SBF, FTX, EA, annoying acronyms, and my sense of sanity returning
Effective altruism proves itself to be a bunch of sociopathic megalomaniacs.
Before I say anything, let me first say that I have never agreed with Tyler Cowan on much but today I couldn’t agree with him more. This is really all that needs to be said in my view, and it is absolutely damning to the effective altruists if taken seriously.
Since around 2018 or 2019, I’ve felt myself swirling through a world of confused morals and challenged assumptions. This may be the nature of being in one’s twenties (in fact, I’d argue it should be?) and it also probably came from the challenges and moral questions that were occurring to me as I pursued a PhD in economics, something that I tell myself I did because I wanted to contribute to economic well-being and economic justice for people and communities everywhere. Though my focus on the US, and my latent desire for power and personal clout should not be discounted as a part of that journey as well.
However, there were two major actors in my 2019-self’s life that had strong influence on my swirling state of mind - one that provided stability and one that endowed me with a long and treacherous internal battle of self-doubt and an eroded sense of morals. The first is my dearest friend who has been working in the Crypto-currency space since 2017 and who I met working at the New York Fed where we both took an interest in the bizzarre and mystical power of money and payments. Our quirky intellectual playfulness over these questions around value and transations has kept us bonded (pun most certainly intended) for years. The other major actor was a romantic partner (aside: be careful with those) who’s academic work intersected with effective altruism and who’s deepest stated desire was to better the lives of others across the globe. These two people now symbolize more to me than two influential people in my lives; they represent something of the current technological and moralistic frontier and one that holds much promise but also much mystery.a
Last week’s news about Sam Bankman-Fried’s collapse could not have been a more eloquently written modern retelling of the fallen Icarus, flying too close to the sun on wings of wax. In today’s retelling, Daedalus is embodied by the uber wealthy class of venture capitalists powering Bankman-Fried to his own fame. The wings of wax are the Effective Altruist movements, who’s promises of rationality, predictabiliyt, precision, and moral fortitude all-too-quickly crumble in the face of stress.
It might be common to see Bankman-Fried’s broken wings as the fraudulent system he created or even the elusive world of crypto currency. It may go against many stalwart economists opinions for me to see that I don’t think that crypto (or blockchain, perhapse more precisely) is valueless. No, I think the failure here was in a moral order, in a social contract with the world that protected people and committed to good-doing in any sort of holistic way.
In 2019, my then romantic partner went to a conference of effective altruists at either Cambridge or Oxford. Will MacAskill, one of the founders of effective altruism who has gotten much press around this FTX calamity, was at the conference with then-partner. The conference was focused on long-termism, a phrase recently made much more popular on Ezra Klein’s podcast. Long-termism is a philisophical branch of effective altruism focused on very long term existential risks to humanity. I bring up this conference because it was the first time I was seeing up close the way that this community operated. I was witnessing second-hand a sort of science fiction conference masquerading as a group of people so deeply concerned with the future of humanity that they needed to dedicate nearly all of their resources to saving others. To the extent that I didn’t understand or didn’t agree, I was cast as immoral, lesser, even juvenile. I was called “abhorrent “by this partner when I asked whether it might be okay for humanity to end some day. I was told that my work studying economic justice in the US paled in moral righteousness compared to the economic development work my partner was doing in Kenya. The absolutist, all-or-nothin attitude of the effective altruist mindset was crystalizing in front of me. One’s own personal actions that were hurtful to those close to them would be balanced by the utility they created through moving dollars efficiently across the globe.
I’m sure I’m misunderstanding parts of this and also there is no doubt that my account is deeply impacted by this very personal component. However, I couldn’t help seeing Bankman-Fried’s fall as a sort of referendum on the moral order that he so boldly represented. A moral order that insisted on “predictability,” “measurement,” “rationality,” “efficiency,” and that balked at gray area, complexity, agnosticism, and reverence towards the unknown.
To me, this group of people, along with the whole of Silicon Valley VCs and Elon Musk represent a group of sociopathic megalomaniacs so convinced of their own do-gooderism that they can overlook the pain, hurt, mistakes and dishonesties living right in their backyards. There is an existentialist quandry that they should be focused on and it is their own.
There is a very strong sense that people like us ought to give, and give generously and plentifully, and give to cost-effective charities, and do some proselytizing about it. But we also need to be friends to those around us, and not let our monkey minds weaponize our concern for those more distant from us into a cudgel to use in a dominance game against those nearby to us.
Over on the email channel ex-FRBNY Vice President Charlie Steindel is quoting, apropos of SBF, some of the words of Hillel, Moses ben Maimon, and Yoshua bar Yosef. The last of those is also supposed to have said: "Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other…"