How does this relate to effective altruism as a whole? SBF does these things... therefore this kind of behavior is endemic in the effective altruism community?
That its community idealized and gathered around a man with no moral center who thought their entire movement was both a joke and a way to avoid scrutiny for his ongoing frauds. That, at the least, gives an indication that its intellectual underpinnings are not solid.
SBF got tons of pushback in the EA community. He gave jobs to some of the actual thought leaders so they tried to give him some credit, but there are tons and tons of posts on the EA forum about how Sam's extreme focus on long termism made EA too easy to meme on, and even more posts about how his political shenanigans were likely to cause major issues for the movement.
These are the sketchy intellectual underpinnings I was mentioning. It's less an intellectual endeavor than a small rich white guy social club. Having a little money and hanging out in EA circles means I might get the ear of somebody with a lot of money; especially if I can somehow fit my elevator pitch into their MCU dreams.
I'm a believer that altruism should be as effective as possible, but there's little crossover between that and what most Effective Altruists are saying and doing. They seem to largely be either using money for direct world poverty alleviation (usually a very good thing, unless it has second-order effects) which is what gets mentioned (you know, goats or wells, nothing new), or using it as an excuse to waste money on their own idiosyncratic libertarian sci-fi fantasies but disguised as charity i.e. secular Scientologists.
I agree that the long termism stuff is largely not effective, but I take issue with your characterization of most effective altruists. Most EA's are just donating to the givewell general fund which I believe does reasonably well at researching and funding effective charities. They're very transparent unlike the long termists, you'd have no problem reading the white papers they publish to see if you agree with their conclusions on effectiveness. And if you don't you're free to do your own investigation and act on what you find. You'd still be an EA.
I do think it's unfortunate that the long termism get all the publicity, but I can't say I'm surprised. WHo wants to hear about boring old philanthropy? Saving humanity from the ai apocalypse much more interesting.
>That its community idealized and gathered around a man with no moral center
You make it sound like SBF was the prophet/leader of effective altruism, but I don't think that's the case. The wikipedia article certainly doesn't paint him as some sort of leader, and only gives a passing mention to SBF.
Using Wikipedia as a barometer doesn’t always works. In this case it probably wouldn’t work even if SBF was much bigger than he was with EA.
There’s a middle ground. He wasn’t a prophet but he wasn’t nobody either. He was a leading non-academic figure/celeb of EA that didn’t get too much pushback.
>There’s a middle ground. He wasn’t a prophet but he wasn’t nobody either. He was a leading non-academic figure/celeb of EA that didn’t get too much pushback.
That's the non-controversial opinion, but where does this leave OP's comment? Should we push back more on billionaires in movements? Should we assume that everyone who's in movements is in it for cynical reasons? Or maybe only billionaires? A new yorker article on effective altruism suggests that SBF got in before his crypto riches. How does that work? Did SBF suddenly turn cynical once his wealth crossed the $1B mark?
> Should we assume that everyone who's in movements is in it for cynical reasons?
This is an all-or-nothing fallacy.
Perhaps we should view facially "altruistic" movements much more skeptically. Indeed in hindsight it seems like membership is much more advantageous for virtue signaling than for being more "effective" with your altruism (is it really so hard to figure out who will do the most good with your money?)
And you refusing to quote the rest of my comment (which contains proposals that aren't "all-or-nothing") is... some sort of fallacy that I'm too lazy to look up.
>Perhaps we should view facially "altruistic" movements much more skeptically.
And how would being more skeptical have helped in this case? The New Yorker article described Bankman-Fried as being involved with EA since his MIT days. He was donating half his salary while working at Jane Street. His charitable activities when he was running FTX is a logical continuation of this. By all reasonable measures at the time, he wasn't doing it for "virtue signaling".
>Indeed in hindsight it seems like membership is much more advantageous for virtue signaling than for being more "effective" with your altruism (is it really so hard to figure out who will do the most good with your money?)
Is there a reason why effective altruists are being singled out here? Everything you said could be applied to all charitable giving.
