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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   19937 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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Annals of Great Friday-at-6:00PM Announcements: "Caroline Ellison Has Joined Manifund."

For those needing a refresher, Caroline Ellison was Sam Bankman-Fried's lieutenant in charge at Alameda Research, the hedge fund he used to embezzle FTX customer funds. She pleaded guilty to felony wire fraud and conspiracy charges. Manifund is an effective altruism grantmaking and infrastructure provider spun-off from Manifold Markets.

I think this is definitive evidence that no, the Effective Altruism community did not properly internalize the lessons from the FTX crisis. This is going to get a lot of bad press, and it will be easy to criticize the decision as bad optics, but this is not simply "bad optics". Aella's Twitter feed is bad optics. This is bad practice. It is bad practice to hire people with bad decisionmaking records for decisionmaking roles. It is bad practice to establish a norm of soft-landings for people culpable in major scandals.

I had sort of expected Caroline to remain a semi-public figure associated with EA/AI/rationalism after her release from prison, but I didn't expect her to get hired for a financial infrastructure job. She should be blogging for pennies on Substack or working in the bednet mines.

Somewhat related but I was thinking the other day about how a lot of EA people have gotten obscenely wealthy but none of the EA problems really got solved. Shouldn’t bed nets in Africa be fully funded by now?

The premise of many EA ideas was that you can “save” a life for extremely cheap, from hundreds to single digit thousands.

Given the insane wealth of EA people, the tech sector, and US progressives more generally, we should have made extreme progress in solving problems in Africa by now. As far as I can tell, we haven’t. All the progress in African is from catch up development and trade. The charities are just a hole into which money is poured, sometimes relieving suffering, sometimes causing harmful effects, but rarely solving any problems. (I will give credit to the guinea worm people).

I think the central premise of EA charity is wrong. You can’t save lives on the cheap. Many problems are intractable and can’t be solved by just giving money. You actually have to be in the trenches. Giving money to charities is mostly just waste.

Given the insane wealth of EA people, the tech sector, and US progressives more generally, we should have made extreme progress in solving problems in Africa by now. As far as I can tell, we haven’t. All the progress in African is from catch up development and trade. The charities are just a hole into which money is poured, sometimes relieving suffering, sometimes causing harmful effects, but rarely solving any problems.

Not only that, to the extent such charities are effective, they only create more problems: more mouths for Westerners to feed and more potential future migrants into Western countries. So worse than mere waste.

Here's a modest proposal I think you can appreciate.

Let's send every person of child bearing age in Africa an iPhone with satellite internet. TikTok, Instagram, and Bumble will come pre-installed. Birth rates won't be a problem for long. If treatment ineffective, free college education through grad school for every girl.

I’d prefer a less circuitous and more direct intervention, such as just paying teenaged girls and young women in Africa to get their tubes tied.

Go listen to one of these lizardmen elite conferences like the WEF / IMF / etc. That's literally their plan.

An awful lot of ea people argue that not giving money now is better if they can leverage it into obscene wealth and donate more in the future. The thing is, you can continue justifying not giving using that equation unto perpetuity.

It's a cool trick.

Chadakin: I don’t donate any money now in case I can leverage it into obscene wealth

Padme: Because then you can donate even more in the future to save African lives, right?

Chadakin: …

Padme: Because then you can donate even more in the future to save African lives… right?

Secretly based. Economic development has done far more for the people of Africa than all charity, probably by multiple orders of magnitude. The tycoons should focus on what they are good at instead of blowing it on conscious-assuaging causes in distant places.

It turns out you can just keep growing GDP and helping people without giving your money to grifters along the way.

I'll go further and say we'd be better off as a society with fewer charitable donations. Billionaire deaths and divorces have been a disaster for the human race. The unprecedented cash bazooka that is about to hit SF will be even worse.

Maybe this time the billionaires will something good with their charity. But I doubt it.

Seems similar to Christ talking about the Pharisees declaring their wealth as "Corban" (ostensibly dedicated to some future contribution to the temple) to avoid having to use it to support their parents in need.

I hadn't considered that comparison before. It's funnier than it should be.

Poverty is a long-standing problem. A lot of well-meaning do-gooders have gone "we have tons of money, if we just throw enough at it by our clever plans, surely we can solve it once and for all!" and then they find out no, you can't.

Plus, this is the kind of bread-and-butter issue that gets boring. The new shiny issue comes along, be it shrimp welfare or AI existential risk, and this is so big and exciting and novel, it's much more fun to talk about than "more bednets for malaria, yes malaria is still happening, no there isn't a cure yet, yes we're still working on different approaches, no I can't tell you when it will finally be gone".

Somewhat related but I was thinking the other day about how a lot of EA people have gotten obscenely wealthy but none of the EA problems really got solved. Shouldn’t bed nets in Africa be fully funded by now?

I think bednets are in fact fully funded and they try investing elsewhere now I misremembered, the marginal bednet today is lower impact than the average bednet. Still worth funding but the bang for the buck isn't as high as it used to be.

I think the central premise of EA charity is wrong. You can’t save lives on the cheap. Many problems are intractable and can’t be solved by just giving money. You actually have to be in the trenches. Giving money to charities is mostly just waste.

