You had me right up until you suggested putting up with scenes that are "obnoxious and weird and suffused with an odd mix of arrogance and credulity" is a low cost proposition. I place high value on my dignity, good sir.
The section of this article where Matt criticizes the 80,000 hours interview seems unfair to me. Matt writes
“But there clearly are diminishing returns in grant-making, community-building, and political advocacy. And the instability itself becomes costly. People don’t want to join projects that are likely to vanish without warning, and the vanishing itself leaves resources stranded and wasted.”
I don’t think the 80,000 hours hypothetical ruled out the possibility of diminishing returns. Rob said “you should just go with whatever has the highest expected value — that is, probability multiplied by the goodness of the outcome”. By expected value he meant the expected value of the amount of good that could be done, not the expected value in terms of the monetary value you could give to charity. I don’t think he's necessarily assuming that the amount of good scales linearly with donation size. I also interpreted the hypothetical as applying to someone trying to figure out what to do with their career, who presumably does not yet have a large sum of money to give away. So the whole funding instability point, while being valid in the case of SBF’s situation, I think wasn’t really applicable to the hypothetical. If I took the 10% gamble for $15 billion and lost, there would be no “resources stranded and wasted” because I don’t have tons of money at the moment and have not committed to funding billions of dollars of projects.
I bet that one of the threads where we had fierce arguments over porn would have beat this one if I wasn't on vacation both times those arguments broke out, because otherwise I would have added a ton more to those threads.
I think an under-appreciated negative of EA is that it often paralyzes people who want to help. For instance, being a vegan can help mitigate climate change. Not flying across the country unless you absolutely have to also helps. But if you try to do these things, other people will tell you that not only are you not making a difference, you’re a dupe who got sold on personal responsibility by Big Oil. Charity is also denigrated as a useless, do-gooder thing that distracts people from insisting the government raise taxes.
Now, of course you can do both, but my experience is that most people get overwhelmed, and rather than do what might be the wrong thing, they do nothing.
Another parallel that occurs to me is Ibram Kendi, whom Matt is rightfully impatient with. But really, is his philosophy so different? He basically says something is racist if it doesn’t help black people, and it’s immediately obvious what some of the problems are here. A policy could be considered good for one year, but over the long term, it ends up being racist. There’s a question of what “helping black people” means. But take away the “that’s not what the term racist means,” then the underlying philosophy is consequentialism. And inaccurately labeling it “racism” could be considered the right move if it makes people feel guilty enough to implement policies Kendi likes.
Matt- you should use one of your journalism grants to fund an investigation into SBF’s origin story. We all know the story about his Japan/Korea arb, but that’s a trade that itself requires tons of capital. Nobody has ever gotten a clear answer on where he got that. Where did he get his earliest funding? He seemingly became massively wealthy and the ultimate insider overnight. The whole thing reeks.
I think this has been pretty well explained. At some point he made a few million with the japan arb trade. Or maybe even less than that. The arb trade $ doesn't really matter. He took the story of the arb trade, his impressive resume, his family connections, and a convincing story about EA and used all those things to dupe EA adjacent billionaire Jaan Tallinn into giving him $50 million.
Once he had his first $50 million, he was able to setup a trading firm that likely was never profitable, but its existence along with the above connections allowed him to keep raising money and put together the appearance of a whiz kid who printed money.
I keep hearing stories like Matt’s where SBF wanted to be in business with them. Obviously, Musk is the biggest one where he is now taking credit for vibing that SBF was a fraud. But there are others that seem like such small potatoes for a Billionaire big shot (no offense Matt) that it just seems weird. The Tangle guy just put out a story that is a little less personal than Matt’s but similar. SBF seems like a guy that was bumping around and using his electronic wealth to make social connections with people he thought were cool. A very 2022 social media, electronic, shallow, complex, networky, virtue signaling, type of story. Odd but maybe there are going to be more of these kind of stories.
I think this is evidence that experience and wisdom does still have value. I don’t question SBFs smarts. He’s clearly very smart. But there are other virtues that are also important in the long run.
if you view him as a guy who’s been intellectually influenced by the writings/tweets of matt yglesias, then “rich liberal donor should fund liberal media” is a logical step.
While I think this is a good piece, I honestly think you should show more humility in general. You’re obviously brilliant, but you’ve been incredibly wrong about many things in the past few years. I listened to you for years on The Weeds, and you repeatedly dismissed inflation as an excuse to keep unemployment high and workers scared. You also called the midterms wrong, still give credence to discredited conspiracy theories and insisted that Elon Musk would make Twitter better.
