Not being glib, just prone to literal-mindedness. In my experience dubbing yourself "effective" anything is tempting fate. Like announcing your event as the "First Annual." Saddling yourself needlessly with expectation.

I heard about "the EA community" couple months ago in the SBF context from people I respect. They were a little surprised I was not up on it. I said I was still not getting it, no one is for ineffective altruism, come on!

That said, after having randomly bumbled over the EA Community here while I was doing something else, I can see the intelligence and earnestness, I have put a small effort into educating myself. But I haven't seen yet much in the way of trying to balance what we called in the Before Times "theory and praxis". The perfect looks to be well on its way to becoming the enemy of the good. Also sure looks to me like there are some loving a thing that won't love them back.

I hope this may be helpful.

@ClubmasterTransparent what do you think would be a better name for the movement? And do you think the movement should have a different name from the general philosophy/aim they aspire towards?

@ClubmasterTransparent re issue of balancing theory with praxis, if you accept the claims of EA, they have already saved around 200,000 lives

@singer This is a pretty interesting article, but I think it is misleading in the way it selectively calculates its statistics.

For example, it counts the actions of followers of the movement as saving lives, even if they didn't do so in the name of the movement. Given that, SBF's actions also count as destroying lives, even though some would argue the movement didn't impact his decisions (I would argue it did.)

If we take FTX alone, SBF destroyed about 2 million lives, but I would argue that with BlockFi, Genesis, Celsius, and the families and children of the individual victims (assuming roughly half of people are married and the "average" number of children is one, for a total of 2x multiplier), the total loss is 4 million ruined lives.

So we have to count the number of deaths from his actions - suicides, people who weren't able to afford medical treatment they would otherwise have gotten, malnutrition (if any), etc. We also have to try to estimate how many lives would have been saved by the people who lost the money but will not be now. For example, I tore up a will leaving $5 million to charities and have decided that I need to live for myself now; all the money I was ever going to give to charity in my life has been lost. SBF didn't just steal money from random people; he stole it from some people who had saved it for 20 years to make a difference in the world.

So, EA is about computing the downstream effects of various interventions, and I believe that if you calculated the downstream effects of EA's disasters, we might actually find a net negative. Given that the year is halfway done, this market isn't looking very good at the moment.

@SteveSokolowski is the example about tearing up a will real or just hypothetical?

@TheAllMemeingEye Real. Actually, to be specific - the act of "tearing it up" is hypothetical, but telling someone at the bank to trash it and replacing it with a new document is real.

@SteveSokolowski Even if you think the current EA movement is ran so badly that it leads to a net negative on people's lives, do you still agree with the attempted end goal of using reason and evidence to determine the most efficient possible ways to help others?

If so, do you agree that their failures are a reason to do it better than them, rather than abandoning the goal?

Ultimately it is your choice, but it sounds like a better compromise than keeping the entire 5 million dollars for personal use might be to give a smaller portion, perhaps half, or even just a quarter, directly to organisations that you are most convinced are robustly positive and efficient when all the knock-on effects are taken into account.

For example, I bet you'd consider the EA Infrastructure Fund to be particularly bad, because it funds the kind of outreach that causes potentially bad people like SBF to get involved in the first place.

However, stuff like StrongMinds (recommended by the Happier Lives Institute, provides effective anti-depression group therapy in developing nations) or the Fistula Foundation (recommended by The Life You Can Save, provides vital reconstructive surgery for severe childbirth injuries in developing nations) strike me as EA recommendations that would be virtually guaranteed to be net positive, even if not the absolute best in expected value efficiency, because they directly work on decreasing definitely real and extreme suffering in ways that don't significantly change population trends.

@TheAllMemeingEye I think you might be misunderstanding. I don't have $5 million. It was stolen by the companies related to FTX - I lost $7 million - 80% of everything I owned. EA is why I saved for 20 years and worked 12 hours a day to "do good in the world" per the standard EA "earn to give" philosophy. Since it was all stolen by Caroline Ellison, my lifetime of giving is over. If I knew that she would have just waste all of it, I probably would have chosen a different career. As it is, I'm starting over now with a new philosophy.

I'm not sure that "reason and evidence" is as clear-cut as you make it sound. It sounds nice in theory, but I spent hundreds of hours researching the lending companies - again, on EA principles of reason and expected value - and I was provided with fraudulent evidence on multiple occasions. I would not have lent to them except for the now provable lies that the CEOs told in video calls. Especially with the advent of AI and the replication crisis in journals, I suspect that a very large amount of all evidence is fraudulent. I furthermore suspect that even if the evidence is true, the majority of people care only about themselves and present only evidence that supports their viewpoints and objectives.

As to me personally, I am not giving away any money to anyone - I don't trust anyone. Once I do get back to eight figures, if I decide to give money away, it will only be if there are no intermediaries - I need to own the AGI robots that are building the houses for the poor. I'll go to where the people are living in poverty, see how many houses need to be built, ensure those people are not in poverty because they are mismanaging their own finances, and oversee the project myself. If I can't do that, then I won't give any money away.

That's fundamentally incompatible with EA, right? With EA, you are supposed to research charities and figure out the most cost-effective ways to reduce suffering. My point of view is that research to perform "EA" isn't possible because the majority of evidence is fraudulent or cherry-picked.

@SteveSokolowski

That's fundamentally incompatible with EA, right?

It could be that you're still doing EA, technically, but with different priors (all charities are untrustworthy). But it feels like an overreaction to me even given your financial losses, and it's unclear why you'd just draw the line at charities. You mentioned talking to someone at the bank about your life savings. Why do you still trust them with your money?

I think you're right to trust them, for the same reasons that would lead you to trust certain charities enough to donate to them. This is assuming you're some kind of utilitarian.

@singer You're correct about the issues of banking. I've taken the best steps I can to mitigate them, but it's difficult. The easiest is just never lend stocks or money to anyone. But there's still the risk of fraud by the banks and US bankruptcy law provides no recourse to fraud. What I've done is that I now have six brokerage accounts and as time goes on I've been using ACAT out requests to limit the number of nvidia shares in each of them. Right now, none of the accounts has more than 500 shares (for SIPC insurance) and I'll probably need to create a new account soon.

Ideally, I think the world would have turned out such that cryptocurrency took over and people could manage their own money. I'm not going to repeat my analysis for why cryptocurrency turned out the way it did; you can see it in other past comments. As it stands, I do hate banks and they do close accounts and seize money periodically and I do the best I can to prevent that.

EA though requires one to actually give money to charities - that's the most basic requirement, isn't it? I'm not giving money away to anyone right now. My goal is that I want to get back to eight figures before superintelligence is achieved, because there will be a point where being unable to afford the absolute best neural implants will essentialy put you permanently and irrevocably behind. And, of course, the first life extension treatments will probably cost millions as well.

I need to stay alive and be able to continue making money first, and then I can consider everything else.

Bettors might benefit from reading this: /SteveSokolowski/will-a-compelling-argument-defendin

@CamillePerrin This market is ridiculously high. I'd give OP a <10% chance of updating in a positive direction