But what in the philosophy of EA really disallows it? In a utilitarian model, if I can do a lot of good by doing some bad (eg, steal from crypto investors and give the money to AI safety research), what did I do wrong? I appreciate that this can discredit EA and hurt their efforts, but this is a short-termist concern; in the long run, the AI research might end up being more important than the transient reputational damage. Furthermore, what if there's only a 5% chance of being caught doing something immoral? Then, in expectation, the positive impact is even higher.
It's all very well to pay lip service to 'common sense morality' but it doesn't seem to fit into the actual theology of EA, and this is what fanatics are most likely to follow.
EA isn't limited to utilitarianism. A very substantial amount of people in EA would not consider themselves utilitarians. And of those who do, it's very rare to find a "pure" utilitarian with no deontological bent and thus willing to engage in fraud.
Even if you find a "pure" utilitarian (which is rare), it's considered "naive utilitarianism" to ignore the long-term and broad effects of creating harm, and it's also considered intellectually arrogant to think you know enough about the impacts of your decisions and moral philosophy that you can justify causing definite short-term harm for potential long-term gain against the moral frameworks of just about everyone else.
On the whole, I can't personally think of any one person involved in EA, or widely-read EA literature, that promote or support that type of thinking.
> But what in the philosophy of EA really disallows it
Because most people who are willing to donate x% of their salary to charity tends to be decent people? Apart from that, there's tons of fundermental EA posts and writings that talk about how EA cannot be an 'ends justify the means' philosophy to donating. Sadly this SBF shit has really corrupted the core message which is to be skeptical of charities and view them like investments, picking the best one for QALY per $, and valuing all lives equally. I don't even like the futurist side of EA because I personally can't put the value of a hypothetical person above someone who's sick today and focus on global health & animal welfare. Honestly the core point of EA is imo very hard to discredit aside from longtermism.
> Because most people who are willing to donate x% of their salary to charity tends to be decent people?
I’m curious if you would accept the claim that a regular churchgoer is unlikely to act immorally, because I can’t see any difference in principle, down to the “donating a portion of your salary” part.
> There's tons of fundermental EA posts and writings that talk about how EA cannot be an 'ends justify the means' philosophy to donating.
This is at odds with its core adoption of utilitarianism, which is the movement's fundamental justification. Utilitarianism is sort of textbook "sounds nice on paper, works crappy in practice" outcome.
How can the press be correct about what something is, when that something has since its inception been both vocally and actively different? Even going back to Singers books that sort of kicked this all off its specifically said to be different to utilitarianism. Most advocates of EA say they're not utilitarian. I'm saying I'm not utilitarian. EA organizations actions are clearly not utilitarian in general.
I don't really know how to defend EA as not Utilitarian beyond that, except saying take a look at some EA-based books or blog posts that aren't from the last month and decide for yourself!
If you're genuine about learning more to have a balanced view I really do recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qslo4-DpzPs. This to me is a good representation of what EA is and is challenged by someone in a sensible way.
You keep using and implying the term learn as if I haven't read about this quite a few times over the past decade, evaluated it, and found it wanting. Please do me a favor and at least acknowledge that many people you interact with regarding EA have thought about it and aren't babes in the wool.
EA is reskinned utilitarianism, which folks have repeated pointed out.
> EA is reskinned utilitarianism, which folks have repeated pointed out.
Well then I respectfully argue you're misinformed, or simply reading a small subset that is utilitarian. I don't know a single utilitarian in the EA circles I'm in. Central EA-orgs define themselves as not utilitarian. There's many sources arguing you give what you can afford while a utilitarian approach would be to give beyond that if you can save more lives. SBF would be championed as a hero, not a villain, for his ponzi scheme. No money would be going to animal welfare or modern healthcare worries because longtermism would have won the argument. There'd be more than one case of someone using EA to cause harm like robbing a bank. There'd be popular EA speakers calling themselves utilitarian in public. There'd be a single post arguing the ends justify the means from a central EA organisation.
Etc...
EA is very simply the idea that one should check the efficiency of charities and try get the best bang for their dollar. That is it.
Maybe it'd help to understand your idea of what EA and Utilitarianism actually are? Because there's a disconnect somewhere between us. And utilitarianism is a huge subject so perhaps your thinking of a particular kind that is different to my (and many EA's) understanding of the topic.
> There's many sources arguing you give what you can afford while a utilitarian approach would be to give beyond that if you can save more lives
A misunderstanding of utilitarianism. If telling people to give everything makes them give nothing, then it is a bad approach. The utilitarian aims to maximize the amount given, which may entail telling them to give less. You treat utilitarianism as if we are philosophers considering it in theory, not practitioners who have accepted its logic.
>SBF would be championed as a hero, not a villain, for his ponzi scheme.
A terrible approach for similar reasons. Telling people you intend to scam them is a good way to get them to not give you money.
>No money would be going to animal welfare or modern healthcare worries because longtermism would have won the argument.
Treated similarly: EA is like a funnel. They draw you in by saying "you give to charity anyways, shouldn't you do so 'effectively'?" Then, instead of telling you which local homeless shelters are best, they tell you "effective" means curing diseases in africa. Once you accept that, then they have another style of charity to sell you. They carefully avoid pushing you too far, to avoid having you throw out the whole project.
> EA is very simply the idea that one should check the efficiency of charities and try get the best bang for their dollar.
"Effectiveness" is not defined, and any concrete definition is carefully buried. In practice, it usually means "maximizing human welfare" or something to that effect (ie utilitarianism), but they will carefully avoiding forcing that definition on anyone. "Oh, you want to donate to a local foodbank," they might say, "better make sure its an effective food bank" - this for reasons explained above. But every EA organization knows exactly what it means by effective, which is always some variant of utilitarianism. Importantly, they never refer to it as such, because utilitarianism is a ideology, and thus open to criticism. Instead, they always describe it in terms of platitudes that seems sufficiently obvious as to be impossible to question. In this way, they prevent anyone from falling off the ramp.
> you're misinformed, or <slightly nicer statement of misinformed>
I'm confident I'm not misinformed, and I have no need to inefficiently waste your and, much worse, my and other HN readers' time arguing with a clear acolyte on the topic. So, to circle back to the portion you dodged from my prior comment:
>> Please do me a favor and at least acknowledge that many people you interact with regarding EA have thought about it and aren't babes in the wool.
----
> I don't know a single utilitarian in the EA circles I'm in ... There'd be popular EA speakers calling themselves utilitarian in public.
With due respect, your personal take on the EA movement is less informative than* that of* the core EA thinkers, which I've reviewed. Why would they not want to claim association to utilitarianism? Utilitarianism has a lot of nasty known failure modes and edge cases. Repackaging it is more sellable than fixing an older idea.
Defining what is really good and bad is a very hard thing to do, and has been the subject of philosophical debate for millennia. It gets really hard when we try to construct a reasonable logical foundation for ethics, but then we always check it by comparing it to the intuitive ethics in our evolved/cultured meat brains. Of course, the intuitive ethics always "wins" and we conclude that the problem must not be there, but any conflicts must be problems with the ethical framework!
So you can conclude that you should just do whatever makes you feel good and all ethics are nonsense as you seem to prefer, but I'm not sure that you've really refuted the basic premise that you should try to maximize the amount of good you can accomplish.
If you reject appeals to intuition there is really nothing to base your argument for ethics on since at their core they all rely on one. Made that college ethics class I took a bit unsatisfying.
It's all very well to pay lip service to 'common sense morality' but it doesn't seem to fit into the actual theology of EA, and this is what fanatics are most likely to follow.