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There is going to be a Netflix series on SBF titled The Altruists, so EA will be back in the media. I don't know how EA will be portrayed in the show, but regardless, now is a great time to improve EA communications. More specifically, being a lot more loud about historical and current EA wins — we just don't talk about them enough!
A snippet from Netflix's official announcement post:
Are you ready to learn about crypto?
Julia Garner (Ozark, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Inventing Anna) and Anthony Boyle (House of Guinness, Say Nothing, Masters of the Air) are set to star in The Altruists, a new eight-episode limited series about Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison.
Graham Moore (The Imitation Game, The Outfit) and Jacqueline Hoyt (The Underground Railroad, Dietland, Leftovers) will co-showrun and executive produce the series, which tells the story of Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison, two hyper-smart, ambitious young idealists who tried to remake the global financial system in the blink of an eye — and then seduced, coaxed, and teased each other into stealing $8 billion.
If it's anything like the book Going Infinite by Michael Lewis, it'll probably be a relatively sympathetic portrayal. My initial impression from the announcement post is that it at least sounds like the angle they're going for is misguided haphazard idealists (which Lewis also did), rather than mere criminal masterminds.
Graham Moore is best known for the Imitation Game, the movie about Alan Turing, and his portrayal was a classic "misunderstood genius angle". If he brings that kind of energy to a movie about SBF, we can hope he shows EA in a positive light as well.
Another possible comparison you could make would be with the movie The Social Network, which was inspired by real life, but took a lot of liberties and interestingly made Dustin Moskovitz (who funds a lot of EA stuff through Open Philanthropy) a very sympathetic character. (Edit: Confused him and Eduardo Saverin).
I also think there's lots of precedence for Hollywood to generally make dramas and movies that are sympathetic to apparent "villains" and "antiheroes". Mindless caricatures are less interesting to watch than nuanced portrayals of complex characters with human motivations. The good fiction at least tries to have that kind of depth.
So, I'm cautiously optimistic. When you actually dive deeper into the story of SBF, you realize he's more complex than yet another crypto grifter, and I think a nuanced portrayal could actually help EA recover a bit from the narrative that we're just a TESCREAL techbro cult.
I do also agree in general that we should be louder about the good that EA has actually done in the world.
historical and current EA wins
The best one-stop summary I know of is still Scott Alexander's In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism from late 2023. I'm curious to see if anyone has an updated take, if not I'll keep steering folks there:
Here’s a short, very incomplete list of things effective altruism has accomplished in its ~10 years of existence. I’m counting it as an EA accomplishment if EA either provided the funding or did the work, further explanations in the footnotes. I’m also slightly conflating EA, rationalism, and AI doomerism rather than doing the hard work of teasing them apart:
Global Health And Development
- Saved about 200,000 lives total, mostly from malaria1
- Treated 25 million cases of chronic parasite infection.2
- Given 5 million people access to clean drinking water.3
- Supported clinical trials for both the RTS.S malaria vaccine (currently approved!) and the R21/Matrix malaria vaccine (on track for approval)4
- Supported additional research into vaccines for syphilis, malaria, helminths, and hepatitis C and E.5
- Supported teams giving development economics advice in Ethiopia, India, Rwanda, and around the world.6
Animal Welfare:
- Convinced farms to switch 400 million chickens from caged to cage-free.7
- Freed 500,000 pigs from tiny crates where they weren’t able to move around8
- Gotten 3,000 companies including Pepsi, Kelloggs, CVS, and Whole Foods to commit to selling low-cruelty meat.
AI:
- Developed RLHF, a technique for controlling AI output widely considered the key breakthrough behind ChatGPT.9
- …and other major AI safety advances, including RLAIF and the foundations of AI interpretability10.
- Founded the field of AI safety, and incubated it from nothing up to the point where Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman, Bill Gates, and hundreds of others have endorsed it and urged policymakers to take it seriously.11
- Helped convince OpenAI to dedicate 20% of company resources to a team working on aligning future superintelligences.
- Gotten major AI companies including OpenAI to work with ARC Evals and evaluate their models for dangerous behavior before releasing them.
- Got two seats on the board of OpenAI, held majority control of OpenAI for one wild weekend, and still apparently might have some seats on the board of OpenAI, somehow?12
- Helped found, and continue to have majority control of, competing AI startup Anthropic, a $30 billion company widely considered the only group with technology comparable to OpenAI’s.13
- Become so influential in AI-related legislation that Politico accuses effective altruists of having “[taken] over Washington” and “largely dominating the UK’s efforts to regulate advanced AI”.
- Helped (probably, I have no secret knowledge) the Biden administration pass what they called "the strongest set of actions any government in the world has ever taken on AI safety, security, and trust.”
- Helped the British government create its Frontier AI Taskforce.
- Won the PR war: a recent poll shows that 70% of US voters believe that mitigating extinction risk from AI should be a “global priority”.
