My Left Kidney

At the same time, don't you risk punishing him for dissecting and revealing his thought process in public, however flawed it may be? I don't think you want to discourage that, do you?

The whole article is an exercise in motivated reasoning, and he comes right out and says as much.

Great article! I'd never considered the mathematical risks associated with this.

Now I'm curious what the numbers would look like if it were a cultural norm for everyone (who passed the screening exam) to donate their kidneys in this non-directed fashion. My incredibly unscientific gut-feeling, back-of-the-napkin math seems like it would be plausible to reduce kidney failures to zero in no time: most people have two functioning kidneys and there are significantly less than 50% of people that need donated kidneys. Of course that gut-feeling math doesn't factor in the increase in risk for the donors (the radiation during screening, botched surgeries, etc), but those risks seem low enough that I imagine we'd net positive on a large scale.

> People can follow a value systems and still understand that other value systems exist.

I'm aware of this! I am fairly anti-utilitarian, and understand that the EA folks I've talked to are deeply utilitarian. What is so frustrating is that they don't seem to be able to understand me back. Any conversation about the ethics or character, duty, or virtue is translated back into utilitarianism, a framework in which non-utilitarian motives can't possibly be valid. Of course I'm not characterizing every EA-ascribing person, but it's ... very common in the community, to say the least, and it makes e.g. engaging with their forums / comment sections / subreddits agonizing.

> This is a quite uncharitable view of things. EA utilitiarians aren't spending their life on optimizing numbers, they're trying to use numbers to guide decisions on how to better impact life.

"better impact life".... as determined by... numbers.

This is a group of people who look at the world and think that the best things to do are things like optimizing QALYs or the number of animal lives or, in extreme cases, their personal lifespan including cryogenic extension in the offchance it works, or "the number of humans who will die when a superintelligent AI Roko's Basilisks / Pascal-mugs them", or other sorts of things like that. And in a world where you are only capable of measuring worth by holding up numbers against each other and comparing them, those arguments become seductive.

But outside of that framework, for instance in a moral philosophy in which the best thing to do is not "the thing with the highest +EV" but "the most noble action", those stances are absurd. It's not, IMO, a person's job to single-handedly have a highest +EV on lifespans or net-suffering; it is (to some approximation) to live a good life and do the right thing in your local journey. I would reject the notion that a person is directly responsible for far-away people's suffering. I think the world is direly short of leadership, character, and compassion, and for me goodness is about those things.

When it comes to large institutions, like governments or large charities, I feel differently, and the calculus switches over to being more +EV --- but ultimately is still about the moral compass of the organization. Like I think SBF was a scumbag and totally wrong, and would still be wrong if his bets had worked out. It is not common that people are operating at a scale where utilitarianism starts to become morally appropriate, and even when it becomes appropriate it's never entirely appropriate, because actual leadership is ultimately about morality even if the organization is doing practical things.

If the human race was completely moral, and then eventually died out due to some X-risk, that is mostly a Fine Result to me and we would all be able to sleep well at night. (but if like, the dying out was because we didn't do our moral duty and handle e.g. climate change or AI or nuclear war or building an asteroid-defense system or dealing with our own in-fighting and squabbling, then that wasn't completely moral, was it?)

To be clear, I have a lot of respect for the kidney donation stuff, a slight amount of respect for giving money to charity, and massive disrespect for the hordes of smart people who have divested from the real world and instead smugly pat themselves on their backs that they're doing important work on AI safety.

I am an EA of long standing, though not very active on the movement side of things. I think SBF is a big deal, at least in so far as it prominently exposed a moral weakness in the movement. A heavy use of Bayes' rule coupled with a focus on the best uses of dollars led in my eyes to SBF being seen less as a successful EA celebrity and more of a moral exemplar. We're trying to effectively improve the world! SBF has developed a magic money printing machine which will make the world awesomely better by generating dollars for EA causes! Earn-To-Give proven the best strategy because of unlimited upside risk! We should be more like SBF!

I had two problems with this: firstly that a movement focusing on extracting money from the megarich rather than 10% tithes from the public more generally may potentially generate more cash (good!) but will probably do so most effectively with thought leadership and fundraising teams and donor care and castles for conferences of important people. This loses a distinctive simplicity and non-heirarchy that feels important.

The second is that I had much less sympathy with the 'longtermism' sub-sect than SBF and many of the richer and increasingly more prominent Californian types do[0]. And that the Good Old-Fashioned EA focus on cheap but unglamorous interventions on malaria, cash transfers etc. were being increasingly overshadowed in the public eye.

So I don't think it reflects badly on EAs that SBF turned out to be shady (as you say, all groups have a worst member). But it should prompt some awkward questions about the extent that the movement was taken in by the smoke-and-mirrors act. And ideally a reconsideration about whether chasing the money and interests of SBF-types is the right direction for the movement.

[0]: I find it suspicious that the equations demonstrating the infinite importance of fairly recherché concerns on the specifics of AI safety, for example, just happen to line up with the research interests of some EA-adjacent people. That suggests people aren't discounting sufficiently for their own group biases.

I looked into this and it isn't true - countries which switch to opt-out don't get significantly more than we do. I agree this is surprising. The best explanation I was able to find was that, of the few people who get in accidents/comas where their organs are useful, most have already opted it, and there's a lot of negotiation with the family around exactly what that means such that an opt-in/opt-out box doesn't make a big deal. See eg https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/presumed... .