, as it isn't limited to EA, nor limited to progressives. It's a part of mainstream Western white culture, e.g., magic dirty theory. Or see for a specific example, a white woman forgiving her mother and cousin's murderer (who's of the demographic one might expect), hiring him to work on her property, only to get murdered by him herself.
Yeah, I don't think that sort of thinking is held by anything close to a majority of Americans.
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Why is "requiring outside subsidies" an issue?
What charities are more effective per dollar than PEPFAR?
Requiring outside subsidies is an issue because your program turns into a self licking ice cream cone. This seems true for PEPFAR. The purpose of PEPFAR is to keep the people on PEPFAR alive which then demands more money to keep the same people alive in the future. There is no expectation that PEPFAR recipients will erect an anti-retroviral factory anytime soon so they can provide themselves the drugs, nor any other factory that will allow them to be productive enough to actually buy them at market price. The expectation, rather, is this program will be a moneysink for the remainder of my lifetime. This is, of course, a problem with most large charities. Effective charities are almost always more targeted and more discriminatory. An adoption program that places kids with well vetted parents, a financial support network for widows of fallen soldiers and police officers, etc. Such programs are effective in that they are targeted towards an end: creating functional adults who can be independent, positive contributors to society. Public schools are an example of a failed attempt at effective altruism. In theory educating the public could have positive externalities. In practice, they have proven to be moneysinks because the reality of schooling is it is related to, but is not actually education, and human teaching ends up approximating a garbage-in-garbage out model. You can predict the outcomes of an incoming kinder-garden class with fairly good accuracy with just the demographics of the children, while ignoring the teachers almost entirely.
Retrovirals work. They let people lead normal lives, and make HIV no longer a death sentence. We now have semi-experimental vaccines that stave off the disease, and I strongly expect a full cure being on the market within a decade at most.
Even if PEPFAR wanted to run indefinitely, it will face the guinea worm 'problem' of not having a disease to tackle, and unless you're 70 years old, it'll happen in your lifetime.
I'll generally defend PEPFAR on its own merits, but the blackpill for PEPFAR-as-promoted is less about the effectiveness of the drugs themselves, and what the actual provisioning of even very effective drugs actually looks like, on the ground. This discussion is specific to PrEP (and this context that got me to write it up), but as far as I can tell it's pretty endemic to the program in the areas it's most critical.
That might change literally overnight if a full cure, extremely long-lasting PrEP, or sufficiently easy and effective vaccine comes about and is accepted, but I'm not highly confident for even that.
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So its just like a normal charity. It keeps people alive who cant keep themselves alive. Its a charity you anticipate will no longer exist in 70 years due to scientific advances wholly unrelated to the charity and the people who benefit from it, other than the fact they will also incidentally benefit from those advances.
70 years? 20 at the worst. I would take bets at worse than even odds at a mere ten.
I really don't understand this line of thinking. It's akin to condemning advocating lifestyle 'solutions' for diabetes right before they discovered porcine insulin. After people have been publishing papers saying, hey, this funny little trick seems to work.
That is still wholly unrelated to PEPFAR. You aren't alleging that PEPFAR recipients are at the bleeding edge of HIV-cure research are you?
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I think one can simultaneously believe that perhaps PEPFAR should not exist forever as a U.S.-funded program and believe that the way DOGE handled it was an unnecessary travesty that caused needless suffering.
But also you seem to be conflating "effective" with "solves something permanently" when those are not always the same thing. Sometimes the latter is not possible via charity but an effective band aid of sorts is feasible.
But really I'm not the guy to defend EA because I'm not one myself on several fronts.
What was needless? PEPFAR can either be cancelled or continued. If it is continued, there is needless suffering on those providing the funds and the marginal increase in prices in paying markets for the drugs. If it is discontinued the people getting the free shit suffer. There is always suffering. The only way you are reducing suffering is if you have an EV+ outcome, like if you teach a guy how to make houses, then he makes a lot of good houses, now he gets money for making houses, other people get houses.
The issue with the house-building-teaching-charity is it isn't scalable. You have to be judicious and wise who you teach to build houses. Not only are there diminishing returns on house-builders in any economy, there also is the issue of many people being unable to learn to be good house builders. So you have to keep your program small and admissions must be selective.
