Effective Altruism

視頻地址https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm0vHQYKI-Y&ab_channel=PhilosophyTube

Abigail Thorn begins the discussion by talking about the FTX crash and the detention of its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried. William MacAskill, one of the initiators of effective altruism, was his close friend.

Then, she moves on to introduce the concept of effective altruism; who are the advocates of this movement? She mentions two books, What we owe the future(WWOTF), written by William MacAskill; and the other, The Precipice. Effective altruism is to dole out money in a way that can make the most of it.

EAs are members of this particular subculture. Most of them are living an affluent life. They are willing to donate their money to those who need it. But how to manage the fund and use it to help as many people as possible? That's the problem that the community aims to solve.

Talking about the case from the beginning again. Sam Bankman-Fried founded Alameda Research, a stock trading company. He controlled FTX and secretly used customers' funds in FTX to trade in the stock market, while Alameda bought cryptocurrency to keep the price of FTX's asset artificially high.

When the news broke, people started selling their crypto, and FTX had a panic withdrawals. Sam Bankman-Fried and his associates were arrested and charged with fraud. Sam also pledged a lot of money to EA's approved charity before.

The problem with EA now, she points out, is that the community leaders are not giving due respect to the constructive criticism. But what leads to this situation? Thorn decides to go deeper into the history of EA.

EA had some changes at the start of the 21st century. They decided to embrace longtermism, which is basically to think and act considering the threats from future. Taking possible but uncertain thing into account seems absurd. But it seems a sensible choice to take a possible and terrible future seriously.

She supplemented the idea of longtermism with the non-identity problem. It made sense to take longtermism into account if our choice is affecting tens of thousands of people who will be born in the future.

MacAskill talks about the threats to humanity from AI. And technology locks in bad values for a long time. But some of his opinions can be found in The Precipice, written by Toby Ord. Ord is more pervasive and richer in opinions in this book. It does not put too many of his eggs in the consequences basket.

Pascal's mugging highlights the difficulty of making decisions now based on future values or risk. It is also hard to study the efficiency of charities' work without actually taking a part in it. The same goes for social reform which most people have no experience of. This results in measurability bias.

EAs tend to favor short-term, small scale interventions that don't tackle the root of the problems. Some of those interventions don't last, or have a negative long term effect.

Evidence can only take you part of the way. If there is a gap, it's that world of business clout that fills them. She means reasoning may help people get off to a good start, but to reach a big goal like effective altruism? EAs need capital.

Instead of dismentling the unequal social system that assigns people unequally in different social stratum, do we have to work within it? How do we balance the positive and negative effect of a movement? Abigail throws out more bigger questions at the end of the video. But she does encourage people to try to solve them, with their eyes open.

Thorn does not give a fixed answer to EA by bringing this topic out. Instead, she questions the worthiness of this movement. What does it truly mean by performing EA? And what is the likely outcome of EA? If the EA community truly wants to make a change to the unequality deep rooted in our society. These are problems that cannot be avoided.