The business plan here will look familiar to anyone who has tracked the promises figures like Sam Altman have continually made. Promise that technology is being developed that will fundamentally change life for the better, cure cancer, and usher in a post-scarcity society. In the meantime, build up huge reserves of money and political power. And then justify the costs being borne in the deployment of technology as a necessary evil to usher in a brighter future.
The entire E.A. worldview has been a microcosm of Silicon Valley’s political framework, which is why it was so expedient for figures like Elon Musk and Dustin Moskowitz to promote it. Bundled into a single philosophy, you have the groundwork to validate elites’ self-importance, justify the amassing of power and wealth, and excuse nearly any antisocial behavior through commitments to the future.
To the powerful people who invested in spreading the gospel of effective altruist thought, these quirks are features, not bugs. A philosophy that confirms that those wielding power and resources are actually heroes fighting a cosmic battle for the future allows for oligarchs to justify the undermining of democratic institutions, the hoarding of wealth, and callous treatment of humanity.
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There are broadly three buckets of destructive ways of thinking that effective altruists are predisposed toward, all downstream of this necessity to determine the relative moral worth of helping different populations with a fixed pool of resources: deference to notions of a chosen elite, justification of the centralization of power and wealth, and wanton disregard for human well-being and agency.
These people are nuts and are radically ideological in the lamest way possible, this doesn't get covered enough when talking about the powerful figures involved here.
If people want to adopt religious views about computers, algorithms, LLMs or the kinds of optimization problems that are best suited for them to solve as inherently more holy than other things in life fine and if people want to idolize the ability to measure things and quantify them beyond any meaning, well it isn't like I give enough of a shit to want to stop people from practicing astrology, so I am not going to be a hypocrit about it... but it is supremely dangerous for people with religious views about computers, the logic they operate on and all of the nonsense that surrounds it to be put in positions of real power when they are completely convinced they hold no irrational religious beliefs at all and thus are perfectly suited to make choices for others.
I believe in the separation of church and state... which also means I believe in religious freedom (which includes the freedom not to believe in religion) even for the tacky scifi fever dream ones.
This is really the fundamental argument for "organized" religion, not that god exists but that every overconfident asshole in the world thinks they are jesus, so people begin to prefer to subscribe to a belief system that reacts to every overconfident asshole proclaiming they are jesus once they get power with "No, you really aren't, you are delusional and you have a hammer so all you can see are nails."
I am not saying religion is great at this, or even adequate, but it is one of the fundamental motors at the heart of what drives people to adhere strictly to organized religions and tolerate their endless bs.
Effective altruism to me mostly seems like a bunch of libertarians deciding once again that they cannot be sure everyone else just isn't dumber than them unless they prove to themselves the hard way what the lessons that have been passed down by humanity for the last several thousands of years are.
We could just skip all of this if we directly acknowledged that they cannot find it within their tiny imaginations to perceive that knowledge can exist outside of spreadsheets and yet they desperately need something to cling to beyond the material and thus inevitably resort to turning spreadsheets into religion to save themselves from their own catastrophic lack of education in the humanities... and then for some reason we are supposed to think they are geniuses or have come up with something new we all have to focus on?