Like it couldn't decide what it's argument was other than to diss EA. I mean, if there's this bad rich guy then surely the more of his cash you divert to helping ppl the better right? And it acted like flattering rich people's ego's was somehow a particular problem for EA as if fancy thousand dollar a plate dinners, offering large donors leadership positions and otherwise fund raising by via flattery wasn't a thing for every last charity.
I have some theories about why this happens but I'll put that in a seperate comment.
So an interesting question is why does EA draw this kind of coverage and I have a start of a theory.
I feel that by raising the issue of how effective a donation is EA makes a certain kind of person feel guilty. Before they'd felt good about themselves for any charitable donation but now once cogent arguments are made that some donations are better then others they feel guilty for not putting in the time to figure out the best donation. You can try and tell them that's not the point and no one is suggesting you feel bad about charity but that doesn't stop the feeling of guilt for many people.
And people resent having something they felt good about suddenly make them feel guilty. A common reaction to feeling guilty because of criticism is to lash out at whoever made you feel that way and attack their virtue -- even, or perhaps especially, when the guilt is really coming from your own self-criticism.
I wish I had a good fix for this since it would be a huge boon for EA to avoid inducing this negative affect. To a degree you can minimize it by emphasizing that you can just let givewell figure out what's best but that still leaves some people feeling bad about their emotional desire to donate to help starving dogs or whatever and, even if you insist they shouldn't, the problem is the argument that it does more good to donate this other way is going to make a certain sort of person feel bad if they don't donate that way.
And (though this is much more speculative) for some people, I think there is also an element of who the criticism is coming from, e.g., there is a feeling that these nerds with calculators are invading the domain of journalists and less quantitative types and setting themselves up as arbiters of social value.
Many good points given the superficial and unfair criticisms of EA/longtermism.
That being said, while EA does a lot of good, it suffers from many genuine structural problems media do not mention. EAs are occasionally aware of these, but mostly consider them as negligible/intractable. A friend of mine mentions naive, antisocial utilitarianism attracting Machiavellian types (not that properly contained utilitarianism is bad), partisanship and political bias way exceeding what's necessary to operate on the nonprofit scene, general mistreatment of volunteers, interns, and low-ranking employees, dynamics creating vicious loops worsening mental health, self-recommending tendencies, lack of transparency leading to distrust in trendsetting institutions, unproductive credentialism/elitism, and major loopholes in cost-effectiveness models.
In the end, "sort-of-EA-adjacent-people" become a better match for Great EAs than Prominent EAs.
The reason AE is taking so much heat is that its richest and most visible proponent a) claimed to know how to make the world, in general, better (AE principles), but b) actually made the world a lot worse (by actually being a cynical crook). It is obvious why this would result in negative press for AE and why people would update their priors in a way that is unfavorable to AE. If the head of Mothers Against Drunk Driving stole several billion dollars, people would also update their priors against MADD. What is actually interesting about the media coverage is not that it turned against the movement of crypto Bernie Madoff but that it was so credulous in the first place about a guy who claimed to be donating all his money to AE charities but actually owned a jet.
I admit I don't pay a lot of attention to EA beyond what I read around here, but my impression so far is that it's basically a fairly trite set of ideas espoused by people who don't understand the world very well and don't get the point of the old saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But I do agree that some of the recent FTX/SBF-related articles that are critical of EA are superficial and silly.
>Young people should resist the lure of political activism and stick to time-honored ways of making a difference, like staying in touch with their family and holding church picnics.
Based and clear pilled.
(I'd guess the media is unfair to EA sometimes mostly because it's still fairly novel and doesn't have a "this is just normal and how things are" vibe yet. But as others have pointed out, the media is often unfair to anyone it considers a threat - an EA is implicitly a pretty big power grab)
While this might be big-picture true about the way EA is covered, the notable part about its coverage this time around (FTX situation) is that it’s been insanely positive/hands off. There have been opinion pieces and such from EA haters, but I found the establishment news to be remarkably sympathetic toward SBF and his goals to change the world for the better.
Separately, a few of these fake headlines make good points!
It's not just that they are all over the fact that a rich guy who turned out to be sleazy made a big deal of his EA giving (that's fair) but there seems to be an active desire to suggest that EA is somehow rotten because it took money from ppl who wouldn't have done good things with it and spent it doing good things.
I mean c'mon, the media isn't so naive as not to recognize that every bad person ever tries to associate themselves with charitable giving. Plenty of major international charities happily take money from the sleeziest ppl around without generating much negative comment.
But I think a better way to phrase my claim is this: bc ppl see EA (wrongly imo) as claiming a kind of higher moral status they then see this as a kind of karma (much like how religious orgs get held to higher standards than other orgs).
