Thy neighbours

December 13, 2022 at 2:24 pm · Filed under business, culture

“Effective Altruism,” so called, takes a utilitarian approach to philanthropy. Proponents argue that rich people can save more people than poor people can, so get rich; AND, their wealth can save more people in the future than it can people in the present, SO invest in caring for generations not to be born for millennia. Looking after people who are suffering now is inefficient and indeed sentimental.

“Look, there are a lot of things that I think have really a massive impact on the world,” Sam Bankman-Fried said. “And ultimately that’s what I care about the most. And, I mean, I think frankly that the blockchain industry could have a substantial positive impact. I was thinking a lot about, you know, bed nets and malaria, about, you know, saving people from diseases no one should die from.” …

To hear Bankman-Fried tell it, the idea was to make billions through his crypto-trading firm, Alameda Research, and FTX, the exchange he created for it — funneling the proceeds into the humble cause of “bed nets and malaria,” thereby saving poor people’s lives.

But last summer Bankman-Fried was telling The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus something quite different. “He told me that he never had a bed-nets phase, and considered neartermist causes — global health and poverty — to be more emotionally driven,” Lewis-Kraus wrote in August. Effective altruists talk about both “neartermism” and “longtermism.” Bankman-Fried said he wanted his money to address longtermist threats like the dangers posed by artificial intelligence spiraling out of control. As he put it, funding for the eradication of tropical diseases should come from other people who actually cared about tropical diseases: “Like, not me or something.” [NYTimes]

I despise these people as much as I do people who want to colonize space.

Earth is our home. Our neighbours are now.

People who want to deracinate us from our home or look past the struggling people down the block to focus on greater things believe that evil things *are* the greater things. We’ll foil the dangers of artificial intelligence and get our way, to colonize space with generations of slaves who depend on us for air.

Comments