The thing that struck me about your attachment to EA was your arrogance and denigration of people who, say, volunteer to walk dogs at shelters. Those people don’t know how to fix the world, and as it turns out, neither do you. You need to be a lot more sympathetic to “at least they’re trying” people.
I’m also uncomfortably aware of the phenomenon you yourself have discussed, where people can see that newspapers are wildly inaccurate on topics they themselves are knowledgeable about, but assume the rest of the newspaper is accurate. I trust your transpo takes because I don’t know much about that space beyond what you’ve told me. But by the same logic, I should assume you’re wrong about that stuff too.
I recommend Eric Levitz’s article from yesterday, I found it a pretty good companion piece to this one as far as exploring what this all means for effective altruism.
I think the lesson from all of this is that if a load of socially awkward nerds come along touting a brand new and super smart way to solve problems that could revolutionize the way we think about the world, we should all just assume that they haven't thought it through and not listen to them.
Was reading and winding up for a critical comment - but your last paragraph nailed it. EA seems weird and pretentious, but of course some inquiry of how best to use your time/money makes sense. Also you deserve kudos for not going to those conferences anymore.
I really like this definition of EA as just a bullet point list of sharp insights about policy.
When EAs start with a grand unified theory of applies ethics, it feels negligent of the key area where theory makes contact with reality. It creates mistakes like "Maybe altruists should gamble" or "Maybe there's nothing we can do about the AI takeover" which distract from independent and better established ideas like "It's clearly a moral imperative to do a better job alleviating poverty and disease".
I don’t understand your assertion that biotechnology is definitely raising the risk of engineered pandemics. A very credible virologist I have followed on Twitter since beginning of Covid has done some digging and what she has found about SBF’s work in the area raises serious questions. https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1593133521958469632?s=21
You had me right up until you suggested putting up with scenes that are "obnoxious and weird and suffused with an odd mix of arrogance and credulity" is a low cost proposition. I place high value on my dignity, good sir.
The section of this article where Matt criticizes the 80,000 hours interview seems unfair to me. Matt writes
“But there clearly are diminishing returns in grant-making, community-building, and political advocacy. And the instability itself becomes costly. People don’t want to join projects that are likely to vanish without warning, and the vanishing itself leaves resources stranded and wasted.”
I don’t think the 80,000 hours hypothetical ruled out the possibility of diminishing returns. Rob said “you should just go with whatever has the highest expected value — that is, probability multiplied by the goodness of the outcome”. By expected value he meant the expected value of the amount of good that could be done, not the expected value in terms of the monetary value you could give to charity. I don’t think he's necessarily assuming that the amount of good scales linearly with donation size. I also interpreted the hypothetical as applying to someone trying to figure out what to do with their career, who presumably does not yet have a large sum of money to give away. So the whole funding instability point, while being valid in the case of SBF’s situation, I think wasn’t really applicable to the hypothetical. If I took the 10% gamble for $15 billion and lost, there would be no “resources stranded and wasted” because I don’t have tons of money at the moment and have not committed to funding billions of dollars of projects.
502 comments (not counting this one)! Is this a new record for most-commented SB post?
The first mailbag had over a thousand: https://www.slowboring.com/p/ask-me-stuff
I bet that one of the threads where we had fierce arguments over porn would have beat this one if I wasn't on vacation both times those arguments broke out, because otherwise I would have added a ton more to those threads.
Wow, I'd forgotten about that mailbag!
Can you share the location of said mocktails and vegan snacks. I am always on the lookout for places in DC with good mocktails.
I think an under-appreciated negative of EA is that it often paralyzes people who want to help. For instance, being a vegan can help mitigate climate change. Not flying across the country unless you absolutely have to also helps. But if you try to do these things, other people will tell you that not only are you not making a difference, you’re a dupe who got sold on personal responsibility by Big Oil. Charity is also denigrated as a useless, do-gooder thing that distracts people from insisting the government raise taxes.
Now, of course you can do both, but my experience is that most people get overwhelmed, and rather than do what might be the wrong thing, they do nothing.
Another parallel that occurs to me is Ibram Kendi, whom Matt is rightfully impatient with. But really, is his philosophy so different? He basically says something is racist if it doesn’t help black people, and it’s immediately obvious what some of the problems are here. A policy could be considered good for one year, but over the long term, it ends up being racist. There’s a question of what “helping black people” means. But take away the “that’s not what the term racist means,” then the underlying philosophy is consequentialism. And inaccurately labeling it “racism” could be considered the right move if it makes people feel guilty enough to implement policies Kendi likes.