The orthogonality thesis in action: the media as highly capable agents, bringing considerable wherewithal to dystopian agendas built on horrifyingly confused conclusions.
(1) "Young people should resist the lure of political activism and stick to time-honored ways of making a difference, like staying in touch with their family and holding church picnics."
Isn't this the same approach as "your single vote doesn't count, stay at home and don't vote" argument which I've seen in the comments on this here site before?
(2) "Obviously this can only be because he’s using his photogenic happy family to “whitewash” his reputation and distract from Facebook’s complicity in spreading misinformation."
I've *seen* the Metaverse trailers, where Zuckerberg is taking a call from his wife (I think she's his wife?) sending him a video about cute stuff their dog is doing. They still fail to convince me that this is anything other than set up as a marketing ploy:
Does this look like something a "photogenic happy family"-man would willingly use as his global image selling-point, or what an android thinks a human would pick?
I'm sympathetic to the concept of EA, and give some of my annual donations to GiveDirectly, who I believe is somewhat EA-aligned. I'm not familiar with the community, so maybe this question is ignorant.
Why was SBF embraced at all by the EA community? It seems most of his giving was political, and not particularly effective. He gave $20 million to a single congressional candidate in Oregon who got smoked in the primary and a couple hundred million to a Biden IE in 2020, where the marginal impact of a dollar is pretty damn low. lsn't this kind of giving the kind that will personally give the donor a lot of prestige, but is low on the measurable impacts EA embraces? (FWIW I do give money politically, but I see that as separate than pure charitable giving). Were there people in the EA community before SBF crashed saying, "this guy is not doing EA?"
The only reason I enjoy a tiny bit of schadenfreude in all of this is that some—undoubtedly not all—seem to give off the impression that they think that before they came along a few years ago nobody else in history ever had the insight that charitable donations are best directed toward where they will do the most good. Rather, everyone else had uncritically donated money to the local opera house with no idea that there could be any issue there. If the same community had done more or less the same substantive work but—instead of making up a cute name for themselves and seeming to think they had invented a novel theory of charitable giving—had just said they were doing some work to help figure out really good recipients and to think through some of the issues related to charity, then they would have much more of my sympathy. It goes without saying that none of this justifies poor media criticism. But as others have noted there has been plenty of equally poorly reasoned articles supporting “effective altruism” and attacking other views. And it’s worth noting that the very hubris of designating themselves as some grand new movement undoubtedly contributed to the lack of media understanding.
I don’t think the human urge to pile on when someone screws up in a spectacular way is a very new thing. Nor the urge to find someone to blame when things go south.
The old saying, no good deed goes unpunished, comes to my mind.
It is interesting to me how so many people seem to of reached the conclusion that SBF was a ConMan through and through when the facts on the ground don’t even come close to supporting that. That might change, but right now the only clear thing is that he misdirected a whole bunch of money to cover up a gaping hole in the balance sheet somewhere else, and (I imagine) assumed that crypto would start going up again and he would be able to make everyone whole. How much damage has been done to a lot of people by the crash in crypto currencies that has nothing to do with FTX per se? In my opinion, comparing him to Bernie Madoff at this juncture in the investigation is really over the top. Bernie Madoff ran a Ponzi scheme for years with no intention of making anyone whole. What endgame was in his mind I will never know. Nothing has come out of this yet that puts SBF anywhere near that league.
The last one is right though. The fighting racism battle is way past the point of diminishing returns and people who worry about it would be better off working on issues internal to their communities.
How does this compare with the way the media shredded the Sackler family? I acknowledge there are differences -- super rich people lie about the addiction potential of their pharmaceuticals and give mountains of money to museums and opera houses and totally non-EA charities. Not only did the media go after them, The Law went after them with some success.
Some of this is just plain old resentment against rich people. Like Richard Cory, they glitter when they walk. They get worshipful press coverage for their good deeds. By contrast we're nothing, and we don't like being nothing. So when they fall, they get torn to shreds by the herd, we sickly and mediocre puddles of hatred. The rich, their charity and beneficence don't shine so brightly now! Turns out we needn't feel bad about ourselves!
- An idealist group of mostly young white men have formed the Union movement. The claim that they want to improve working conditions for workers all over the world, but their methods have been controversial. Recent events have shown the catastrophic but predictable outcomes of the strategy called "strike-till-you-get-what-you-want" in Union circles. Famous philosophers have idealistically claimed that this method should theoretically be an effective way to improve working conditions and wages. But anyone with a common-sense understanding of real-world human psychology can predict that strikes will attract lazy people who do not want to work and who now can hide behind this fashionable cause. Worse, strikes may cause productive workers to become lazy due to the prolonged inaction. For every worker that strikes for improved condition, there will be ten who strike out of pure laziness. Instead of striking, maybe workers would be better of by encouraging a stoic mindset?
