| ▲ | simianwords 20 hours ago |
| How is he ethically challenged? This looks like an accusation that doesn't have merit |
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| ▲ | glitchc 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| As per the article, he formed a trading company without any background in investing, and once his investments tanked, he sold the stocks for pennies on the dollar to a financial firm, leaving investors holding the bag while pocketing trading fees associated with a $45B USD portfolio. |
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| ▲ | like_any_other 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | How is effective altruism related? I skimmed their wiki page [1], but didn't find anything endorsing such actions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism | | |
| ▲ | kimixa 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | No, but to most people the only exposure they've had to the term "Effective Altruism" (if they've even heard of the it) is morality-washing personal greed that never quite seems to get past the "accumulation" or "self-serving boondoggle" stages. As a brand it's tainted. You might argue unfairly, but that's never mattered in "public brand perception" before. | |
| ▲ | glitchc 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sam Bankman-Fried is an effective altruist (or was anyways, not sure what he is after they denounced him). The list of effective altruists reads like a who's who of scummy people. https://www.wired.com/story/deaths-of-effective-altruism/ | | |
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| ▲ | simianwords 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | bad ethics is when you run a company in free market transparently and don't have a monotonically increasing revenue? |
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| ▲ | jandrese 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Effective Altruism is one of those things that sounds smart on the surface, but in practice is a yellow flag. The fact that he started the club is a red flag. In short, Effective Altruism says you don't engage in charity until you have sufficient means to actually make a difference. Basically, you leverage capitalism to accumulate enough wealth to actually be able to solve a big problem, then you go all in on solving that problem. Sounds great right? In the real world these people never accumulate enough wealth to actually start solving problems. Even when they become billionaires. In practice it is a convenient excuse to act like the most depraved capitalist while still pretending to sit on the high horse and talk down to people who simply try to help with the means available to them. |
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| ▲ | platinumrad 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I have a lot of problems with Aschenbrenner and the "Rationalist" community as a whole, but this is not a factually correct characterization of Effective Altruism. | |
| ▲ | pingou 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "Giving What We Can" pledge is to give 10% of your income to charity. | |
| ▲ | skavi 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | can you support those claims? | | |
| ▲ | TimorousBestie 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s the “tractability” part of the ITN framework: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/itn-framework In practice, it can be used as a fully-general counterargument to supporting most charities, since decisively and completely solving problems in this space is rare. It’s harder to split a problem into component parts than it is to throw up one’s hands and say, “well, this isn’t tractable.” | | |
| ▲ | yorwba 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | "tractability = % of a problem solved / % increase in resources" does not sound like "you have to decisively and completely solve a problem or it's not worth supporting." You can only throw up your hands and say "this isn't tractable" if tractability is 0, i.e. the charity doesn't help at all, no matter how much money you spend on it. | | |
| ▲ | TimorousBestie 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I’m describing about how the term is used by EA folks, which may not match its formal definition. (“In practice, it can be used as. . .”) > You can only throw up your hands and say "this isn't tractable" if tractability is 0, i.e. the charity doesn't help at all, no matter how much money you spend on it. Even I don’t believe this. You’ve gone too far in the other direction and made tractability a useless metric. | | |
| ▲ | yorwba 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | If tractability could only be used to filter out literally intractable charities, it would indeed not be very useful. But you can also use it to compare different approaches and pick the best ones. Then you don't throw up your hands and say "this isn't tractable" but you throw up your hands and say "why are you wasting money on this when a much more tractable approach exists." |
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| ▲ | jandrese 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | One has to only look at the actual participants to find ample examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQZWMmINqxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S54GrXDjokg https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/a-mirror-for-tech-br... https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-problem-with-effectiv... |
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| ▲ | 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
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