Effective Altruists are Indulgence Peddlers
Most people have forgotten FTX and its louche leadership. They probably never even heard of their philosophy, Effective Altruism.
Effective altruism (EA) is a 21st-century philosophical and social movement that advocates impartially calculating benefits and prioritizing causes to provide the greatest good.
What this definition hides is the fact that the "greatest good" is supposed to encompass all humans who will live in the future as well. With such a large population and a program of quantifying "utility", it is very easy to fudge the numbers to advocate for hurting people today in the name of the good of people who have yet to be born.
The books on EA only balance long after all people living today are dead. Meanwhile, they want us to give them money now. It is giving in the sense that all their "work" is funded by financial scams like FTX or Bitcoin that suck money out of the corrupt gambling casino formerly known as the stock market. Or by donations the winners of the internet monopoly lottery, who will self-servingly profit from EA's emphasis on using computing to solve all mankind's problems.
(EA) does not address the deep sources of global misery - international trade and finance, debt, nationalism, imperialism, racial and gender-based subordination, war, environmental degradation, corruption, exploitation of labour - or the forces that ensure its reproduction. Effective altruism doesn't try to understand how power works, except to better align itself with it...
Indeed, its not hard to see a conflict of interest arising from the lavish funding for EA...Silicon Valley may be using EA to buy an image of moral rectitude. And EA, in turn is compromised by its reliance on philanthropy from the winners of the tech industry lottery....
- Adam Becker, More Everything Forever
EA is a religion
EA is based on "faith" that its promises will be fulfilled in mankind's future, i.e., in an afterlife. The same racket was run in the late Middle Ages by the Catholic Church. It was called "indulgences", and it caused the Protestant Reformation. The most infamous indulgence peddler was Johann Tetzel:
As soon as the gold in the casket rings
The rescued soul to heaven springs
Ganss, Henry George (Catholic Encyclopedia, 1912), "Johann Tetzel".
EA and others of its ilk are collectively referred to as TESCREAL
TESCREAL is an acronym neologism proposed by computer scientist Timnit Gebru and philosopher Émile P. Torres that stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, (modern) Cosmism, Rationalist ideology, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. Gebru and Torres argue that these ideologies should be treated as an "interconnected and overlapping" group with shared origins. They claim these constitute a movement that allows its proponents to use the threat of human extinction to justify expensive or detrimental projects and consider it pervasive in social and academic circles in Silicon Valley centered around artificial intelligence. As such, the acronym is sometimes used to criticize a perceived belief system associated with Big Tech.
EA is basicalliy a religion that promises salvation by technology. The background of EA's adherents, then, is not surprising
"A fun fact about the Rationality and EA communities is that they attract a lot of ex-evangelics. They have this whole thing about losing their faith but still retaining all the sin and guilt machinery looking for something more...rational...to latch onto."
- Adam Becker, More Everything Forever
When the details are worked through, EA is in favor of eugenics, with smart, rich white guys deciding who has good genes. The fact that all its proponents are screaming radical libertarians should tell you where this is coming from. Its "Atlas Shrugged" in computerland. The problem for the rest of us is that computers and the internet have so consolidated and strengthened the control of a handful of SV monopolists that they just might be able to pull a John Galt and leave the rest of us shut out. This threat is already recognized: Democratize AI or Make the AI Oligarchy an Inevitability
Governmental hijacking is increasingly out in the open as the military has created a unit composed of SV executives to run advanced research.
In an unprecedented fusion of corporate and military power, the US Army has commissioned OpenAI, Meta, and Palantir executives as officers in its new “Detachment 201.” These architects of commercial AI now shape battlefield algorithms as uniformed decision-makers, accelerating a dangerous monopoly over lethal technologies by unaccountable tech giants.
- Brave New World Order: Digital Oligarchs And The Rise Of The Algorithmic Leviathan
Great, put a bunch of TESCREAL true believers in charge of the military. What could possibly go wrong? Can you say Skynet?
The basic misdirection: Technology is a tool, not a solution to social problems
This promise of a technological godhead...is the goal...the reduction of all problems to the judicious application of computer science. Its the dream of technology as salvation from all threats. But, technology doesn't solve social and political problems, any more than it causes them. The prospect of nuclear war was made possible through technology, but is a concern because of geopolitics....The solution to, say, border disputes between India and Pakistan isn't throwing more technology at the problem...
- Adam Becker, More Everything Forever
There are many flavors in TESCREAL, but all of them are entangled with the philosophy called Utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism relies on there being a single thing called "utility" that can be defined and measured (in theory if not in practice) for every person. The "total view" further requires that utility measurements can be collected and added up across entire populations of humans. But its unclear exactly what kind of thing utility could be...Utility isn't simple pleasure. " one of the objections that John Rawls famously made about utilitarianism is its conception of persons, which it basically reduces to containers of value,,,we're a means to an end. We're just the receptacles...People are best seen as people, not as reservoirs for holding an abstract quantity of dubious ontic status.
The whole project of utilitarianism smacks of a kind of ethical Tayloirism confusing metrics with the reality they imperfectly capture, and then trying to optimize things by focusing solely on increasing the metrics to the exclusion of all else. Ethics isn't economics....utilitarianism isn't the only game in town when it comes to ethics.
- Adam Becker, More Everything Forever
EA is conveniently blind to all issues except ones that call for ever more computing power.
MacAskill is evidently comfortable with ways of talking that are familiar from the exponents of global capitalism:
the will to quantify,
the essential comparability of all goods and all evils,
the obsession with productivity and efficiency,
the conviction that there is a happy convergence between self-interest and morality,
the seeming confidence that there is no crisis whose solution is beyond the ingenuity of man...
At the core...for both capitalism and EA, is the need for quantification... anything that can't be quantified is dismissed as unimportant...longtermists are forced to see people as numbers. And those numbers in turn need to be maximized and optimized.
- Adam Becker, More Everything Forever
In closing
As Meta/Palantir/OpenAI lock down the online space and extend into running the military, the end of democracy is at hand. The public will be distracted with Middle East wars, oil crises, massive inflation, and government shutdowns over the budget as higher interest rates devour revenue.
In the midst of this chaos, there will soon be a Council of Nicaea event where a Nicene Creed -like document will be produced and Western countries will be forced to adhere to it under pain of technological excommunication and persecution.
It didn't have to be this way. The public funded science since WW2. The government underwrote microelectronics and all its many offspring - GPS, touch screens, cheap CMOS cameras. But most importantly, the government funded the creation of the Internet for almost thirty years. It got not one penny of recompense. The technology was privatized and tens of billionaires were created. Those billionaires now control an increasing proportion of the government.
After the Covid fiasco, people began to doubt "the science". This gave an opening to Trump's defunding of science. I think defunding is beyond mere hatred of elites. It is part of a plan to take science completely private. No public oversight at all of whatever horrific weaponization is undertaking by out of control monopolists.
Once again, no joy. I continue to work through "More everything forever", which was heavily quoted in this essay.