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Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

time.com

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Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#261

Post by AlbertCory »

JohnFen wrote: post #16
jfengel wrote: post #12

The worst thing about being smart is how easy it is to talk yourself into believing just about anything. After all, you make really good arguments. EA appeals to exactly that kind of really-smart-person who is perfectly capable of convincing themselves that they're always right about everything. And from there, you can justify all kinds of terrible things. Once that happens, it can easily spiral out from there. Peopl…

Effective Altruism is just a modern iteration of a thing that's been around for a very long time. The fundamental idea is sound. However, in practice, it all-too-easily devolves into something really terrible. Especially once people start down the path of thinking the needs of today aren't as important as the needs of a hypothetical future population. Personally, I started "tithing" when my first business was a succe…

On the subject of charities being annoying with you, there's a simple answer:

Start a donor-advised fund (DAF) with your financial institution. Most have one, and some large charities (e.g. Silicon Valley Charitable Foundation) have their own.

You fund it with cash or appreciated stock. For the latter, you can take a tax deduction that year for the entire market value.

You can't get the money back (that's why it was deductible). You can "advise" that they make a grant to some 501(c)(3) charity, and from my experience they always do, after due diligence.

Here's why they're not annoying: you can give anonymously if you want. They can't bother you because they don't know who you are.

The one I have allows you to name a "successor trustee" who takes over as advisor if I'm gone.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#262

Post by throwanem »

jfengel wrote: post #12

The worst thing about being smart is how easy it is to talk yourself into believing just about anything. After all, you make really good arguments. EA appeals to exactly that kind of really-smart-person who is perfectly capable of convincing themselves that they're always right about everything. And from there, you can justify all kinds of terrible things. Once that happens, it can easily spiral out from there. Peopl…

The worst thing about "smart" is that it doesn't mean a damn thing because it conflates cleverness and wisdom, which are orthogonal.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#263

Post by stale2002 »

rcoveson wrote: post #146
bena wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we do that with mosquito nets. EA seems like a way to achieve nothing while looking like you're doing everything. No one expects you to fly to Mars tomorrow. And that's true every single day. It's true today. It'll be true tomorrow. It was true yesterday. It was true 10 years ago. It will be true 10 years from now. So if no one really expects you to fully achieve your goal, all you have to do is kinda look li…

Where does this view of EA come from? Hatchet jobs written by TIMES and its ilk? Twitter personalities like Elon Musk who have so much social gravity that people perceive them as the spokesmen of anything they mention that you hadn't heard of before? Google "effective altruism" and the first two results are EA/Giving What We Can and GiveWell. Both of these organizations are meta-charities that help forward money or e…

> Where does this view of EA come from?

I''ll answer. I think the view comes from a different, but related group known as "The rationalists".

"The rationalists", or less wrongers, fit the bill to a Tee, of all these common criticisms of EA that people are bringing up.

And, the reason why this criticism may be misattribute to EA specifically, is because there is a large overlap between the rationalists, and EA.

The Rationalists are the ones talking about AI existential risk, and colonizing mars, and all that nonsense.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#264

Post by throwanem »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #100
jmeister wrote: post #4

Does Time’s readership have any clue about Effective Altruism?

Well there's this high profile in the EA community who happened to have its name tied to FTX not just for being SBF's guru but also for being on the FTX payroll in FTX's early days. But not only that: it gets better for he happen to have bought a mansion in the UK, supposedly for EA, with $15m of stolen money SBF gave him. (mansion which may be clawed back, I sure do hope it is). The dude is a teacher at some fancy u…

No, see, it's actually very complicated and difficult to maintain an optimal environment for thinking up new ways to mitigate the existential risk posed by an AI that has a .0001% chance to be invented ten million years from now, so really from a standpoint of perfect altruism Bostrom has to keep the mansion.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#266

Post by jojobas »

dragonwriter wrote: post #256
jojobas wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact male homosexuals are about 1̶0̶x̶ 2x more likely to be pedophiles than heterosexuals. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1556756/

> In fact male homosexuals are about 10x more likely to be pedophiles than heterosexuals. That's not what your source says, it says that the heterosexual:homosexual ratio is 11:1 among those it found to be pedophiles, which is lower than the 20:1 ratio in the general population, implying a higher (but less than 2×, not about 10×) likelihood of pedophiles among homosexuals than heterosexuals.

