posted on December 08, 2022 09:18 PM by
u/Soyweiser
76
u/Soyweiser49 pointsat 1670534417.000000
We
literally cannot create satire about this. (source)
there is only sneer. Bonus, that ‘I have been to 70 conferences and I
going to make up this is actually a good buy’ person? Primalpoly
himself! (for people who don’t know who that is, that is the guy who did
the ‘strippers earn more when they are fertile’ research and the guy who
said he wouldn’t allow you to do a phd if you are fat because that means
you have no self control. Fun guy!)
E: honesty needs me to tell you that this one comment from ‘Totally
not a PUA’ Miller is not representative, the others are just trying to
calculate after the facts how much they will need to use the location to
make it worth the cost or justifying it with other reasoning by going
‘well it fits due to our complex org structure’ or other bullshit (I
can’t believe EA people are falling for the ‘it is a subsidiary’
bullshit). Just like any charity which ingest a lot of money for their
own use would.
And yes dgerard also mentioned the castle, what I find the extra
sneerworthy thing is the reasoning they all use to justify it, enough I
thought to make an additional post about it.
~~Wasn't there also a thing that he was no longer allowed to interact with students? Or am I misremembering that?~~ I prob am. Don't quote me on this.
E: Im prob misremembering an [evopsychgoogle](https://twitter.com/evopsychgoogle/) post. Did make me find [this one again](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FgbNC9SVUAAV1Y4?format=jpg&name=medium) eurgh. But even if he isn't banned from interacting with coeds, [he prob should be.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FfDkoXMWQAEZcEh?format=jpg&name=medium)
Like back in 2018 on his wifes twitter. She was talking about how she had to do all the approach work bc Geoffrey was too autistic.
I can’t remember her name otherwise I’d go look for the tweet.
Wow, their reply is the classic, "No, that's a different overlapping group, not us! Someone with bad intentions is trying to confuse you."
"First I want to disambiguate between:
CEA, the project that runs the EA Forum, EA Global, etc.
CEA, the former name of a legal entity which hosts lots of projects (including #1)
We’ve now renamed this to EVF, basically in order to avoid this kind of ambiguity!"
For me as an EA this is an important distinction: I view EVF as the "actual" decision-making entity which controls ~~the~~ some large amount of money, and EA brand, and so on. Their decisions are *more* important and should get even *more* scrutiny than those of their "subparts".
None of the doing-good-for-the-world nonprofits I've been involved with had a structure in which the connections were murky, and like you said, accountability tended to flow up the organizational structure. For instance, I've observed local Sierra Club staff get flak for policies national made years ago, and that's just how it goes. Unless you're astroturf, you generally want the public and funders to associate the central organization with all its work, and as a nonprofit, you have less need of tax shelters. This sort of shell game is much more common with corporations, such as FTX. I've never worked for an international nonprofit or one with a 501c4/formal lobbying wing, though, but then again, I don't know if all the EA ones should be assessed on budget (which seems huge) or dedicated staff (which seems pretty small).
> E2 The EA subreddit also is not happy.
You got to love the sheer amount of damage control a "former" "Director of Communications for Effective Animal Activism, The Centre for Effective Altruism" is doing over in that thread, despite purportedly not being "convinced that it is a net positive purchase".
Well to be fair that is their job. And just like people im crypto are speedrunning 'why are there regulations' EA seems to be speedrunning 'how does big charities and capitalism get corrupted'.
No but you need the castle to attract wealthy donors so you can get
more money with which to do more charity, see? Gotta spend money to make
money. It works like this:
Get money
Use money to get MORE money
???
Utopia!
Now, since MORE money means MORE charity, that means you should get
more money. In fact, even when it seems like you should do charity, you
shouldn’t actually do that, you should get more money. Because if you
spend the money on getting more money, you can then use that money to do
MORE charity. Except you shouldn’t do charity, you should spend the
money on getting more money so you can do MORE charity! Except you
shouldn’t do charity, you should sp-
Look, the point is this: Step 3. is go back to step 2. Just get more
money and everything will be fine. Also buy yourself very nice things,
because having very nice things will make you feel nice, and feeling
nice will help you make more money, which as we have already established
is like doing charity but better.
