[tptacek]

The ends don't justify the means for you, which is laudable, but clearly for some leaders in the EA community, they do. This is the standard critique of "longtermist" EA, which hypnotizes itself with huge numbers of extrapolated future entities to justify harming people today.

[eddsh1994]

> which hypnotizes itself with huge numbers of extrapolated future entities to justify harming people today.

Any sources on this? Or do you mean things like reducing energy usage to tackle climate change?

[tptacek]

Reducing energy to tackle climate change seems pretty unimpeachable. Directing money away from developing world medical charities in order to fund wealthy people riding bikes while thinking about AI seems apposite though.

[eddsh1994]

I both strongly agree and disagree with you here.

> Directing money away from developing world medical charities in order to fund wealthy people riding bikes while thinking about AI seems apposite though.

I dislike the whole longtermism stuff and am very vocal about that when I can be. Lives now matter more than hypothetical lives in the future. I've written about this on the EA forums before. However, if EA was to die today, I strongly believe the number of funds to developing world medical charities would decrease! Why? Because people normally think local when it comes to charity, especially larger donations, such as the mantra "charity starts at home". EA has led many people to really think about this and review the charities they donate to, drank the koolaid of being "Effective" with their charitable donations, and now 'regular' people (like me) are donating a good chunk of their pay checks to world medical charities (based on which ones are doing the better job, such as those suggested by givewell).

Overall even if EA has some bad actors (like SBF), and some stupid research goals (imo), and some money that seems fairly... circular if you know what I mean (EA Infrastructure Funds), I believe the general message is strong.

[tptacek]

Seems fair. The high level ideals of the EA movement seem hard to argue with. I asked on HN a few weeks ago how it could have gotten so weird; my understanding at the time was that it was just like, a fund you send some of your income to that distributes the money to the highest-ranked charities. Seems great!

But then there's this whole weird Scientology side to it, and, worse, that side of it seems to have swallowed up all the highest-profile people in EA.

[eddsh1994]

> But then there's this whole weird Scientology side to it, and, worse, that side of it seems to have swallowed up all the highest-profile people in EA.

The argument I've seen for why this happens, which I think is probably accurate, is that EA itself is a solid idea and currently solved (charities have been evaluated, winners are "boring" like malaria nets and deworming), and people are just happily chugging away donating money to those effective organisations. Givewell and other organisations review their work, they agree it's still doing really great work, and the overall group is silent because there's nothing to talk about :)

Longtermism, on the other hand, is hotly debated and highly theoretical. People write arguments for and against, people put out funding requests and speak to billionaires such as Musk to fund them, they get press coverage to try and gain traction for their arguments... It's a minority of EA, it really is, but it's the majority of the noise. This is why there's a disconnect between people both in EA and between EA and those outside of the group. And I agree it's an issue, it's just never been so public as since FTX blew up. It doesn't help a lot of the key 'leaders' of EA are pro-longtermist views. I say 'leaders' because you have central organisations but it's not like you're a member with a card or anything, it's a philosophical view you subscribe to when you donate your money to charity.

Personally I'd like to see the two orgs split so one can focus on saving lives on Mars from AI in 10,000 years time while others can focus on arguing why $10 a month to vaccine work in Ethiopia is probably better than going to the local donkey sanctuary.

[impossiblefork]

Reducing energy use to tackle climate change will impact GDP, and thus increase unemployment, and thus as a consequence lead to reduced competition for workers, and thus a reduced labour share of GDP. It's thus something which can greatly benefit large capital owners while harming workers.

For this reason it isn't completely unimpeachable.

It'd be great if it could be done without harming workers, but it would harm workers, and disproportionately.

[tomrod]

Sidenote: today I learned the word "apposite" and my day is vastly better.

[yboris]

Where do EAs advocate for harming people today? I'm not aware of any nefarious outcomes that come from caring about making the future go well.

[eddsh1994]

I guess the argument they have is if you have someone suffering today and $10,000 will end their suffering, longtermist EA’s will argue that $10k should be spent on AI alignment research because theoretically AI could end human life & theoretically there could be trillions more humans if that doesn’t happy so trillions of lives > 1 life (valuing existing and future lives the same). I don’t subscribe to this view but it does exist and ‘harming people today’ to make ‘the future go well’ is a vocal minority within EA.