Hi, I now found and I agree that the advice is bad, directionally.
However, I expect LT people who receive large amounts of funds, to be personally competent and responsible enough to say/write/prepare to set aside these funds. They would be looked down upon if they needed to be scolded on an online forum to navigate the moral and legal issues in the most basic way. Polite disagreement would have been adequate.
However I really think you should reconsider the way you’ve worded your sentiments. It’s fine to register an anonymous account to say something that you wouldn’t readily put your name to.
(I’m not anonymous, and this setup is intentional, but this is wildly hard to explain. )
More to the heart of the issue, unfortunately, the situation is exactly the opposite as I believe you perceive.
Outside of voting/writing on the EA forums, many parts of EA is treated with absolute contempt and seen as noxious, and this was before November and held by multiple senior EA people across all cause areas, people that you would respect.
Personally, it’s also hard not to just generally feel worse about the “EA community” as a set of social institutions distinct from the specific ideas. I always had sort of mixed feelings about this, and I gave money to GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund for years before I ever attended my first EA conference. And while I thought the conference was fine, afterward I felt more confident that I would keep donating to GiveWell than that I would ever go to another EA conference.
If two weeks ago you found the whole scene to be obnoxious and weird and suffused with an odd mix of arrogance and credulity, recent events have tended to vindicate that.
What is especially bad and broken is that many people do actually act with great conscientiousness and care online, on the EA forum and Lesswrong, but this is effectively harvested by active people who want access to the resources, power structures, that has been built up by conscientious, unrelated work.
I literally suspected this was deliberate or at least tolerated, in part because this kept the related worldviews relatively weak. However, in the wake of the FTX collapse, this situation and the weakening of MacAskill and non-AI establishment, these latent issues might result in extremely bad states for EA.
I believe large parts of online EA discourse is intellectually bankrupt and dysfunctional. I believe I can decisively articulate why. This would really depress a lot of people without a solution, so I haven’t written it up.
Hi, I now found and I agree that the advice is bad, directionally.
However, I expect LT people who receive large amounts of funds, to be personally competent and responsible enough to say/write/prepare to set aside these funds. They would be looked down upon if they needed to be scolded on an online forum to navigate the moral and legal issues in the most basic way. Polite disagreement would have been adequate.
(I’m not anonymous, and this setup is intentional, but this is wildly hard to explain. )
More to the heart of the issue, unfortunately, the situation is exactly the opposite as I believe you perceive.
Outside of voting/writing on the EA forums, many parts of EA is treated with absolute contempt and seen as noxious, and this was before November and held by multiple senior EA people across all cause areas, people that you would respect.
As for one example, see Matt Yglesias.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/some-thoughts-on-the-ftx-implosion
What is especially bad and broken is that many people do actually act with great conscientiousness and care online, on the EA forum and Lesswrong, but this is effectively harvested by active people who want access to the resources, power structures, that has been built up by conscientious, unrelated work.
I literally suspected this was deliberate or at least tolerated, in part because this kept the related worldviews relatively weak. However, in the wake of the FTX collapse, this situation and the weakening of MacAskill and non-AI establishment, these latent issues might result in extremely bad states for EA.
I believe large parts of online EA discourse is intellectually bankrupt and dysfunctional. I believe I can decisively articulate why. This would really depress a lot of people without a solution, so I haven’t written it up.