[seanhunter]

If you’re curious, I would start by listening to William MacAskill’s appearance on “Conversations with Tyler”[1]. It predates the whole Sam Bankman-Fried thing so you can make your mind up purely on the intellectual merits rather than being coloured by that mess.

Then if you’re serious about understanding it further, the logical next step would probably be to read “Doing Good Better”, where MacAskill really sets the whole thing out.

There’s something about the sort of “fundamentalist” utilitarianism of his ideas that really troubles me especially when taken to its logical conclusion so even when I logically agree with them I don’t personally find it easy to actually “sign up” so to speak, but it might resonate with you idk.

[1] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/william-macaskil...

[matthewdgreen]

That podcast is from August 2022, which is well after SBF began making major contributions to EA organizations using misbegotten funds. In fact it’s likely that his giving helped pay for the entire MacAskill book promotion effort, which could well have been connected to that podcast (which is dated six days before the book publication date.) It’s reasonable to assume that MacAskill and other EA luminaries didn’t know that SBF was funding their organizations with misbegotten funds, but on the other hand there’s no evidence they looked very closely either. SBF’s close involvement and financially-based access certainly do color my impression of the movement.

[seanhunter]

Those things should definitely colour your opinion[1]. What I’m saying is, if you want to give the EA ideas the benefit of the doubt, this is the strongest possible version that I can think of as an intro - one of the main dudes given a chance to really explain his point of view while being gently challenged intellectually, but without just guilt by association with SBF. Then if it survives that, you can investigate further if curious. If it doesn’t survive that, then the SBF thing might be the thing that finally sinks the ship but it was already taking on a lot of water already.

[1] In my opinion at least- they certainly do for me. I already had some qualms about it before that but it sort of confirmed a queasiness that I had about how it all seems pretty convenient. You can be megarich and live in a very selfish way and that’s alright because you’re earning to give etc. While I like the fact that they try to measure (and optimise) impact, I also have a big problem with the way MacAskill in particular seems to only value impacts he can measure, so philanthropy with social benefits - donating to things like art, culture, museums etc he basically says are completely worthless. That just seems very obviously wrong to me. From a personal point of view, I have seen the social mobility benefits that arise from things like art or music scholarships, where the benefit accrues to the family of the scholarship student even if (maybe especially if) they don’t go on to pursue a career in the arts.

[matthewdgreen]

I’ve read some of MacAskill’s writings, and my objection to his philosophy is twofold. First, while he talks about the value of “measurable contributions”, many of the things he finds important aren’t measurable. Longtermist investments and things that maximize the utility of future humans are almost by definition impossible to measure. This undermines the entire founding ethos of EA. What substitutes for true measurement in these cases is something more like opinion, where major EA orgs can then justify buying a luxury retreat for meetings since it will “help to produce an environment conducive to good ideas, and those ideas could save countless lives” and other nonsense like that.

Secondly there’s the obsession with cultivating and catering to high-earning donors, which in this case has a long and “rational” justification. But is, in the end, largely similar to what all traditional (non-effective) charities do. The major difference in EA is that there is even less incentive to look closely at what the donors do, and what kind of human beings they are, since the only measure that “matters” is the donation amount.

In that sense “the SBF fiasco” wasn’t so much an outlier but an inevitable result of the entire approach that specific wing of EA has been taking. I also agree that the focus on measurability harms difficult-to-measure causes like the arts, but I sort of expect that from a tech-nerd focused charity anyway.