Part of moving the needle in Africa or other hell holes is figuring out where to allocate the money so it doesn't get immediately embezzled and also doesn't contribute to poverty trap issues. This isn't just a throw money at it problem. Indeed, part of why DOGE gutting USAID hurt so much is because EA relied on some of this existing infrastructure. Aside from funding odd trans art in Ecuador here and there, and for being a vector for soft power in foreign policy, it also helped make aid auditable. USAID paid for the census data, the logistics chain, and the in-country people who notice when money goes missing, which is exactly the infrastructure GiveWell can't do itself.

It turns out the EA people were wrong about their signature policy: they should have been funding malaria vaccines.

But yeah, Africa's problems can't be solved by throwing money at them. Because even if your target is good, when you throw money, there's always people happy to get between you and your target.

You've also got the difficult question of how well EA people can commit to it -- FTX sponsoring a concusionball stadium should have been one of those Murder-Ghandi moments -- but yeah. The systems here are hilariously corrupt, the tooling is corrupt, and even the numbers being used to extrapolate any analysis are huffing their own farts.

They are saving lives, are they not? It's just that there are more lives to be saved every minute.

No, they aren't The utter refusal of EA's to actually look at what happens after they implement their policies, and update accordingly, is breathtaking. It's amateur hour "reasoning from 1st principles" all the way down: Malaria is devastating! Malaria nets are cheap and easy to use! Give Africans Malaria Nets! ← stop here, completely refuse to think if there are any second order effects to take into account, or consider what, if anything, could go wrong, then loudly insist that you are, in fact, very smart.

Austin doesn't strike me as a lunatic but the way he writes about her reeks a bit romantic. Oh no!

This will come across as "uncharitable," but show this announcement to 100 of your normie coworkers and 100% of them will answer "They're fucking. No doubt about it."

Edit: Hold the phone, this is the organization that got $500k from FTX, and is currently fighting to not have to give it back? We're well past "good optics"

Nothing in that article actually says that malaria nets aren't saving lives.

Austin is married with his wife only days away from popping out the sprog ("...and my wife is due to give birth ~5 days and didn't want to worry about the announcement while on paternity leave"). Let's hope for the sake of all concerned that there is no workplace romance going on, always a terrible idea and Caroline should be well aware from what happened the first time round that it's even more of a terrible idea.

(Also this is the second time I've seen "paternity leave" mentioned online in the context of a female, is this a Californian thing?)

It's a progressive state thing to also give the father some time off to spend with their newborn. It's in addition to maternity leave.

To be fair, the EA side does have numbers and did look at them hard. They can give numbers for malarial infection rates and deaths, both in before/after, difference-in-difference, and comparing high-malarial and low-malarial-risk environments to make sure they weren’t getting some spurious signal. There were even a couple times this lead to use of different insecticides chasing maximized numbers.

The bigger problem is how real the numbers they looked at are. The infection rates at least have some random sampling going on, but it’s a tiny fraction with some selection effects crawling back in. The bigger problem is fatality rates, which are derived from a mix of ‘verbal autopsy’ and modeled estimates from infection rates. But the verbal autopsies are known to be terrible, and the models use local funding of anti-malarial supplies as an input. Start backing them out and you end up with 10x to 20x variations that might be real or might be sampling on the dependent variable. Worse, almost all of the modeled effects (and even the difference-in-difference studies) give drastically higher results than the early RCTs, often 2-3x, and they themselves depended on comparing against people sleeping without nets at all, a scenario that basically doesn’t exist. That’s not impossible, but it’s reason to treat them with a massive grain of salt.

But on the gripping hand, the pessimistic numbers still involve at minimum tens of thousands of lives saved, and more likely hundreds of thousands. It breaks the economic argument, but not the raw effect.

The fishing nets thing is an annoying problem from an environmentalist perspective, but it’s ultimately a rounding error. There’s not much risk of fishery depletion from these nets, very little of the target areas rely on fishing for a big source of calories, and the chemicals aren’t that toxic to mammals. It’s a hundred-life problem, not a hundred-thousand-life problem.

Come on dude. EA organizations make and publish analyses of effectiveness all the time, it's their whole thing. Here is an EA blog post about bednet misuse I found in a minute of searching. As it mentions, Givewell commissioned Rethink Priorities to research use of bednets in fishing:

Based on the available data, Rethink Priorities estimates that only 1.2% of bednets globally are repurposed for fishing.

Imperfect use is already included in cost-effectiveness:

For example, GiveWell estimates that only 60% of recipients will use their nets consistently and correctly. After accounting for this, they still find bednets to be extremely cost effective, with every thousand nets saving a life in expectation. That 400 will not be used correctly— and that 12 might be used for fishing— is already baked into the calculation.

And of course there is a ton of research, including randomized control trials, showing distributing bednets is effective:

The typical study design involves randomly assigning groups of people to receive (or not receive) nets. Researchers then wait to see whether mortality and malaria rates differ between the two groups. There is never an assumption that everyone who receives a net will use it. And yet, such studies consistently find that nets reduce child mortality by around 17 percent.

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