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- Hacker News
- Fortunately, SBF had a secret weapon: the EA community. “All the employees, all the funding—everything was EA to start with.”
https://paulromer.net/ea-ftx-sbf/
SBF Has a Savior Complex—And Maybe You Should Too. The founder of FTX lives his life by a calculus of altruistic impact.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221110080531/https://www.sequo...
- I think the fundamental problem with effective altruism is it assumes there is some absolute form of good to be maximised. In reality goodness is largely in the eye of the beholder and if you don't deal with that you get silly results. Do good but recognise there are limitations to the idea and common sense is the way to go?by tim333
- Likely a better read
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/the-reluctant-...
by abhis3798 - If this is "conquered the world", one wonders what The Economist thinks defeat would resemble.by smitty1e
- > There is an elusive quality to effective altruism. The movement is tiny, with an informal membership probably in the tens of thousands, many of whom claim to be only “EA adjacent”.
Oof, that one hit close to home.
by PoignardAzur - What’s that thing pg said about a submarine? Somebody’s got a dossier of all the weirdest things about effective altruism they can find (not that it’s in short supply), and they’re out there convincing reporters who need to run articles about AI that this is the ideology of the AI guys, and wouldn’t your readers like to know all the lurid details?
While it’s probably something prosaic as “Anthropic pays the most lip service to EA, this makes them look bad” or “Our employees are leaning EA and it’s causing problems, things would be easier if they were too embarrassed to admit they were EA”, I do wonder - the board member who instigated the firing of Sam Altman from OpenAI does happen to be a long-time effective altruist…
by fwlr - There was modest farmland in Iraq managed by a trust for about 400 years that paid for the wedding dresses for all women in the nearby town. The colonial administrators found this ineffective and dismantled the trust fund and privatized the land.
There is something to be said about how we sometimes fail to account for the effectiveness of ineffective altruism.
- I was surprised by the weakness of this article, regardless the potential absurdities of parts of EA.
Why does The Economist consider this the most important issue this week, in a world of complex problems, to splash its first leader on (and more than one page long too)?
by wodow