Just noting, for people who might not read the book, that there are many more mentions of “effective altruism”:
I agree that EA seems often painted as “High IQ immature children”, especially from Chapter 6 or 7.
To me, EA also seems painted as kind of a cult[1], where acolytes sacrifice their lives for “the greater good” according to a weird ideology, and people seem to be considered “effective altruists” mostly based on their social connections with the group.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention what was for me the spiciest EA quote, from SBF in ~2018:
This combos really badly with the current EA shitshow I’m supposed to be, in some ways, adjudicating.
It seems somewhat irresponsible to title this post “every mention of EA in Going Infinite” if it only includes a handful of the many mentions of EA in Going Infinite. Appreciate you for clarifying!
I wrote about every mention, but some were summaries rather than direct copies and pastes, which I thought was straightforward for readers.
For example when I say, “He devotes several pages to talking about Peter Singer, Toby Ord and Will MacAskill, and the early version of 80,000 Hours Will was promoting on his visit to Harvard”, I mean there were many mentions of effective altruism on those pages!
I also include sections of the book that talk about effective altruism without using that exact phrase.
I don’t think there are any I didn’t either quote or summarise, but I only read it once, so I could have missed some
Note that the author uses “the effective altruists” as shorthand for “Caroline, Nishad, Gary, and Sam”. E.g. “that’s where the effective altruists all lived, at least until Caroline booted Sam out” is just referring to the four of them.
So I think there are fewer references to EA per se than these search results might imply.
He does, but at the same time I think it matters that he uses that shorthand rather than some other expression (say CNGS), since it makes the EA connection more salient.
Just noting, for people who might not read the book, that there are many more mentions of “effective altruism”:
I agree that EA seems often painted as “High IQ immature children”, especially from Chapter 6 or 7.
To me, EA also seems painted as kind of a cult[1], where acolytes sacrifice their lives for “the greater good” according to a weird ideology, and people seem to be considered “effective altruists” mostly based on their social connections with the group.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention what was for me the spiciest EA quote, from SBF in ~2018:
Same way as this Washington Post article puts it
It seems somewhat irresponsible to title this post “every mention of EA in Going Infinite” if it only includes a handful of the many mentions of EA in Going Infinite. Appreciate you for clarifying!
Yes, I think the title should be changed.
“A Summary of Every Mention of EA in Going Infinite”?
“How EA is portrayed in Going Infinite”?
Yeah the latter is good.
I wrote about every mention, but some were summaries rather than direct copies and pastes, which I thought was straightforward for readers.
For example when I say, “He devotes several pages to talking about Peter Singer, Toby Ord and Will MacAskill, and the early version of 80,000 Hours Will was promoting on his visit to Harvard”, I mean there were many mentions of effective altruism on those pages!
I also include sections of the book that talk about effective altruism without using that exact phrase.
I don’t think there are any I didn’t either quote or summarise, but I only read it once, so I could have missed some
I didn’t really understand that SBF quote to be honest! What was he referring to—the conflict he caused?
Note that the author uses “the effective altruists” as shorthand for “Caroline, Nishad, Gary, and Sam”. E.g. “that’s where the effective altruists all lived, at least until Caroline booted Sam out” is just referring to the four of them.
So I think there are fewer references to EA per se than these search results might imply.
He does, but at the same time I think it matters that he uses that shorthand rather than some other expression (say CNGS), since it makes the EA connection more salient.
Agreed, it’s just important to understand that what the author means by that term is not what most of us would mean by the term.