At risk of going NSFW, it's obvious that none of these folks have read Singer 1971, which is the paper that kickstarted the EA movement. This paper's argument has a massive fucking hole right in the middle.

Without cracking open the paper, I seem to recall that it is specifically about Oxfam and famine in Africa. The central claim of the paper is that everybody should donate to Oxfam. However, if one is an employee of Oxfam, then suddenly the utilitarian arithmetic fails; his argument only allows for money going from non-Oxfam taxpayers to Oxfam employees.

Can't help but notice how the main problem with EA charities is the fucking nepotism. Almost as if the EA movement rests on a philosophical foundation of ignoring when charities employ friends of donors.

a quick supercut of garbage Scott Alexander takes for your sneering convenience:

I bet the billionaires who have donated the majority of their fortune to the cause also enjoy being told it's just so they can get a few percent tax break.

does anyone have the slightest idea what Scott’s talking about here? cause I feel like I’d have heard of a billionaire donating most of their money to any cause, unless my intuition’s right and scott’s playing with words pretending that treating a non-profit as a piggy bank somehow isn’t possible or common

I am of the opinion that most billionaires are good and have nothing to whitewash. But even aside from that, this is the worst possible way to whitewash money. If you spend your money on a yacht, people say "cool yacht".

I… I don’t have words for this one actually, the sneers write themselves

"Doesn't actually do selfless things with the money" - can you explain how this works? My impression is if your foundation spends money on yachts or mansions for yourself, that's plain tax fraud.

a bunch of folks in the thread and the original podcast have already explained exactly how this works, Scott, and it’s also kinda fucking obvious, but I guess don’t let that stop you from JAQing off about it

For a subreddit of supposedly ultra rational, dispassionate intellectuals that are willing to consider any ideas for merit based on pure argument and ignoring the speaker they sure do spend a lot of words talking about the kind of man Robert is vs what he actually says in the ep.

I constantly experience [the Gell-Mann amnesia] effect on this subreddit; everyone sounds so smart and so knowledgeable until they start talking about the handful of things I know a little bit about (leftism, the arts, philosophy) and they’re so far off the mark — then there’s another post and I’ve forgotten all about it

Bias noted, impact not reduced. Basic rationality failed. These people are so willing to discard their own sense of right and wrong, moral or rational, just to belong in their weird cult. Why is it so hard for these dorks to admit that they don't actually care about being smart or rational and that they just want a bunch of other dorks to be friends with?

Are there crazy people adjacent to the community? Of course, and there are certainly loud billionaires co-opting it to their own purposes, and even some of the people from the beginning have failed to live up to their aspirations.

99% of EA funding went into building a lampshade to hang over this minor quibble.

But dismissing the majority of the community is like saying the entirety of Antifa

drink!

it’s actually amazing to me how many folks in that thread say they love behind the bastards but don’t appear to have learned anything from it. it’s all “oh man I thought Robert Evans would love my particular techfash grift run by billionaires” which, like, what did they think the point of the podcast was this whole time?

They say that our whole project is the baby killing machine, but it's not. Do I have other examples? No.

I haven't listened to this podcast, but

Not all Effective Altruists! But! all Antifa.