Matt- you should use one of your journalism grants to fund an investigation into SBF’s origin story. We all know the story about his Japan/Korea arb, but that’s a trade that itself requires tons of capital. Nobody has ever gotten a clear answer on where he got that. Where did he get his earliest funding? He seemingly became massively wealthy and the ultimate insider overnight. The whole thing reeks.
I think this has been pretty well explained. At some point he made a few million with the japan arb trade. Or maybe even less than that. The arb trade $ doesn't really matter. He took the story of the arb trade, his impressive resume, his family connections, and a convincing story about EA and used all those things to dupe EA adjacent billionaire Jaan Tallinn into giving him $50 million.
Once he had his first $50 million, he was able to setup a trading firm that likely was never profitable, but its existence along with the above connections allowed him to keep raising money and put together the appearance of a whiz kid who printed money.
I keep hearing stories like Matt’s where SBF wanted to be in business with them. Obviously, Musk is the biggest one where he is now taking credit for vibing that SBF was a fraud. But there are others that seem like such small potatoes for a Billionaire big shot (no offense Matt) that it just seems weird. The Tangle guy just put out a story that is a little less personal than Matt’s but similar. SBF seems like a guy that was bumping around and using his electronic wealth to make social connections with people he thought were cool. A very 2022 social media, electronic, shallow, complex, networky, virtue signaling, type of story. Odd but maybe there are going to be more of these kind of stories.
I think this is evidence that experience and wisdom does still have value. I don’t question SBFs smarts. He’s clearly very smart. But there are other virtues that are also important in the long run.
if you view him as a guy who’s been intellectually influenced by the writings/tweets of matt yglesias, then “rich liberal donor should fund liberal media” is a logical step.
It strikes me as Epstein-ish, though hopefully without Pedophile Island. Rich guy who likes to be liked and rub elbows with smarties.
It’s like a social laundering of your bad behavior.
While I think this is a good piece, I honestly think you should show more humility in general. You’re obviously brilliant, but you’ve been incredibly wrong about many things in the past few years. I listened to you for years on The Weeds, and you repeatedly dismissed inflation as an excuse to keep unemployment high and workers scared. You also called the midterms wrong, still give credence to discredited conspiracy theories and insisted that Elon Musk would make Twitter better.
The thing that struck me about your attachment to EA was your arrogance and denigration of people who, say, volunteer to walk dogs at shelters. Those people don’t know how to fix the world, and as it turns out, neither do you. You need to be a lot more sympathetic to “at least they’re trying” people.
I’m also uncomfortably aware of the phenomenon you yourself have discussed, where people can see that newspapers are wildly inaccurate on topics they themselves are knowledgeable about, but assume the rest of the newspaper is accurate. I trust your transpo takes because I don’t know much about that space beyond what you’ve told me. But by the same logic, I should assume you’re wrong about that stuff too.
That’s it. Altruism and effectiveness are now permanently discredited!
I believe that ship has sailed.
the important thing is whether the movie based off the nonexistent michael lewis book is good and how it blames utilitarianism for SBF’s actions
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/effective-altruism-sam-bankman-fried-sbf-ftx-crypto.html
I recommend Eric Levitz’s article from yesterday, I found it a pretty good companion piece to this one as far as exploring what this all means for effective altruism.
That was already on my queue of reading for today. Just got through it and I agree with you.
I think the lesson from all of this is that if a load of socially awkward nerds come along touting a brand new and super smart way to solve problems that could revolutionize the way we think about the world, we should all just assume that they haven't thought it through and not listen to them.
Sometimes a movement needs to clear out weirdos and crooks instrumental in founding the movement in order to achieve broader adoption.
Was reading and winding up for a critical comment - but your last paragraph nailed it. EA seems weird and pretentious, but of course some inquiry of how best to use your time/money makes sense. Also you deserve kudos for not going to those conferences anymore.
I really like this definition of EA as just a bullet point list of sharp insights about policy.
When EAs start with a grand unified theory of applies ethics, it feels negligent of the key area where theory makes contact with reality. It creates mistakes like "Maybe altruists should gamble" or "Maybe there's nothing we can do about the AI takeover" which distract from independent and better established ideas like "It's clearly a moral imperative to do a better job alleviating poverty and disease".
I don’t understand your assertion that biotechnology is definitely raising the risk of engineered pandemics. A very credible virologist I have followed on Twitter since beginning of Covid has done some digging and what she has found about SBF’s work in the area raises serious questions. https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1593133521958469632?s=21