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Curated and popular this week
With the AI windfall, mental health may be taken increasingly seriously by mainstream EA. There’s increasingly room to explore the cause area and answer some of the biggest uncertainties; at the same time, costs of the most effective interventions are continuing to fall. StrongMinds is now treating for ~$35, about a third of GiveWell’s best guess from a few years ago, and is expected to...
Summary: The actions taken this decade may be exceptionally important for the future of civilization, but we should be unusually hesitant to proclaim that any course of action is “best.” Still, we should try to think carefully about how we'll influence the future.
This post was written as part of an introduction to a new reading group I’m starting called “Doing Good in the Age of AGI.” If you want to follow along, the full curriculum can be found ...
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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.