-Another issue for the Union movement is that some of the movement seem less concerned with simply improving working conditions, and more concerned with abstract ideas about perfect utopian societies. Inspired by philosophers, they predict that "socialism" will occur in the future, and that the Unions should prepare for it instead of focusing on improving working conditions now. While this may be an useful idea to think about, it is clear that these fringe theories are scaring of ordinary people who just care about wages and working conditions and who might otherwise want to join the Union movement. The Union movement would better achieve it's goals if the person in charge would ban discussions about "socialism". Those discussing socialism could just form a new movement and the person in charge could make sure that these two movements never overlap. That this hasn't happened already indicates that the Union movement is incompetent, and that it's more interested in theoretical speculation than real-world work conditions.
These echoes-of-Slate-Star-Scratchpad type subscriber posts are a nice cherry on top of the 5% paid content tithe, but for meta-consideration reasons I'm glad you're choosing to keep them paywalled. There's a time and place for half-serious half-trolling optically-spicy punching takes, and...God help me, I think Twitter works better for that than The Blog. Different product lines and all that, even if both are run by the same boss.
(It wouldn't be too much more work to polish this into a suitable-for-all-ages post, though. I think.)
They do misreport this way when it suits them which is most of the time. I've been on the inside on the ground of several movements since the 1980 and news worthy incidents and the media seems routinely awful to me. Peace, civil rights, economic reform, political finance reform, police reform, aids research and gay rights, skeptics, new atheist, gamer culture etc... Have all seemed to have had reporting that emphasized the salacious and got things systematically wrong.
The media is a social clique that is in part derived from the popular kids that used to run highschool social life and student government. Their modus operandi is being blandly authoritative and charming to the majority of the student body while putting down any unallied concentrations of social power and prestige.
Nevertheless, there is one essential thing i hope a lot of the EA/Rat community learns from this.
All social movements, that gain power, credibility, clout, money or prestige, attract predators, opportunists and fanatics. The more idealistic they are the faster they are invaded. The more filled with youth and youthful energy, the faster they are invaded. The more informal their structure, the faster they are invaded. The more they separate themselves from traditional social structures and norms the faster they are invaded.
This sort of stuff happens as inevitably and ineluctably as favorite pets getting sick and dying does. It's still nice to have a pet and it can greatly improve the quality of for life. Just be prepared to have to some serious vet bills and for it to end badly.
The only durable changes/improvements seem to come from the advancement of technological, scoenrific, social, and psychological know-how. Those unfortunately always carry unintended consequences.
Art imitates life, or, you guys *should* have set up a prediction market on this 😁
Who was it in a different thread was asking for titles about a Michael Lewis book on the FTX saga? Because one is forthcoming, there's money to be made off this!
And casting for a movie version? Well, we'll be getting an eight-part streaming series from Amazon. Let's hope they do a better job on it than the "Rings of Power", yes?
"Marvel directors Joe and Anthony Russo have teamed up with Hunters creator David Weil on a series about the collapsed bitcoin business and its embattled founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) for Amazon.
The streamer has ordered an eight-part limited series about the subject.
It comes less than 24 hours after Deadline revealed that Amazon was one of the bidders that is set to lose out to Apple to the rights to Michael Lewis’ upcoming book on the topic after the Moneyball author spent six months with SBF."
Okay, I'm going to ask all you fine people out there: if Amazon gives this the Rings of Power treatment, what do you think they will change about the canonical events (such as we know them at this time)?
Will Will MacAskill be Sauron?
Should a diverse cast be cast and if so, will they make Bankman-Fried (1) African-American (2) HIspanic/Latino (3) Unspecified other?
Dwarves - anti-Semitic stereotype of money-obsessed outsiders or no? Will Sam be a dwarf?
Bahamian luxury penthouse apartment = Khazad-dum or a flet in Lindon?
> Young people should resist the lure of political activism and stick to time-honored ways of making a difference, like staying in touch with their family and holding church picnics.
You know I think my younger self would have chuckled along and agreed with the sentiment here ("the satire is delicious, because clearly political activism makes a difference in the grand scheme of things and quaint boring things like community and family life don't") -- but I am not so sure now. I feel like every day I see new results about the importance of community and family life (even if not always framed that way).
Or said slightly differently, if a genie gave me a choice between:
(A) all young people had such good family and community lives, that they wanted to stay in touch with family and they wanted to go to regular community picnics, but they never got to do political activism, or
(B) all young people really felt compelled to do political activism, but their family and community lives were such that they didnt want to stay in touch with family and had little connection to local community,
... it's very unclear to me that (B) is society that has better aggregate results.