Other:
- Helped organize the SecureDNA consortium, which helps DNA synthesis companies figure out what their customers are requesting and avoid accidentally selling bioweapons to terrorists14.
- Provided a significant fraction of all funding for DC groups trying to lower the risk of nuclear war.15
- Donated a few hundred kidneys.16
- Sparked a renaissance in forecasting, including major roles in creating, funding, and/or staffing Metaculus, Manifold Markets, and the Forecasting Research Institute.
- Donated tens of millions of dollars to pandemic preparedness causes years before COVID, and positively influenced some countries’ COVID policies.
- Played a big part in creating the YIMBY movement - I’m as surprised by this one as you are, but see footnote for evidence17.
I think other people are probably thinking of this as par for the course - all of these seem like the sort of thing a big movement should be able to do. But I remember when EA was three philosophers and few weird Bay Area nerds with a blog. It clawed its way up into the kind of movement that could do these sorts of things by having all the virtues it claims to have: dedication, rationality, and (I think) genuine desire to make the world a better place.
According to the Guardian there is also one movie, another series, and several documentaries potentially in the works
The series is one of several projects in the works on the high-profile financial saga. It was announced in November that Girls creator Lena Dunham will write a movie based on Michael Lewis’s 2023 bestseller Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon for Apple and A24. Amazon Prime Video has a limited series in the works from Marvel directors Joe and Anthony Russo and writer David Weil.
There are also multiple competing nonfiction projects: one from Vice Media and the Information on effective altruism, and another from studio XTR and director David Darg that promises “unprecedented access to key players at FTX and the cryptocurrency community” in Bankman-Fried’s home base of the Bahamas.
A third documentary from Fortune and Mark Wahlberg’s company Unrealistic Ideas will focus on the relationship between Bankman-Fried and one of his most vocal critics, Binance founder and CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao. Bloomberg has already aired a nonfiction special on the debacle, titled Ruin: Money, Ego & Deception at FTX.
and another from studio XTR and director David Darg that promises “unprecedented access to key players at FTX and the cryptocurrency community” in Bankman-Fried’s home base of the Bahamas.
I don't think this is necessarily related, but it should be noted that XTR is also currently making a documentary about the Zizians.
I think this is very hard to predict, and I just feel uncertain. Public perception seems to be really fickle, and I could imagine each show being either:
- Negative towards SBF/Caroline and negative towards EA (it's all tech bros feeling superior, e.g. here)
- Negative towards SBF/Caroline and positive towards EA (they used ethics as "mostly a front" and only cared about winning)
- Positive towards SBF/Caroline, and negative towards EA (they started as idealistic altruists and got corrupted by the toxic EA ideology)
- Positive towards SBF/Caroline, and positive towards EA (e.g. making John J. Ray III and Sullivan and Cromwell the villains)
And for each of these 4, it's not clear what the impact on EA would be, e.g. I think "The Wolf of Wall Street" probably got many people excited about working in finance.
I predict the documentaries will be negative towards EA, as was the vast majority of media on EA in 2023 and 2024, and I think documentaries tend to be mostly negative about their subject, but I'm much more unsure about the fiction series
David Nash's Monthly Overload of Effective Altruism seems highly underrated, and you should most probably give it a follow.
I don't think any other newsletter captures and highlights EA's cause-neutral impartial beneficence better than the Monthly Overload of EA. For example, this month's newsletter has updates about Conferences, Virtual Events, Meta-EA, Effective Giving, Global Health and Development, Careers, Animal Welfare, Organization updates, Grants, Biosecurity, Emissions & CO2 Removal, Environment, AI Safety, AI Governance, AI in China, Improving Institutions, Progress, Innovation & Metascience, Longtermism, Forecasting, Miscellaneous causes and links, Stories & EA Around the World, Good News, and more. Compiling all this must be hard work!
Until September 2022, the monthly overloads were also posted on the Forum and received higher engagement than the Substack. I find the posts super informative, so I am giving the newsletter a shout-out and putting it back on everyone's radar!
The global health Roundup is insanely good too. https://gdea.substack.com/?utm_source=homepage_recommendations&utm_campaign=822941
At Anthropic’s new valuation, each of its seven founders — CEO Dario Amodei, president Daniela Amodei and cofounders Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish and Christopher Olah — are set to become billionaires. Forbes estimates that each cofounder will continue to hold more than 2% of Anthropic’s equity each, meaning their net worths are at least $1.2 billion.
I don't know if any of the seven co-founders practice effective giving, but if they do, this is welcoming news!
Dario Amodei is the 43rd Giving What We Can Pledge member, (a?) Tom Brown the 1214th, and (a?) Jack Clark the 4002nd.
What happened to US Policy Careers?
They had several in-depth, informative articles. Shame if they are off the Forum and there is no way to access them.
I think most of their articles have been repackaged and can be found here: https://emergingtechpolicy.org/
Why not keep posting to the forum?