Moral consistency in this sense is not an EA value.
Czynski
Karma: 109
Your contrasting examples for things we don’t offset convince me we should offset more and change behavior less. We offset carbon; we offset vegetarianism; we should try to offset more things. It’s a good strategy and it would do more good to frame foreign wars etc. in those terms.
Indeed, if you are at all concerned about animal welfare, the EA ethic to do the most good demands that you do both.
The essence of EA is to get the most effect for the least effort. GWWC is not a pledge to get as much good effects as you can; it’s a pledge to devote a measured, specific amount of your life, effort, and money to good causes and spend it with the most effectiveness you can. And even that is too much for some people; they can’t maintain it. I am, personally, on the short list of people who have been removed from the pledge list, which I suspect is significantly shorter than the list of people who stayed on the list and stopped fulfilling their promise.
Usually the effort is measured in dollars, but if the effort to get people to offset animal products is lower than to stop using them, do that. Almost no one is going to devote their entire spare budget to EA, and no one but Peter Singer will devote all their lifestyle. You cannot get everything and it’s naive, presumptuous, and foolish to pretend otherwise. The marginal effort to help animals should go wherever is most effective per time spent doing it, which is pretty much always going to be offsets or arguing for larger offsets, not lifestyle changes.
And if it’s easier to get governments to offset foreign wars than to make them stop waging them, then obviously we should do that.
committed vegans—which all EAs have the power to become!
This is preposterous. Frankly, thinking this discredits most of your post (everything from Why Offsets Don’t Really Exist onward) by itself. Because it displays total ignorance of everyone who isn’t vegan, and indication that you’re engaging in motivated reasoning everywhere else.
No, all EAs cannot become committed vegans. Leave aside the ~5-10% who can’t become any kind of vegan for health reasons, and the other 10-20% who technically could but whose health issues if they did would reduce their counterfactual impact by 20% or more. You claim those don’t exist, which has remained a persistent claim by vegan EAs for over a decade despite being conclusively proven false repeatedly over the course of that decade. (Hint: your sources are hopelessly confounded. And their methodologies have been applied to intermittent fasting and found that it had no negative effects and some benefits, which, if you look at any study considering effects with mental health included, is shown to be ludicrously false.)
Focus on those who find veganism unpleasant but could be persuaded to do it for reasons of moral obligation, who make up the majority of the remainder, likely 30-35% of EAs with 15-20% who wouldn’t find it particularly unpleasant. Why would you possibly think those people, even if became vegan, would evangelize? Let alone evangelize at the rates of people like you who have never experienced drawbacks or felt conflicted about it? No, there is no chance they will be anywhere near the 5 follow-on veganism attempts per lifetim.
People doing difficult things they dislike do not enthusiastically persuade others to do them. And despite the repeated disingenuous claims by vegans, veganism is, and will for the foreseeable future remain, a difficult life change that makes most people’s lives noticeably, persistently worse for as long as they maintain it.
There’s a story people tell about a new employee at a large investment bank. Some time in their first few weeks, they make a mistake that costs the company ten million dollars.
“I’m sorry,” says the new hire, “I’ll completely understand if you fire me for this.”
“Why would I fire you?”, their boss replies, “I just spent ten million dollars training you!”
This obviously applies here. Someone who has handled billions of dollars has given evidence of their competence even if it ended in fraud. If you believe they are genuinely aligned with EA (which I do without reservation in Caroline’s case), and that the fraud was not intentional on their part (seems very likely), and are unconcerned with reputation and PR (Austin is), then what this looks like is a serious error in judgment, which cost billions of dollars (and jail time) training them. If you oversee them for a short time and their judgment is greatly improved (I’m not sure this amount of evidence should be convincing), then it can be an entirely reasonable decision, picking up a $100 bill off the sidewalk that everyone else sees as tainted.
Common sense is often uncommon, and often nonsensical. Austin may have poor judgment, but this is absolutely not “rank incompetence.”
No shit rationalists dismiss animal welfare more. The people who don’t, are far more likely to call themselves EAs. Same for global poverty. To a lesser degree, same even for pandemics.
You have egregiously confused correlation for causation. And played into the stereotype that animal activist EA is persistently the sloppiest and most prone to deception for a good cause.
Personally I think Eliezer’s position is much more reasonable than Bentham’s counterarguments; the things BB dismissed as ridiculous seem obviously plausible, even if they aren’t relevant to animal moral patienthood. It may be there are good arguments against it, but they aren’t present here, and I would not trust them from any animal activism EA I didn’t already know well enough to trust by rationalist standards, because nearly every time I do that, I have more experiences that confirm the stereotype.
Especially since I don’t consider being correct on this point urgent by my own moral standards; I will continue eating chicken even if I’m convinced they are capable of having moral relevance.
The ‘stylistic choices’ were themselves evidence of wrongdoing, and most of their evidence against claims both misstated the claims they claimed to be refuting and provided further (unwitting?) evidence of wrongdoing.
Also, the only known raids on the corporate assets happened post-crash and therefore long post-audit. Under the espoused worldview of the management, everything before that was plausibly ‘good for the company’. In that it benefitted the company in raw EV across all possible worlds with no discount rate for higher gains or for massive losses.
That wasn’t the question. The question was why any company would go to less-than-maximally-trustworthy auditors.