Now of course this doesn't suggest a solution, there is no magic genie that gives everyone fulfilling family and community lives.
But I just notice in myself how my thoughts have changed here over time.
I'm not usually this wise, but in the case of SBF I have refrained from accessing anything except primary sources, mostly SBF himself in podcasts and in that text exchange with the Vox reporter. There, he comes across sort of like a teenager who's gotten busted for dealing cocaine at his prep school -- cocky, amoral, way more interested in himself than in anyone else involved, and convinced that all the people who count for something have done or would do as he did -- he's just the one who got caught. It's pretty repulsive, and I feel a lot of personal disgust and anger at him.
I think a lot of the mistreatment EA is getting currently flows from the anger most people feel at the very rich, as currently exemplified by SBF. Envy's part of it, but not the biggest part. We see them as having big wallets and small hearts, and that may be accurate. There's a line of research into the empathy and compassion of the very rich, and multiple studies have found them to be less interested in the suffering of others, less empathetic, and less compassionate. Here’s a link: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealth-reduces-compassion/.
I’m not presenting these studies as proof that view is valid. I do not know how good this research is. It does line up with my intuitions -- or maybe I should say it confirms my prejudices? Certainly SBF in the communications I've seen since he went bust seems grotesquely lacking in empathy for the people he's harmed. Why is he not *crying*? Wouldn't you be?
As for Effective Altruism itself -- I don't exactly have anything against it, but I find it hard to warm up to. When it comes to human suffering, I am disturbed by people who are so able to look at the big picture, and to take the long view. There's something chilly about being able to do that. It seems like they must not be very moved by any the small individuals in the big picture in the here and now. Here's a small illustration of what I mean. I'm a pretty conscientious recycler. I'll get up from where I am to go throw a single empty envelope into the paper recycling; I wash the cans and chop the cardboard up into small pieces, as our town asks us to; I take plastic film to Target, who recycles the stuff. I probably spend a couple hours a month doing that tedious stuff, and I often have the thought that if I skipped the recycling completely and instead worked 2 extra hours per month and donated the money to environmental causes I would be doing more good. But I can't bring myself to skip the recycling. When I throw recyclables into the trash I picture things like seahorses choking on shreds of plastic wrap.
If I took a pill that cured me of my painful sympathy for imagined present day seahorses, would I then become more of an effective altruist? Would I work 2 extra hours a month and donate the proceeds? I'm not sure I would. I would certainly be able to see that seahorses and other creatures would be better off if I contributed that money to environmental organizations, but I'm not sure I would be moved enough to go to enough trouble help out the sea creatures. And as for future seahorses -- they're even harder to care about. Besides, it's not clear how much longer seahorses will even inhabit the seas. If I were to become an EA, it would not be out of feeling for seahorses present and future. It would be a result of feeling personally very compatible with other EAs, and/or very good about being able to see the big picture and take the long view.
Here's a quote that gave me some comfort many years ago:
> "And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new."
- Niccolo Machiavelli, "The Prince", Chapter VI, tr. W. K. Marriott in 1908
I'm beginning to see "media bad" as the "orange man bad" derangement of this community. Yes, it's supremely annoying and antithetical to our sacred values. But it's not a winning strategy for winning over moderates and it is degrading our maps.
For context: my lib friends are all livid about how *generous* the media has been to SBF, particularly the puff piece in the NYT.
The media is gonna media; it's as fundamental a constraint as entropy. I was raised in a libertarian community, in which the red meat fan service was to just get super mad about the government for being mad, every day, because the government is bad every day. Feels good, doesn't work.
I mean... 3 of these make a good point!
(Love this series of posts so much)
Remember this instead of having Gel-Mann amnesia next time you read something.
I know. This article pissed me off sooo much! ( https://newrepublic.com/article/168885/bankman-fried-effective-altruism-bunk )
Like it couldn't decide what it's argument was other than to diss EA. I mean, if there's this bad rich guy then surely the more of his cash you divert to helping ppl the better right? And it acted like flattering rich people's ego's was somehow a particular problem for EA as if fancy thousand dollar a plate dinners, offering large donors leadership positions and otherwise fund raising by via flattery wasn't a thing for every last charity.
I have some theories about why this happens but I'll put that in a seperate comment.
The media *does* report on other things like it reports on Effective Altruism. Namely, Republicans. Welcome to the outgroup.
It’s funny because it’s true. I wonder if this is just an outgroup thing, as the other commenter said, or if there’s something else at work here.
So an interesting question is why does EA draw this kind of coverage and I have a start of a theory.
