I am exploring the intersection of #EffectiveAltruism and the #energytransition. Working on an article for RZ Notes (https://rzondervan.substack.com), but I can’t shake the feeling I might be re-inventing the wheel. Recommendations for reading material welcome!
#effectiveAltruism
Why didn’t Will MacAskill predict Sam Bankman-Fried’s malfeasance?
I thought this was a great, as well as hilarious, critique from Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever, loc 398:
And MacAskill’s ability to forecast the future—even in the short term—is seriously questionable. Given far more information than most, he still didn’t accurately predict what would happen with Sam, just a few months after What We Owe the Future was published.
Effective Altruism founder Will MacAskill has built a hugely influential philosophical movement on the moral application of our knowledge about the world. In its more recent Longtermist variant this rests on weighing knowledge, even if fuzzy, about the long term trajectory of human civilisation against present concerns.
Yet Will MacAskill was old friends with billionaire crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), who he was repeatedly warned about and who supported his organisations with tens of billions of dollars. If he couldn’t act morally in relation to the substantial weight of evidence about SBF’s malfeasance then why should anyone have confidence in his capacity to act morally in relation to the deeply speculative knowledge of the future he assigns great importance to?
#AdamBecker #digitalElites #effectiveAltruism #longtermism #SamBankmanFried #WillMacAskill
Finally updated my #profile at https://speakerinnen.org :awesome:
Are you looking for a #talk, a #workshop or an #interview on the #socialimpact of #digitalization?
On #ai, #sustainability or #ideologies behind digitalization as #cybernetics, #gamification, #longtermism, or #effectivealtruism?
Why the thoughts and theories of those in power heavily influence societies?
Are you looking for a #workshop on how to really interest people in #computersecurity?
Contact me.
And #boost if you like
#ideologies like #transhumanism #effectivealtruism #gamification & #longtermism
People like #elonmusk #PeterThiel or believe in this pseudo #religion
That is heavily based on ideas of #eugenics & other #fascist dreams
It is the strong believe in #superhumans & unequal #society
Know your enemies & read or watch some about their #ideologies
@MSchnetker on #longtermism https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-longtermismus-der-geist-des-digitalen-kapitalismus
@xriskology https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-acronym-behind-our-wildest-ai-dreams-and-nightmares/
And some of my videos
https://media.ccc.de/search/?q=Katika
Thinking about the "Dust Speck vs Torture" fallacy a lot recently… "Is torturing one guy for 50 years better than a huge number of people getting a speck of dust in their eye" 🧵 #Utilitarianism #EffectiveAltruism #Longtermism #TESCREAL @xriskology.bsky.social
@Dnmrules
Yo dejé de ver los videos de #kurzgesagt cuando salieron con uno haciendo loas al altruismo efectivo. En el fondo son de la secta #TESCREAL
New on the my blog: Breakthrough Incentive Markets - a third path for science funding that combines democratic problem prioritization with market-driven resource allocation.
https://open.substack.com/pub/danielvanzant/p/breakthrough-incentive-markets?r=3j968v&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Science today is trapped: academic funding favors incremental progress over radical ideas, while industry only invests where profits exist. Critical research falls through this gap.
What if we harnessed the same efficient mechanisms that drive innovation in the private sector to fund science that solves our most important problems?
Breakthrough Incentive Markets create outcome pools for specific scientific problems. Investors buy positions, fund promising research, and earn returns when breakthroughs happen.
The key innovation: Investors' returns are higher when solutions come sooner. This creates powerful incentives for speed, collaboration, and funding approaches too radical for grants but too public-good-oriented for industry.
Everyone does what they do best: The public identifies important problems through donations, markets efficiently allocate resources, and researchers focus on innovation instead of grant-writing.
Read the full proposal on my blog. I'd love some constructive criticism on this idea. #EffectiveAltruism #ScienceFunding #metascience
The more I hear about #EffectiveAltruism, #Rationalism, and the followers thereof, the luckier I feel that I didn't accept a Silicon Valley job when I was young.
That shit is beyond insane, and I think the person that I was when I was considering SV jobs would fall for it super hard, because I was a naive arrogant little shit.
I will be attending EAGxPrague conference in May.
I have been a big fan of https://80000hours.org for some time and given my background, I am interested in AI safety and also in "AI for good".
This is my first in-person involvement with the effective altruism community. I am well aware that there are some controversies around the movement, so I am quite curious about what I find when I finally meet the community in person.
The two most recent episodes of #BioUnethical with David Thorstad, Emily Largent, and @GovindPersad were very (very!) good.
Hosts Leah Pierson and Sophie Gibert may be doing reflective discussion better than anyone — outstanding stage setting, questioning, improvising, etc.
