It's been nearly a year since I last wrote anything on the forum, and I'm just now getting to place where I have the time to write again. A little over a year ago, I wrote a piece on effective altruism here (https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forum/off-topic/o…)
Separately, in recent days, the FTX cryptocurrency trading house and its Alameda proprietary trading arm have been widely exposed as a fraud of gargantuan scale predicated on taking depositors' money and using it to buy worthless trading-bubble junk with the hopes of being able to repay the depositors at some uncertain, future date. It was a fractional reserve banking system built on stupidity, fashioned together by people who don't value reading, knowledge, culture, or so many other things which are integral to doing anything well or with integrity.
Instead, this cadre decided to live "high on the hog" in the Caribbean while living out their dreams of an "Imperial Chinese harem" or whatever other sordid Tumblr fantasies came their way. Given such circumstances, decadence is a gross understatement.
The intersection of these two topics, effective altruism and FTX, collide because FTX's founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, proclaimed so loudly that effective altruism was the way that one ought to act. SBF routinely attended Effective Altruism conferences, met on many occasions with Macaskill, the one who coined the concept, and regularly had business dealings with him.
The question with which we are left is this: "is effective altruism still an ideology worth espousing in the face of such corruption and decadence?"
My resounding response is yes.
For all the media accounts I have read, I haven't been able to find any instances where Sam Bankman-Fried actually gave any money to an organization which I would consider being consistent with the principles of effective altruism. If any of you are able to find such a thing, I would appreciate it in the utmost, and I will consider it carefully.
Besides this matter of not actually giving, anyone who lives the debauched lifestyle that SBF and his cohort did are in no mindset to properly consider the wellbeing of others in the way that someone practicing effective altruism ought to. There are too many accounts of him being a complete jerk to all of the local Bahamian people he had in his employ for him to truly possess a regard other people. The same can be said of his wanton disregard for his depositors' money in an unregulated marketplace, despite the fact that if only he had read a book on how a commercial banking institution is run, a person of his intelligence could have operated a cryptocurrency exchange in accordance with fairly sound principles (as sound as cryptocurrency can be, that is).
Thirdly, where SBF did give, it seems to have been related to gaining favor with regulators and politicians of both major American political parties, which fits into a broader pattern of self-aggrandizement rather than a regard for other people.
Fourth, many organizations which subscribe to effective altruism are more focused on "longtermist" highly-speculative spending on long-tail risks like the AI-singularity or infinitely-replicating nanobots. I do not hold that spending on these edge cases should be the focus of effective altruism, as they are most often used to funnel money to the science-fiction Silicon Valley glitterati who consult on the technological aspects of these issues, rather than actually focusing on helping people in need.
I know that this topic will likely generate some interest, so I will refrain from commenting further. Keenly looking forward to your thoughts, and it feels good to be writing again.
Welcome back!
Thank you. So great to be on a thread with you again.
EDIT: Separately, I’m just now noticing how everyone has been nuked on the WSO credits. I personally have none, and even Isaiah here only has two, otherwise I would have given a friendly SB here
It's all good - not sure why you're getting MS.
SBF is top level Sociopath. For those of us with souls and conscientious, altruism does exist. But for people like that? Like I said in another thread, altruism is catching your neighbor in the hall as they're off to the store for dog food and you tell them, "Take 'em to the dog park and play with him. I'm on the way to the store anyways, I'll grab you some food. Don't worry about it." Whether you're out $10 on top of the groceries for the food, or simply if you were actually on your way to Jack in the Crack but volunteered that time instead of your own. That's altruism.
Not to sound too harsh, but don't just look at what he particpated in, or for whom, but also the woman he dated and who is rightly implicated on what we know, I'll throw $20 down right now she was entirely in on it and they fed off of each other's *pathies. As someone who's been there and back, Jordan Belfort, I'd love to see you weigh in and drop the anchor through the bottom of the hulls of their arguments they think are keeping them afloat. Or the other Jordan that ends in Peterson. Or we could have the Rick & Morty version that'd also be extremely entertaining.
I'll also take odds on people calling it all a conspiracy and then Alex Jones comes back with "Folks..." since for him we've had to rename them spoilers, not conspiracies. For better or *sigh* worse.
I have a question
Are you Caroline Ellison?
Blink three times for a yes
You might still want to expand on the validity of effective altruism. The main reason it's tarnished now it's that yet another academic fad being exposed for what it is: charlatanism to cover fraud. ESG and broadly sustainability is right behind.
SBF didn’t believe in any sort of altruism. He was a grifter saying what he thought others wanted to hear.
That's liberalism.
The whole thing is laughable, seeing as SBF was taking credit for an idea that has had real cultural currency for well over a century. Go read the Gospel of Wealth, and the oceans of ink that has been spilled on the topic since.
SBF was a grifter and a dunce, and we should refuse to give him credit for an idea he blatantly cribbed from someone else. And even if he didn't, we shouldn't give him credit for an idea someone had come up with a century before just because he talked about it while wearing cargo shorts.
Really appreciate the response, which is the best on this thread so far.
Just a quick comment to say that I don't know that I would characterize Carnegie's The Gospel of Wealth as "effective altruism." It promotes philanthropy, charitable giving, and a certain feeling of noblesse oblige (viz. the money is better stewarded by the rich people in the private sector), all three of which are features of effective altruism, but it misses the moral calculus of effective altruism which argues that it is often more ethical to give to communities far different than your own.
Carnegie's most well-known philanthropic contributions were the Carnegie libraries, which were built in America at a time when other countries would have had far lower literacy rates. Equivalent statements could be made of the public baths he constructed in his Scottish hometown. Carnegie practiced philanthropy, but not in the same sense as the effective altruism that Macaskill espouses.
TLDR: Carnegie was a homegrown philanthropist, but not one focused on helping the very most needy in the very most acute ways. Thanks for your contribution.
My understanding is that effective altruism, as espoused by Mr Bankman Fried, was basically "it's okay that I'm a billionaire, because I am going to give it all away." Perhaps I haven't read deeply enough into what he meant by that, but it always seemed to be placed in the context of a guy making an obscene amount of money for doing very little. A justification for his wealth, an excuse for how he makes it, and a promise as to what he'd do with it.
This is all excellent insight, but I'd still argue that it's nothing new under the sun. John Rockefeller embodied this, in that he was interested in giving to causes that would benefit humanity and not any given sect or group. It would be tiresome to list all the accomplishments his charities had, but eliminating hookwork in the US was a big one. A lot of the research that went into Watson and Crick's discoveries surrounding DNA began in Rockefeller funded institutes.
Anyway, the point is that none of this is new. At best it's a slight variation on principles which wealthy philanthropists have believed in and put into practice for well over a century, if not longer (I don't know of it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist!). I found and still find it infuriating that an obvious con artist like SBF was not only given money to run his extremely transparent fraud, but is also lauded as some kind of visionary humanitarian for parroting a philosophy that was no longer novel when his grandparents were born! Not to mention, mind you, that his "charitable" giving seems to have been focused mainly on political campaign contributions for Democrats. So even more despicable, that he's saying that he wants to do well and is instead channeling money through the same old boys network that every other wealthy person does.
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