I feel that by raising the issue of how effective a donation is EA makes a certain kind of person feel guilty. Before they'd felt good about themselves for any charitable donation but now once cogent arguments are made that some donations are better then others they feel guilty for not putting in the time to figure out the best donation. You can try and tell them that's not the point and no one is suggesting you feel bad about charity but that doesn't stop the feeling of guilt for many people.
And people resent having something they felt good about suddenly make them feel guilty. A common reaction to feeling guilty because of criticism is to lash out at whoever made you feel that way and attack their virtue -- even, or perhaps especially, when the guilt is really coming from your own self-criticism.
I wish I had a good fix for this since it would be a huge boon for EA to avoid inducing this negative affect. To a degree you can minimize it by emphasizing that you can just let givewell figure out what's best but that still leaves some people feeling bad about their emotional desire to donate to help starving dogs or whatever and, even if you insist they shouldn't, the problem is the argument that it does more good to donate this other way is going to make a certain sort of person feel bad if they don't donate that way.
And (though this is much more speculative) for some people, I think there is also an element of who the criticism is coming from, e.g., there is a feeling that these nerds with calculators are invading the domain of journalists and less quantitative types and setting themselves up as arbiters of social value.
Many good points given the superficial and unfair criticisms of EA/longtermism.
That being said, while EA does a lot of good, it suffers from many genuine structural problems media do not mention. EAs are occasionally aware of these, but mostly consider them as negligible/intractable. A friend of mine mentions naive, antisocial utilitarianism attracting Machiavellian types (not that properly contained utilitarianism is bad), partisanship and political bias way exceeding what's necessary to operate on the nonprofit scene, general mistreatment of volunteers, interns, and low-ranking employees, dynamics creating vicious loops worsening mental health, self-recommending tendencies, lack of transparency leading to distrust in trendsetting institutions, unproductive credentialism/elitism, and major loopholes in cost-effectiveness models.
In the end, "sort-of-EA-adjacent-people" become a better match for Great EAs than Prominent EAs.
Watching the media dogpile on EA just made me like EA more.
The reason AE is taking so much heat is that its richest and most visible proponent a) claimed to know how to make the world, in general, better (AE principles), but b) actually made the world a lot worse (by actually being a cynical crook). It is obvious why this would result in negative press for AE and why people would update their priors in a way that is unfavorable to AE. If the head of Mothers Against Drunk Driving stole several billion dollars, people would also update their priors against MADD. What is actually interesting about the media coverage is not that it turned against the movement of crypto Bernie Madoff but that it was so credulous in the first place about a guy who claimed to be donating all his money to AE charities but actually owned a jet.
1. I'm not 100% sure I disagree with the political activism one.
2. Wasn't that Mark Zuckerberg one an actual article?
Great post but why subscriber only?
I admit I don't pay a lot of attention to EA beyond what I read around here, but my impression so far is that it's basically a fairly trite set of ideas espoused by people who don't understand the world very well and don't get the point of the old saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But I do agree that some of the recent FTX/SBF-related articles that are critical of EA are superficial and silly.
>Young people should resist the lure of political activism and stick to time-honored ways of making a difference, like staying in touch with their family and holding church picnics.
Based and clear pilled.
(I'd guess the media is unfair to EA sometimes mostly because it's still fairly novel and doesn't have a "this is just normal and how things are" vibe yet. But as others have pointed out, the media is often unfair to anyone it considers a threat - an EA is implicitly a pretty big power grab)
While this might be big-picture true about the way EA is covered, the notable part about its coverage this time around (FTX situation) is that it’s been insanely positive/hands off. There have been opinion pieces and such from EA haters, but I found the establishment news to be remarkably sympathetic toward SBF and his goals to change the world for the better.
Separately, a few of these fake headlines make good points!
This one was particularly satisfying. All of the gnashing of teeth about effective altruism is so poorly reasoned.
It seems like EA is taking a bigger beating in the media than SBF. I'm _honestly_ not sure why.
Brilliant.
Sure that's part of it but see articles like this one: https://newrepublic.com/article/168885/bankman-fried-effective-altruism-bunk
It's not just that they are all over the fact that a rich guy who turned out to be sleazy made a big deal of his EA giving (that's fair) but there seems to be an active desire to suggest that EA is somehow rotten because it took money from ppl who wouldn't have done good things with it and spent it doing good things.
I mean c'mon, the media isn't so naive as not to recognize that every bad person ever tries to associate themselves with charitable giving. Plenty of major international charities happily take money from the sleeziest ppl around without generating much negative comment.
But I think a better way to phrase my claim is this: bc ppl see EA (wrongly imo) as claiming a kind of higher moral status they then see this as a kind of karma (much like how religious orgs get held to higher standards than other orgs).
