Effective Altruism Forum
EA Forum

by Grayden 🔸
2 min read 2

34

CommunityFTX collapseReligionSam Bankman-FriedNonprofit governanceEffective altruism cultureEffective Altruism for Christians
Frontpage

The last week has created a huge mix of emotions for people in EA, myself included.  It is really difficult to know how to respond to the cognitive dissonance created when a "good guy" is accused of bad things.

I have seen this happen to another global altruistic movement that I'm part of, the church.  Over the centuries, many actions have been carried out in the name of God despite directly contradicting Jesus's clear teachings.  In more recent decades, there have been numerous cases of child sex abuse carried out by people in a position of trust that have subsequently been covered up in an effort to pretend that people in church are in some way faultless.

Yet, Christianity also offers an explanation for all this that I have found powerful.  For as long as mankind has existed, there has been a spiritual battle between good and evil, but we as people do not fall neatly into one side or the other.  We all fall short of perfection.  Human nature frequently conflicts with good morality.  Both Peter Singer's drowning child story and Jesus's Parable of the Good Samaritan advocate the position form of the Golden Rule:  not just "don't do anything to anybody that you would not want done to yourself", but "do to others what you want them to do to you" (Matthew 7:12).  I know I sometimes don't get it right and I'm sure everyone reading this will be in the same position.

Irrespective of your own religious beliefs, I think Christianity offers some helpful advice on how we should respond:

  1. Focus on making ourselves better - Jesus told us not to be hypocrites when it comes to faults (Matthew 7:5).  When a woman was brought before him accused of adultery, he told the crowd that the first person to stone her shall be a person who hasn't sinned.  One by one everybody left (John 8:3-11).  Let's condemn the action but not the person, i.e. avoid ad hominem attacks.  Let's take lessons from it about how we can avoid making the same mistake and make ourselves better as a result.
  2. Implement good governance structures - The bible tells us "do not put your trust in princes, in human beings who cannot save" (Psalm 146:3).  Once we recognize that humans are flawed, we appreciate the value in putting in place strong measures to safeguard important institutions and avoid centralization of power.  We learn not to idolize individuals as it risks reducing the objectivity of our judgement (I was too slow to accept that SBF might have done something wrong).  We should use this time to strengthen EA institutions and build resilience in the movement[1].
  1. ^

    At this stage, I should plug the EA Good Governance Project, which is trying to achieve just that

34

0
0

Reactions

0
0
Mentioned in
Comments2


Sorted by
New & upvoted
Click to highlight new comments since:
ben.smith6
1
0

I partially agree, in that I want to see EA avoid making SBF a scapegoat for systemic problems in our organizations or ideology that could have led to the current series of events.

At the same time, if someone does something bad, character judgements are unavoidable. We all fall short of most particular ideals of moral perfection, but whatever your theological views on sin, someone's past actions are one of the best guides we have to predict their future actions, and we're going to need to make some inferences based on actions in the past to determine how much we trust what they'll do in the future.

My primary concern is that--if we consider, for instance, that EV-maxxing or naive consequentalism was part of the ideology that led to the disaster, we have to correct the problem where-ever it is and not just condemn the singular person who happened to live by an ideology that many people in the movement might share.

Reply
Grayden 🔸1
2
0

I think we're pretty much in agreement. Forgiveness does men forgetting and failing to learn the lessons. I certainly don't in any way want to condone the actions. I just want to make sure we direct our energy to the future and how to move on from this.

