Well, that's the point in question. For its critics, the whole enterprise is a misguided sham. See Leif Wenar's stimulating recent piece, 'The Deaths of Effective Altruism', which sees SBF less as aberration, than symptom.
I think EA was naive from the start, both in its unreflective moral realism, and its reduction of complicated questions of social theory down to back-of-the-envelope utility calculations based on threadbare empirics.
> For its critics, the whole enterprise is a misguided sham.
I'm a critic, but I don't think it's a sham. I do think it's very misguided and I very strongly suspect it has evolved into a cult, but it's not a sham.
> “None of them,” said a young Australian woman to laughter. Out came story after story of the daily frustrations of their jobs. Corrupt local officials, clueless charity bosses, the daily grind of cajoling poor people to try something new without pissing them off.
Probably too late for anyone to notice, but I appreciate this being posted.
My perspective on this coming into the discussion is EA started off well and noble and I had a good impression of organizations like GiveWell and the Against Malaria Foundation. I was largely of the mind that EA was corrupted later on when it was taken over by long-termists and AI alarmists who Pascal's Wagered their way into making no possible cause more important than raising the probability of producing infinite future good by infinitesimal percentage points that are bullshit to begin with because nobody can estimate future probability to that many significant digits anyway. But the original "most charity money today goes to museums and universities that are already rich so they can buy paintings and build ornate classrooms - surely we can do better with poverty aid in developing nations" message was basically sound.
This guy is making me question whether any of it was ever sound. Unless this is all lies, it would appear GiveWell was, at best, selectively presenting data and making up a lot of it, at worst, flat-out lying, and poverty aid in and of itself may not even be effective, possibly not even net positive.
It's interesting to see myself going in the exact opposite direction of the supposed "all old people are conservative" trope. I was an avowed libertarian 20 years ago, but today, everything I see and learn has made me question whether concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a tiny number of oligarchs who use shoddy data that might be made up to justify allocating resources toward pet projects they already found interesting in the first place is really the best way to organize the whole of human activity. Maybe, Marxist as it sounds, the real answer is distribute that power more evenly amongst all people and let those closest to each local purchasing decision decide what to allocate toward.
In theory, that is what free market economics was supposed to accomplish in the first place, but it doesn't work if you only have a few hundred out of 8 billion people making 99% of the world's purchasing decisions. You've just privatized a centralized command economy.
"distributing power evenly" is the classic reign-of-terror trope. Hell is always paved with good intentions and if you want to abandon unplanned order (our society) and build some utopia where a "the adults in the room" distribute power "evenly" to "distributed" parties than you'll just re-create a new Mao\Stalin\Committee of Public Safety.
Except 100% Free Markets lead to Monopolies. Then the argument is, those big companies are 'Free' to crush all competition and innovation.
But to prevent monopolies, you would need regulation, something to prevent them from forming, and then that is then 'Not-Free'. How dare you prevent me from having a monopoly.
It's a conundrum, if there is no oversight, regulation, then you are totally free to prevent other from having freedoms. It's just who do you want in control.
The fancy multiple Harry Potter castles they bought while saying everything was scientifically calibrated to not do the buying of fancy buildings and other status stuff normal charities and universities do.
Weren't the castles on sale at a bargain price? It seems like that was one of those inflammatory stories 'look they are buying castles', but then you look closer and they were cheaper than office space would be.
He was doing fraud, but the rest are mentally masturbating about problems that are about as relevant to the world as the number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin.
