This is way too many words trying to do morality without God. The effective altruist movement is best bracketed under the wider divine imperative of charity. Longtermism I think is best understood as a practical means for us to cooperate with the divine will that we should – and undying promise that we will – build a true Galactic Empire, as expressed in Genesis 15:4. Boom, done, ethical problems of EA philosophy solved.
Sabs
A charming and thought-provoking post , to which I will just add a few minor nitpicks. I cannot stand the framing of everything through Newman’s dubious concept of development of dogma, which IMO is a slow-motion bomb blowing up Catholic orthodoxy. In fact I don’t see that this adds anything to the piece, which stands perfectly well without it! All your excellent points about the antiquity of Christian acceptance of a long timeframe between the life of the Lord and his Second Coming work fine without this bizarre insistence that unchanging dogma develops according to completely arbitrary and post hoc criteria of authenticity. For modern Catholicism, of course, with its fixation on the theological authority of the Pope, this sort of thing is quite nice because ultimately both Newman and his modern interpreters simply made the authoritarian turn down the road of church history and turned authentic doctrinal development a simple matter of “whatever Rome wills”, but this is IMO historically unsupportable and an evangelistic disaster.
Another nitpick: ‘and even a committed Augustinian notion of perseverance as entirely God’s gift maintains that “a man who does not persevere fails by his own fault.”’ - I think a secular audience will misunderstand this. Augustine’s “fault” is the fallen nature of man: it is not a personal capacity of any individual. Man sins through his own inherited weakness and natural propensity towards sin- the “fault”—but can only do good through the grace of God. But I think nowadays this is widely misinterpreted as saying that human nature is morally neutral and individual persons simply make good or bad choices in some kind of vacuum, whereas the Augustinian position is that all of us are born defective, entirely irredeemably so absent the grace of God and so we will inevitably choose the bad. I’m sure you know this perfectly well, of course, but I think this audience will not.
But again, these are minor nitpicks. To add some more scriptural evidence to the contention that Christian longtermism is theologically viable: Genesis 15:5, where we can, I think, read the text as God showing Abraham all the stars of the universe, by a special grace of extraordinary vision. This would, I think, imply 300 billion trillion descendants of Abraham, which the Earth could never support, so logically I think this must imply an eventual inter-Galactic Empire. In Haggai 2:9, of course, God promises that “the glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former”, which we can read as narrowly referring to the rebuilt Temple, more broadly as referring to the New Testament, but which we might read even more broadly as a perpetual promise of the slow ascent of man, up the skyscrapers, towards the stars, and towards the great eventual reunion with the divine. These are, I admit, more speculative readings, but somewhere from heaven I like to think Origen smiles down on them.
Dear Fr,
Yes, that makes sense. I am actually a traditionalist Anglo-Catholic with a strong Augustinian bent, so in my corner of the Church of England things are a little different and I think there’s more acceptance of novelty. Nevertheless, I wonder if even in more conservative Catholic circles it would be easier to gain acceptance of more novel takes if the primary framing was exegetical rather than top-down doctrinal, if that make sense? After all, the Fathers always do theology through exegesis rather than vice versa, and I still feel the possibility space of things we can say about Scripture remains vastly under-explored.
Alameda Research is going to be worth nothing after today, zero, nada, nyet. I will confidently bet good money that their trading losses on various shitcoins (Solana and ofc FTT itself) are what is responsible for FTX going down (i.e essentially Alameda was using FTX customer deposits as a cheap source of capital). This is of course incredibly unethical and doubtless illegal in every jurisdiction, but hey, some altruism was done along the way? Of course no one is going to buy Alameda itself because it’s almost certainly a giant cesspit of vast liabilities & worthless assets.
Btw, SBF would never sell in a fire sale to CZ (who he hates!) unless FTX had massive solvency issues, not just a short-term liquidity problem. This thing was valued at 32 billion just a few months ago, if SBF could prove it was all a liquidity problem he could raise the capital to get through this and keep things together IMO. That he can’t do so indicates that FTX is almost certainly deeply insolvent, probably as a result of doing some incredibly unethical and illegal things. The lawsuits are going keep everyone busy for a few years, though!
