I am an Effective Altruist. I think it is good to help people in the most efficient way we can. I believe quite firmly in “shut-up and multiply” — that is, we cannot lose sight of magnitudes. If a positive and a negative are of wildly different weights, then we should go with the one which is much larger than the other, not simply say that there are positives and negatives.
In the past couple years, EA was hurt by the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s network of companies. This has led to skepticism around becoming too closely associated with any one figure. We want to be independent, and to be seen as independent.
But I think this is hooey. We need to consistently shut up and multiple! SBF donated about $190 million to charity. The scale of this is perhaps hard to grasp. Let’s say that the reputational damage stopped some people from donating to effective charities. Let’s also say that these people would have donated $5,000 each (about what is needed to save one life from malaria). The reputational damage from SBF would have to have stopped 38,000 people from donating, for it to turn into a net negative. Is that plausible?
A billion dollars is a lot of money. It’s a stupefying amount of money, truly. The gain from convincing one billionaire to donate one billion, is greater than encouraging hundreds of thousands of people to chip in a few thousand. As such, EA should explicitly focus on recruiting the rich, or the to be rich. Effective Altruism MIT seems extremely cost-effective! Surely this is something worth investing relatively trivial resources in.
This post is mostly noise because this is a basic point going back over a decade and you do nothing to elaborate it or incorporate objections to naive utilitarianism. There is prior literature on the topic. I want you to do better because this is an important topic to me. The SBF example is a poor one that's obfuscatory of the basic point because you don't address the hard question of whether his fraud-funded donations were or weren't worth the moral and reputational damage, which is debatable and a separate interesting topic I haven't seen hard analysis of; you open up a can of ethical worms and don't address it in a way that reasonably looks bad to low decouplers, which is probably the reason for the downvoting. Personally I would endorse downvoting because you haven't contributed anything novel about increasing the number of probably good high net worth philanthropists, though I didn't downvote. I only decided to give this feedback because your bio says you're an econ grad student at GMU, which is notorious for disagreeable economists, and so I think you can take it.
I've wondered about this as well. Scott Alexander's mistake #57 seems like a relevant starting point:
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