I think so. The way I see it, effective altruism is a dangerous trend because it can very quickly go into the 'ends justify the means' territory.'
In the case of SBF, if he essentially stole from a bunch of retail investors, and then went about doing altruism (this is not yet verified, of course) did he ultimately create a net positive? That only works if the investors in FTX did not lose out, which they did.
Anything that goes into the 'ends justifies the means' territory ends up badly. Sometimes immediately, sometimes over time, but always.
He did donate and fund many people through his FTX Foundation and donations via Giving What We Can. I know this because 1) people were funded with real money, even if some people who have not received money yet are of course screwed and 2) I did some voluntary data analysis work for some EA orgs and saw figures, SBF donated.
There are uncountably many cases where people defraud/steal from others, destroy the environment or do any number of bad things in order to accumulate wealth for themselves or their families. These are all cases where people have thought that the end (i.e. their own personal benefit) justified the means. Indeed, this kind of behavior is more-or-less the norm. People seek to advance in their careers to make more money to buy the things that they want to buy, often regardless of the moral character of the companies they choose to work for or the detrimental effects that their purchases have on others.
In the case of EA, we now have exactly one instance where someone engaged in this ends-justify-the-means behavior in a morally problematic way, and this is for some reason supposed to show that EA is irredeemably flawed. This seems a bit absurd.
“Ya. Hehe. I [SBF] had to be. It’s what reputations are made of, to some extent. I feel bad for those guys who get fucked by it, by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”
Is it a bad thing that people can convince themselves that whatever they do to make a lot of money is ethical as long as they buy some mosquito nets afterward? I can see some potential issues.
> whatever they do to make a lot of money is ethical as long as they buy some mosquito nets afterward
EA doesn't support this. It's absolutely not okay to do immoral things to make money and even things like Earning to Give via legit quant roles is and was pretty hotly debated.
But what in the philosophy of EA really disallows it? In a utilitarian model, if I can do a lot of good by doing some bad (eg, steal from crypto investors and give the money to AI safety research), what did I do wrong? I appreciate that this can discredit EA and hurt their efforts, but this is a short-termist concern; in the long run, the AI research might end up being more important than the transient reputational damage. Furthermore, what if there's only a 5% chance of being caught doing something immoral? Then, in expectation, the positive impact is even higher.
It's all very well to pay lip service to 'common sense morality' but it doesn't seem to fit into the actual theology of EA, and this is what fanatics are most likely to follow.
EA isn't limited to utilitarianism. A very substantial amount of people in EA would not consider themselves utilitarians. And of those who do, it's very rare to find a "pure" utilitarian with no deontological bent and thus willing to engage in fraud.
Even if you find a "pure" utilitarian (which is rare), it's considered "naive utilitarianism" to ignore the long-term and broad effects of creating harm, and it's also considered intellectually arrogant to think you know enough about the impacts of your decisions and moral philosophy that you can justify causing definite short-term harm for potential long-term gain against the moral frameworks of just about everyone else.
On the whole, I can't personally think of any one person involved in EA, or widely-read EA literature, that promote or support that type of thinking.
> But what in the philosophy of EA really disallows it
Because most people who are willing to donate x% of their salary to charity tends to be decent people? Apart from that, there's tons of fundermental EA posts and writings that talk about how EA cannot be an 'ends justify the means' philosophy to donating. Sadly this SBF shit has really corrupted the core message which is to be skeptical of charities and view them like investments, picking the best one for QALY per $, and valuing all lives equally. I don't even like the futurist side of EA because I personally can't put the value of a hypothetical person above someone who's sick today and focus on global health & animal welfare. Honestly the core point of EA is imo very hard to discredit aside from longtermism.
> Because most people who are willing to donate x% of their salary to charity tends to be decent people?
I’m curious if you would accept the claim that a regular churchgoer is unlikely to act immorally, because I can’t see any difference in principle, down to the “donating a portion of your salary” part.
> There's tons of fundermental EA posts and writings that talk about how EA cannot be an 'ends justify the means' philosophy to donating.
This is at odds with its core adoption of utilitarianism, which is the movement's fundamental justification. Utilitarianism is sort of textbook "sounds nice on paper, works crappy in practice" outcome.
Defining what is really good and bad is a very hard thing to do, and has been the subject of philosophical debate for millennia. It gets really hard when we try to construct a reasonable logical foundation for ethics, but then we always check it by comparing it to the intuitive ethics in our evolved/cultured meat brains. Of course, the intuitive ethics always "wins" and we conclude that the problem must not be there, but any conflicts must be problems with the ethical framework!
So you can conclude that you should just do whatever makes you feel good and all ethics are nonsense as you seem to prefer, but I'm not sure that you've really refuted the basic premise that you should try to maximize the amount of good you can accomplish.
If you reject appeals to intuition there is really nothing to base your argument for ethics on since at their core they all rely on one. Made that college ethics class I took a bit unsatisfying.
People are not forced to treat EA as an all-or-nothing package. If some of their claims are more convincing than others, and acceptance of only the more-convincing claims leads to SBF-like behavior with much-higher-than-background probability, it is important to strengthen some arguments, and/or withdraw community support for ideas that are currently too unsafe in practice.
I agree with this. I think there are two sides of EA - the futurist utilitarian viewpoint and the rational QALY/$ viewpoint. I'm a believer of the latter, but do worry because this is boring (malaria nets and deworming) the former is the only one people hear of or see even if it's a minority group.
I say this as someone who took the Earning to Give path from 80,000 hours and happily donate to healthcare charities suggested by Givewell via Giving What We Can. My wife took the other path and is a postdoc at Stanford working on medical research with an EA focus (both in her field and on replication crisis in medicine). I'm pretty in this space so to speak, albeit only in a small way.
Felix Salmon on Slate Money podcast this past weekend suggest that its still net positive given alternative is those people don't even try to make world better. More nuanced than that but my take on the position.
Effective altruism sounds like choosing between destroying the enviroment and destroying the enviroment with some greenwashing on top. In my mind, the movement amounts to PR to make excessive riches and excessive political influence palatable.
Feels like the same logic all over again as when we had tyrant kings sending out their peasants to get killed in a field in order to win them more lands and wealth, then dumping their fortune into building a cathedral to try to buy their way into heaven.
Maybe it works if folks make a clear eyed appraisal of what the salient issues are. But once the biggest issues facing humanity were identified as AI or the sun exploding and not climate change and wealth inequality, it was game over
Yes. You're not just cleaning your own conscience but also your image in the minds of other people.
It's basically a license to be a charming scoundrel. Everything good you do can be balanced by some vice of yours, and that's how we get powerful people abusing their employees and other relations.
The MO is not new, you might have heard of the Sacklers donating to art. Should it buy them any sympathy for what they've done? Doubt it.
If you want to do good things, do good things. As soon as you do a good thing and get publicity for it, I'm going to think you're buying publicity. I think there's an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm about this.
If you're after good publicity, then EA is a spectacularly bad approach.
If you want to turn money into publicity, then giving locally to high profile causes is optimal. EA discourages both in favor of more global, more impactful causes.
The rich man who came to Jesus asking him what he should do knew that too much money was a bad thing. He followed all the commandments but felt that it wasn't enough.
In the case of SBF, if he essentially stole from a bunch of retail investors, and then went about doing altruism (this is not yet verified, of course) did he ultimately create a net positive? That only works if the investors in FTX did not lose out, which they did.
Anything that goes into the 'ends justifies the means' territory ends up badly. Sometimes immediately, sometimes over time, but always.