Comment by quantumwannabe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quantumwannabe | Hacker News Reader

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The founders of the Effective Altruism movement are mostly non-technical people. You can't blame their arrogance and failures on the "techbros".

The people mentioned on the Effective Altruism Wikipedia page:

Peter Singer: Professor of Bioethics (philosopher)

Toby Ord: Philosopher. Philosophy PhD, Computer Science bachelors

Hilary Greaves: Philosopher, and he double-majored in physics in undergrad

William MacAskill: Philosopher/Ethicist. PhD in philosophy.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: self-described autodidact, no formal education or notable work history. Runs a "AI" "Research" center called MIRI.

Holden Karnofsky: Co-Founder of GiveWell, Harvard degree in Social Studies

Yew-Kwang Ng: Welfare Economist, has published biology, mathematics, philosophy, cosmology, psychology, and sociology papers.

Derek Parfit: Philosopher. Has a history degree.

Nick Bostrom: Philosopher. BA in philosophy and math, MA in philosophy and physics.

Benjamin Todd: Physics/Philosophy double major, worked at Kodak for eight months and at an investment firm for 1.25 years before joining the Centre for Effective Altruism.

The financial backers are more diverse:

Dustin Moskovitz: Co-Founder of Facebook, Co-Founder of Open Philanthropy

Cari Tuna: Dustin's wife, previously worked as a reporter before cofounding Open Philanthropy

Dan Smith: Professional poker player

Liv Boeree: Professional poker player. Physics degree

Sam Bankman-Fried: con-artist, thief, fraudster. Has a physics degree and a minor in math, interned/worked as a trader at Jane Street, and founded Alameda Capital and FTX.

"TechBros" doesn't mean "programmers". It broadly means something like "people who think tech will solve everything but don't think very deeply"

Nah, it's an insult meant to lower the assumed position/opinion of whoever it was aimed at. Maybe in the past it meant what you describe it as, but I haven't seen that in any recent use.

It's more or less a term one would use to signal to others to dogpile the person and get them to leave the conversation/topic, mostly by being absurdly obtuse and misconstruing their words to it's most literal meaning with nothing left to deem charitable if engaging, or just speaking to other people entirely and not towards the subject whatsoever. Kind of like how most insults devolve into in pretty much all social media, just another word to pull out of the ad-hom bag.

And yet Effective Altruism in itself is not technology focused. There's no evidence that list of people (many philosophers) think tech will solve everything.

Longtermism explicitly is technology focused though:

> Many longtermists reckon that the antidote to the threat from technology is more technology; mastering artificial intelligence will forestall a malevolent AI from enslaving us. They also believe that technological acceleration is morally good in its own right, as it enables the universe to sustain more people. Bostrom laments the lives lost every second that technological advances are delayed. In a paper from 2003 he invites readers to imagine all the “unused energy…being flushed down black holes”, and all the suns beyond our own that are “illuminating and heating empty rooms”, because we lack the means to populate the planets orbiting them

And longtermism has taken over much of the EA movement:

> Disillusioned effective altruists are dismayed by the increasing predominance of “strong longtermism” ..[snip].. According to Benjamin Todd, a founder of 80,000 Hours, longtermism “might well turn out to be one of the most important discoveries of effective altruism so far” ..[snip].. Projects devoted to global health and poverty still garner the most funding, but their share of the total allocation is shrinking as long-term-risk research attracts more cash.

Both quotes from the linked article.

> And longtermism has taken over much of the EA movement

Show me the money. Sci-Fi/Fantasy longtermst nerd concerns get a disproportionate amount of attention. But from what I can tell, most donations still go to charities dealing with malaria, deficiencies and vaccines: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/2021-allocation-to...

Sure, some people are getting paid thousands of dollars for navel gazing. But more than a billion dollars was donated to directly improve global health.

It's great that over $1B was donated now for global health!

But the highest ever grant was $55M for "potential risks from AI". The 4th and 6th highest grants were similar.[1]

More recently[2] the highest ($10.7M) grant was for "Potential Risks from Advanced AI" and third highest grant ($2.3M) was for "longtermism" and there were 4 other similar grants on the first page.

[1] https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/?sort=high-to-low#ca...

[2] https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/?sort=recent#categor...

potential risks of AI sounds the opposite of the position of someone who would think technology can solve everything. You're shifting goalposts to protect the initial narrative.

> potential risks of AI sounds the opposite of the position of someone who would think technology can solve everything.

Yes, that's a logical conclusion, but it's not right because of the weird "longtermist" logic. Their "AI risk research" is about AI alignment, which is a "longtermist" priority.

To repost my previous quote:

> Many longtermists reckon that the antidote to the threat from technology is more technology; mastering artificial intelligence will forestall a malevolent AI from enslaving us. They also believe that technological acceleration is morally good in its own right.

This is the "acceleratist view" of AI research, of which Nick Bostrom is a prominent proponent: basically he views progress as inevitable, so it's best to accelerate AI that is aligned with human values. See https://nickbostrom.com/papers/openness.pdf

He also values future lives equally to existing lives (the "longtermist" view) so any timme where we aren't expanding to the stars is morally repugnant:

> One recent paper speculates, using loose theoretical considerations based on the rate of increase of entropy, that the loss of potential human lives in our own galactic supercluster is at least ~10^46 per century of delayed colonization. [snip] The effect on total value, then, seems greater for actions that accelerate technological development than for practically any other possible action.

Let me requote that:

The effect on total value, then, seems greater for actions that accelerate technological development than for practically any other possible action.

https://nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste

I'd highly recommend you read the linked article this discussion is about. It goes into some depth about on these points.

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