they don't think it's a messy and inevitable fact of the world that certain people have outsize wealth. they think it fucking rules

Getting Trump reelected should count as 'billionaire philanthropy'.

Thank you. My wife is deathly allergic to shrimp, and I live by the motto

'If they send one of your loved ones to the emergency room, you send 10 of theirs to the deep fryer. '

where's the list?

Salvation Army

they are certainly mostly doing worthwhile things

No. Nope. Not in the slightest. Crucially, they're not even a charity! They don't get any financial transparency scrutiny a charity gets! It's a church! We don't even know how to evaluate them because there's literally no way to check what percentage of it is actually spent on charity. Their primary mission is to evangelise!

Also Chick'fil'A had to distance themselves from SA because of their egregious track record with gay rights. The Bigotry Chicken deemed them too bigoted.

Mosquito nets are still an effective intervention against malaria, not least as "there's a vaccine" is a very, very long way from "everyone is vaccinated" especially as really useful interventions such as draining marshland where A. falciparum breeds or attempting to eradicate it with insecticide are substantially harder and, also, take time. Given that half of all deaths from malaria are in children under 5 and that the malaria parasite is not transmitted between humans but from mosquitos to humans the herd immunity effect doesn't really exist if people are still getting bitten. (FWIW, my dad literally wrote a book called "Malaria")

EAs are wrong about a lot of stuff but they're not wrong about malaria eradication being about more than vaccines.

<3

After reading his older article, I can totally see how he fits into one of the middle layers of the diagram in the UAntwerp paper. He moved beyond basic followership and knows enough to stan EA to potential recruits. But he hasn't advanced to the part where you score comfy research positions in backroom deals with rich benefactors. So AI doom is just one of those things he doesn't really get, but a lot of people he respects take it super seriously, so it's got to be something.

Amazing how well he it the nail on the head back then.

In the beginning, EA was mostly about fighting global poverty. Now it’s becoming more and more about funding computer science research to forestall an artificial intelligence–provoked apocalypse. At the risk of overgeneralizing, the computer science majors have convinced each other that the best way to save the world is to do computer science research. Compared to that, multiple attendees said, global poverty is a “rounding error.”

There's another version of sneerclub?

but muh "nice sneers for winners" ;_;