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by concordDance 1295 days ago
Me. The movement and ideas are good even if the most famous person connected to it is bad.

You don't hear about the vast majority of EAs who just quietly try and improve girl's education in Indian or distribute malaria nets (to mention two I know personally).

2 comments

Adding to this, groups like 80000 Hours and Evidence Action are EA and still worth it.
This is like "communism is good, it was just badly implemented".

For a movement that prides itself on being evidence-based, there is a lot of evidence EA is willing to ignore.

Isn't effective altruism just max_a E[benefit to society | a]?

I don't see how that can be discredited as a personal moral philosophy, even if you don't personally disagree with it.

SBF and FTX fraud doesn't discredit that it's more cost effective to educate people in certain areas than others.

I discredit this philosophy because E[..] cannot be accurately estimated. So it should be P(no harm|a) > 1-eps before anything.