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Comment by metalcrow | Hacker News Reader

For anyone interested in charity or doing good, and this is your first time hearing about EA, i recommend you check out some of the major resources at https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/ or https://80000hours.org/. You have an opportunity in your life to alleviate massive suffering and change lives, you shouldn't let negative publicity sway you from doing good things.

EA is all about doing the most good you can, and thinking about how to do it, instead of just guessing or following fleeting emotional moments.

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Yes, but you have to recognize that it matters that this movement traced this path to being almost entirely associated with a scammer and an obsession with artificial intelligence, blowing right past its (IMO) more grounded and useful focus on improving conditions for presently-existing life.

What I mean is: you can't simply ignore that outcome when evaluating the principles, because people followed those principles to this (in my opinion) bad outcome.

I wouldn't say that the movement was entirely associated with him at all! He donated to a lot of EA organizations, sure, but Bernie Madoff donated to a lot of Jewish charities yet that doesn't cause Judaism to be associated with scam artists.

Now the complaint that EA influenced SBF to do the bad things that he did, that's a much more valid complaint about the principles. But i think that's just a coincidental association, rather then a causal one. Nowhere does EA suggest doing short term bad things in exchange for long term good things. It suggests "earning to give", but that's not at all why SBF is considered a bad person. He stole money and committed fraud, plain and simple. EA has advocated against that in the past, and continues to.

The most you can say about EA imo is that it's concern about alleviating large scale suffering allowed SBF to internally justify doing bad things in exchange for doing a lot of future good. And sure, if your message is corruptible easily that's a problem with your message. But there is literally always going to be people mis-interpreting your message, or worse yet people intentionally using your message as cover while knowing full well they are disobeying it. That happens with social justice movements, leftist movement, rightist movements, literally any message ever has had this problem. It's a problem that should have lessons learned from it, but if it invalidated the movement i don't think there is a single valid movement left on earth.

> I wouldn't say that the movement was entirely associated with him at all!

Unfortunately, this is a bubble perspective. I (and I assume you) have known people who have been interested in or involved with or have been talking about effective altruism for many years. This is probably true of most people here on HN and in our broader techie bubbles.

But for every person like us who first heard of effective altruism years ago, there are now a couple orders of magnitude more people who have only heard of it within the past year, entirely because of SBF's rise and fall.

It's a shame! But that's just how it works when some niche thing becomes mainstream via some famous person. Sometimes that publicity is good for that niche thing, but it is fundamentally a risky proposition, because famous people are fallible and their reputations are inevitably tied into the things associated with them.

Fair point. Although just in terms of PR, that is at least fixable. But yes, you're absolutely right about the bubble.

Frankly, I very much doubt it is fixable. But perhaps it is re-brandable. Few enough people know what effective altruism actually is, that if people start talking about the same thing under a different name, not all that many people will make the connection that it's the same thing they have this hazy negative association with.

I think there's a strand of EA that goes hardcore utilitarian, because utilitarianism is the only thing that is both logical and universally fair. And that specific strand of EA is IMO very very vulnerable to ends-justify-means kind of thinking. SBF doesn't even have to be a fake EAer to have done what he did. He just has to be a hard-utilitarian EAer who thinks there's a way to rob the world and repurpose the money to the most likely path to infinite utility.

Agreed, utilitarianism definitely causes people to suffer from "i am smarter than everyone else"-itis (and i say that as a hardcore utilitarian). The good news from this is that hopefully this make other utilitarians enter the odds of failure, and that they are less likely to succeeded then they think, into their calculus. The only difference between a utilitarian that creates a positive impact (Bill Gates for example, even though i don't think he's utilitarian) and SBF is that SBF was overconfident and suffered from delusions of grandeur.

Possibly Bill Gates' focus on solving a massive problem, without utilitarian whataboutism, is what makes him genuinely effective.

The utilitarianism "whataboutism" is what allows most people to see and be motivated to solve (real) massive problems. Most people don't care about solving world hunger, it's only if you really understand the depth and suffering of that problem do you know how badly it has to be solved. You either get lucky enough to have your emotions line up with it, or you figure it out via utility. Plus, emotions can lead you into solving fake massive problems just as easily as real. Mormons are certainly highly motivated into solving the problems of a lack of God in our society.

> You either get lucky enough to have your emotions line up with it, or you figure it out via utility

Emotions are what enable us to decide what is the most utility. It's accounting, not finance.

One question is : how exactly did SBF come to his... "interesting" interpretation of the expected value of money ?

And the vocabulary and the whole framework that he has been using to think about these issues come with their own values and consequences, AFAIK widely shared inside EA ?

"this movement traced this path to being almost entirely associated with a scammer"

You have a wildly distorted view of effective altruism. Peter Singer's book, The Life You Can Save, is nearly 15 years old. It was updated (more current statistics) about four years ago. The leading thought experiment presented in the book (the child drowning in a pond) was written by Singer over 50 years go.

The label "effective altruism" might be new (2011) but the ideas behind it have been around for a long time. There are terrible people who give money to many causes -- do you think all those causes are disreputable because of them?

It seems like a lot of people replying to me are somehow misunderstanding what I said.

In that quote I said that effective altruism is now "almost entirely associated with a scammer", I did not say "I almost entirely associate effective altruism with a scammer".

I read Singer's book around the time it was written! I have long been, and remain, a strong supporter of GiveWell's approach to effective charitable giving.

But you have to understand: The vast vast majority of people have never heard of these things, but have now heard of "effective altruism", because that phrase appeared in an article about the salacious acts of a criminal scam artist.

Yes, that's very frustrating! But what I'm saying is that people who consider themselves part of this movement could use to reflect on how it ended up in this position.