The orthogonality thesis in action: the media as highly capable agents, bringing considerable wherewithal to dystopian agendas built on horrifyingly confused conclusions.
(1) "Young people should resist the lure of political activism and stick to time-honored ways of making a difference, like staying in touch with their family and holding church picnics."
Isn't this the same approach as "your single vote doesn't count, stay at home and don't vote" argument which I've seen in the comments on this here site before?
(2) "Obviously this can only be because he’s using his photogenic happy family to “whitewash” his reputation and distract from Facebook’s complicity in spreading misinformation."
I've *seen* the Metaverse trailers, where Zuckerberg is taking a call from his wife (I think she's his wife?) sending him a video about cute stuff their dog is doing. They still fail to convince me that this is anything other than set up as a marketing ploy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9vWShsmE20
Does this look like something a "photogenic happy family"-man would willingly use as his global image selling-point, or what an android thinks a human would pick?
https://www.indiewire.com/2022/08/mark-zuckerberg-metaverse-hollywood-1234753898/
(3) "If these tech bros would just read a book, they would learn that excessive concern about wife-kidnapping is dangerous and unnatural."
Well, pretty much everyone *did* end up dead.... and by one version of the legend, the real Helen was in Egypt all the time anyway.
I'm sympathetic to the concept of EA, and give some of my annual donations to GiveDirectly, who I believe is somewhat EA-aligned. I'm not familiar with the community, so maybe this question is ignorant.
Why was SBF embraced at all by the EA community? It seems most of his giving was political, and not particularly effective. He gave $20 million to a single congressional candidate in Oregon who got smoked in the primary and a couple hundred million to a Biden IE in 2020, where the marginal impact of a dollar is pretty damn low. lsn't this kind of giving the kind that will personally give the donor a lot of prestige, but is low on the measurable impacts EA embraces? (FWIW I do give money politically, but I see that as separate than pure charitable giving). Were there people in the EA community before SBF crashed saying, "this guy is not doing EA?"
omg amazing. I'm trying to control my giggles lest i have to explain
The only reason I enjoy a tiny bit of schadenfreude in all of this is that some—undoubtedly not all—seem to give off the impression that they think that before they came along a few years ago nobody else in history ever had the insight that charitable donations are best directed toward where they will do the most good. Rather, everyone else had uncritically donated money to the local opera house with no idea that there could be any issue there. If the same community had done more or less the same substantive work but—instead of making up a cute name for themselves and seeming to think they had invented a novel theory of charitable giving—had just said they were doing some work to help figure out really good recipients and to think through some of the issues related to charity, then they would have much more of my sympathy. It goes without saying that none of this justifies poor media criticism. But as others have noted there has been plenty of equally poorly reasoned articles supporting “effective altruism” and attacking other views. And it’s worth noting that the very hubris of designating themselves as some grand new movement undoubtedly contributed to the lack of media understanding.
This is epic, pleeeeease consider making it public (maybe in a few months, though)
I don’t think the human urge to pile on when someone screws up in a spectacular way is a very new thing. Nor the urge to find someone to blame when things go south.
The old saying, no good deed goes unpunished, comes to my mind.
It is interesting to me how so many people seem to of reached the conclusion that SBF was a ConMan through and through when the facts on the ground don’t even come close to supporting that. That might change, but right now the only clear thing is that he misdirected a whole bunch of money to cover up a gaping hole in the balance sheet somewhere else, and (I imagine) assumed that crypto would start going up again and he would be able to make everyone whole. How much damage has been done to a lot of people by the crash in crypto currencies that has nothing to do with FTX per se? In my opinion, comparing him to Bernie Madoff at this juncture in the investigation is really over the top. Bernie Madoff ran a Ponzi scheme for years with no intention of making anyone whole. What endgame was in his mind I will never know. Nothing has come out of this yet that puts SBF anywhere near that league.
Alright, what's your best price on making this post public?
This appears correct to me. You should post it public
The last one is right though. The fighting racism battle is way past the point of diminishing returns and people who worry about it would be better off working on issues internal to their communities.
How does this compare with the way the media shredded the Sackler family? I acknowledge there are differences -- super rich people lie about the addiction potential of their pharmaceuticals and give mountains of money to museums and opera houses and totally non-EA charities. Not only did the media go after them, The Law went after them with some success.
Some of this is just plain old resentment against rich people. Like Richard Cory, they glitter when they walk. They get worshipful press coverage for their good deeds. By contrast we're nothing, and we don't like being nothing. So when they fall, they get torn to shreds by the herd, we sickly and mediocre puddles of hatred. The rich, their charity and beneficence don't shine so brightly now! Turns out we needn't feel bad about ourselves!
