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Crossposted to Less Wrong
‘Like most of life’s dangers, the dangers of artificial intelligence are not easily identified from the armchair.’
J Dmitri Gallow
Epistemic status
I’m not an expert in this field, and herein I make some sweeping generalisations educated guesses about the overall...
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TL;DR: EA has traditionally deprioritized climate change as a cause area. But a new report from Rethink Priorities, an EA research institute, suggests that specific Earth systems risks driven by climate change could have mortality impacts comparable to major global health burdens, on top of the known damages of climate change.
The report finds that research and governance work on ‘Earth Systems Stabilization’ to establish whether safe options to address th...
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Question:
Is blaming EA for FTX like blaming Elie Wiesel for Bernie Madoff?
Background:
Elie Wiesel was a Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor who trusted his personal finances and his foundation's endowment to Bernie Madoff. Wiesel's foundation and personal finances were decimated when Madoff's Ponzi scheme fell apart. Madoff is famous for a Ponzi scheme that destroyed the finances of thousands of investors of tens of billions of dollars.
Question:
Is the analogy apt?
Unfortunately, it's probably a really bad look to imply that we're akin to Holocaust survivors.
I don't think this is apt. FTX was formed by a team of people who very much seemed to be EA-aligned and EA-inspired at the time of forming. Elie and Madoff had no such connection - Elie's only interaction with Madoff was as a victim.
You can quite reasonably make the claim that EA has very little blame, but certainly if you were going to rank both scenarios, we would at least be somewhat more at fault than Elie was.