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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   23886 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.

Garrett Hardin wrote a lot about this. Dumping food and medicine on 3rd world countries increases the number people dependent on aid to survive. Perversely increasing deprivation and suffering long term.

Googling him now I see Wikipedia lists him as a white nationalist. I read a bunch of his writings and never encountered that. Either I somehow missed his spicy works or a Wikipedia editor is character assassinating some dead academic.

Per Google Search’s AI, it’s nothing I haven’t heard here a dozen times from prolific posters:

While his early essays focus on resource allocation and overpopulation from a Malthusian ecological lens, watchdog organizations and historians trace his white nationalist label to several specific actions:

  • Leadership in Nativist Groups: Hardin served on the board of directors for the Social Contract Press, a publication designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a hate group. He was also heavily involved with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and Californians for Population Stabilization.
  • Funding from the Pioneer Fund: Hardin accepted funding from the Pioneer Fund, a foundation established to promote eugenics and fund controversial research into the hereditary basis of intelligence and race psychology.
  • Writing and Correspondence: He contributed to far-right publications like Chronicles and The Social Contract. Decades of his private correspondence—such as letters with heiress and population control financier Cordelia Scaife May—revealed explicit support for policies aimed at maintaining a white, English-speaking majority in the U.S. and promoting racial segregation.
  • Belief in Racial Homogeneity: Later in his life, Hardin argued explicitly that multicultural societies were unstable and that only racially homogenous societies could successfully manage resources over the long term.

https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/garrett-hardin/

I have no respect at all for the SPLC. "designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a hate group" just means they aren't sufficiently progressive. Which this Malthusian born over a century ago certainly wasn't.

Based on my memories of reading his writings: he was very concerned about the fact that parts of Africa are desertifying. Those localities' ability to grow food is decreasing over time. So it is an enormous act of cruelty to dump food on them. That lets their population grow yet further past their decreasing food supply. That's endless escalating starvation and dependence. And if the aid ever stops it is mass starvation on the scale of the worst communist policies. He's concerned for their welfare so he cautions against poorly thought out aid programs.

I wasn't aware of his private letters. That's disappointing. Oh well. I would also like an English speaking majority in the US. I'm sure the SPLC would smear that popular and valid view as "hate". Using their non-standard understanding of that term.

That lets their population grow yet further past their decreasing food supply.

It's not a requirement that any region, state, or even nation be self-supporting in terms of food production, even if it is probably a good idea where possible for a few regions. But Singapore is never going to grow enough food for itself, for example.

Singapore has a functioning modern economy. They can buy food. The poorest people on earth with desertifying land cannot.

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