[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.