[ben_w]

While it may feel a bit unfair for those reasons, it's not at all dumb.

Why?

Effective Altruism can't be fully effective if it can't spot scammers.

Yes this is hard, yes extra hard when the first encounter is them parachuting a promise of a billion dollars into your lap… but while I have no solutions and absolutely don't blame anyone who took that money, it's not dumb to criticise.

In fact, I'd say that failures you couldn't spot in advance are the learning opportunities; failures you did spot in advance would make you a co-conspirator in my view, even if not by law.

[anthonypasq]

expecting effective altruism to not trust every single institutional indicator of legitimacy (dozens of governments, central banks, the entire media) is dumb.

its a fairly decentralized movement, its just a random collection of people donating money.

[ben_w]

I don’t blame for the same reason I wasn’t expecting, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a learning opportunity.

If you skip the learning opportunity, then I will blame, given the association with big-R Rationality causes an expectation.

[anthonypasq]

there's absolutely no indication they aren't using this as a learning opportunity. William MacAskill who is one of the leaders of the movement has already put out multiple posts about this whole affair.