I tend to believe that SBF committed fraud for the same reasons that ordinary people commit fraud (both individual traits like overconfidence and systematic traits like the lack of controls in crypto to prevent fraud). Effective altruism might have motivated him to put himself in the sort of situation where he’d be tempted to commit fraud, but I really don’t see much evidence that SBF’s psychology is much different than e.g. Madoff’s.
ozymandias
Karma: 1,162
My take was originally in my article but wound up being cut for flow—I wound up posting it on my blog.
The “TESCREAL” Bungle
Development RCTs Are Good Actually
I think that relevant context for backlash against Davis Kingsley’s anti-polyamory views is that he is an orthodox Catholic. His anti-polyamory views are part of a set of fairly extreme views about sexuality, including being opposed to homosexuality, masturbation, contraception, premarital sex, and any sexual intercourse other than PIV. He has also expressed the viewpoint that polyamory should be socially stigmatized and people should be pressured into monogamy. I believe that much, perhaps most, of the backlash he has faced is due to the overall set of his beliefs and that it was disingenuous for him not to include this context.
Obviously, I am opposed to sexual harassment and to pressuring people towards any relationship style.
[Note: comment edited to use Davis’s preferred terminology for his style of Catholicism. The first sentence originally said “traditional”. I’m sorry for using terms for his beliefs that he doesn’t identify with.]
The Economist article discusses the practice of widespread polygyny: that is, men who have multiple wives and whose wives are only married to them. As a matter of mathematics, polygyny (without polyandry) means that many men will stay unmarried, which makes them less connected to society and more likely to behave violently. That argument seems true to me.
However, the argument hardly seems applicable to the egalitarian polyamory almost always practiced by effective altruists. Poly female effective altruists can and do date multiple people. Further, many poly effective altruists are in same-gender relationships. If anything, polyamory as practiced by most effective altruists seems to reduce relationship inequality. People who have trouble finding a primary relationship can find a secondary relationship and receive many of the benefits of a romantic relationship. (Although not all, of course—I don’t mean to erase the very real loneliness that comes from having a hard time finding a primary partner, even if you have secondaries you love.)
Further, the article discusses polygyny in cultures where women are literally bought from their families by wealthy men. Both polygamy and monogamy are harmful relationship structures when women are sold by their fathers to strangers three times their age. That doesn’t mean that either is harmful when freely chosen by an individual in a society with much better protections for human rights in general and women’s rights specifically.
Don’t worry, I’m robust to bad comments on the EA Forum. :) Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to be a norm anywhere close to being adopted.
I don’t understand why bad actors who are already willing to harass women wouldn’t be willing to cheat on their wives. I also don’t understand why we can’t just stigmatize people hitting on their employees, if that is the thing we actually care about. Your proposed system has no advantages if the senior men are single or serially monogamous—both very common.
Your language also strikes me as oddly and unnecessarily gendered. It isn’t exactly better if a senior woman is hitting on a younger, vulnerable man! Effective altruists are much more LGBT+ than the general population, and poly effective altruists even more so; it seems to me to be a very incomplete analysis to assume that everyone is heterosexual.
I have been harassed by many monogamous men but if I posted on the LW forum saying “I was harassed by many monogamous men” I would expect a lot of pushback from people who—very sensibly—would think I was trying to stigmatize monogamy.
There are places for unendorsed venting. Those places are not the Less Wrong forum.
ETA: I’m guessing from comments of yours I read elsewhere that you didn’t mean to come off as anti-poly as you did to me and Amber, and I’m sorry if my comment came off hostile. I know I’ve definitely written things that came off in ways I didn’t intend. :)
As a queer person, it definitely makes me feel unwelcome to hear people suggest that the social movement I’m part of gets to have an opinion on my consensual relationship choices.
An interesting counterexample to some of your points is the Disney Renaissance, generally considered to be the golden age of Disney animation, which started fifty years after Disney began animating films. AIUI, the conventional wisdom is that there happened to be a confluence of incredible talents: in particular, Howard Ashman and Alan Menken were an incredible songwriting duo. The Renaissance was also when the iconic Disney princess line was invented. Before the Renaissance, Disney happened to have made films about princesses, but it wasn’t a distinct category, any more than films about talking animals were considered a distinct category. The anecdote I’ve heard is that a producer noticed that girls were wearing handmade Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella dresses, and decided to appeal to the obvious market here!
I for one would be very interested in it if you decided to look into why the Disney Renaissance was so good so long after Disney began animating films.
I have written a couple of times about my feelings about taking the GWWC pledge. (I don’t believe I’m signed up on the website, but I in fact have given 10% for my entire working life, except two years that were particularly bad financially.) I think the essence, for me, is a sense of empowerment.
The world is full of enormous problems that I can’t do anything about. I often feel weak and powerless and helpless. GWWC says to me that I do have power to positively affect the world, and always will. I don’t have to be exceptional: as long as I have money, I can donate to highly effective charities and save lives. I don’t have to worry about dying and leaving the world the same as it was when I entered it. Though I will never know their names, there are people who would be dead if not for me, and who are alive. And that means so much.