Re funding, does anyone know if the FTX Foundation is an actual legal entity? If so ,I imagine its funds should be relatively safe at least in the short-term (i.e Binance/bankruptcy court will have no claim on them). Although perhaps when FTX depositors sue, they might have some claim if it can be shown (as it probably can) that the Foundation’s assets were gained through some kind of illegal activity? If not, and “FTX Foundation” is just a name for SBF giving money out of the (formerly big) pot of Alameda/FTX funds, then it probably all dries up overnight.
yeah the crypto lending platforms that went under, well, they lent badly. But an exchange is not supposed to be lending out customer funds at all! Ergo I think there’s a lot more lawsuit potential. And ofc FTX is way bigger.
fwiw I think it’s no better than a coinflip that CZ/Binance actually buys; it very much depends on just how big the hole in the FTX/Alameda balance sheet is. When Full Tilt Poker went under and it turned out they also had not segregated customer funds, Pokerstars came in to make FTP depositors whole. But Pokerstars did this because they were getting kicked out of the US, wanted to come back to the US one day when regulations changed, and wanted to buy themselves some credit with US regulators by buying FTP and assuming its liabilities. But CZ/Binance have never really acted like the sort of people who care all that much about what regulators think.
Withdrawals are definitely not going through on FTX itself—only on FTX US afaik.Very much doubt deposits on FTX itself are safe in the slightest—depositors there are basically 100% reliant on the Binance deal going through.
what operationalization would you accept? Perhaps at some point in the next 5 years a court finds that FTX/Alameda were doing this? Perhaps CZ/Binance publicly anouncing that they’ve found this to be the case when examining FTX’s books?
Hypothetically, let’s just say I own a business, Andromeda Research, with $500 million of assets and about 8 billion of outstanding liabilities? How much would you pay to acquire this concern? Perhaps $1 might seem quite a lot, in context?
Maybe hold off on this sentiment until we know exactly what they were doing with customer funds? It could age quite badly.
No. This would be a bad idea. This is financial advice.
How can it be a credible bid unless you have a lot of spare billions to cover the lost customer funds? At least 5bn or so, judging by the size of the funds FTX were apparently trying to raise yesterday.
I sort of suspect that they were not, in fact, exemplary on any definitions of protecting retail investors at any point. The whole point of FTX was to offer leverage to its users! It was the derivatives exchange where you could get margin! This is generally bad for retail! (and then maybe had Alameda trading against you, but hey).
This is all before their exchange suffered huge outflows and it turned out they didn’t have customer funds protected at all. So no, at no point was this good for retail, it was incredibly predatory from beginning to end!
Why? To light 5 billion on fire because....?
When Full Tilt Poker collapsed in 2011 after it turned they also had not segregated customer funds, Pokerstars bought them out and made their depositors whole. But Pokerstars did this because they were getting kicked out of the US market by the regulators and needed to buy some goodwill so they’d be let back in the event of eventual regulatory change (which is slowly happening, state by state). No one actually has a meaningful incentive to save FTX unless either a) you want to curry favour with crypto regulators or b) you’re worried about contagion in the wider crypto market affecting your own assets. Both of these things might be true for Binance—maybe—but they surely aren’t true for anyone else. Even Coinbase was asked to buy FTX and just straight up turned them down, presumably because the losses are far too large for Coinbase to safely cover.
SBF was reportedly ringing about the billionaire world yesterday asking for emergency funds. Coinbase was definitely approached to see if they’d buy FTX: their CEO has confirmed this. If Binance are the only ones buying (maybe, perhaps unlikely the deal actually goes through) it’s because no one is touching this hot garbage even with a fifty foot bargepole.
Pretty sure Pokerstars also bought Full Tilt for pennies on the dollar, and in fact later relaunched the site under their ownership before eventually shuttering it again. But the brand value of these failed businesses is generally not great, especially when fraud is involved.
See https://www.semafor.com/article/11/08/2022/before-deal-with-rival-ftx-scoured-wall-street-silicon-valley-billionaires-for-1-billion-lifeline for the size of the hole being around 5bn. Could well be higher tbh.
Because FTX is almost certainly morass of worthless assets and enormous liabilities, totalling $5bn or more. The brand also will be worth very little. And Binance may not feel the political capital it would acquire from making depositors whole is worth the risks.
Binance have walked away from the deal to buy FTX. Pretty much all customer funds on the site are likely lost for good.
Tremendous stuff. One thing I would add is that higher crime, by its very nature, provokes worse policing. This happens through some obvious mechanisms (more brutalized, overworked, and trigger-happy cops), but also through some more subtle mechanisms. As crime reduces urban densities, police numbers relative to the area they cover start to fall, and cops become confined to their cars, since this is the only way they can cover their expanding territories. This kills off foot patrolling, one of the best and most proven anti-crime interventions, with a pedigree hearkening back to the Victorians. Some London police stations still have 19th-century maps on their wall of their territory divided up into individual officers’ beats, which were often no more than a few streets of super-densely populated space. Solve the crime problem, and you may well find that America’s policing problem fixes itself to a surprising degree.