shocked that anyone could think Rationalists and Effective Altruists to be lying grifters. Spending the charity money on buying a literal fucking castle *clearly* maximizes the happiness of 10^54 hypothetical future human emulations living in the Matrix
(https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-grift-brothers/)
posted on December 07, 2022 09:31 PM by
u/dgerard
Their own conversation about it is quite entertaining: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xof7iFB3uh8Kc53bG/why-did-cea-buy-wytham-abbey
There are some skeptics, but basically the slightest push back - “well, conferences are expensive and we looked at 2 other venues. Buying an Oxfordshire Abbey was just the maxiumum cost benefit option because we are going to run such a great events schedule! This is maximising utility!”
And they immediately all go “oh well that makes complete sense then, stupid normies just can’t do maths!”, even though: a) in no world is this the best value venue b) The “benefit” is running loads- minimum weekly- events with lots of attendees- yet they’ve never heard of the venue! c) this is coming from people who will directly benefit from the use of the building as their workplace
It amazing every time that all the bayesian hyper rational gumph is meaningless in the face of even the most spurious reasoning from the in group.
Riches to “rags”
“Get filthy rich, for charity’s sake” lol, these people cant possibly believe this shit
“I thought there was such a thing as a good billionaire and I was a fool! A FOOL I SAY!”
One of the ideas behind EA isn’t that bad, the idea that a lot of money going into normal charities is getting lost/wasted etc on unrelated things to that charity.
But it looks like this crypto scam lost people 51 billion dollars. There is no way ever they can offset this. The only way to rationalize this away as not being a collosal failure and a reason to stop doing anything related to EA because that is a number no traditional charity will ever reach is by going ‘well crypto money isn’t real money, it is only real as soon as you sell and actually spend it on the charity’ but that just cuts out the biggest pillar from under the whole ‘get rich for charity’s sake’ idea. I don’t get how EA people sleep at night with all this on their shoulders. (esp when you also constantly see people on twitter going ’hey friends, sorry to bother you with this, but I got fired/didn’t get enough hours at my job/am disabled but get no help etc etc, I need 500 dollars for rent/emergency etc).
For context, EA in 2021 they got 10 mil in reported donations which they said (asspull sound effect) is prob 1/4th of all total donations. So lets be generous and say that is 40 million per year for the past 10 years. 400 mil compared to a 51 billion loss (15 billion of that was apparently SBFs personal money). What a joke. (note I didn’t read the report fully and just skimmed it for the first total, im prob wrong and im just using Fermi estimates (but it is a Fermi estimate based on EA Fermi estimates so double plus good (lol if it turns out their estimates included future spending of their wealth including the FTX funds, but im lazy and not going to check)))
They’re bending over backwards trying to justify this on HN right now lol
You don’t understand, Centre for Effective Altruism didn’t buy it, it was the umbrella organization. Totally different
Don’t mention FTX/Alameda.https://twitter.com/NathanpmYoung/status/1600877682396389376
It’s incredibly frustrating that anyone ever treated these people as serious. Like, the “this’ll help X future people” was always made up, and they didn’t even bother to come up with a good lie either.