That's really most of the story.
- An idealist group of mostly young white men have formed the Union movement. The claim that they want to improve working conditions for workers all over the world, but their methods have been controversial. Recent events have shown the catastrophic but predictable outcomes of the strategy called "strike-till-you-get-what-you-want" in Union circles. Famous philosophers have idealistically claimed that this method should theoretically be an effective way to improve working conditions and wages. But anyone with a common-sense understanding of real-world human psychology can predict that strikes will attract lazy people who do not want to work and who now can hide behind this fashionable cause. Worse, strikes may cause productive workers to become lazy due to the prolonged inaction. For every worker that strikes for improved condition, there will be ten who strike out of pure laziness. Instead of striking, maybe workers would be better of by encouraging a stoic mindset?
-Another issue for the Union movement is that some of the movement seem less concerned with simply improving working conditions, and more concerned with abstract ideas about perfect utopian societies. Inspired by philosophers, they predict that "socialism" will occur in the future, and that the Unions should prepare for it instead of focusing on improving working conditions now. While this may be an useful idea to think about, it is clear that these fringe theories are scaring of ordinary people who just care about wages and working conditions and who might otherwise want to join the Union movement. The Union movement would better achieve it's goals if the person in charge would ban discussions about "socialism". Those discussing socialism could just form a new movement and the person in charge could make sure that these two movements never overlap. That this hasn't happened already indicates that the Union movement is incompetent, and that it's more interested in theoretical speculation than real-world work conditions.
These echoes-of-Slate-Star-Scratchpad type subscriber posts are a nice cherry on top of the 5% paid content tithe, but for meta-consideration reasons I'm glad you're choosing to keep them paywalled. There's a time and place for half-serious half-trolling optically-spicy punching takes, and...God help me, I think Twitter works better for that than The Blog. Different product lines and all that, even if both are run by the same boss.
(It wouldn't be too much more work to polish this into a suitable-for-all-ages post, though. I think.)
I'm so sad that this is subscriber-only - I want to propagate this more than anything else I've read about the FTX collapse.
They do misreport this way when it suits them which is most of the time. I've been on the inside on the ground of several movements since the 1980 and news worthy incidents and the media seems routinely awful to me. Peace, civil rights, economic reform, political finance reform, police reform, aids research and gay rights, skeptics, new atheist, gamer culture etc... Have all seemed to have had reporting that emphasized the salacious and got things systematically wrong.
The media is a social clique that is in part derived from the popular kids that used to run highschool social life and student government. Their modus operandi is being blandly authoritative and charming to the majority of the student body while putting down any unallied concentrations of social power and prestige.
Nevertheless, there is one essential thing i hope a lot of the EA/Rat community learns from this.
All social movements, that gain power, credibility, clout, money or prestige, attract predators, opportunists and fanatics. The more idealistic they are the faster they are invaded. The more filled with youth and youthful energy, the faster they are invaded. The more informal their structure, the faster they are invaded. The more they separate themselves from traditional social structures and norms the faster they are invaded.
This sort of stuff happens as inevitably and ineluctably as favorite pets getting sick and dying does. It's still nice to have a pet and it can greatly improve the quality of for life. Just be prepared to have to some serious vet bills and for it to end badly.
The only durable changes/improvements seem to come from the advancement of technological, scoenrific, social, and psychological know-how. Those unfortunately always carry unintended consequences.
Welcome to the human condition.
Art imitates life, or, you guys *should* have set up a prediction market on this 😁
Who was it in a different thread was asking for titles about a Michael Lewis book on the FTX saga? Because one is forthcoming, there's money to be made off this!
And casting for a movie version? Well, we'll be getting an eight-part streaming series from Amazon. Let's hope they do a better job on it than the "Rings of Power", yes?
https://deadline.com/2022/11/russo-brothers-david-weil-ftx-crypto-scandal-series-amazon-1235181170/
"Marvel directors Joe and Anthony Russo have teamed up with Hunters creator David Weil on a series about the collapsed bitcoin business and its embattled founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) for Amazon.
The streamer has ordered an eight-part limited series about the subject.
It comes less than 24 hours after Deadline revealed that Amazon was one of the bidders that is set to lose out to Apple to the rights to Michael Lewis’ upcoming book on the topic after the Moneyball author spent six months with SBF."
Okay, I'm going to ask all you fine people out there: if Amazon gives this the Rings of Power treatment, what do you think they will change about the canonical events (such as we know them at this time)?
Will Will MacAskill be Sauron?
Should a diverse cast be cast and if so, will they make Bankman-Fried (1) African-American (2) HIspanic/Latino (3) Unspecified other?