The abrupt end with little chance for handover to a different org/funding source.
How something is ended can matter quite a lot. This was not done gracefully. Or constitutionally, but that's a procedural issue.
I don't think PEPFAR and home construction training programs are a worthwhile comparison.
You really, really don't have to sell me on the downsides of humanitarian interventions as a general rule.
How does this change the problem of the program being bad? PEPFAR is bad. It keeps people alive for the sole purpose of spending money to keep them alive.
Its end was at least as legitimate as its illegitimate beginning. The program is obviously unconstitutional.
Why not? These are both hypothetical subsidies to Africans. In one scenario you subsidize sexual deviancy, in the other you subsidize housing. This is a worthwhile comparison in that obviously subsidizing sexual deviancy is bad.
I suppose if you place zero or negative value on the lives saved by PEPFAR, then yeah, obviously. End it yesterday.
Not sure I'd agree with that proposition, however. I'm not much of a Christian, but I do think George W. Bush had his heart in a charitable place when he got the program going.
Congress allocating funds? Is all foreign aid unconstitutional by definition? Generally, the constitution is far more free-wheeling on doing things for foreign policy than it is for domestic policy.
And being able to build houses would also be bad? Like what on earth do you think you're arguing by comparison here?
Those are very different things, to me, personally. Like, sure, most sexual deviancy probably happens in houses, which someone had to build, but that's true of a broad range of human activities. Am I to understand that building more houses would lead to more sexual deviancy?
Like houses are not inherently bad, right? And training locals to build their own housing gets around the classic problem of just providing a good such that the local market demand is satisfied and domestic production gets hurt. Now such training may or may not be a worthwhile charitable intervention, but it's not obviously terrible by default.
You can argue that PEPFAR is not just ineffective, but bad for reasons of sexual deviancy or whatever else without talking about African housebuilding, I think.
I mean, the market puts little to no value on their lives. I am simply pointing out that there is nothing different about keeping people alive for the sake of keeping them alive in PEPFAR than any other boring charity like food stamps or Medicaid. I suppose these people kept alive can also threaten to immigrate, which is a bad thing. So yeah. Why is this "effective?"
Foreign aid is arguably unconstitutional, but the inception of PEPFAR was not approved by Congress. They may arguably have adopted it later on, but the inception was just GWB going rogue.
No the point of the comparison is that my house building program IS actually good and effective, so long as you keep it small in scope. You scout 10 potentially talented homebuilders and spend time, money, and resources training them. Then they go out and make their world better by building homes. PEPFAR does nothing of the sort. It just lets anyone who contracted a deadly STD keep on living with no scrutiny as to whether they can or will make the world better by their continued existence, and past performance indicates not so.
I was posing a hypothetical charitable educational program that had the potential for being effective, not just a self licking ice cream cone.
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How much of the lives of the Americans paying are you willing to sacrifice to allow Africans to have happy fun times without consequences?
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I think EA does have a fair share of pure altruists. I know of at least four people that have gone celibate over the last few years as a result of being too concentrated on their jobs (and I claim they could have had romantic success if they had chosen to). I think coordinating around "we are doing the most good" also has an easy attractor in pure altruism.
The thing I was pointing at is that the job of the apparatchiks was to nominally be pure altruists towards the population of Russia as a whole, and this predictably failed.
That there are some "pure" altruists in EA is not what I am picking at. The essays I reference are targeted at that very phenomenon because it is a thing some people do. Selection effects are what they are. You are making points without the knowledge of what is already been discussed on the topic. Go google "avoiding EA burnout" and you'll find a plenty of stuff on this front.
The thing I am pointing at is that comparing Soviet anything to EA is apples to hand grenades. Donors are not coerced. OpenPhil analysts are not employees of the state, and aimed at "doing the most good" insofar as they can figure that out. The failure mode that is most apt is the standard "NGO Industrial Complex" where organizations exist to exist, not to actually solve the problem in their mission statement.
I think you are empirically wrong on this. E.g., if you go to one of the most upvoted such essays you will see my comment at the top. But it's been a while. Maybe there is much that I have forgotten.
https://www.google.com/search?q=avoiding+effective+altruism+burnout
No, this really wasn't much better than posting a LMGTFY. Don't do this.
