Pronouns: she/her or they/them.
I got interested in EA back before it was called EA, back before Giving What We Can had a website. Later on, I got involved in my university EA group and helped run it for a few years. Now I’m trying to figure out where EA can fit into my life these days and what it means to me.
Unfortunately, I believe there’s more terminological confusion between us than I currently have the energy to try to clear up.
Who said anything about unregulated?
But how is public ownership of firms compatible with ownership of firms being exchanged on markets?
A benign singleton might do that. Even if the odds are against this, it doesn’t seem wildly unlikely. The same is true of space settlement. There may well be unforeseen developments with the same effect. We could reasonably assign a subjective probability of five or ten percent to the possibility that something will ensure our long-term survival.
Huh? Why five percent? Why not 0.5%? Why not 50%?
And OP discusses market socialist systems which allow capital markets but not private capital!
How do you have capital markets without private capital?
To clarify, in the post, I discussed a hypothetical form of market socialism without capital markets.
I agree these definitions are the most canonical ones, but their existence has not prevented the terminological confusion we presently find ourselves in. Participatory socialism and social democracy, for example, do not entail the public ownership of the means of production.
Abandon your friends and family, join a rationalist group house in the Bay Area, and write 100,000-word essays about your priors for your AGI timelines and p(doom).
Just kidding!
“I have laboured carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate human actions, but to understand them.”
–Baruch Spinoza
Does this apply to things other than existential risk?
This is an interesting point, and I guess it’s important to make, but it doesn’t exactly answer the question I asked in the OP.
In 2013, Nick Bostrom gave a TEDx talk about existential risk where he argued that it’s so important to care about because of the 10^umpteen future lives at stake. In the talk, Bostrom referenced even older work by Derek Parfit. (From a quick Google, the Parfit stuff on existential risk was from his book Reasons and Persons, published in 1984.)
I feel like people in the EA community only started talking about “longtermism” in the last few years, whereas they had been talking about existential risk many years prior to that.
Suppose I already bought into Bostrom’s argument about existential risk and future people in 2013. Does longtermism have anything new to tell me?
It feels to me like black-and-white in-group/out-group thinking, where the out-group is evil, corrupt, deceptive, unintelligent, pathetic, etc. and the in-group is good, righteous, honest, intelligent, impressive, etc.
It actually isn’t my experience that people who identify as EAs interact “in good faith, rationally and empirically, constructively and sympathetically, according to high ethical and epistemic standards”. EAs are, in my experience, quite human.
FTXFF had business practices that led to far more harm than Nonlinear’s.
Like what?
Haven’t listened. Did Will talk about receiving warnings about Sam Bankman-Fried before the collapse of FTX?
Will responded here.
Have Will MacAskill, Nick Beckstead, or Holden Karnofsky responded to the reporting by Time that they were warned about Sam Bankman-Fried’s behaviour years before the FTX collapse?
I do not follow everything that happens in the EA world. I don’t use Twitter. I’m out of the loop. So, I don’t know if any of the people named have responded to the claims made in this Time article from March 2023:
...[Will] MacAskill had long been aware of concerns around Bankman-Fried. He was personally cautioned about Bankman-Fried by at least three different people in a series of conversations in 2018 and 2019, according to interviews with four people familiar with those discussions and emails reviewed by TIME.
He wasn’t alone. Multiple EA leaders knew about the red flags surrounding Bankman-Fried by 2019, according to a TIME investigation based on contemporaneous documents and interviews with seven people familiar with the matter. Among the EA brain trust personally notified about Bankman-Fried’s questionable behavior and business ethics were Nick Beckstead, a moral philosopher who went on to lead Bankman-Fried’s philanthropic arm, the FTX Future Fund, and Holden Karnofsky, co-CEO of OpenPhilanthropy, a nonprofit organization that makes grants supporting EA causes. Some of the warnings were serious: sources say that MacAskill and Beckstead were repeatedly told that Bankman-Fried was untrustworthy, had inappropriate sexual relationships with subordinates, refused to implement standard business practices, and had been caught lying during his first months running Alameda, a crypto firm that was seeded by EA investors, staffed by EAs, and dedicating to making money that could be donated to EA causes.
Many of the emerging issues at Alameda that were reported to EA leaders beginning in 2018—including pervasive dishonesty, sloppy accounting, and rejection of corporate controls—presaged the scandal that unfolded at FTX four years later, according to sources who were granted anonymity to avoid professional retribution or becoming entangled in Bankman-Fried’s ongoing legal drama. “I was shocked at how much of what came out about FTX rhymed with the concerns we raised in the early days,” says one person who spoke directly with MacAskill and others about Bankman-Fried in 2018. “It was the same thing. All of the same problems.”
It’s not entirely clear how EA leaders reacted to the warnings. Sources familiar with the discussions told TIME that the concerns were downplayed, rationalized as typical startup squabbles, or dismissed as “he said-she said,” as two people put it. EA leaders declined or did not respond to multiple requests from TIME to explain their reaction to these warnings and what they did in response. But by the end of 2018, Bankman-Fried’s behavior was such an open secret that EA leaders were debating Bankman-Fried’s presence on the board of the Centre for Effective Altruism. In emails among senior EA leaders, which TIME reviewed, one person wrote that they had raised worries about Bankman-Fried’s trustworthiness directly with MacAskill, and that MacAskill had dismissed the concerns as “rumor.” In 2019, Bankman-Fried left CEA’s board.
