Discussion
“Another kind of utility monster is the one who creates much more utility than others. Effective altruists have argued that saving a life in a rich country is more important than saving a life in a poor country because richer countries have more innovation and are more economically productive.”
Of course these fuckers have. I wanna strangle one
‘He stopped reading books when he was around eighteen years old, replacing them with utilitarian message boards online. "I would never read a book," he said. "I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.’
Stupiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiid, I ended reading about stupid Bankman-Fried 😫
“Perhaps if Bankman-Fried had had a spectacular teacher in high school who had taught him Dickens and a love for good books, his life would've gone better.”
I ❤️ how much she ❤️ Dickens and in particular Hard times, underrated novel
“When Nate Silver asked William MacAskill whether the latter should have seen the collapse of FTX coming, MacAskill said it was unpredictable and cited a forecast from a prediction market site called Metaculus that estimated the chance of FTX defaulting on any customer deposit in 2022 to be about 1.3 percent.”
This is all you need to know about the “philosopher” behind effective altruism
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“Yet another argument in the tool kit of effective altruism is the idea of replaceability. If you don't take the job as a banker, someone else will, and they won't do as much good. The most troublesome side of the replaceability argument is that it has no moral limit to what it can justify: from working as a drug dealer to dropping a nuclear bomb. As long as someone equally qualified as you is willing to do the job, and you think of yourself as someone altruistically minded who will do less harm (or more good) than someone else, anything goes—no job is l off limits. Worse, you should probably take the most harmful job you can think of, because otherwise your replacement is almost guaranteed to do more harm than you.”
This timeline is so fucking stupid