When someone obstinately denies easily checked facts what do you suggest?
(a) Let it go and disengage. (b) Provide links to specific citations and proactively provide an explanation of their relevance. (c) Consider the possibility that they are not "ignoring facts" but that you are both interpreting the same evidence in a way that caters to your own biases and that you need to actually make an argument.
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Not the greatest comment for two reasons. First, it’s too snarky by half. Second, my word, that’s a lot of unnecessary tracking info. In case you don’t know, you could have deleted everything after the first “&” and been fine.
I could have made it worse and use the ol' LMGTFY.
There are some people in this conversation on various topics, like air conditioning units in Europe, that seemingly want to endlessly debate a relatively minor point that could be resolved with a quick google search and it baffles me.
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People have been killed in the name of EA ideas. One can claim that this was the work of the criminal and mentally ill (and be right), but that's also what the Marxists say about their bad apples.
I, for one, think that if you gave soviet levels of power to the shrimp welfare people, they would be very unwise with it. I don't think that's an unreasonable view.
Soviet levels of power were not granted by God of Thought Experiments from above, they were achieved by mobilizing large numbers of people to violence with arguments such as "this guy over here is better off than you - it was at your expense, go lynch the kulak". I do not think shrimp welfare is as persuasive an argument.
I think you're vastly underrating the earnestness and good will of communists. People very rarely start with murderous intent. That tends to proceed from the grinding of relatively benign dictums against the realities of power.
Moreover, please don't do the whole "it's just a few kooks on college campuses", one loses use of that argument after their first SBF. You and I are not beyond lynching kulaks, there is just a precarious set of incentives that allows us to maintain the moral rectitude to not do so. And I'm arguing that most EA people have, as part of their utilitarian construction, jettisoned important parts of those incentives.
To wit, I recommend rule utilitarianism and a higher degree of humility before history and the human condition.
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Such as? If we're referring to the Ziz stuff then well that's not going to cut it for me in that they were not part of "EA" in any meaningful sense for a long time before the real insanity began.
But also, plenty of people have been killed in the name of classic liberal ideas.
Probably! I can't get over that Classic Environmentalism is anti-interventionist to the point some want humanity to disappear, and then some EA types are so interventionist they want to basically eliminate nature because of the inherent suffering.
In the light of your own answer, what is the ideological component in EA that would prevent interventionist types, in principle, from being soviet tier hand grenades? I don't see it. I see the same type of unbounded consequentialism that can allow people to engage in the same sort of evil in the name of ultimate good.
EA has no provision against people thinking of themselves as bringing about a utopia, and that makes it a dangerous philosophy. And this is why Ziz killed people and SBF defrauded millions.
Marx was once a benign economics nerd too.
Well, there is no one "EA"; but broadly speaking EA exists within the liberal democratic view of human rights. So "unbounded consequentialism" isn't actually on the menu for policy interventions.
I'm personally a rule utilitarian / classic liberal, so I care about specific classic (negative) human rights and fostering material progress. So I like a lot of what EA is all about, but I have my differences. I do not like philosophical ignorant veils and ponds of kids, for example. In terms of rhetorical utility though, I very much enjoy using EA as a hammer to bludgeon progressives/leftists with.
I do not think it is fair to directly fault EA at large for Ziz and SBF. In the former case, they literally disavowed the individual and their ideas. In the latter case, they were too trusting (I just assume all crypto is a scam by default) and deserve some demerits for that, but SBF also fooled a great many worldly financial types outside of EA.
Again, this is an extremely broad criticism that applies to many religions and ideologies.
What's a "human right"? I'm not asking what you think, you clearly believe in some utilitarian formulation of natural law, likely in the style of J.S. Mill. That has boundaries I'm well familiar with.
I'm asking what most EA people believe.
Because in my experience it's a lot less solid than what you have in mind, generally more aligned to Rawls than Mill and almost entirely without bounds.
I do not believe that Effective Altruists would oppose vaccine mandates categorically under grounds of bodily autonomy, for instance.
I understand those as fair arguments, but they are the same fair arguments Khrushchev made for Stalin and that Marx made for Guesde. We are responsible for what we bring into the world, the purpose of a system is what it does, etc.
Of course. And I denounce them all as capable of the same horrors.
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anything unbounded has the same problem
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