Also, there seems to be a lot of conflation between effective altruism (the principle) and Effective Altruism (the movement). The movement seems rotten to me and perhaps dangerous. The principle seems solid.

Yeah this seems right to me.

This is like associating Christian charity with the crusades or Spanish inquisition.

Christianity (and all religions) absolutely do have this same problem! Jesus' philosophy is (IMO) quite good, but it doesn't make sense to ignore the thousands of years of what has been done in the name of the religion when evaluating it. Both things matter. A nuanced view of a movement includes both evaluating its principles, and considering what people have done with those principles as the movement has met reality and evolved over time.

May I suggest Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis or The Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton?

Well, I think it's a step too far to evaluate principles based on what people do in your name. If I do something in your name, that shouldn't bring into question your principles. And if it does, that's people not thinking clearly.

I think this is just "no true scotsman", right?

I'm just saying: It's not irrelevant to consider what people who profess to be living by the principles of a movement have actually done in reality. It's fine to say "well, by my understanding of the principles, those people were not actually doing it right". (That's certainly how I feel about a bunch of stuff that has been done in the name of Christianity!) But that doesn't make their behavior irrelevant.

Point I'm making is they may well not being living by those principles. I could say Atkins doesn't work because I do Atkins and its claims don't live up, but if I'm not actually doing that then that has zero reflection on the diet, and purely reflects on me.

No, that does reflect on the diet. And, again, this is what "no true scotsman" is all about. Or, if you like, it's the same as "communism has never been tried". If "the Atkins diet works" but it doesn't work for most people because "they just aren't doing it right", then no, it doesn't work; if it did, people would do it right, and it would work.

The actual aggregate outcome of ideas / principles / movements matters, in addition to their intentions.

For what it's worth, I think the major religions actually hold up fairly well to this level of scrutiny, despite all of them having major obvious failures in the particular, and that that's a big contributor to their longevity. For instance (just because it happens to be Christianity that I know the most about), it is notable that when Martin Luther put up his demands for Church reform, he was rejecting very specific behavior that had become ingrained in practice, rather than the foundational principles of the religion. Despite being essentially a radical reformer, he thought the principles were nonetheless good.

Maybe effective altruism will also have staying power, because maybe its principles will also stand the test of time, and its scandals fade. But I think people who care about it shouldn't just rest on their laurels and assume that will happen! I think people should be aware that if most people are "doing it wrong" then they aren't actually doing it wrong, it just is what it is.

> if it did, people would do it right, and it would work

No, that's a non sequitur. People aren't machines following rules. It's hard to stick to principles. Saying "if love thy neighbour worked, people would do it right, and it would work" is just not right. It would work if we did it, but we don't do it.

It isn't a non sequitur! The circularity you're responding to in what I said is implicit in all these "no true scotsman" issues.

Maybe I'm not being explicit enough: It is not effective to just have principles, and then when it turns out that nobody is following them, keep saying "well if people would just follow the principles, it would work!". What is effective is to develop practices that reinforce the principles.

So Christianity didn't just write down "love thy neighbor" as a principle, it developed a practice - going to church - to continuously reinforce that principle, and in practice that has worked out very imperfectly but also much better than most things (like the Atkins diet!). And indeed, I think a big part of the problem with contemporary political Christianity in the US / Christian nationalism, is that it doesn't emphasize this kind of praxis, but rather mere identity and sloganeering. And that doesn't work!

> blowing right past its (IMO) more grounded and useful focus on improving conditions for presently-existing life

Longtermism is one strand of the movement - still many millions of dollars get donated to global health and animal welfare.

Yes, but to me it seems like that strand has sucked up most of the air in recent years, and (again, IMO) made the movement significantly less, well, effective.

if you choose to characterize every social movement by it's worst scandal, you're not going to have much of value left.

For what it's worth, I think two totally separate things:

1. It doesn't really matter how I choose to characterize this, what matters is that this social movement only entered mainstream consciousness because of the scandal. And that will be fatal to its ability to ever gain a mainstream foothold. If it had already broken through into mainstream consciousness, and then there was a scandal, then maybe things would be different. But as it is, for 99% of people, this will now just be some scammy thing that a famous criminal was into.

2. But for me personally, prior to any of this scandal, I had lost patience with EA. I was a big fan of the version of it that was like "people should mostly donate to charities that are not wasteful and efficiently use their funds on things with measurable positive impacts to peoples' lives". But then it has seemed like for the last few years, they got bored with that and started advocating that people instead throw all their money into - in my view, even more wasteful - initiatives speculatively aimed at improving the lives of humanity (or our successors) thousands of years from now.

1 is totally fair. I do worry about that, especially as far as backlash on givewell happens because of this.

In many respects I think longtermism is a thing that really doesn't/shouldn't scale to have everyone's attention, because so often throwing more money or non-niche skills at it is frankly worse than useless because it attracts grifters. AI safety isn't really something most people outside of the research frontier should really give much attention, let alone money.

Yep, agreed.

But the sexier thing will inevitably suck up the attention of people who see themselves as the brilliant movers and shakers of the world.

> EA is all about doing the most good you can, and thinking about how to do it, instead of just guessing or following fleeting emotional moments.

The original concept is, but I deeply question the movement itself. Fortunately, you don't have to join the EA movement in order to be thoughtful about how to help your fellow man.

Yeah, at its core EA is about using data and logic to try to maximize the good that one can do through giving or taking action. Sure, some people have gone of the rails with AI doomerism and other far flung ideas, but its hard to really criticize either the intention or the strategy of trying to be as effective as possible when attempting to improve the situation for the planet and/or people in need.

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