opsimath.bsky.social
An Effective Altruist in grad school who's interested in catastrophic risk reduction and the welfare of non-human animals.
116 posts
480 followers
218 following
Active Commenter
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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!
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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.
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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."
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Agree
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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.
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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...
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"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.
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The deeds are listed in the screenshot?
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You're welcome to believe zero taxation is good, I do not think that's a good idea.
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I think you should donate that $100 via give directly as that will be much more impactful than food banks.
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They do, actually.
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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.
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Bruh it's called fucking taxation
I was talking about taxation!!!
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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.
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You are welcome to read about them, they are thoroughly vetted.
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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.
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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).
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Why wouldn't it?
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Nope, they are not all billionaires and some of them give much more than 10%.
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Ok 🤷♂️
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50% of EAs are undergrad and grad students. We are not that rich.
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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
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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.
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fake news forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FTTPCt...
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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
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Oh, EAs are way too self critical to ever claim that the movement is perfect.
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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.
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Ok, confused what this has to do with EA or EAs.
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??? Huh
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I think I'm defensive because EAs are the ones who are doing a lot to reinstate USAID/PEPFAR — writing, protesting/advocacy, & donating!
Some rando on Bluesky claims it's EA-orchestrated, everyone else happily drinks that kool-aid — isn't that maddening?
As Jesse said: bsky.app/profile/jess...
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I think it's okay to push back against obvious false claims, such as the one on eugenics and musk being an EA or whatever.
Of course real world impact matters far more than these vibes-based conversations, and I'm p happy with EA and EAs on that front:
forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FTTPCt...
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And money
forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FTTPCt...
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Yup, he attended that one conference in 2015 and promoted Will's book but neither of those makes him an EA.
With USAID cuts, I think he is a prime example of an anti-EA person because he's quite literally responsible for ~10K preventable deaths based on nationalistic, anti-impartialist grounds.
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That's a wild claim because the larger movement contains mostly left-y/liberal types who feel strongly about poverty reduction, animal suffering, making AI safe, or a niche range of other causes.
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Certainly was involved during uni! But given that he is working for DOGE, he either changed his mind or is following orders.
One of the core EA tenets is impartiality, that random factors like nationality or kinship do not determine moral worth. You can't really be one if you aren't impartial.
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What happened is simple:
• Rando Bluesky user claims that the person responsible for USAID cuts is an EA
• Everyone here blindly believes OP
• Actual EAs are panicking over the death of USAID, writing about it, and trying to raise money
forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FTTPCt...
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He definitely is!
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Although, this makes no sense because nearly all EAs do zero moral discounting for humans in other countries (i.e., all humans are morally equal so you don't have special obligations to save random Americans over random Africans just because of nationality).
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He is not.
He doesn't donate to EA causes, doesn't engage in the community, doesn't post in the Forum, doesn't subscribe to EA ideas (being truthseeking, caring about prioritization, caring about faraway humans or non-human animals, etc.) ... really nothing.
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Could not be further from the truth. For instance, these are highlights from last year.
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We are infuriated and sad.
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Silicon Valley higher-ups don't like EA because EA is pro AI regulation.
Idk how it became established leftist mythology that most EAs are wealthy techies, simply not true!
If you formulate your beliefs based on ideas that an out-group likes, you should be skeptical of left-of-center politics too:
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I expect in the best case order of mag $10 million will be raised.
The end goal should be re-establishing US foreign aid programs like PEPFAR, of course.
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It's altrusitic to give money so that we can prevent HIV deaths — happy to die on this hill.
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Please list these grifters, curious
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yea this is like saying socialists endorse fascism because mussolini exists imo. both EA's stated values and the actions of 90% of its members are for PEPFAR existing. to whatever extent luke was an EA and is acting to hurt PEPFAR, it's because he changed his mind or is ""following orders""
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Ok that is funny