(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Neoliberalism, Effective Altruism, and the Things Fish Have No Words For [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-01 (Photo by Ed JONES / AFP) (Photo by ED JONES/AFP via Getty Images) An Oxford Doctoral candidate was almost taken in by the effective altruism cult and now wants more accountability in its ranks: How exactly did well-intentioned, studious young people once more set out to fix the world only to come back with dirty hands? Unlike others, I do not believe that longtermism — the EA label for caring about the future, which particularly drove Bankman-Fried’s donations — or a too-vigorous attachment to utilitarianism is the root of their miscalculations. A postmortem of the marriage between crypto and EA holds more generalizable lessons and solutions. For one, the approach of doing good by relying on individuals with good intentions — a key pillar of EA — appears ever more flawed. The collapse of FTX is a vindication of the view that institutions, not individuals, must shoulder the job of keeping excessive risk-taking at bay. Institutional designs must shepherd safe collective risk-taking and help navigate decision-making under uncertainty. Why effective altruism needs to decentralize after Sam Bankman-Fried - Vox I recommend reading the entire article. It is insane in a way that I don't think the author fully understands. She describes leaders of the movement ranking people on their perceived IQs and job choices, and allegedly setting up systems where those rankings would determine who would get welcomed into the arms of the upper reaches of the movement. She describes a meeting with SBF and his cadre of thieves and weirdos where they tried to talk her out of becoming a biologist and instead go work in high finance, since she could make more money that way and thus "do more good" (how there would be anyone left to do good if everyone is spending their time being traders rather than, just as a random example, biologists, is left as an exercise for the reader). And she describes an environment where the powerful used that power to stifle criticism: Another person on the EA forum messaged me saying: “It is not acceptable to directly criticize the system, or point out problems. I tried and someone decided I was a troublemaker that should not be funded. [...] I don’t know how to have an open discussion about this without powerful people getting defensive and punishing everyone involved. [...] We are not a community, and anyone who makes the mistake of thinking that we are, will get hurt.” I say that she doesn't quite understand the lunacy of what she is describing because she still seems overly enamored with the basic structure of effective altruism. Her arguments are sound, despite the fact that she underplays the role long termism has in the moral to at the heart of effective altruism. The movement really did have a terrible track record of understanding and coping with risk. It really was ruled by the whims of a few. Her solutions -- make people accountable to the larger community -- are theoretically sound. And completely useless. Because she is a fish swimming in the sea of neoliberalism, she does not even notice the water, cannot conceive of dry land. What the author wants is a democratically accountable government, but she doesn't seem to realize it. All of her solutions -- making sure that the larger group holds the leaders accountable, making sure that dissent has a hearing, making sure that the group judges the risks not just the leadership, making sure that leadership can be changed or overruled, making sure that the organization is transparent in its actions and finances. Those are the hallmark of democratic governments. But not where does she seem to realize that. The entire article focuses on what the movement can do, not what the people who are affected by the movement can do to reign it in. Government, democratic accountability, is not considered in her world, not even to dismiss it out of hand. It simply doesn't exist. She wonders why the people at the top of the effective altruism pyramid treated those below with such contempt and disdain. It was because they could. Their power and money isolated them from consequences and opposing views. There is only one effective way short of a guillotine to prevent the rich from imposing their experimentation on the rest of us: democratically accountable governments. And yet this obviously well-motived, intelligent author never even considers the possibility that the people who live in the society being shaped by this so-called altruism deserve a say in how their lives are manipulated by it. That is the damage down by neoliberalism. It has denigrated the very notion that government is a force for good, that any part of our society should be held to democratic accountability. We have been conned into the idea that private forces are always better and that the very society that allows those forces to flourish should have no say in holding them to account or ensuring that the privileges we collectively grant them are earned, respected, and used for the overall betterment of society. No one is saying there is no place for private charity. It is good to allow space for small scale experimentation and for people to set up organizations to assist with problems that fall through the cracks. But allowing billionaires to unaccountably reshape societies just because they were able to use the structures of society, the protection of societies, to earn a lot of money, is insane. If you want to really have effective altruism instead of a movement with the name effective altruism, then you need to run your large-scale altruism through the machinery of a democratically accountable government. Any other way just makes the people in a society the playthings of the rich and powerful. We are all fish swimming in the sea of neoliberalism. If we want to reach dry land before sharks like SBF gobble us up, we better learn the word for water. Fast. Want more oddities like this? You can follow my RSS Feed or newsletter. 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