Fair enough, will edit parent.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#267

Post by cellis »

mise_en_place wrote: post #169
atdrummond wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has used opiates for well over a decade (for medical reasons), heroin and stronger synthetic opioids can absolutely cause an opioid naive individual to have withdrawal symptoms after even a week. This is why codeine OTC recommends no more than three consecutive days of use.

It depends on if you have a specific antibody that targets specific opiate compounds. For example, oxycodone was very dysphoric and caused me even more pain, whereas hydrocodone caused me the intended therapeutic effect of euphoria and analgesia

Hydrocodone has to be one of the best drugs known to man. I had a very small prescription for my wisdom teeth and I instantly understood the opioid dependency problem.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#268

Post by NoZebra120vClip »

steveBK123 wrote: post #223
jfengel wrote: post #12

The worst thing about being smart is how easy it is to talk yourself into believing just about anything. After all, you make really good arguments. EA appeals to exactly that kind of really-smart-person who is perfectly capable of convincing themselves that they're always right about everything. And from there, you can justify all kinds of terrible things. Once that happens, it can easily spiral out from there. Peopl…

aren't these all, at their root, postmodern re-implementations of religion? with all the related problems & benefits.

Yes, this is perspicacious. If you reject the premises and practices of religion, you will eventually re-invent them all.

Disestablishmentarianism by modern democracies means that without a centralized religion to arbitrate Truth, pseudo-religions will expand their power bases to fill in the blanks.

Psychiatry, Social Security, shelters, soup kitchens, hospital and university systems. All were adequately handled by Christendom, until society decided that Christendom was superfluous and hindering their goals.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#269

Post by naasking »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #61
jfengel wrote: post #12

The worst thing about being smart is how easy it is to talk yourself into believing just about anything. After all, you make really good arguments. EA appeals to exactly that kind of really-smart-person who is perfectly capable of convincing themselves that they're always right about everything. And from there, you can justify all kinds of terrible things. Once that happens, it can easily spiral out from there. Peopl…

> EA appeals to exactly that kind of really-smart-person who is perfectly capable of convincing themselves that they're always right about everything. And from there, you can justify all kinds of terrible things. I came to the same conclusion after a group of my friends got involved with the local rationalist and EA community, though for a different reason: Their drug habits. They believed themselves to have a better…

> I intentionally drifted away from that group around that time, so I don’t know what happened to them

This isn't a convincing story that they were wrong if you don't actually know what happened to them. It just looks like you're showing a bit of that hubris yourself, in assuming they went off a cliff.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#270

Post by naasking »

dfgheaoinbt6t wrote: post #24
JohnFen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Effective Altruism is just a modern iteration of a thing that's been around for a very long time. The fundamental idea is sound. However, in practice, it all-too-easily devolves into something really terrible. Especially once people start down the path of thinking the needs of today aren't as important as the needs of a hypothetical future population. Personally, I started "tithing" when my first business was a succe…

>Especially once people start down the path of thinking the needs of today aren't as important as the needs of a hypothetical future population. It's not that that bothers me so much as the fact that many effective altruists do it so badly . We need to be concerned with the future. That is the only reason to maintain roads and bridges, to prevent pollution, or to conserve resources like water in aquifers and helium.…

> We have no idea how likely "existential risks" are.

We absolutely do. We have quantified the risks of supervolcanoes, asteroid impacts and coronal mass ejections. We continue to quantify the ongoing risk of climate change and nuclear war (how many minutes to midnight?). The real open questions are the likelihood of a biological agent (natural or engineered), and AI.

The fact that we don't know the risks should make you more worried about those. Unknown unknowns can bite you in the ass hard with no warning. Maybe we should figure out some warning signs.

> We have no idea what, if anything, can be done about them.

That's what research is for. Sounds like we maybe we should fund some research into these issues.

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