MacAskill declined to answer a list of detailed questions from TIME for this story. “An independent investigation has been commissioned to look into these issues; I don’t want to front-run or undermine that process by discussing my own recollections publicly,” he wrote in an email. “I look forward to the results of the investigation and hope to be able to respond more fully after then.” Citing the same investigation, Beckstead also declined to answer detailed questions. Karnofsky did not respond to a list of questions from TIME. Through a lawyer, Bankman-Fried also declined to respond to a list of detailed written questions. The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) did not reply to multiple requests to explain why Bankman-Fried left the board in 2019. A spokesperson for Effective Ventures, the parent organization of CEA, cited the independent investigation, launched in Dec. 2022, and declined to comment while it was ongoing.
In the weeks leading up to that April 2018 confrontation with Bankman-Fried and in the months that followed, [Tara] Mac Aulay and others warned MacAskill, Beckstead and Karnofsky about her co-founder’s alleged duplicity and unscrupulous business ethics, according to four people with knowledge of those discussions. Mac Aulay specifically flagged her concerns about Bankman-Fried’s honesty and trustworthiness, his maneuvering to control 100% of the company despite promising otherwise, his pattern of unethical behavior, and his inappropriate relationships with subordinates, sources say.
[Naia] Bouscal recalled speaking to Mac Aulay immediately after one of Mac Aulay’s conversations with MacAskill in late 2018. “Will basically took Sam’s side,” said Bouscal, who recalls waiting with Mac Aulay in the Stockholm airport while she was on the phone. (Bouscal and Mac Aulay had once dated; though no longer romantically involved, they remain close friends.) “Will basically threatened Tara,” Bouscal recalls. “I remember my impression being that Will was taking a pretty hostile stance here and that he was just believing Sam’s side of the story, which made no sense to me.”
“He was treating it like a ‘he said-she said,’ even though every other long-time EA involved had left because of the same concerns,” Bouscal adds.
To me, this feels like the most important part of the whole story.
I feel like this would be a good post. It might get unfairly buried as a quick take.
I skimmed the sci-fi short story. What do you think is unhelpful?
slow space colonization
I mean, the good news (from your point of view) is that Mars colonization is going to happen pretty dang slowly. Even establishing a tiny base like the ISS or the moonbase in For All Mankind is probably going to take decades. (Elon’s timelines are always wildly optimistic, and always getting pushed back…)
The only things I can see that would make Mars colonization go fast would be things that have a disruptive or transformative impact on Earth, such as superhuman AGI.
stop fueling utopians
Don‘t feel any pressure to reply, but if you feel like it, I’m curious to know what kind of utopians or utopianism you think is dangerous.
A lot of people seem to think EA is this singular, exceptional, incomparable thing, unlike other movements or ideologies or group identities. But I think EA is not special or exceptional or unique at all. It is just another human enterprise with many of the flaws that human enterprises typically have.
I studied philosophy at university and, by the time I was done, I still loved philosophy (maybe just as much or even more than ever), but developed many deep frustrations and critiques with philosophy, and a little bit of cynicism or skepticism toward the field, or some aspects of it. One thing I wished philosophers and philosophy teachers asked themselves more and more pointedly was, “Why is this worth thinking about?” or “Am I wasting my time with this?”. (I imagine if you had a glass of wine or some weed in a private place with any random philosophy PhD student or professor and asked them about the structural problems in their field, there’s a good chance they would have a lot to complain about.)
At university, I got intensely involved with political activism to the point of burnout and mental destabilization. I still believe very strongly in many of the basic ideas I believed in then (e.g. trans rights, economic justice) — maybe even more so, given the subsequent years I’ve had to think on it — but I was scared and disturbed by how amped up and out of control people can get when they spend so much time talking to people in their weird little in-group and have a strong sense of self-righteousness. Very relevant to EA.
EA is something like a combination of philosophy and political activism. When I got involved in my local EA community circa 2015, from the jump, I had a certain wariness about how something like this might go astray. One thing that bothered me then and I still don’t quite get is why people want to say “I’m an EA” or say things like “EAs like to help other EAs”. Why is this part of your personal identity? Maybe it’s fine and normal to want to be part of a group or to label yourself and I’m overthinking it. Maybe it’s largely personal preference.
A thing that weirds me out today is when I see EAs having a weird superiority complex, like the apparent idea that EAs, exceptionally, care about truth and know how to get it, whereas I guess everyone else are just lying fools.
I don’t remember where I read this, but someone pointed out that a lot of EAs just like talking about philosophy and futurism, and then for some reason feel the need to justify that it’s important. (Maybe it feels wasteful or indulgent otherwise? Maybe pleasure is a sin?) My feeling is that people should just be able to enjoy talking about philosophy and futurism, just like they enjoy sports or video games or playing in a band, and that shouldn’t be frowned upon. In fact, it should be looked on as an enriching and somewhat admirable part of life. You don’t have to furiously justify things along the lines of, “Well, if my essay has a 1 in a billion chance of making things go 0.01% better for 10^52 future lives…”
You can devote yourself to an institution, an organization, a movement, an idea or ideal or ideology, a community, a subculture, a career, a cause, or a hobby and not elevate it to the point of “we are the special few this sick, sad world needs”. It can just be fallible humans trying their best, not being perfect, not always knowing for sure what’s true, not always knowing for sure what the right thing to do is.
To the extent that feels uncomfortable or even intolerable to some people, or just not good enough, I wonder if what’s missing in their lives is just being loved for who they really are, without feeling the need to prove that they deserve to be loved.