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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   30744 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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This may be a bit oversimplified, but a core part of utilitarian ethical calculus revolves around optimizing tradeoffs. EA takes that ethos, and tries to apply it to the real world, identifying places where minimal resources may be expended to reduce the most human suffering--mosquito nets in Africa is one of the central examples. EA looks for efficiency, opportunities for optimization, and benefits that scale cheaply and easily. Very much for better and for worse, EA is a big-picture-focused approach to practical philanthropy. Many other strains of philanthropy are individual-focused; the EA critique of such measures is that they are inefficient and do not scale well.

EA looked at American politics and decided the cheap, low hanging fruit to easily have large effects with small amounts of money was..........

Giving hard-left organizations millions to make an indie film about racism and millions more to the richest liberal slush fund in the world to write one paragraph.

My half-assed review of OPP can be found in the comments here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/vdwwso/a_critical_review_of_open_philanthropys_bet_on/

It sounds like you are skeptical of the efficacy of magic beans? Yeah, in that case, it looks like just the worst combination of some form of quokka-ness with enough of a veneer of "trust me, I've done the utilitarian math, and it says that Democrats are surprisingly underfunded!" High-minded principles got suckered by a grift (well, to the extent that principles were involved at all beyond providing a fig leaf, which is worth questioning).

That said, as a practical matter, EA looks especially vulnerable to grifting exactly because its focus on big-picture analysis tends to dismiss individual failures. On the principles side, EA is an attempt to speedrun morality, which to me raises more red flags than a Chinese military parade.

EA looked at American politics

The irony here is that EA in general was extremely allergic to politics for over a decade. To the point where there were multiple lectures and serious discussions about avoiding political alignment.

Not everyone in EA wanted SBF to start meddling in politics, in fact I'd argue a majority didn't. And a majority right now certainly agree that political meddling is a bad idea.

EA is not a hivemind. I don't recall GiveWell endorsing politicians, for example.

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