All of akberkhan's Comments + Replies

Going to chime in with a comment I haven't seen others make yet, and likely for good reason... EAs are congenial to a fault sometimes.

I used to think, as I think you are implying in your excerpts of Hanania's piece, that a full-throated agreement and recognition of the moral imperative to not consume animal products (from factory farms or elsewhere) even if one did not or had not yet chosen to take this moral circumscription upon themselves, was commendable. Hey, I thought, at least they are aware. Then I read this argument in an otherwise excellent Noah S... (read more)

You know what helps me evangelize the EA movement to friends? When a movement I've talked about being steadfastly committed to moral rigor launches a "fellowship" for people to work remotely in the  Bahamas because it's crypto-friendly?!  

This is insanely tone-deaf.  Ridicule and charges of hypocrisy directed at this effort will be much deserved. Purporting to carry a great moral burden means taking great pains to act with moral propriety and to head-off PR minefields like this one. 

7
Linch
2y
Hmm, even though I'm someone who'd be excited to go to the Bahamas and am happy to subsidize others interested in doing so, I agree that from the outside this is a really funny situation, and I think it's reasonable to laugh at ourselves a little for it.  But ultimately, we are a movement primarily bottlenecked not by small-donor $s, PR, or appearance of moral rigor, but by a) lacking the strategic clarity to confidently know what we're doing and b) having enough people to act on the directions that we are moderately confident about what's right to do. Building a community of people next to the richest company in EA seems like a reasonable bet for us to get better at both.
2
Frederik
2y
There is much that could be said in response to this. 1. The tone of your comment is not very constructive. I get that you're upset but I would love if we could aim for a higher standard on this platform. 2. The EA community is not a monolithic super-agent that has perfect control over what all its parts do -- far from it. That is actually one of the strengths of the community (and some might even say that we give too much credit to orthodoxy). So even if everyone on this forum or the wider community did agree that this was a stupid idea, then we could still do nothing about it since it is FTX's money and theirs to do with what they want. It does not make sense to talk about this in terms of "the EA community" launching this fellowship in the same way that it does not make sense to say that "the EA community" thinks that [cause XYZ] is the most important one. You could of course argue that the post received a lot of positive attention and that indicates support from the wider community and that would be a good argument, but it's far from being equivalent to everyone (or even the majority) of the EA community agreeing that this is the best way to spend a few million marginal dollars (ballpark estimate I just made up). 3. You are getting the direction of causality wrong. FTX moved to the Bahamas because it is crypto-friendly. That makes sense because FTX is a crypto exchange. Afaict, they want to build an EA community there because that's where they are located which also makes sense from their perspective (I don't necessarily agree it's the best place for this kind of project but I can at least understand the reasoning). 4. You seem to be mixing two arguments here. One is the "PR disaster" angle which might be valid regardless of the actual merits of the project. The other one seems to be an argument against the actual merits of the project, but you don't provide actual arguments on the object level, so I don't know what to respond here.