I Ran Away from Philosophy Because of Sam Bankman-Fried

I agree Utilitarianism is a crock, largely because of the obvious impossibility of agreeing on what constitutes total utility. But to claim Utilitarians equate utility with pleasure is an unfair caricature.

This looks like extremely unfair, biased and outright lying article. Honestly, it is hard to even finish, because of obvious lies author perpetuates.

Some: EA is in large about removing pain, not only adding pleasure. Also, there are many varieties of effective altruists. Moreover, author takes one person and assigns his faults the the whole! movement. Speak of unfair!

Last parts tell me author is close to being dangerous new-age lunatic. Doesn't he know middle east "atrocities" he criticizes made in the love of Allah? Immediate love!

I see how he basically promotes such way of doing things: giving money to the street beggars without thinking of the "context", thus perpetuating cycle of exploitation of beggars by organized crime.

I would avoid people like him at all cost, the opposite of what he suggests.

This is like running away from food because of McDonald’s…

This “Effective Altruism” business, sounds just like a way to rationalize (and perpetualize) undue privilege.

>It eventually chased me away from philosophy, specifically analytic philosophy of the Anglo-American variety

Lucky for all of us, there is a lot more philosophy than this lying around. That said, I can imagine how frustrating it could be training under a utilitarian. There are lots of strawman arguments against utilitarianism but my impression of them is that they are better at trying to get you to think about something or argue with them that they aren't technically wrong but are wrong in some other way than they are at designing systems that work when applied at civilization scales.

Sam Bankman Fried representing Effective Altruism and then blowing it up is funny Sort of like how people stopped talking about Basic Income the moment we started experiencing Covid Era inflation. The dream of printing free money without consequences got blown up fast

I am not an EA shill (by their comments shall ye know them), but this post fails across multiple dimensions.

    I was disillusioned by what they taught. It eventually chased me away from philosophy, _specifically analytic philosophy of the Anglo-American variety_.
    [...]
    I had no idea that their worldview would come back to life as a popular movement promoted by the biggest scam artist of the digital age. [...] The philosophy is nowadays called Effective Altruism.

So the headline is shameless clickbait.

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The "granny" example is just awful. That it's in fairly poor taste could be forgiven if it were in service of a salient point. As the author says:

    I’m not going to spell it out for you, but you can guess where this is heading.

But maybe he should have spelled it out a bit more.

- Surely maximizing pleasure goes along with minimizing suffering. (...right?? It boggles the mind that the author wouldn't address this.) That granny "can’t experience much pleasure even under the best circumstances" (itself dubious on its face) ought to be irrelevant.

- In the author's surprisingly simplistic analysis, the "long-term holistic effects" of selling granny are limited to Granny's suffering and the pleasure of the traffickers' clients. Off the top of my head, he failed to account for:

The suffering of his family from losing their grandmother.

The "long term holistic effects" of someone patronizing a sex trafficker for sex. What if they ruin their marriage in doing so? What about their kids?

The sex traffickers' profit from all these transactions. They might use that profit to acquire much younger victims who are still "capable" of feeling pleasure - oh no!

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    This may sound like a gross parody of a philosophical system. But variants of this way of thinking are everywhere in Anglo-American philosophy, inherited from Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and other utilitarians. They were the geniuses who decided that morality must aim at maximizing pleasure.

Except that the link in this _very paragraph_ describes Bentham's "felicific calculus", which BALANCES pleasure and pain to approximate the moral rightness of an action. So what is the point of this piece?

On top of that, it's way too long, the self-labeled stories/jokes are presented more or less without context or justification, and this:

    By the way, it’s ironic that Sam Bankman-Fried is going to prison. That’s because the key progenitor of his consequentialist ethics, a curious man named Jeremy Bentham, actually invented a prison

is not irony!