It’s been showing up in eerie conversations I can’t legally share
Seems like a pretty good guiding principle, unless you’re the kind of self-serving muppet who skims philosophy texts to find reasons why it’s ethically okay to behave like a selfish dick.
Possibly the scariest cult.
Just billionaire bullshit like the rest of the TESCREAL movement
Sounds like post-modern Western BS. Altruism/prosociality/solidarity are already words, the “effective” just makes it sound like something a scammer would say.
To me it always sounded like victim blaming TBH. Some poor people don’t deserve to be helped, so us effective altruists (who do things to make people poorer) will weigh their souls and help those who want to be helped.
I think that they face a fundamental problem in Hume’s guillotine, where trying to rigorously define “the best” outcomes can lead to strange results when done in an echo chamber. This is best exemplified when taken to the extremes, e.g. the Zizians, an offshoot group of EA who have been rightly disavowed.
It’s just rich people lying to themselves to justify doing whatever they wanted to do anyway and pretend it’s somehow in humanity’s long term interests. It’s not, and nothing the rich do ever is.
A kind of good concept that got taken over by some of the weirdest people around
Tricle down economics with a different name.
No opinion, but the only guy I personally, know who is into it, is a poly-sex-fiend-genocide-denier.
So it kind of tracks with recent posts on EA.
Effective Altruism is a plausible-sounding framework, but the practitioners are literal insane people. Should you donate a fixed part of your earnings every pay period to the most effective charities? Yes! But after that, it basically all falls apart and suddenly you’re in Yudowsky’s weird sex cult donating money to some weird crypto scheme.
It’s a shallow, pointless ideology for super-rich motherfuckers who need a way to morally justify their tax evasion and the effects of the poverty that their lifestyles and business practices create.
In favor in theory, in practice they do have a tendency to get into insane bullshit ideas like that we somehow have control over anything that’ll happen 1,000 years from now.
It’s just capitalism and econ101 duct-taped and stapled to utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham is crying.
It’s for psychopath tech bros who’ve got spiders in their brainz.
For example, imagine a myopic billionaire who imagines himself “saving” humanity. If his contributions happen to cause suffering to people alive today, so what? He’s saving “trillions” of people, just in the future. Obviously this means that of all people alive, this billionaire is the only one who really matters. Certainly not Ukrainians who die because he turned off their battlefield communication… hypothetically.
We should have required some basic social science or political science courses in comp sci from the start
This is worth a listen for some background on how EA thinking has been influencing the AI world:
https://podcastaddict.com/better-offline/episode/235206311
Short version is that it’s a cult that believes that they are about to bring about a god, and need to ensure they are the ones in control.
I like the all-lowercase concept of effective altruism (making the most out of limited resources) but the organizations claiming that name are shady af