This whole thing but unironically. I really do think that they think the status of this stupid ass castle will let them hob knob and sex cult their way into more contacts and more money and thus be able to be more effectively altruistic. One guy on the EA subreddit even noted that they don't necessarily *owe* the cost of the castle since they can sell it, just the cost of *upkeep* which falls more into this delusion of altruism.
The only thing this caste does is make them look deeply unserious about their cause which is going to drive away way more donations than it could possibly attract. At least SBF understood that the correct aesthetic for selling EA is tech bro asceticism. "I drive a Camry and have roommates" etc. Harder to sell that image from within a castle!
I think the FTX/SBF implosion is what is causing this to gain a lot of attention though. Before when Anthropic got some 500 million and a half dozen AI safety startups just appeared out of no where, with freaking $100k prizes for *essays* there was hardly a blurb even though from all evidence that we can see it's just EA cronyism.
Really it's all about laundering the EA "money" into EA "causes" but the house of cards fell down and now people are actually looking into their inner circle of grifters.
Yes, even here often there was an undertone of EA isn't that bad, sure some of the causes like the 100k on HPMOR books sucked, but they cancelled that. But this has put more serious attention on it indeed.
Scene 1: SBF and McAskill are having a good laugh about how fake the charity is.
Scene 2: SBF donates a fuckton of money to McAskill
Scene 3: McAskill scratches his head and says, I've been doing it wrong all along! It is all signaling after all, and donors need to know for sure that we aren't an actual charity.
Scene 4: McAskill shops for castles, split screen SBF is getting detained.
More seriously, if any of these folks convinced everyone around them that they really do believe in totally dumb ass shit, then nobody would be appreciating how intelligent they really are, which can't possibly be allowed to happen. Hence all the "fake charity nerd girl" shit and "section about wire fraud in my profile" and other dumb shit like that. They need to brag to *someone*. Presumably that holds not just for FTX people but also for EA, and between themselves they had a good laugh about fake charities and wire frauds.
edit: and hopefully they had enough of a laugh over logged communications and it'll come out some time soon.
> drive away way more donations than it could possibly attract.
Isn't the whole thing funded by a small number of billionaires who don't want to pay taxes? I imagine the number of donations they get from amateur Python programers pales in comparison.
Presumably your interests aren't COMPLETELY unaligned with the good of humanity, there must be some thing that you want to do with your money that would also be prosocial through some unpredictable chain of causality, so just spend your money on whatever you want, triple your spend each time and iterate until you've done a cost-effective good deed.
Nah more like a bond villain. I mean look at [this speech](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx4t4fBIY88) where Yudkowsky explains his master plan from his space station. SBF got some expensive teeth bling.
I wonder, but am to lazy to try and look up, how much overlap there is in actual people between these groups. This has the feeling of a billionaire giving to charity(\*)
\*: The charitable billionaires last name giving organization which is ran by all the various failfam parts of the family.
The groups that matter are the charity boards. I'm too lazy to check but I'd guess there is one person from CEA who also sits on the board of EVF. Even if that's the case though, I'm sure it's just superficial and in reality all the org leaders coordinate behind closed doors.
_And all would cry, beware! beware!_
_His hot take blogs, his Nazi fare!_
_Leave an upvote on him thrice_
_And ignore what he previous'ly said_
_For he on Yudkowsky has fed_
_And drunk the thoughts of incel guys._
What gets me is these are the same people who will turn around and
fixate on the overhead of any given nonprofit. Like, isn’t half the
basis for their bullshit worm and bednet ideals that they require
minimal fixed infrastructure?
Also, having your conference center in England means people from a
lot of countries need visas to visit, but we already know they don’t
care about that.
No, focusing on minimizing overhead doesn't determine the effectiveness of a charity - the outcome does.
