I had not bothered to look up
effective altruism, but just listened to a Philosophy Bites episode with William MacAskill, one of the founders. When asked why people have a problem with it, he just said something like I dunno maybe it makes them feel outdone.
Pretty disingenuous.
This bit from Wikipedia says a lot:
Sam Bankman-Fried, the eventual founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, had a seminal lunch with philosopher William MacAskill in 2012 while he was an undergraduate at MIT in which MacAskill encouraged him to go earn money and donate it, rather than volunteering his time for causes.
It is amazing that a philosopher could not figure out what could go wrong with that. Even if they hadn’t been outright fraudulent, what are the consequences for the *long term* of FTX promoting blockchain technology?
It doesn’t have to be blockchain to harm the long term, either. The advice “just go make money and donate some of it” can cause this kind of problem in other ways. What if he told a Google product manager, just have YouTube recommend whatever gets the clicks, then donate some of it.
There’s a very “carbon offsets” sort of nature to all of this.
And this doesn’t even get into all of their sexual harassment. Which, again, has long term consequences for the suffering of people in the future.
Amazing how they’ve stirred some poo into the simple idea of making things better for people in the far future.