Reply
More from Grayden 🔸
290
Bad Actors are not the Main Issue in EA Governance
Grayden 🔸
· · 4m read
22
22
114
Introducing the EA Good Governance Project
Grayden 🔸
· · 5m read
9
9
61
Update from the EA Good Governance Project
Grayden 🔸
· · 1m read
3
3
View more
Curated and popular this week
LintzA
 ·  · 15m read
 · 
Cross-posted to Lesswrong Introduction Several developments over the past few months should cause you to re-evaluate what you are doing. These include: 1. Updates toward short timelines 2. The Trump presidency 3. The o1 (inference-time compute scaling) paradigm 4. Deepseek 5. Stargate/AI datacenter spending 6. Increased internal deployment 7. Absence of AI x-risk/safety considerations in mainstream AI discourse Taken together, these are enough to render many existing AI governance strategies obsolete (and probably some technical safety strategies too). There's a good chance we're entering crunch time and that should absolutely affect your theory of change and what you plan to work on. In this piece I try to give a quick summary of these developments and think through the broader implications these have for AI safety. At the end of the piece I give some quick initial thoughts on how these developments affect what safety-concerned folks should be prioritizing. These are early days and I expect many of my takes will shift, look forward to discussing in the comments!  Implications of recent developments Updates toward short timelines There’s general agreement that timelines are likely to be far shorter than most expected. Both Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have recently said they expect AGI within the next 3 years. Anecdotally, nearly everyone I know or have heard of who was expecting longer timelines has updated significantly toward short timelines (<5 years). E.g. Ajeya’s median estimate is that 99% of fully-remote jobs will be automatable in roughly 6-8 years, 5+ years earlier than her 2023 estimate. On a quick look, prediction markets seem to have shifted to short timelines (e.g. Metaculus[1] & Manifold appear to have roughly 2030 median timelines to AGI, though haven’t moved dramatically in recent months). We’ve consistently seen performance on benchmarks far exceed what most predicted. Most recently, Epoch was surprised to see OpenAI’s o3 model achi
Dr Kassim
 ·  · 4m read
 · 
Hey everyone, I’ve been going through the EA Introductory Program, and I have to admit some of these ideas make sense, but others leave me with more questions than answers. I’m trying to wrap my head around certain core EA principles, and the more I think about them, the more I wonder: Am I misunderstanding, or are there blind spots in EA’s approach? I’d really love to hear what others think. Maybe you can help me clarify some of my doubts. Or maybe you share the same reservations? Let’s talk. Cause Prioritization. Does It Ignore Political and Social Reality? EA focuses on doing the most good per dollar, which makes sense in theory. But does it hold up when you apply it to real world contexts especially in countries like Uganda? Take malaria prevention. It’s a top EA cause because it’s highly cost effective $5,000 can save a life through bed nets (GiveWell, 2023). But what happens when government corruption or instability disrupts these programs? The Global Fund scandal in Uganda saw $1.6 million in malaria aid mismanaged (Global Fund Audit Report, 2016). If money isn’t reaching the people it’s meant to help, is it really the best use of resources? And what about leadership changes? Policies shift unpredictably here. A national animal welfare initiative I supported lost momentum when political priorities changed. How does EA factor in these uncertainties when prioritizing causes? It feels like EA assumes a stable world where money always achieves the intended impact. But what if that’s not the world we live in? Long termism. A Luxury When the Present Is in Crisis? I get why long termists argue that future people matter. But should we really prioritize them over people suffering today? Long termism tells us that existential risks like AI could wipe out trillions of future lives. But in Uganda, we’re losing lives now—1,500+ die from rabies annually (WHO, 2021), and 41% of children suffer from stunting due to malnutrition (UNICEF, 2022). These are preventable d
Rory Fenton
 ·  · 6m read
 · 
Cross-posted from my blog. Contrary to my carefully crafted brand as a weak nerd, I go to a local CrossFit gym a few times a week. Every year, the gym raises funds for a scholarship for teens from lower-income families to attend their summer camp program. I don’t know how many Crossfit-interested low-income teens there are in my small town, but I’ll guess there are perhaps 2 of them who would benefit from the scholarship. After all, CrossFit is pretty niche, and the town is small. Helping youngsters get swole in the Pacific Northwest is not exactly as cost-effective as preventing malaria in Malawi. But I notice I feel drawn to supporting the scholarship anyway. Every time it pops in my head I think, “My money could fully solve this problem”. The camp only costs a few hundred dollars per kid and if there are just 2 kids who need support, I could give $500 and there would no longer be teenagers in my town who want to go to a CrossFit summer camp but can’t. Thanks to me, the hero, this problem would be entirely solved. 100%. That is not how most nonprofit work feels to me. You are only ever making small dents in important problems I want to work on big problems. Global poverty. Malaria. Everyone not suddenly dying. But if I’m honest, what I really want is to solve those problems. Me, personally, solve them. This is a continued source of frustration and sadness because I absolutely cannot solve those problems. Consider what else my $500 CrossFit scholarship might do: * I want to save lives, and USAID suddenly stops giving $7 billion a year to PEPFAR. So I give $500 to the Rapid Response Fund. My donation solves 0.000001% of the problem and I feel like I have failed. * I want to solve climate change, and getting to net zero will require stopping or removing emissions of 1,500 billion tons of carbon dioxide. I give $500 to a policy nonprofit that reduces emissions, in expectation, by 50 tons. My donation solves 0.000000003% of the problem and I feel like I have f
Recent opportunities in Community
20
Free Habit Change Coaching
John Salter
· · 2m read
0
0
40
Feedback requested: Financial Independence Purpose Planner tool
Rebecca Herbst
· · 5m read
2
2
56
Request for Guidance: Reaching Out to Charities Before Publishing Reviews and Our Concerns
VettedCauses
· · 5m read
54
54
View more