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Quantumfreakonomics  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   5506 thread views

FTX is Rationalism's Chernobyl

You may be familiar with Curtis Yarvin's idea that Covid is science's Chernobyl. Just as Chernobyl was Communism's Chernobyl, and Covid was science's Chernobyl, the FTX disaster is rationalism's Chernobyl.

The people at FTX were the best of the best, Ivy League graduates from academic families, yet free-thinking enough to see through the most egregious of the Cathedral's lies. Market natives, most of them met on Wall Street. Much has been made of the SBF-Effective Altruism connection, but these people have no doubt read the sequences too. FTX was a glimmer of hope in a doomed world, a place where the nerds were in charge and had the funding to do what had to be done, social desirability bias be damned.

They blew everything.

It will be said that "they weren't really EA," and you can point to precepts of effective altruism they violated, but by that standard no one is really EA. Everyone violates some of the precepts some of the time. These people were EA/rationalist to the core. They might not have been part of the Berkley polycules, but they sure tried to recreate them in Nassau. Here's CEO of Alameda Capital Caroline Ellison's Tumblr page, filled with rationalist shibboleths. She would have fit right in on The Motte.

That leaves the $10 billion dollar question: How did this happen? Perhaps they were intellectual frauds just as they were financial frauds, adopting the language and opinions of those who are truly intelligent. That would be the personally flattering option. It leaves open the possibility that if only someone actually smart were involved the whole catastrophe would have been avoided. But what if they really were smart? What if they are millennial versions of Ted Kaczynski, taking the maximum expected-value path towards acquiring the capital to do a pivotal act? If humanity's chances of survival really are best measured in log odds, maybe the FTX team are the only ones with their eyes on the prize?

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Fair in general, but he is a central figure in EA specifically, and arguably its founder.

Yeah, fair, I'll cop to him being the founder (or at least popularizer) of EA. Though I declaim any obligation to defend weird shit he says.

I think one thing that I dislike about the discourse around this is it kinda feels mostly like vibes-- "how much should EA lose status from the FTX implosion"-- with remarkably little in the way of concrete policy changes recommended even from detractors (possible exception: EA orgs sending money they received from FTX to the bankruptcy courts for allocation to victims, which, fair enough.)

On a practical level, current EA "doctrine" or whatever is that you should throw down 10% of your income to do the maximum amount of good you think you can do, which is as far as I can tell basically uncontroversial.

Or to put it another way-- suppose I accepted your position that EA as it currently stands is way too into St. Petersberging everyone off a cliff, and way too into violating deontology in the name of saving lives in the third world. Would you perceive it as a sufficient remedy for EA leaders to disavow those perspectives in favor of prosocial varieties of giving to the third world? If not, what should EAs say or do differently?

I don't have a minor policy recommendation as I generally disagree with EA wholesale. I think the drowning child hypothetical requires proximity to the child, that proximity is a morally important fact, that morality should generally be premised more on reciprocity and contractualism and mutual loyalty than on a perceived universal value of human life. More in this comment.

Is there, do you think, any coherent moral framework you'd endorse where you should donate to the AMF over sending money to friends and family?

I think utilitarianism should play a very small but positive part of one's moral framework, a tiny minority vote in one's moral parliament, but committing to donate 10% of one's income to the other side of the planet is messed up, and asks to be reciprocated by your neighbors and fellow countrymen treating you as no more deserving of moral consideration than a stranger on the other side of the planet. If one see an EA type drowning in a pond, I don't exactly endorse this approach, but I think there would be a certain cold reciprocity to walk whistling past, clean in conscience that one has already dedicated at least 10% of one's attention to one's neighbors, friends and community.

Are there any charities to which you would endorse sending 10 percent of your income each year?

I think it's fine if the charity supports your neighborhood, community, people who have an affinity to you through some sort of shared experience or cultural background, etc.

Gotcha. I appreciate this insight into the anti-EA perspective.

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