[erostrate]

I used to be a utilitarian, but it made me morally repulsive, which pushed my friends away from utilitarianism. I had to stop since this had negative utility.

More seriously, any moral theory that strives too much for abstract purity will be vulnerable to adversarial inputs. A blunt and basic theory (common sense) is sufficient to cover all practical situations and will prevent you from looking very dumb by endorsing a fancy theory that fails catastrophically in the real world [1]

[1] https://time.com/6262810/sam-bankman-fried-effective-altruis...

[Smaug123]

SBF did have a very unusual discounting policy, namely "no discounting", in fairness. I'm not aware of anyone other than SBF who bites the "keep double-or-nothing a 51% probability gamble forever, for infinite expected utility and probability 1 of going bust" bullet in favour of keeping going forever. (SBF espoused this policy in March 2022, if I recall correctly, on Conversations with Tyler.)

[tim333]

I'm not sure that SBF being a crook shows that effective altruism failed.

[erostrate]

One main idea of EA is that you should make a lot of money in order to give it away. The obvious problem is that this can serve as a convenient moral justification for greed. SBF explicitly endorsed EA, Will MacAskill vouched for him, and I understand he was widely admired in EA circles. And he turned out to be the perfect incarnation of this problem, admitting himself he just used EA as a thin veil.

What would you count as evidence that effective altruism fails?

[tim333]

If effective altruism was not much good for the average adherent I'd say that was a fail. SBF was an outlier.