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Notes -
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.
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.
Source?
Scott keeps talking about things, like the Giving What We Can Pledge, which are designed to counteract this exact failure mode. I expect that a random EA is more likely to give than a random American, let alone a random investor.
My brother in Christ, we are in a thread about Sam Bankman Fried, Caroline Ellison, and the fallout of FTX and you are asking for a source?
How about William McAskill, in his paper Investing to Give?
There's also Sam Harris and Sam Bankman Fried in Sam Harris' podcast.
Ellison herself brought it up during her trial.
Even Scott's arguments against it are lukewarm at best, and he accepts it as a valid practice. The giving pledge is Earning to Give in drag. It's the same mechanics - defer giving for an extended period of time under the nebulous promise that it will do more good in the long run. The giving pledge it simply says that your kids don't get to keep up the grift forever. That doesn't matter much. In the long run, we're all dead.
You can argue that I may have been imprecision in my terminology, but "perpetuity" vs an "entire human lifespan" feels like a distinction without a difference.
Yes, I’m asking for a source. The biggest, most dramatic scammer in the movement doing something does not imply an “awful lot.”
I couldn’t find a talk or paper called Investing to Give. I did see this proposed framework, which doesn’t give a single threshold, and this, where he talks about the theory. But I also note that this guy donates all income past $32,000. It sure sounds like this guy is giving and not just earning.
The baseline level of charity for an American is less than $1300. I’m pretty sure that’s an average, too, and I expect the median is much lower. I am confident that EAs, as a group which self-selects for neurotically caring about this stuff, clear that bar.
Sorry - I was wrong on my title. I was working from memory while on mobile. I'm back at my desk now.
The actual paper is "When should an effective altruist donate", from 2019, by William MacAskill, published by the global priorities institute. He establishes a proposed mathematical framework that determines whether to donate now or later (page 14 of the PDF). Reading through his own definitions above, he sets it up so that it's almost always beneficial to give later. Take the "Values" section. He explicitly state that values are unlikely to change over time. I find that just as unlikely as he finds it likely.
On a deeper note, this goes back to a problem I have with utilitarianism in general and effective Altruism in particular. I used to hang out with some effective Altruists. I also volunteer at an animal shelter, doing unglamorous work that most volunteers don't particularly want to do. My EA acquaintances mocked me for that choice, and earnestly argued that I would be better off quitting my job, moving to a HCoL area, getting paid "what I (was) really worth", then donating back to the animal shelter in question to hire somebody else to "do that kind of work".
I don't talk to them much anymore. I'm still disinfecting ringworm and mending fences at the animal shelter, and they're donating to groups like METR, because that will allegedly do more good than anything I'm doing.
That's the kind of unconsciously classist/condescending attitude that annoys me in EA discourse about the most effective and rational way to donate, and where the people involved would be highly insulted if you flat-out told them they think they are a superior class/caste of people and the lower orders are merely there to do the dirty work. But "hire someone of less value than you to shovel the shit out of the cages" is precisely that attitude at work. Manual labour is not worth much, even if we need it, because it is low paid (and besides soon we'll have robots to do it, so all the manual workers can... evaporate into thin air? get UBI and become creative artists? go back home to Central and South America?)
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What he actually says:
Not really - he lays out seven categories of considerations which he suggests qualitatively scoring from 1 to 7 and summing the scores. If the scores add up to less than 24, the considerations lean in favor of giving now.
What he actually says:
He is in fact saying that the impact of changing values is bigger than the impact of donating now or later.
You've also dodged the fact that the guy is donating all his income past $32k. Hard to accuse him of cynically withholding donations until the future.
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