Dwarves - anti-Semitic stereotype of money-obsessed outsiders or no? Will Sam be a dwarf?
Bahamian luxury penthouse apartment = Khazad-dum or a flet in Lindon?
> Young people should resist the lure of political activism and stick to time-honored ways of making a difference, like staying in touch with their family and holding church picnics.
You know I think my younger self would have chuckled along and agreed with the sentiment here ("the satire is delicious, because clearly political activism makes a difference in the grand scheme of things and quaint boring things like community and family life don't") -- but I am not so sure now. I feel like every day I see new results about the importance of community and family life (even if not always framed that way).
Or said slightly differently, if a genie gave me a choice between:
(A) all young people had such good family and community lives, that they wanted to stay in touch with family and they wanted to go to regular community picnics, but they never got to do political activism, or
(B) all young people really felt compelled to do political activism, but their family and community lives were such that they didnt want to stay in touch with family and had little connection to local community,
... it's very unclear to me that (B) is society that has better aggregate results.
Now of course this doesn't suggest a solution, there is no magic genie that gives everyone fulfilling family and community lives.
But I just notice in myself how my thoughts have changed here over time.
I'm not usually this wise, but in the case of SBF I have refrained from accessing anything except primary sources, mostly SBF himself in podcasts and in that text exchange with the Vox reporter. There, he comes across sort of like a teenager who's gotten busted for dealing cocaine at his prep school -- cocky, amoral, way more interested in himself than in anyone else involved, and convinced that all the people who count for something have done or would do as he did -- he's just the one who got caught. It's pretty repulsive, and I feel a lot of personal disgust and anger at him.
I think a lot of the mistreatment EA is getting currently flows from the anger most people feel at the very rich, as currently exemplified by SBF. Envy's part of it, but not the biggest part. We see them as having big wallets and small hearts, and that may be accurate. There's a line of research into the empathy and compassion of the very rich, and multiple studies have found them to be less interested in the suffering of others, less empathetic, and less compassionate. Here’s a link: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealth-reduces-compassion/.
I’m not presenting these studies as proof that view is valid. I do not know how good this research is. It does line up with my intuitions -- or maybe I should say it confirms my prejudices? Certainly SBF in the communications I've seen since he went bust seems grotesquely lacking in empathy for the people he's harmed. Why is he not *crying*? Wouldn't you be?
As for Effective Altruism itself -- I don't exactly have anything against it, but I find it hard to warm up to. When it comes to human suffering, I am disturbed by people who are so able to look at the big picture, and to take the long view. There's something chilly about being able to do that. It seems like they must not be very moved by any the small individuals in the big picture in the here and now. Here's a small illustration of what I mean. I'm a pretty conscientious recycler. I'll get up from where I am to go throw a single empty envelope into the paper recycling; I wash the cans and chop the cardboard up into small pieces, as our town asks us to; I take plastic film to Target, who recycles the stuff. I probably spend a couple hours a month doing that tedious stuff, and I often have the thought that if I skipped the recycling completely and instead worked 2 extra hours per month and donated the money to environmental causes I would be doing more good. But I can't bring myself to skip the recycling. When I throw recyclables into the trash I picture things like seahorses choking on shreds of plastic wrap.
If I took a pill that cured me of my painful sympathy for imagined present day seahorses, would I then become more of an effective altruist? Would I work 2 extra hours a month and donate the proceeds? I'm not sure I would. I would certainly be able to see that seahorses and other creatures would be better off if I contributed that money to environmental organizations, but I'm not sure I would be moved enough to go to enough trouble help out the sea creatures. And as for future seahorses -- they're even harder to care about. Besides, it's not clear how much longer seahorses will even inhabit the seas. If I were to become an EA, it would not be out of feeling for seahorses present and future. It would be a result of feeling personally very compatible with other EAs, and/or very good about being able to see the big picture and take the long view.
Gun owners:
First Time?
Here's a quote that gave me some comfort many years ago:
> "And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new."
- Niccolo Machiavelli, "The Prince", Chapter VI, tr. W. K. Marriott in 1908
I'm beginning to see "media bad" as the "orange man bad" derangement of this community. Yes, it's supremely annoying and antithetical to our sacred values. But it's not a winning strategy for winning over moderates and it is degrading our maps.
For context: my lib friends are all livid about how *generous* the media has been to SBF, particularly the puff piece in the NYT.
The media is gonna media; it's as fundamental a constraint as entropy. I was raised in a libertarian community, in which the red meat fan service was to just get super mad about the government for being mad, every day, because the government is bad every day. Feels good, doesn't work.
This is incredible!
The political activism bit sounds legit. Should we fund indiscriminate bad journalism to raise the sanity waterline?