Effective altruism is this century's biggest idea
The Economist's leader argues that effective altruism, an ethical doctrine born at Oxford, has moved from academia to the corridors of power with remarkable speed. Its adherents populate Silicon Valley and lead top AI companies, while the Trump administration brands it 'defective altruism' and 'dystopian.' The movement is admirable, the article concludes, but dangerous.
Thought precedes deed as lightning precedes thunder, wrote the poet Heinrich Heine.
- pfortuny
The basic idea of EA is the same many people have (especially those not used to the idea of nonlinear orders): quantifying everything, even "goodness" or "utility".
Not everything is quantifiable, and even more, not any family of things (investments, in this case) admits a linear ordering (they may even not admit a total order).
There can be incomparable outcomes from actions, and they may be maximal in their suborder.
This is difficult until you stop measuring everything and dedicate a minute to think of ordered trees.
- gizajob
What a totally ridiculous headline.
It’s just last century’s Objectivism with an even more smoke-and-mirrors name.
Effective altruism should have been effectively killed by SBF’s take on consequentialism - that basically the ends justify the means, and the means are all fine because one has egotistically (and narcissistically) omnipotently computed the optimal end result therefore the steps between now and that end are all justified. The problem is the world is a complex messy place, and reason is the slave of the passions, so in the real world it just seems to result in fraud and manipulation and can justify basically any kind of behaviour while making the doer believe they’re acting morally.
- red-iron-pine
effective altruism is this century's biggest scam