This phenomena is especially interesting because it's a bunch of left-leaning people regurgitating precisely the same flavor of arguments that conservatives have against leftism/liberalism!
I disagree!
Ob the community rejected him, but SBF was a case that highlighted weaknesses of our community's norms. EA ideas and certain influential higher ups were at least somewhat responsible.
But with the doge kids, the evidence is super flimsy and people are just looking for a scapegoat.
Someone who was involved in an EA group during college. We don't know if he remained engaged or changed his mind or is happy following orders.
The basis on which these claims are being made is flimsy. That one post I quoted, the evidence literally is "I saw him tweet about it once."
A recent report showed that the destruction of just one USAID program, the anti-AIDS PEPFAR initiative, would lead to the deaths of one million people *every year* www.vox.com/future-perfe...
Agree
Yup, EAs disagree with each other a lot about prioritization across causes, like where talent and money should be allocated and how.
The voting behavior is weird, but much better than most of reddit, and magnitudes better than Bluesky.
Ok, maybe you perfectly know what's going on but I'm skeptical.
And I have my laundry list of complaints with EA but overall I think it's a cluster of pretty good ideas.
open.substack.com/pub/thingoft...
"reached me" I'm not on drugs lol
Trust me, I do a lot of self-reflection and do not take my moral convictions lightly.
I can almost guarantee that the caricature of EA you likely have in your head is different from how the movement and its adherents are in real life.
The deeds are listed in the screenshot?
You're welcome to believe zero taxation is good, I do not think that's a good idea.
I think you should donate that $100 via give directly as that will be much more impactful than food banks.
They do, actually.
On the contrary, EAs subscribe to radical empathy — we should be empathetic to people and beings despite surface level differences. See: www.openphilanthropy.org/research/rad...
In terms of GHD impact, a lot has been done for malaria, lead poisoning, air pollution, pandemic prevention, and more.
Bruh it's called fucking taxation
I was talking about taxation!!!
I don't think there are any other groups of people who take prioritization of career choices or donations as seriously and actually take action on those obvious seeming ideas, so I think the community and movement are quite valuable.
You are welcome to read about them, they are thoroughly vetted.
Meritocracy is great because of the monetary and intellectual value we can generate.
But privilege is real, so the gains of meritocracy should be redistributed.
I think beneficentrism — we should dedicate some portion of our lives to helping others — which is one of the central tenets, is pretty defensible.
Another EA idea I'm happy to strongly defend impartialism (nationality, race, gender, and even species aren't determiners of moral worth of a being).
Why wouldn't it?
Nope, they are not all billionaires and some of them give much more than 10%.
Ok 🤷♂️
50% of EAs are undergrad and grad students. We are not that rich.
EA doesn't say "do whatever."
Here's an EA org that does direct cash transfers to the poorest people in the world so that they can buy food or blankets or whatever necessities they do not possess.
www.givedirectly.org
Most EAs don't practice earning to give, direct impact work is much more highly valued.
EAs who do practice earning to give are not Uber rich. Some of them are people who earn regular salaries but manage to donate 10%.
Carbon offsets are bullshit, no one donates to that.
The zizzians have fanatical beliefs and are a cult based around one person
They also sympathize with two EA cause areas
I don't think the latter was the reason they committed violence, that's all I'm saying
Oh, EAs are way too self critical to ever claim that the movement is perfect.
This is a very strange claim. Do you think caring about AI Safety or animal welfare is the reason zizzians killed people or was it some other set of beliefs that led them to act the way they did?
This is the same as someone claiming leftism is inherently dangerous because Bolsheviks.
Ok, confused what this has to do with EA or EAs.