And it makes you wonder why companies would go to these known-worse-auditors, especially if they can afford the best auditing like FTX should have been able to, if they don’t have something to hide.
Complying with an audit is expensive, and not just in money.
A thorough audit in progress is going to disrupt the workflow of all or most of your company in order to look at their daily operations more closely. This reduces productivity and slows down the ability to change anything, even if nothing improper is happening. It is expensive and disruptive.
A thorough audit is also going to recommend changes. Not just changes required to be technically in compliance, but ones which will make it easier to audit for compliance in the future and ones which remove something that could potentially be mistaken for bad behavior in a dim light. Making those changes is expensive and disruptive.
If you don’t need extremely high levels of trust from your customers and partners, choosing to receive a thorough audit means you’re paying a bunch of unnecessary costs. Much better to get a more lax audit, which is less disruptive to have ongoing and less disruptive to handle once the results are in. Better still if it also costs less money.
The correct audit is the one that provides your customers and clients—and/or your own management—with exactly as much trust and reassurance as you need them to get and no more. Anything less and you lose business that doesn’t trust you; anything more and you’re paying a cost for a benefit you don’t actually benefit from.
Simple: It’s another meta thing. Those have a very poor track record and seem to require extraordinary competence to be net-positive.
That’s literally just the same thing I said with more words. They don’t have reasons to think finance is net negative, it just is polluted with money and therefore bad.
Those two are perfectly good examples. They did. Every successful startup does something approximately that bad, on the way to the top.
Because finance people are bad people and therefore anything associated with them is bad. Or for a slightly larger chain, because money is bad, people who spend their lives seeking money are therefore bad, and anything associated with those people is bad.
Don’t overthink this. It doesn’t have to make sense, there just have to be a lot of people who think it does.
Why wouldn’t it be controversial? It suggests something other than people acting according to their personal pet projects, ideologies, and social affiliations, and proposes a way by which those can be compared and found wanting. The fact that it also comes with significantly more demandingness than anything else just makes it a stronger implicit attack.
Most people will read EA as a claim to the moral high ground, regardless of how nicely it’s presented to them. Largely because it basically is one. Implicit in all claims to the moral high ground—even if it’s never stated and even if it’s directly denied—is the corollary claim that their claims to the moral high ground are lesser or even invalid. Which is a claim of superiority.
That will produce defensiveness and hostility by default.
Many people’s livelihoods depend on ineffective charity, of course, and Sinclair’s Rule is also a factor. But it’s a minor one. The main factor is that the premise of EA is that charity should be purchasing utilons. And even starting to consider that premise makes a lot of people tacitly realize that their political and charitable work may have been purchasing warm fuzzies, which is an unpleasant feeling that they are motivated to push back against to protect their self-image as a do-gooder/good person/etc.
Of course, there is no need for contradiction. You can purchase both utilons and warm fuzzies, so long as you do it separately. But in my estimation, no more than 5% of the world, at the absolute most, is amenable to buying warm fuzzies and utilons separately. (More likely it’s less than 0.5%.) The other 95% will either halt, catch fire, and reorient their internal moral compass, or, much more commonly, get outraged that you dared to pressure them to do that. (Whether you actually applied any pressure is basically immaterial.)
No, you’re thinking about it entirely wrong. If everyone who did something analogous to Alameda 2018 was shunned, there probably wouldn’t be any billionaire EA donors at all. It was probably worse than most startups, but not remarkably worse. It was definitely not a reliable indicator that a fraud or scandal was coming down the road.
C, Neither. The obvious interpretation is exactly what he said—people ultimately don’t care whether you maintained their standard of ‘ethical’ as long as you win. Which means that as far as talking about other people’s ethics, it’s all PR, regardless of how ethical you’re being by your own standards.
(I basically concur. Success earns massive amounts of social capital, and that social capital can buy a whole lot of forgiveness. Whether it also comes with literal capital which literally buys forgiveness is almost immaterial next to that.)
So he’s said essentially nothing about his own ethics and whether he believes he stuck to them. Later elaboration strongly suggests he considered his actions ‘sketchy’ but doesn’t even say that outright. This is entirely consistent with SBF believing that he never did anything wrong on purpose.
Whether you think that belief is true, false but reasonable, or totally delusionary, is a separate matter. Just based on this interview I’d say “false but reasonable”, but there’s a lot of unsubstantiated claims of a history of lying that I haven’t evaluated.
Again, that’s orthogonal to the actual problems that surfaced.
Yeah, still not seeing much good faith. You’re still ahead of AutismCapital, though, which is 100% bad faith 100% of the time. If you believe a word it says I have a bridge to sell you.
Strongly disagree. That criticism is mostly orthogonal to the actual problems that surfaced. Conflicts of interest were not the problem here.
The accounting of “the chain of obligation” seems inflammatory to me. Exaggerated beyond the point where it is plausible. I don’t think it’s morally correct or reasonable.
Also, in a practical sense: If we had taken that perspective closer to the time, rather than use the legal process… there pretty much wouldn’t be an EA funding ecosystem left. Not because there was no other source of money, but because every funder would have had to give back money they didn’t have, all at once, money that had been donated through them but not to them, and which they’d have been held accountable for anyway. Cut the heart out of everyone but GiveWell and probably OpenPhil/Coefficient, and the ecosystem’s gone.