#bioethics #appliedEthics #Philosophy #medicine #health #biology #economics #law #psychology #epistemology #science #longtermerism #effectiveAltruism #xRisk #existentialRisk
"A couple years ago, Oliver Habryka, the CEO of Lightcone, a company affiliated with LessWrong, published an essay asking why people in the rationalism, effective altruism and AI communities “sometimes go crazy”.
Habryka was writing not long after Sam Bankman-Fried, a major funder of AI research, had begun a spectacular downfall that would end in his conviction for $10bn of fraud. Habryka speculated that when a community is defined by a specific, high-stakes goal (such as making sure humanity isn’t destroyed by AI), members feel pressure to conspicuously live up to the “demanding standard” of that goal.
Habryka used the word “crazy” in the non-clinical sense, to mean extreme or questionable behavior. Yet during the period when Ziz was making her way toward what she would call “the dark side”, the Berkeley AI scene seemed to have a lot of mental health crises.
“This community was rife with nervous breakdown,” a rationalist told me, in a sentiment others echoed, “and it wasn’t random.” People working on the alignment problem “were having these psychological breakdowns because they were in this environment”. There were even suicides, including of two people who were part of the Zizians’ circle.
Wolford, the startup founder and former rationalist, described a chicken-and-egg situation: “If you take the earnestness that defines this community, and you look at civilization-ending risks of a scale that are not particularly implausible at this point, and you are somebody with poor emotional regulation, which also happens to be pretty common among the people that we’re talking about – yeah, why wouldn’t you freak the hell out? It keeps me up at night, and I have stuff to distract me.”
A high rate of pre-existing mental illnesses or neurodevelopmental disorders was probably also a factor, she and others told me."
https://www.theguardian.com/global/ng-interactive/2025/mar/05/zizians-artificial-intelligence
#SiliconValley #Transhumanism #EffectiveAltruism #Rationalism #AI
@georgetakei @JosephMeyer Perhaps those unfortunates are part of his planned prey. #Musk #EffectiveAltruism #eugenics
lol of course the rationalist reporter kelsey piper supports james damore. rationalists have never met a sexist/racist/etc computer toucher they didn't like. #rationalism #lesswrong #effectivealtruism
@mojala @ms_eikku Tuo on yksi syy, miksi jostain efektiivisestä altruismista jotkut etsii apua, kun yhteiskunta ei hoida sille kuuluviksi arveltuja tehtäviä, eikä itse pysty millään kalkyloimaan seurauksia.
Tässä yleinen sivu https://www.effectivealtruism.org/, tässä suomalainen https://www.altruismi.fi/, ja Wikipedian otto suomeksi https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efektiivinen_altruismi, ja maailma-kielellä https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism, ja tiettävästi löytyy nykyään jo kunkin ideologiaan sovitettuja. En tiedä, millä perusteilla tuollaisia hankkeita on missäkin kritisoitu, eikä itselläni ole vielä kantaa niihin.
Hyvän tekeminen missä vain on arvokasta, vaikka sitten rahalla, mutta uusi maailmantilanne Trumppeineen sun muineen sekoittaa päätä, joka ei muutenkaan osaa hyvin laskea (cf. cognitive biases). En tahtoisi niukasta toimeentulosta lahjoittamalla lahjoittaa pelkästään omalletunnolleni tai kuvittelemalleni tulevaisuudelle.
#lahjoitus #EffectiveAltruism #auttaminen #tulevaisuus #future
#PeterSinger seems to be busy: he has not answered to our email. We have proposed him to be our “emperor” ambassador. We will be very happy when he will accept. And we are very confident about this, as our initiative is inspired by its #EffectiveAltruism methodology. We just lack, for the moment, a way to receive your donations. Be altruist, be effective and not fanatic, join the #feminuary movement!
Hey @AxiosNews someone actually reads this stuff. This interview, posted today, actually centers on remarks the professor made 2 years ago. And the guy made those remarks at a meeting of #EffectiveAltruism people. He is an EA apologist, it says so right on the header of his blog. This is why context (not just that he is a professor, but that he also actively advocates for a radical ideology) matters.
https://blog.oup.com/2022/12/the-predictably-grievous-harms-of-effective-altruism/
FWIW, Effective Altruism is just Eugenics with extra steps.
#EffectiveAltruism folx should work on their reading comprehension.
I got an #AI in 2024 retrospective from 80,000 Hours, an Effective Ventures project (related to EA). In it, they mention that "the o1 language model [developed by OpenAI ][...] has the ability to deliberate about its answers before responding."
The OpenAI o1 release says: "We introduce deliberative alignment, a training paradigm that directly teaches reasoning LLMs [...] safety specifications..."
Quite the leap of faith...
I just learned that #SherlockBioscience, a much hyped #Biotech Company, was sold for a fraction of what they have raised. Looks like once again mostly smokes and mirrors. No magic #CRISPR_rEvolution as it seems. SB received significant funding from the #EffectiveAltruism promoting #OpenPhilantropy org. OP is currently looking for a "Director of Government Relations" and I think I know why 😉
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