[Joeboy]

Similarly, the reason comments like yours get voted to the top of discussions about EA is that they imply "It's best if rich people keep their money, because the people trying to save poor people's lives are actually bad". There's a very obvious appeal to that view, especially somewhere like HN.

[pjc50]

No, I think this is just about the difference between Effective Altruism (tm), altruism that is actually effective, and the hidden third option (tax the rich).

EA-the-brand turned into a speed run of the failure cases of utilitarianism. Because it was simply too easy to make up projections for how your spending was going to be effective in the future, without ever looking back at how your earning was damaging in the past. It was also a good lesson in how allowing thought experiments to run wild would end up distracting everyone from very real problems.

In the end an agency devoted to spending money to save lives of poor people globally (USAID) got shut down by the world's richest man, and I can't remember whether EA ever had anything to say about that.

[Joeboy]

The work I do is / was largely funded by USAID so I'm biased, but from literally everything I've seen EA people are unanimously horrified by the gutting of USAID. And EA people are overwhelmingly pro "tax the rich".

But again, I recognize the appeal of your narrative so you're on safer ground than I am as far as HN popularity goes.

[pjc50]

> EA people

I have a lot of sympathy for the ideas of EA, but I do think a lot of this is down to EA-as-brand rather than whatever is happening at grassroots level. Perhaps it's in the same place as Communism; just as advocates need a good answer to "how did this go from a worker's rights movement to Stalin", EA needs an answer to "how did EA become most publicly associated with a famous fraudster".

[Joeboy]

Well, there are some fairly obvious answers:

EA had a fairly easy time in the media for a while which probably made its "leadership" a bit careless. The EA foundation didn't start to seriously disassociate itself from SBF until the collapse of FTX made his fraudulent activity publicly apparent.

But mostly, people (especially rich people) fucking hate it when you tell them they could be saving lives instead of buying a slightly nicer house. That (it seems to me) is why eg. MOMA / Harvard / The British Museum etc get to accept millions of dollars of drug dealer money and come out unscathed, whereas "EA took money from somebody who was subsequently convicted of fraud" gets presented as a decisive indicator of EA's moral character. It's also, I think, the reason you seem to have ended up thinking EA is anti-tax and anti-USAID.

I feel like I need to say, there's also a whole thing about EA leadership being obsessed with AI risk, which (at least at the time) most people thought was nuts. I wasn't really happy with the amount of money (especially SBF money) that went into that, but a large majority of EA money was still going into very defensible life-saving causes.

Edit: I made a few edits, sorry