Some people in EA have written about this, check e.g. [this](https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog/arent-the-best-charities-those-with-the-lowest-overhead-costs) and [this](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/relationship-between-overheads-and-effectiveness).
I agree that England is a suboptimal place for the conference center
A part of me — a childish, desperately hopeful part of me — just
wishes my friends and I had a castle. We could set up a wing as a
museum, and there could be a bookstore with lots of used and antique
books, and we’d have rooms to host D&D games, and the grounds would
be perfect for archery meets and RenFaires and — oh! oh! — a live
performance of Macbeth every Halloween! To say nothing of all
the other theatre opportunities it would provide.
Haha, oh man; Scott is trying to defend this in the SSC subreddit
thread, it’s not going well. Somebody asked if he could provide the
supposed “business case” that proves this was a sensible purchase:
It is amazing in a way, he as he prob would do a lot better if he just shuts up and doesnt align himself with this controversy. Which makes me think he actually thinks this argument will convince people.
And lol at him trying to setup some weird argument about realeasing the documents at the start.
Turns out their 'we are not like the other charities' charity is like the other charities.
We literally cannot create satire about this. (source) there is only sneer. Bonus, that ‘I have been to 70 conferences and I going to make up this is actually a good buy’ person? Primalpoly himself! (for people who don’t know who that is, that is the guy who did the ‘strippers earn more when they are fertile’ research and the guy who said he wouldn’t allow you to do a phd if you are fat because that means you have no self control. Fun guy!)
E: honesty needs me to tell you that this one comment from ‘Totally not a PUA’ Miller is not representative, the others are just trying to calculate after the facts how much they will need to use the location to make it worth the cost or justifying it with other reasoning by going ‘well it fits due to our complex org structure’ or other bullshit (I can’t believe EA people are falling for the ‘it is a subsidiary’ bullshit). Just like any charity which ingest a lot of money for their own use would.
And yes dgerard also mentioned the castle, what I find the extra sneerworthy thing is the reasoning they all use to justify it, enough I thought to make an additional post about it.
E2 The EA subreddit also is not happy.
No but you need the castle to attract wealthy donors so you can get more money with which to do more charity, see? Gotta spend money to make money. It works like this:
Now, since MORE money means MORE charity, that means you should get more money. In fact, even when it seems like you should do charity, you shouldn’t actually do that, you should get more money. Because if you spend the money on getting more money, you can then use that money to do MORE charity. Except you shouldn’t do charity, you should spend the money on getting more money so you can do MORE charity! Except you shouldn’t do charity, you should sp-
Look, the point is this: Step 3. is go back to step 2. Just get more money and everything will be fine. Also buy yourself very nice things, because having very nice things will make you feel nice, and feeling nice will help you make more money, which as we have already established is like doing charity but better.
[deleted]
From the EA forums
I’m not sure I’m capable of sneering properly at people who think this covers an adequate amount of ass.
Oh man, the last time I’ve seen something described as “stately”, it was a pleasure dome too
ah, so this is their damage-control strategy after SBF. very nice.
What gets me is these are the same people who will turn around and fixate on the overhead of any given nonprofit. Like, isn’t half the basis for their bullshit worm and bednet ideals that they require minimal fixed infrastructure?
Also, having your conference center in England means people from a lot of countries need visas to visit, but we already know they don’t care about that.
A part of me — a childish, desperately hopeful part of me — just wishes my friends and I had a castle. We could set up a wing as a museum, and there could be a bookstore with lots of used and antique books, and we’d have rooms to host D&D games, and the grounds would be perfect for archery meets and RenFaires and — oh! oh! — a live performance of Macbeth every Halloween! To say nothing of all the other theatre opportunities it would provide.
Haha, oh man; Scott is trying to defend this in the SSC subreddit thread, it’s not going well. Somebody asked if he could provide the supposed “business case” that proves this was a sensible purchase:
He’s so panicked he’s demonizing his own fans for showing mild skepticism, it’s great.
If I had an award to give, I would give you an award for that title